It makes sense from the point of view of a giant corporation. If people are paying despite of recent price increases and declining quality, why not try to increase profits even further?
Succumb? They're going to be at the forefront of creating it, reducing their expenses and therefore increasing their profits.
If you're saying that people will just watch other variants of video slop posted on youtube or other free sites instead of paying for some sort of curated entertainment service, history indicates otherwise.
Well we are already seeing the effects of it. No one wants to watch a film made with generative models. The sentiment is pretty clear online outside of the aibro sphere.
People expecting that the content companies were going to just accept lower revenue forever and not eventually get back to cable pricing were fooling themselves
In fact, the content companies are planning on making more money than they did under cable because since they're selling direct to the consumer, there's no DirecTV/Comcast/Charter middleman taking a slice anymore
Of course they'll sell through those intermediaries and take a cut but it will be much less than the cable companies were getting before, and will just go into the marketing cost bucket
Then they're just eventually going to lose out to things like short-form content and services like live streaming that younger generations are moving towards.
I wouldn't be surprised if they end up basically exactly like cable, where the only people who hang around end up being the older generations in the decade to come.
All the major streaming providers are also adding live content. Once they have the infrastructure built out and the customers, it’s relatively easy to add the live content.
Relatively easy is doing some heavy lifting. There's plenty of reports about the streamer's live content having piss poor performance. Getting VOD streaming to work correctly is totally different than live coverage streaming correctly. The only thing they have in common is the viewer using the same app to view it.
They’re going to lose out to a choose your own adventure-esque experience that locally generated AI content will produce. Why pay a subscription for terrible content when you can make your own personal terrible content?
as addicting as short form content may be its really lacking when compared to fully fleshed out stories. I think big picture there's no way it wins. it'd be like mcdonalds replacing sit down restaurants.
I don't know about expect companies to accept lower revenue, but I certainly expect value for the money paid and I am personally seeing less and less of it. Surely, it is a dance of what the customer is willing to swallow. At this point, wife's habits are the only thing keeping our household from becoming disney-free. It is a shame, because as a platform, Disney+ did have a decent selection after it acquired hulu.
Spot on. They discounted to encourage the transition away from cable and DVR (remember TiVo?) to streaming and then they raise prices to the magical “fraction of monthly budget for entertainment” level that everyone (cable, too) works up to. Every company is going to try to get you to give them all of what you’re willing to pay. When cancellations are greater than new subs, they’ll stop and wait for inflation and rising wages to catch up again. That’s the game. That’s always going to be the game.
People expecting that the content companies were going to just accept lower revenue forever and not eventually get back to cable pricing were fooling themselves
Well that sort of happened for the music industry. I think people thought the video industry would follow a similar path where a few providers offer very large catalogs and then pay the media owners per play.
Instead these media owners got greedy and every media producing company decided it also needed to be a streaming company. But further, they licensed the media out exclusively to single streaming companies.
I'm also certain nobody expected that bought digital media would simply evaporate due to licensing.
Don't get me wrong, if the music industry could get away with the same move they would. But there's simply a lot more music and the ecosystem is too well established.
There was precedent, in the form of music. Music did get wildly better than "buy a CD", and the norm for music purchasing is zero DRM and files you own forever. So it wasn't an unreasonable expectation to hope the same would happen for video.
I think it was, because that serves as the cautionary tale that tv/movies are determined not to repeat (illustrated early by their refusal to get into bed with Apple as much as the music labels did)
We are worse than cable pricing at this point from what I can see.
It's absurd that piracy is the _best_ user experience. 1 app, 1 place for your content, no licensing deals to worry about, no outrage pulling old episodes, local streaming, the list goes on.
You literally cannot pay (legally) for a better experience, and that makes me sad.
Streaming services have become the worst of all worlds.
As an EU citizen, even tho I pay for Netflix and Prime, I cannot access most of the content there as even tho it exists on the service because it's not available in my country.
Amazon prime has 2 good shows and just a bunch of D-tier movies or some 35+ year old ones. It's mostly worthless.
Netflix region locks a whole lot of content or removes it after some time. I can't watch some great movies and TV shows because "oh we don't have rights for this region".
