Consumers are paying more than ever for streaming TV each month and analysts say there’s no reason for the companies to stop raising prices
(finance.yahoo.com)
from L4s@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world on 06 Nov 2023 00:00
https://lemmy.world/post/7850310
from L4s@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world on 06 Nov 2023 00:00
https://lemmy.world/post/7850310
Consumers are paying more than ever for streaming TV each month and analysts say there’s no reason for the companies to stop raising prices::Finding new subscribers in a saturated streaming video market isn’t easy. And with legacy media companies desperate to recoup revenue declines in their linear TV businesses, the cost of your monthly plan is likely to keep rising.
threaded - newest
Yarrrr, we be seein’ about that…
Yeah I don’t have the budget to subscribe to multiple streaming services, let alone cable or even one service. Thank god there’s not a lot I’d want to watch…even if sailing high seas.
No reason to stop raising prices for any business, except for the fact that demand goes down as price goes up. People will cancel or downshift to a cheaper service.
Yarr matey
Streaming platforms make more money from you if you use the cheaper ad-supported plans. The price hikes are to get you off the ad-free plans.
hollywoodreporter.com/…/netflix-disney-now-pushin…
There’s a scene in Fight Club about how auto companies approach recalls, and a similar method is applied for these price hikes. The company predicts how many people will leave or change plans or whatever with their changes and they price it out so that they end up making more money.
And for a small example let’s say you have two customers paying $10/month for a service. If the price increases by $11, and one customer leaves, you are now making $21/month from the service.
Now it’s not as simple as that in the real world, but that’s the general idea.
The issue here is that even if a vocal minority leave these streaming services, or social media there’s still a large amount of people putting up with their shit.
And as a bonus you have less customers to provide support to!
Sorry mate this is not some special fight club logic. It’s not even really accounting or economics logic, it’s just kinda common sense.
What price should I sell my lemonade for? I’ll have more customers if I sell it cheaper…
The part which seems lost on most commenters is that these companies have huge and very sophisticated market research campaigns. They can predict with great accuracy how their demographics will respond.
That’s pretty much what the above person said lol
They have a good idea of how many people will leave before they do it.
That’s literally what they teach you about basic economics at school…
The standard graph of price increasing on one side and customer demand decreasing on the other, and how companies try to find the crossover point.
Really? No reason to stop raising prices? My Jolly Roger got something to say about that.
Piracy has never been easier or safer or faster than it is now, and these platforms think driving people away with overpriced subscriptions for shitty content is beneficial for them?
Piracy isn’t easier than not bothering to cancel your subscription for most people. I’m sure they’ll lose some people, and especially the demographic here, but I don’t know about the average person.
And yet I see all sorts of articles saying these platforms complain that piracy is now even higher than before Netflix became a streaming service.
What?! It was way easier and safer in the era of Napster, edonkey and emule. Easy discoverability and companies didn’t pay any attention yet. Since then it’s a cat and mouse game.
Get a good VPN and you’re set.
That’s not easier than not needing a VPN in the first place.
Nope, because every time another one raises the price we cancel it. It’s working out quite well
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/23ab2f4d-84b9-4dac-99e2-de8fc69d31b0.jpeg">
I do pay a little for Usenet and my NZB indexer, about $115 per year all said and done. And I pay for hardware and electricity, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Any recommendations for usenet provider?
I use Eweka.
Why is piracy costing you 4$ a month.
not everyone can torrent freely
VPN?
I’d say piracy is not even free, if done right. I mean, you may want to support JDownloader, MediaFire, Mega, your VPN, and whatnot.
I’m not into piracy (wink), but if I did, I’d pay my monthly Plex subscription, MediaFire account, and tip JDownloader monthly for their effort.
Now chart hours of content against cost across the market, and watch it go vertical. Bonus for weighting by critical rating.
Piracy is the only reasonable choice.
We’re also getting more than ever from streaming. That is if you like shitty remakes and sadistic defacto porn.
Thanks for the reminder to cancel Disney+ and HBO Max - I almost forgot! ;)
Still have Peacock, because that’s comped through my mobile provider.
My wife does Amazon Prime, Netflix, and Hulu. I had Prime but realized I only ever used it for free shipping, which I can get anyway by bundling my orders and setting ship dates.
Bundling orders and set ship dates - what? This is something I don’t know about.
Even without Prime, you can get free shipping if you spend over a certain amount.
So instead of placing multiple small orders and paying shipping, I’ll wait until the combined dollar value qualifies for free shipping.
Also on check out, you can specify a delivery date with free shipping.
And then everything comes in separate packages with different parcel services anyway… Amazon really has become shit.
.
Why are you pirating dogshit?
I’m begging zoomers to learn how to torrent
I’m kind of amazed how my Gen Z buddies are so adamantly against pirating. They think the cops will bust down their door, literally.
As a gen z kiddo, like half of the software on my pc and 90% of my movies are pirated lmao.
I mean i’ve met a lot of millenials like that too. I’m not exactly sure where it stems from
Noobs using public trackers then getting scary letters from their ISP.
A few of mine got cease and desist orders from their ISP, one got two… so that’s why they’re against it. Some now do VPN, some just hop streaming services. Some just stopped watching as much stuff because: life.
Did you not see the PSA?
Why? You realize if everyone torrents there will be nothing to torrent, right?
Everyone torrented in the 00’s, and Netflix was born from that.
No way they’ll let the whole market crash before trying to get some customers back.
.
Lol no. That’s not how an economy works. When you sell less of a thing you then have to adjust price to make it favorable again. Companies aren’t just going to say “If we can’t charge $350 a month we might as well just turn off this massive money machine.” No, they will charge $200 and accept making less money over making no money.
You’re correct. Theft has nothing to do with the economy.
It doesn’t matter what they charge when everyone steals it for $0.
Ummm theft, aka shrink, is very much a part of any business.
Hiring theft prevention is an entire field of work around this very concept. How can you say theft has nothing to do with the economy when there is an entire industry around theft prevention…
You missed the part where people stop stealing if the price is reasonable. It’s the reason why pirating went way down when Netflix first came out. People are willing to pay, not be taken advantage of. Are you not reading these comments, people saying they will pirate if there is another hike? There is clearly a line, if they cross it then they lose customers.
LOL “reasonable” according to whom?
God the fucking galle you must have to say “ah that’s too expensive to pay for so I’ll just steal it! And if they bring the price back down I’ll totally pay for it out of the kindness of my little heart because I’m just such an ethical person!”
Stop lying, you’re not paying for shit.
According to the market. That’s how reasonable prices are arrived at. It’s this little thing called an economy.
I’m not saying stealing is OK, I’m just being realistic. If you charge $200 a month for Netflix people will steal it. You can get upset and rant all you want, that’s reality. People refuse to be charged more and more for the same thing, there is a breaking point.
Also, it’s not stealing. This argument has been had and proved false. The large number of people who pirate content are very unlikely to have ever paid for it. It’s not stealing vs buying, it’s pirating vs never watching. The outcome of pirating or never watching is the same to the creators.
Right now I pay for Netflix, Hulu, HBO Max and Sunday pass. I’m paying for plenty. You’re just too ruled by your emotions to have an actual conversation, so you make wild assumptions and throw insults instead.
LOL buddy, you are bypassing the economy. You’re just stealing the content. You need to take your own advice because that is not remotely how an economy works.
My God, this is the dumbest shit and I can’t believe you morons are still peddling this.
Except it’s not, at all. And you know it isn’t. And there wouldn’t be giant megacorporations going after pirates if it was. This is nothing but shitty mental gymnastics you use to justify being a thief.
There’s no conversation to be had here. You’re just off living in a fictitious reality of your own creation. Have fun with that. Bye.
I already unsubscribed from prime and if Disney+ is changing to the Netflix way of "no no no you cannot share your account" than that will be gone too. I already thought about unsubscribing from Netflix as well.