Meanwhile, piracy provides a user experience that not just lets me access all of their content - one I'm already paying for - anywhere, but also lets me access movies and shows that would otherwise not be found anywhere else, including regional movies and short movies.
Content rights are micro managed too, unlike ever before so you get things like a streaming service buying a title in one language but not the one you want. This doesn't stop them from returning it in your search results though
It's pure joy to be able to always answer "I haven't seen it" when someone starts with "Have you seen that ad...".
The disrespect that streaming companies show their customers is insane. I'm sure most of the customer don't even know what they are missing, the hoops they have to jump through, the mental load to switch between all those terrible, hostile UIs, etc...
It's absurd because in a sane world we'd have rules similar to playing music on the radio. If all the content providers provided a stream/video to resellers (and couldn't refuse to license/sell) then we could have a company that did the same thing as pirates can build, legally.
Instead the content is silo'd in a bunch of massive companies that don't care about UI/UX and exist only to force more ads down our throats.
This isn't about being law abiding or not for the sake of it, it's about the best experience _at any price_ is unobtainable without breaking a law.
And yes, I'm in favor of abolishing copyright and/or significantly limiting/curtailing it. Some short exclusivity window (<5 years, ideally <1 year) and then anyone can redistribute it paying small royalties for another <5-10 years, then it's public.
I really like AppleTV, and find it to be a much better experience than pirating ever was. For one, the resolution is always great, secondly, I don't have to know what I want to watch, and third pretty much everything on there is good. My habits have changed though, I don't spend nearly as much time watching tv compared to the college days.
The service? The Hardware? The App on the hardware? (Great job naming Apple...)
I agree that the Apple TV is the best experience one can have. It can be further enhanced by using a single app (Plex/Plezy/Jellyfin/Infuse/etc). Jumping between streaming services and their hostile, horrible UIs is such a pain. The Apple TV app was meant to improve that situation but without buy-in from all the streaming providers (which they will never get) it's always going to be playing second fiddle to the high seas.
They do, in fact, have that buy-in. It’s a prerequisite for having an app that does video on Apple TV: the same video stream provider that does listings for search in-app is also used out-of-app, with results lifted and recontextualized. Everything from Netflix to Disney+ to Crunchyroll is listed in app.
It’s a prerequisite for having an app that does video on Apple TV
It's not. Netflix is a _very new_ addition (last year) to the Apple TV app (which is ironic seeing how Netflix was highly integrated into ATV before they moved to apps on the ATV).
All of your services might be represented at this point in time but it can (and has) changed over time.
It's funny because everyone predicted this would happen back when Netflix had everything and was $5. "Eventually other companies are going to make their own apps, put in ads, increase prices and we'll be back to $80 a month"
For now we’re still better than cable because you don’t need to stay subscribed to everything just because you want to watch something. Especially in this modern age of “dump a whole season at once and then spend 2 years making the next season”. You can subscribe to something for a month to watch the latest season and then drop the subscription.
That is worse than cable if you had something like TiVo. Back with a cable subscription you were "locked in" but it was cheaper than buying all the subscriptions. We have taken a massive step backwards in UI/UX when it comes to TV, piracy is the only thing that beats TiVO but TiVo (old TiVo, before Cable Card was killed) beats pretty much everything else today.
Yeah its also interesting seeing the niche apps that pop up that basically pick what to watch for you and where everyone watches the same thing at the same time. Seems like converging on old school television.
It's fine to extract from the subsidies as long as you have an exit ramp. Always have an exit ramp planned for when the gravy train ends (because that's always the goal, achieve market share or dominance and then crank on profitability as hard as possible). The defense against enshittification is a stack you can own and operate end to end.
(Jellyfin + Soundcloud + Bandcamp + sonarr/radarr/lidarr in this context; if you have Plex, that is also an option; you can also stick web content into this system with yt-dlp)
On the bright side, it’s just TV. I watch it like everyone else, but with the awareness that literally any hobby that replaced it would be a better use of my time.
On the other hand, we're back to cable pricing except everything is on demand and there's no need to match any channel timetable when you want to watch a show. So it's not all bad.
In a way I feel today's environment is less conducive to pirating than it used to be. So many fewer people have any kind of "always on" computer these days, they're using phones and tablets instead. Not to mention locked down App Stores, etc.