But I guess me and my friends are not the norm with a plex server that gets feeded by ~10 persons who like to buy blurays :D
Be careful with who you tell about that. The recording agencies love to make examples out of file sharers…
well those are all legal backup copies for private use. It's not like I'd share it with randos on the internet :D
Don’t forget sharing is caring. 😉
Streaming:
-Charges you unreasonable amount of money
-If you cancel the subscription, you lose it all
-If they change the terms, you may lose access to some of the things in your library
Torrent:
-Costs a grand total of 0$
-Allows you to retain content for eternity
-Requires a 5 second effort to enter the name of a show/film in Sonarr/Radarr
The choice is clear.
Torrent:
-Unless your a millennial with really good memory… requires a (usually) a good paid VPN + 3 hours of reading and setup so you dont get nasty letters from your ISP.
-Requires requisite ports and knowledge of how to get the shows to your TV
-ideally requires a standalone PC, which most households no longer have
-Requires knowledge of additional programs that need to be researched and have paid competition
-Requires knowledge of how to find the source material, with huge gatekeeping between source pools
I am probably forgetting other stuff, especially for Gen Z and now the oldest Gen Alpha. But if I as a millennial feel it’s a burden to relearn the steps for something I already was doing a decade or so ago. That must be a massive bar for someone who never had their hand in it, so to speak.
I am not saying it’s impossible, just I haven’t found a straight forward guide from beginning to end, with all the new technology included. And the first time they get a love note from their ISP, they will likely just stop.
Edit: The vastly different responses with different solutions, only proves to me that this is more complex than people let on. You have some people giving services that weren’t mentioned in the OP in euros (not that there is anything wrong with Europe, just a different experience. Do EU IPs even send love notes? Then you get a mix of people saying what the best VPN is and other people saying you don’t even need a VPN. Just so much different information, is it surprising that people could feel overwhelmed?
This is the age of information. It would take a grand total of a few hours for the average person to watch a video to give them all the knowledge they need to avoid the pitfalls you listed.
People are afraid and lazy, it’s easy to let fear control your decisions.
I think the age of information has passed. If you try googling/search engine any of this you get scraps of information that don’t tie well together.
All I am saying is I could see people throwing up their hands and thinking it’s too confusing or dangerous.
Information is everywhere, but so is misinformation now. There’s LOTS of AI-generated articles out there telling people nothing helpful, or straight-up incorrect answers from Google searches.
We have a Piracy board on Lemmy with a beginner’s guide.
It’s not hard. Mullvad is €5/month. In torrent client, set up Mullvad proxy. Go to thepiratebay or any other tracker to download. Watch.
You can also do it on your old laptop and use it as a home media server. Android TV can access network shares, I’m sure some of the others can too.
I guess this is the kind of shit people are talking about. Wtf does this even mean.
mullvad.net/en/help/socks5-proxy/
Good points, there should be an all-in-one solution which very easily guides you through all the necessary steps
The knowledge is extremely easy to obtain though. There are lots of very detailed guides. It’s not extremely complex, anyway.
It’s just hard to know what information even correctly pertains to me. My comment received a half dozen other comments… some seemingly from the US, others from the EU. Some comments saying every house has a PC (not true) others saying a PC isn’t even necessary. Some comments with how to find a good VPN, other comments saying a VPN isn’t even necessary. Then I got recommendations for a half dozen different services from various comments with no idea if they are all necessary and how they interact with each other.
It may not be extremely complex, but until you get your feet wet, it sure seems like it is. In my day you downloaded what you wanted off of Kazaa or BearShare or the like and then watched it on your PC with VLC. or if you were really fancy you burned it on CDS or DVDS. Then when the bad emails or letters came in, you just told your parents it was the neighbors.
I have never been in a house with out a pc since the 90s.
My sister, my mother, and my brother all have laptop-exclusive households. Most people these days don’t see a need for a standalone pc when they have a laptop they can take from room to room and costs the same as a desktop.
Not to be pedantic but a laptop is a PC
That’s being very pedantic, if you start typing in Laptop V, it autofills PC on searches. Many homes don’t have a desktop, you can do 90% of what you need on mobile nowadays and the other 10% can be done on a laptop.
I don’t think it’s being pedantic in this case. They’re talking about the capabilities of a PC vs something like a mobile phone or a tablet. In this case a laptop is a PC and is fully capable of doing all the things described in this thread.
I know. I said standalone pc to fit the earlier commenter’s point. Desktop would have been the correct choice, but I figured the gist got across. If it was unclear to anybody, I apologize.
No need to apologise I just wanted to clear things up for anyone reading the thread.
You can do everything you need to do on an old laptop… you don’t need a desktop. You just need to make sure you disable any of the power saving settings so it can stay on all the time but then enable a display-off type of screen saver.
I don’t think most people have an extra laptop sitting around their home. And they definitely aren’t gonna want to do that to their daily driver.
I just don’t think this is feasible for the average person.
So you are mostly wrong here, I’ll let you know my setup that costs me $15 a month.
A 4 core 8GB VPS: $5 a month. Unlimited cloud Storage: €10 a month.
I have Emby (Use jellyfin, I haven’t changed out of laziness), Sonarr, Radarr, Jellyseerr all running on a VPS with caddy running a reverse_proxy to point a domain at emby via HTTPS.
No need for VPNs, but you can run OpenVPN on your VPS for maximum value for money if you want to use a high speed VPN.
It’s all very straight forward to setup on Ubuntu 20.04 with lots of documentation. My server has been up for 3 months now and I have had 0 issues, friends use jellyseerr to requests shows and movies. Everything else is automated. Can even import lists from IMDb.
Make sure if you want to save space to use h.265 encoding where possible. Additionally, if you don’t want to torrent you can use newservers. But that will cost an additional $10 a month.
When you say VPS, do you mean like an AWS or GCP virtual machine?
AWS/GCP is an order of magnitude more expensive for those specs. And they would ban you for downloading copyrighted material without a VPN. So I wouldn’t recommend that. I was able to get a similar set up using Linode but the specs were way worse and I couldn’t do transcoding, and I didn’t torrent using the $5 a month VPS.
It depends on what hardware the host is using, my VPS is capable of transcoding around 4 streams simultaneously.
Ionos, but I have been grandfathered in with price so you won’t be able to get my deal
Where are you getting a 4 core 8GB VPS for $5 a month with unlimited bandwidth/CPU time?
All the reputable providers have 1GB, single core shared compute for that price.
The skill issues related to piracy can and should be addressed. This is how we form a truly strong resistance to the madness that is going on.
Your point is valid and it’s important to work it through.
You’re mistakening the wide range of solutions and tooling for complexity.
I mean, most of this is wrong?
What are you reading for 3 hours about a VPN?
Why do you need to know about ports? You can literally put shows on a flash drive and plug it in.
A stand alone PC, why? What? Hell I torrent from my phone sometimes.
A lot of this can be done, but this is not the bar for entry by any means.
Wow theft is free!? Who would have thought!
Piracy is a service and pricing issue. Plenty of people willing to pay, proven by the fact the streaming services were so successful in the first place. They’re just not willing to take substantial pay hikes when they’re going hungry.
No, piracy is an entitlement issue.
Streaming services are still successful, that’s why they’re able to raise the prices. But most of them have been operating at a loss for a long long time to drive user adoption. This is the part where people have to decide if they’re willing to pay what it actually costs.
You are not entitled to this media. These companies don’t owe you anything.
<img alt="" src="https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/33eff01c-227a-4497-b6f8-2d8fc0947b30.jpeg">
…what is that supposed to be?
I imagine it’s you portrayed as the soyjak but it’s so well drawn I can’t imagine its effectiveness
WTF is a soyjak
You are become soyjak: You soyjak now son.
The embodiment of a fool
How I imagine your brain works based on your previous comment.