Solving the linear scheduling problem is welcome. Allowing each MSO/Content maker to profit is also welcome. Creating islands of content exclusive to that platform and then raise prices after record breaking profits and mergers to create a monopoly? Not welcome.
Cable companies purposefully enacted legislation more than a decade ago to prevent innovation until they could provide these streaming platforms for their oligarchs. Cable companies then sell to them and now are board members of the new platform.
They already started slow rolling episodes that are already done, no doubt they'll create periodic view windows for things that you'll miss, then make that same content "extra charge" outside those windows, to try and extract extra payments or make you wait until after the next billing date to watch something.
We've had DVRs since 1999 so scheduling hasn't been an issue for a long time. And the commercials with a real TV DVR are skippable, unlike with streaming.
In slovenia, one of the media houses demanded from telcos (iptv providers) to disable skipping ads when timehshifting shows (for the first 3 days), so even if you're watching a show that was on yesterday, you can skip forwards/backwards all over the show, but you can't skip over the ads (currently you can skip forwards over the ads only "a lot" (like 10 minutes), then slowly skip backwards until you reach the end of the ads, but it's a pain).
So yeah... cameras tracking your eyes (that you're not turning away or going to pee during ads) are next, and then the "drink the verification cam".
On the other other side, a lot of content is unavailable in more permanent forms, so if you want to watch something again, you're entirely at the mercy of the content provider. e.g. The Norsemen on Netflix. If I ever want to watch that in the future, I need to subscribe to Netflix and hope they still have it in their catalog. I can't find a blu-ray or dvd.
I'm old enough to remember that the original pitch to get people to pay for cable TV (which was a big barrier in the 1960s/70s) was "Yes, there's a monthly fee - but no ads!). The only time I see cable TV is when I'm staying in a motel, and I'm just astonished by the ad load.
I would argue we have a duty to do so, as a counter incentive to the network and streaming execs for making it so annoying and inconvenient to watch anything. I do not pay for YT TV w/ NFL Sunday Ticket, but there was one weekend last year where ESPN and Google were fighting, and no NFL games were shown on YT TV.
There have been times where I will pay to "own" instead of rent a tv show I really like, and then a year later that streaming service loses the rights to it, and so do I.
Funnily enough, the high seas remain unsailed around here because content got so formulaic I rarely see the point.
I can't remember the last time that talk about a show in my inner circle made me check it. Season 1 severance maybe? It feels forever ago, it used to be an almost weekly thing.
Same company that also announced that their supposedly "ad-free" plans will now be allowed to include ads and promotional content before and after content.
These streaming services learned nothing from cable are just pushing people back to pirating
Maybe they haven't learned anything. Or maybe they crunched the numbers and decided losing a percentage of users to piracy was worth the risk? The only thing that is crystal clear is the greed - no amount of money/profits will ever be enough.
As a user, probably the best thing to do is get a library card and read books published prior to 1980 or thereabouts. Much of the movies/shows produced these days is not that good anyways, and anything that is good gets canceled after a season or two
For the streaming services, its far easier to negotiate a contract with one advertiser than it is to raise your price for X customers and reach the same revenue increase. If they don't believe they'll lose more customers than they gain revenue, the move is inevitable.
Capitalism requires users to vote with their wallets. And advertising still isn't enough of a deterrent to most users to vote differently. Books and grass don't have ads.
Surprisingly, increasing user hostility is a filter of users' tech savviness and IQ. I doubt most HN dwellers will tolerate price increases or ads or anything like that. They can pirate shit, and they can block ads. They're better off compared to the rest of the population who is not tech-savvy enough or smart enough to bypass these user-hostilities. These companies basically extract revenue out of people who are relatively poor.
This seems backwards. The salaries around here are relatively high, so a marginal increase in monthly entertainment costs wouldn't be noticeable in the first place. People can get self-righteous if they want, but these are entertainment services, not essential goods.
Only speaking for myself, but these streaming services would need to increase costs A LOT to make me invest valuable time replacing them.
It's a big world out there, whatever "here" means.
That last sentence makes me wonder, do you enjoy ads?
I went to a Super Bowl party a while back and the half time show glitched continuously. Random weird glitches for the rest of the time. => note to self: don't pay for this.
The "relatively high" salaries also mean that 20 minutes of ads in a 60 minute session "costs" more. It's not quite as simple as applying my hourly rate to the ads, but it's at least a decent place to start the analysis, and by that metric it doesn't take long before the ads are the dominant cost of the service. It gives me a lot of virtual money to deploy to the task of turning to entertainment that doesn't annoying vast quantities of my time to squeeze out fractions of a penny from me because they can do it in bulk.
If you live in the DMV, you can get a free DC library card. You then get free access to Kanopy - a good streaming service with no ads. That could scratch the streaming itch without having to pay for these expensive services.
The Kanopy model is fascinating. Library members get free views but there are limits as the library has to pay for those views. Our county library system has a Kanopy subscription at each library and county residents are eligible to become members at every location. Kanopy supports adding multiple library cards, so you can boost your limit.
Several times I got a free or discounted Disney+ subscription. Every time I watch a few shows on it, then let it go once those promotions ended. It's just not worth the money no matter the price tier, even at older prices (that considering in my country it's already cheaper than in the US), and even less so with any kind of ad thrown with it.
I didn’t realize Disney+ had twice as many subscribers as Hulu. Hulu has been around a lot longer than Disney+. Goes to show the value of the content mix.
Not what everyone wants to hear, but I think there’s more headroom for price increases than the HN crowd likes to admit. Compared to how much people spent on cable or satellite TV, these prices feel like peanuts.
If you have a cable subscriptions, pretty much all of the apps will allow you to use the app by connecting with your provider. When I cut the cord, I was reminded of how many of the apps I was using were covered this way. At this point, rough math in my head suggests the a la carte app subs are higher than the single cable sub.
Disney has a wide-ranging, vast library of content. All the classic Disney stuff, Disney Channel movies, Marvel, Star Wars... Not saying it's worth it, but it's a wide appeal. I can only thing of 5-10 great Hulu shows; I don't really know what to watch on there.
D+ exists outside of the US only: Everywhere else al things owned by Disney that are streaming are in D+, like ABC and FX series. Also, nobody streams more than children that have Moana in the background, and thus watch it 4 times a day. It makes it far stickier.
Hulu is not long for this world anyway, as Disney has been trying to merge them for years, if you believe investor calls. They'll probably be just one streaming service within the year.
"I didn’t realize Disney+ had twice as many subscribers as Hulu. Hulu has been around a lot longer than Disney+. Goes to show the value of the content mix."
Brand awareness is more likely. No one knows wtf a "Hulu" is outside the US, and even parts of the US too (it was never the biggest player).
Parents see "Disney" and sub for a free** babysitter.
**With all these price hikes this dynamic may have shifted.
Eh. Kodi, Torrserver, and Jacktook, Jacktor if you rather stream torrents and not have to deal with storage. Fairly easy to keep track of your shows and view on demand within Kodi.
This but Jellyfin way before Plex, which is always revenue hungry. You bought a lifetime pass? That's cute, try on some advertising unless you disable it.
They'll continue to make anti-consumer choices in order to attempt to drive growth. Jellyfin has done nothing but improve.
What's a reasonable setup for sailing the seas safely?
It's not only the price hikes and the atomization/fragmentation of content, what made me cut the wire was that I couldn't get high quality in my computer unless I used X browser for Y service.
If you’re lazy and don’t mind dealing with a few ads, search yandex for ‘[content name] free stream’ and use one of the many pirate stream sites that show up in the results. Adblocker highly recommended.
I have access to a well-seeded 20+ year old private tracker but usually use the above method to stream content for free these days.
In general terms, set up a seedbox VM that is configured so it can only access the internet through Tor/VPN. Join a private tracker (I recommend IPT). Only allow file transfer one-way to your NAS or whatever, then use something like Jellyfin to pull from that.
A day or so of setup (if you're completely new) and you'll need a usenet sub (recommended) or torrent site (or sites, quality may vary on open trackers) but the *arr stack can be automated[1] to make sure you have the best quality versions of each episode/movie fairly easily.