You think my brain works…like a windmill?
boo-hoo-hoo poor mega corps, I’m pretty sure the CEOs of these companies were paying by their own money the price difference of the true cost and the decreased subscription price of all the customers and they will walk out poorer. Not with millions in their pockets.
I’m genuinely baffled that you interpreted any of what I said as garnering sympathy for streaming platforms or their CEOs. They don’t need your sympathy, nor does it have anything to do with what I said.
then explain me why you mentioned the “operating at a loss” thing. What does it prove in your argument? What does this offer in the dialog and please explain me if the CEO of a said company which is “operating at a loss” walks out with millions in their pockets or not. And also what will happen in the owner of a small business which is also operating at a loss. Then compare these two “operating at a loss” and tell me if they are even slightly comparable.
The point is that the company has to be profitable. It’s not complicated. The point of companies is to be profitable. If they’re not profitable, they cease to exist, which isn’t good for anyone. Those are the only options they have: become profitable or cease to exist. I know you people like to think money is just conjured into existence with magic but that’s not the way anything works.
you didn’t manage to reply to any of the arguments above. You just spitted out some basic principles which all of us are aware of. I don’t understand even why you bothered to type these since they also don’t offer anything valuable in the conversation
Maybe “aware of” but have clearly demonstrated that you don’t understand.
Listen, it’s really an irrelevant point. It doesn’t matter if they’re a fucking Fortune 100 company charging $500/mo, nothing about that entitles you to the content they produce.
It’s not food, it’s not healthcare, it’s not shelter, you’re not being deprived of any sort of necessity, it’s entertainment. Too expensive? Don’t fuckin buy it.
yes, this is what I’m doing. So, what is your point?
Piracy is a capitalism problem.
People don’t pay what it actually costs, people pay that + the revenues the company brings home. And that’s a lot now.
Operating at a loss is a standard practice that is not only meant to drive user adoption, but to (whoops!) remove competition with smaller bags to pay losses from. So we end up with a few services that do whatever they want.
This is not okay.
.
lol I’m like 20 clicks into Sonarr’s website and I still cant find a simple answer: what is Sonarr?
Agreed. I found it a bit disappointing they skipped to the highlights without describing the big picture first. This is from their GitHub:
Took a buttload of Googling to just figure out what PVR stands for lol… and I’m still not sure I got it right. Seems like it’s Personal Video Recording??
Some sites just assume you know. In short, thing that automates and streamlines series piracy. Radarr is for films, Lidarr for music, Readarr for book, Whisparr for porn, Prowlarr allows to better manage sources for all of the above.
So is Prowlarr an alternative to Jackett? I’ve use Jackett before but it was (as best as I could understand) a way to translate different indexer URIs into a common format.
More or less, yes, they serve similar purposes.
Don’t forget about autobrr, for getting things as fast as electronically possible, increasing your seeding ratio to ungodly levels.
Wow, interesting! Thanks.
My main gripe with torrent is that there isn’t always a seeder available. This is a major issue if you’re looking for a movie that isn’t mainstream. There are pirate streaming services but we know that the quality is not usually great. Even if you download from torrent, the quality is not also always great either. I definitely noticed difference in video and sound quality between torrent and what you get from “mainstream” sources. Some torrent say they’re 4k or HD quality, but many files are actually cropped so that uploading and downloading is faster.
Edit: Grammar and wording
I’d also give Usenet and Soulseek a try, lots of rare media in there
I’ve got a setup that has gradually improved over the years, I have put a few hundred $$ in that time too.
But, it was fairly easy to get started, my improvements have made the automatic downloads very consistently high quality, and sonarr/radarr do all the searching and filtering for me.
My wife wanted to watch some Winnie the Pooh, within like 5 minutes the first season was ready to watch, and the rest was finished downloading and ready before the 1 episode was over.
And it only took 5 minutes because I had to help the searcher bc all my auto filters are optimized for recent releases. Though I’m gonna set up some filters for older stuff, so it’s not trying to download a 4K hdr file for something that came out 50 years ago and was never remastered to 4K.
plus, you fight corporate greed.
Theft removes the original, priacy makes a copy.