Depends how much you want to automate, but all you really need is a VPN (or so I am told). There are some good docker containers that bundle the VPN, Transmission, and a dead-man's switch for the connection (allegedly)
Just a note, sailing the seas safely is fairly easy today but unless you want a more involved setup and only want to keep unwatched or unwatched plus a few "keep forever" shows, the cost of hardware is not going to be much "cheaper".
I have a friend who calculated up their hardware costs (before ram/ssd/hdd-ageddon) and paying for all the streaming services costs came in lower over the span of something like 10+ years. That said, they have the best UI/UX experience I've seen and don't see ads so I'd still count it as a win.
Oh sure, you can use an old laptop (or seedbox-type thing), an external drive, and get pretty far but if you want to replicate streaming services for all the shows you care about, it's not cheap.
Yeah its not a panacea. IMO there is no full turnkey solution that doesnt involve cobbling multiple services together (ie jellyfin, seer, etc). Then you have high cloud prices that, in order to save money, would require a local setup with old hardware to be cost effective.
You shouldnt be spinning up cloud resources to host your media stack. You should be buying used hardware off cycle and cobbling it together. All of which costs time to operationalize it, ie tweaking gpu drivers on linux to get that old hardware working.
It only really makes sense if youre a real enthusiast, or amortize it across your family, friends, etc. But then youre breaking a bunch more laws and as a working professional that just isnt worth the liability for the value provided.
The real answer I think is simply to consume less content.
I have no idea what you're talking about. have plex on my beefy Linux PC and before that was using a Mac with an Intel i7. unless you need to transcode you can use what ever ancient hardware you have, there are people using raspberry pi's for running plex/jellyfin
Yes, QuickSync is amazing but hard drives alone (for a larger collection) are incredibly expensive (today). Even before prices shot up I know people that sunk $8K+ into hard drives alone.
I think we need to segregate data hoarders from people who want maybe 100-200 movies. At pre-insane levels, $8k of storage would have been petabytes of non mirrored space. Back in the day, I routinely watched movies compressed to fit on a CD at 700mb. Sure, that is now laughable quality, but most people don’t care about 8k with Dolby digital at 100+Gb per film.
A single 20TB drive can hold quite a bit of media.
At pre-insane levels, $8k of storage would have been petabytes of non mirrored space.
Not quite. Before the insane prices I was able to get 4x 20TB for $1,200, so $300/20TB, so $8000/300 = 26.6, call it 27 drives, so 27x20 = 540TB, a little over half a petabyte, not "petabytes" (before mirror/raid/etc).
If you were buying that over time and keeping your price-per-harddrive about the same, you'd come up with much lower (since you would have been buying smaller drives in the past. Also smaller/older drives have to be rotated out due to age/wear/too-small so it's not all additive.
But you are correct, there is a difference between "data hoarders" and people that pirate and it's an important distinction (eww, that sounds a little AI-y, but I wrote it).
One could also pay for a usenet provider, this is much better than p2p. You pay a monthly fee and the usenet provider hosts all the linux distros :) one might desire. You just download and never distribute.
Once you set it up with Sonarr and Radarr and Plex/Jellyfin you will never go back to HBO, Netflix, blah blah blah blah.
Did you buy a boat with the money not being spent on media, or using that money to pay for renting? Either way, it made me think of the old saying, "the two happiest day's in a man's life are the day he buys a boat and the day he sells that boat".
I'm seeing "average" people adopt piracy at astonishing levels because of these decisions. I went over to a friend's house the other day and his relative sent him one of those Android TV devices with access to all the pirated content you could ever want. I would never have imagined him to be ok with it. This has been happening in my social circle at an accelerating rate. People that would have scolded me for doing the same 10 years ago are now doing it.
The unfortunate reality is this is why we have residential botnets. Your friend is probably paying for his free TV by attacking things over the Internet.
You don't need a special (often compromised) device, and usually there is a service you will have to pay for as well.
Search up IPTV on any social media and you'll start getting loads of ads for these services, for like $25 a month for a trillion channels, a catalog of VOD content, etc. You can use a simple client like Chillio on Apple TV as the client and have a safe stack.
I subscribed to one. And just to be clear, I subscribe to and pay $ for every streaming service available in Canada, and a maxed out cable plan. My cable company (Cogeco) serves up some pixelized dogshit low bitrate/obsolete codec feed for both NFL football and F1 racing. Via some dodgy IPTV provider (there are a million names and resellers but they're all ostensibly the front for the same service) I get amazingly crisp, excellent visuals, better accessibility, etc. It's crazy. Technically and usably an infinitely better option, at a fraction of the price.
"Oh but you might fund organized crime!" -- yeah, when most media empires are oligarchs pushing their politics and kleptocracy on people, I have more faith in those organized criminals than I do garbage like the Ellison family.
Via some dodgy IPTV provider (there are a million names and resellers but they're all ostensibly the front for the same service) I get amazingly crisp, excellent visuals, better accessibility, etc. It's crazy. Technically and usably an infinitely better option, at a fraction of the price.
Your dogshit provider must be better than the one I was using. Live sports was usually good, but sometimes very flaky. Video on demand files were served with uniform rate limiting that was too low to handle scenes with people on horseback riding through confetti parades. Also, no bandwidth adaptation (which wasn't a real issue for me, but is needed for many users). Captioning was very weird... IIRC I would have to either have no captions or all captions, there was no option for captions only for non-english you're supposed to read to follow the plot.
I mean, you really don't. They are mostly infected with malware, it will probably try compromise as many devices on your network as it can to make them part of a botnet and try to access as many files as it can.
People that would have scolded me for doing the same 10 years ago are now doing it.
I can see how they could tell themselves it's not the same. This is a device that just shows a library of content that they can watch. There's no needing to know that P2P, warez, torrents, seeding, etc even exist let alone know what they are or how they work. They couldn't sell these devices if it was illegal, right?
This will be what makes companies start pursuing legal action. Once it's not mostly people in poor countries who are pirating, companies will try to reclaim that lost revenue. I'm not sure if they can do anything about torrenting, but I would be surprised if TV devices like what you mentioned are still available in a couple years.
I'm looking now to cancel my Netflix/Apple TV/Disney+/Prime subscriptions and have 1 at a given time for a few weeks/months while watching some particular series.
My family has been assembling a DVD collection for the past couple years and it's really starting to pay off. Wow, I own this media and can play it whenever I want without ads, and fear of it randomly disappearing or having scenes cut out of it? It really feels like magic.
I've got a record player coming tomorrow. My song streaming service of choice keeps jacking up prices and now feeds me AI slop; it's time for a change.
I suspect kids growing up right now will experience a renaissance of physical media from fed-up parents.
So price of the service goes up, revenue goes up... quality goes down and service is worst... and this is kind of recurrint theme with other companies... what's the option here?
And remember same will happen with healthcare, education, products like cars or phones...
I already cancelled Netflix and HBO, I guess Hulu is next. It feels almost like a yearly 10-20% increase across streaming services and the content hasn’t improved. There’s just more crap to filter out. I think I may just be happy with Criterion only once I’m done with a couple of shows on Apple TV.
I use the language immersion for learning languages. And with the streaming platforms you can't get cc captions in the original language. There is many foreign media thay is on the platform but not on your country, there is extension that are useful for making flashcards or small clips, but for some reason you can't watch whatever you want to watch in the original resolution if you're on the browser and if you use linux they dare to limit you to 720p. Compare this to just downloading anything you want and using mpv with any extension you want that does whatever you want it to do.
I still pay less than when I had a cable bundle with the caveat that, then, I didn't have premium channels and, now, don't have live TV. In my personal book, I'm still ahead in the game.
I can not pick up anything with an antenna, cheap or otherwise.
I'm at the foot of of a hill that's between me and where broadcast antennas are 40-50 miles away. I had no TV when I moved in until Comcast eventually put in cable. The seller had even tried putting an antenna up in the attic which did no good. So I would need to subscribe to a live TV streaming service which isn't worth it for me as I don't really watch sports much.
But I'm glad you're so confident of your knowledge of my situation.
Yeah, exactly. I can appreciate that people don't like how these services are raising their prices. If you don't think you're getting your money's worth, then cancel. If you want to turn to piracy instead, then I know I don't care. But people comparing these streaming services to cable really don't seem to understand just how bad cable was (and still is). It was way more expensive, you got way less content, and the quality of the experience was way worse.