Oh how I hate those graphs that could but doesn’t start at zero.
It wouldn’t make any sense in this case, their prices never started at 0.
It’s about perceived change.
For me it’s not the same if 1000 to 1001 shows up as a 50% hike because the diagram starts on 999, as a 1 to 2 hike which also shows up as a 50% with the diagram starting at 0.
They both look the same, but in the first case the hike is 0,1% as in the second it’s really 50%.
So for me it’s bad journalism or trying to fake things (which here isn’t needed IMO).
This is why I Plex/Jellyfin.
Yup, came to say they should move to Plex/Jellyfish to get away from the streaming shitshow.
Exactly. It’s funny because if one streaming company were more like Valve, they could have all of the content on one platform like Steam has with Valve. Piracy is a convenience problem, after all, not a pricing problem, and it sure as hell isn’t convenient to have to be subscribed to 5 or more different platforms just to get all the content I’d want to watch.
With prices going up and likely subscribers going way down the next logical move for the Streaming Companies is to start cracking down on Piracy again as they already had a go at password sharing.
Now I am not saying they will be successful in prosecuting those that are careful, just that there will be a few high profile cases against groups of people who aren’t using the best hygiene when it comes to piracy. Fear is their best weapon against piracy that they actually want to deploy, just make sure you do enough research to make sure you aren’t in that harvest of low hanging fruit.
Remind me if this is still valid a year from now
I am actually curious. We like to laugh at the obviously anti-consumer practices these streaming services are pushing, saying they’ll end up losing their customers to piracy, but the point of the article is to illustrate that just isn’t happening and most people will suck it up and pay more for less. Look at how much Netflix gained by killing off password sharing.
True, but the point is that at each level of abuse they impose to their customers, more and more will leave for piracy, and you don’t need to go far. A jailbroken firestick with plex installed and a friend who is technically savy and has his own plex server when one can see a bunch of movies (not to mention the free ones on plex)
Charge the analysts more first. I’m sure they’ll charge their tune.
I am slowly cancelling services with each price increase. I uave cancelled Netflix and HBO. Will continue until morale improves.
Weird… why is piracy growing then? Every reasonable person should pay $300 to watch the shows they want on the weekend… and then pay a couple more hundreds in the theater.
every dollar you raise, the fewer customers you get. the point is that you should want to raise the price whenever the relative drop in customers is less than the relative increase in price to maximise profits (where marginal cost is marginal benefit :) )
Raise prices. Blame “the liberal agenda”. Profit.
Yarr harr fiddle dee dee. Fuck Netflix, Hulu and Disney
m.youtube.com/watch?v=SLMJpHihykI
I’ll have you know I watched two fucking vrbo commercials just to watch that 240p video!
Arrrrr
.
m.youtube.com/watch?v=iH3tqQY0ioI&pp=ygUQeW91…
Laughs in $0 a month payments for streaming services
Wouldn’t it be great if one company would get with each of the streaming services and put them under one umbrella. They could rent you a device that is mandatory for the service. While charging you a large subscription fee. Even better yet that could lock additional content behind another paywall. Direct TV and the cable companies need to hurry before someone beats them to it.
People in this comment section really thinking that the average person cares enough to go learn how computers really work in order to get tv for free
That’s why you gotta start a Plex share with your friend group - they get content, you get booze. Win win.
Actually there are a lot of people out there building plex servers on VPS services and charging friends/family/others to access (to offset the price of storage and network charges). That’s one of the reasons plex is now blocking certain VPS hosts.
Hah, well good thing that despite charging my friends in booze I host at home with a gigabit upload speed.
Fuck plex. Jellyfin FTW
I definitely care enough, but I can’t figure it out to save my life. All the online communities just act like everyone’s supposed to automatically already know what they’re talking about.
That’s because it’s illegal to discuss -how- to sail the seas in many jurisdictions. You either know or you don’t know. The best thing to do is ask a friend IRL to help you out.
If there are any questions or anything you want to know about it, I can help you. Unfortunately sailing the seas is a bit more tricky in the US, Since your isp sometimes sends you a cease and desist. Get a vpn, download qbittorrent and for the basic part, thats really it!
Why isn’t anyone mentioning that there are arrrrr streaming sites that won’t land someone a cease and desist?
For the most part, clearnet sites are safe. Except for the insane ads that these websites usually have, any clearnet site you connect to, nothing can harmyou. The real problem comes from downloading torrents
Step 1: If you are in the USA (or other oppressive state), learn about & get a VPN.
Step 2: Learn about either torrents (more popular) or usenet. And download a torrent client (free and perfectly legal).
Step 3: Search around for a torrent tracker or indexer where you will search for media content.
You can google/chatgpt these steps for further insight but it boils down to these three steps. It can get as complex or as simple as you want it to.
it’s worth noting that in a place like the US where ISPs set up torrent honeypots, you absolutely need a VPN and in many cases a paid tier that allows p2p (like proton).
Small price (literally) to pay in comparison to streaming price bloat/cableification.
I’ve tried, but I can’t get qbtorrent to work correctly. It’s just stalls on every download now.
Maybe try downloading a slightly older version, i had the same issue with a specific update around 4.5ish and downgrading fixed it!
You laugh, but that’s exactly what happened with Napster and other file sharing software. It starts with the nerds, then someone makes a good easy piece of software for it, then everyone is downloading cars.
I think people forget that it happens often. Remember napster/sharebear/lime wire. People learn when motivated.
Hulu is currently the only streaming service I still pay for, and that’s mainly because TV shows are a removed to pirate (disk space and download times being the main annoyance), but it won’t take more than one or two more price hikes for the balance to shift so that it’s worth the effort to just go full pirate instead of forking out so much cash.
The fact that Disney just fully bought Hulu bodes very poorly too - I’ll bet anything that it’s going to get folded into Disney+ soon as a “pay an extra 15/month to access Hulu content, but only through your Disney+ membership sort of deal”
Here’s a tip: I went to cancel my Hulu subscription, and they offered on my way out to instead lower my price for 6 months. I decided to go with it.
I can’t guarantee the same would happen for others, but ultimately it’s all gonna be a haggling situation.
Its the same thing cable did.
One option that exists for the price-averse is going for the low-subscriber streaming services. This doesn’t give you the popular shows everyone else is watching, but it’s suitable if your goal is to just entertain yourself with something distracting for a while.
I was briefly subscribed to Shudder, a niche horror flick service that doesn’t cost much and has a few decent items on there.
Crunchyroll is relatively cheap for anime, has been buying up other properties to give itself a large library. That said, there are accusations that the money doesn’t ever reach the original creators. HiDive is another anime service with some weird options.
There’s free services like Pluto TV, usually ad-supported (but hey, a lot of the paid options are giving ads)
Haven’t read it, but there’s also articles out there about other options, should people decide the major entries are too expensive, and they don’t want to go for piracy. Knowing your options is always good.
Anything good on shudder?
The best thing I found was a horror thriller simply called Revenge. A woman is violated and left for dead by a three-man hunting club. Then, against all odds, she hunts them back and kills them all. Small cast but very intense and bloody.
.
Ohhhhhhhhhh… it’s a pirates life for me. We have never subscribed to any of this shit. Savings have allowed us to eat avacado toast.
Streaming services, digital services in general, should be made to compete on having the best platform, not on exclusive content.
It’s all the same wires going to the same machines. Internationally, too. I can see maybe allowing for different pricing for countries with very different wage levels, but if it’s online, it should be available everywhere.
I’m paying for the services that produce the best content, not simply platforms that host content from others. It would be nice if they shared it to other streaming services, but then they would have little reason to create them.
The way to get that is to split them and say: a streaming provider can’t be a content creator as well. That way, content creating companies would be incentivized to sell their content to every streaming provider at a price that the market will bear, and streaming providers would be incentivized to compete on providing the best experience to their users.
Arrrrrr
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I’ve no problem with paying for good services, but when I get a better service from a random pirate streaming site than I do from Amazon Prime, why would I continue paying for that?
I’m just sick of things either being exclusive to one service even though they’re decades old, or just plain not available.
Oh, and if I’m paying, I don’t want ads. Not ever.
Yeah some of the arr software is pretty fucking cool for being entirely free.
Exactly. It used to be that netflix was all you needed to get most quality content, and it was a fair deal for customers: you pay a reasonable monthly amount, and you and your family gets convenient access to most streamable movies and TV series.
Now that quality content is spread out and locked out over half a dozen other streaming services, and subscribing to them all is not just a hassle but also incredibly bad value compared to the original offer.
In a healthy competitive environment, you would expect companies to counter reduced value by increasing customer value in other ways or by reducing prices, but instead we got price hikes, lots of low quality filler content, crack downs on password sharing, advertising, various unpopular UI changes and other service reductions decreasing value even further.
To solve this, I think the content producers and streaming services should be split up, because right now they’re not really competitors in a true sence but small monopolies who each clutch the keys to their own little franchises. It should be noted for example that music streaming works a lot better: there are various competitors that each hold a viable content library on their own, so you don’t need more than one music streaming service. IMO that’s because Spotify, Tidal, YT Music, etc. are merely distributors and not the actual producers.
Being totally serious, you should copy and paste your comment and email it to your local US Representative.
Yeah, the music industry finally got their shit together and made something that was more convenient than just nicking it online. Took their sweet time over it, but I think they realised that it was taking like a minute to download a whole album by that point.
It’s really the model of how to do it well. Very little in the way of exclusives locked to one particular service. Occasionally an artist kicks up a fuss over something and pulls all their stuff from one of them, but it’s rare enough that I don’t care.
Source on better pirate streaming service?
Any of these will do. Prime is not a high bar to get over. Some may work better than others, and I think it’s down to where you are and time of day than anything else.
fmhy.pages.dev/videopiracyguide/#multi-server
It’s not as good as downloading yourself and running Jellyfin, but it’s convenient.
Many thanks kind stranger!
I have a problem paying for DRM. I want to use open source and DRM is the opposite. I like (and buy sometimes) Creative Commons music/audio-books just because it tastes better when artist isn’t supporting restricting me. Cory Doctorow is a creative worker who lives and breaths anti-DRM, if you’ve not explored this. I recommend his old talk “The Coming War on General Computation”.
I’ll give you a reason, pirating. Pirating with obfuscated networks (VPN, onion, etc) will never die. People just put it down because the convenience was worth the price. When it no longer is, ships will sail the seas again, and having everything already digital in these services will make it that much easier.
torrenting over tor would be exhaustive for the onions.
I2P
I’ll cancel my account before I willingly subject myself to advertising. I’m sure I’m not the only one.
It blows my mind that advertising could be worth more than a subscription.
Their evaluation of advertising must be tied with brand recognition and other general brain washing tactics.
I think it is possible advertising is over valued. There I’ve said it. I’m not alone in this: freakonomics.com/…/does-advertising-actually-work…
I’m already in the process of replacing my streaming services with cheaper alternatives.
Remember March 2012, when SOPA and PIPA were about to pass, and many websites were blacking out as a form of protest, some people were advocating for a “Black March” to have everyone boycott Big Media, pirated or not, for the entire month? Yeah sure it didn’t spread like wildfire because of course, the population is already too addicted to popular culture to drop it cold-turkey, but at this rate people may be forced to give it a go by force.
Only reason I still have Netflix is that T-Mobile pays for it for me. I also used to have Funimation, but Crunchyroll taking over stopped adding captions to translate written text from new dubbed anime. Especially anime that uses a lot of written segues and such that is important to understanding what’s going on. So I had to pirate anyway. And now so many services are removing features, especially as they merge, but still continue to raise prices. There just aren’t any services worth the cost anymore and I’m not willing to pay hundreds of dollars. That’s one of many reasons! why I dumped cable ages ago.