I swear, the people who compare these streaming services to cable are all too young to remember that the average cable experience was flicking through channels until something remotely reasonable was on (and it was likely an episode or movie you've already seen many times before), you'd hop in part way through the content (so hopefully it was something you've seen before so you knew what was going on), you wouldn't be able to pause anything obviously, and about a third of your viewing time was forced ads. And all of this could be costing you over a hundred bucks a month in 2000s money in a locked-in contract lmao
TiVo et al. helped somewhat. But at one point I realized I hadn't watched anything on my TiVo in months and the landline on my triple play Comcast plan wasn't worth the cost as a backup or because I had to train my dad to call my fricking cell phone.
I get way more video than I have time to watch and I do monitor things so if I'm really not using a service I can always drop it. I care very little about having access to EVERYTHING which I never had before streaming anyway. If I really miss anything, it's DVD by mail.
Streaming markets have really felt like price fixing scenarios over the past few years. I can't think of any exceptions that haven't been regularly and aggressively raising their prices like every 6 months at this point as if they are all coordinating.
Why the hell can't we have streaming businesses that reach some equilibrium threshold for how much content they want to produce, the quality of said content, and then focus on optimizing production and tech to both reduce prices and increase profits over time accompanied with scaling subscriber growth.
Is this a loaded question? People are getting hooked by high(ish) quality shows for relatively low prices. Once hooked you need to make them binge content (algorithm). Once hooked you can sell the ** for higher price.
I cancelled Disney+ years ago, am grandfathered into a Spotify/Hulu combo package, and I cancelled ESPN+ after they stopped their Bundesliga coverage. I haven't seen a Disney film in ages, part of me wonders how this company survives outside of nostalgia and college football.
I think people who buy disney aren't going anywhere. Where else are they going to get their fix? They can charge whatever they want and disney adults will pay for it. Lighter load on their servers too lol.
I do think interesting dynamics come into play when the customer base ages though. You saw this happen with kids and cartoons, kids do not even watch normal tv shows anymore. It's all youtube or streamers.
what moves if any has disney done to capture the youth group there
I canceled almost all streaming services this year and kept YouTube Premium, and honestly it’s the best decision I’ve ever made. Watching costs spiral out of control of just absolutely garbage is insane to witness. I cannot imagine spending hundreds of dollars a year to watch __any__ of the what is largely low effort, low budget trash barely a step beyond the crappiest reality TV. And for the rare diamond in the rough I can almost buy those separately, à la carte, and not have to give a crap when it canceled after a singe season.
I used to sort of scoff at the idea of streaming services being a bad deal, now I can’t even imagine paying for them. They’re so awful. They make me wish we had cable still!
The *arr family of software (sonarr, radarr, prowlarr, bazarr) are so convenient that I sometimes feel bad for these content companies. I'm traveling for a few weeks now and my server is just updating all of the shows I subscribed too and movies I may have added months ago that are just coming out now. I don't watch much tv (few hours a week) but over the years I've had so many friends and relatives that have wanted to get on my server and have requested shows/movies to be added. There's software that can automate that step as well but I haven't installed it because I'm worried about how quickly the drives would fill up - currently at about 40TB.
Maybe I’ll be skewered for saying this. It $22 a month for combined Disney and Hulu isn’t bad value for my family (we have small kids so Disney is more worth it for us).
What really surprises me is how little value I get from Netflix by comparison. It used to be the streamer but when I think of the prestige dramas I’ve enjoyed recently I’d place Apple TV and Hulu above Netflix. Their catalog is getting overrun with cheap reality TV.
That's how you double profits, indeed.
At some point the customer base is going to shrink, especially when the AI slop hits the market, right?
And you still get what you pay for in your subscription - ads you can't skip. ;-)
It makes sense from the point of view of a giant corporation. If people are paying despite of recent price increases and declining quality, why not try to increase profits even further?
It's going to be interesting to see how these beast succumb to AI created movies and shows.
Succumb? They're going to be at the forefront of creating it, reducing their expenses and therefore increasing their profits.
If you're saying that people will just watch other variants of video slop posted on youtube or other free sites instead of paying for some sort of curated entertainment service, history indicates otherwise.
Well we are already seeing the effects of it. No one wants to watch a film made with generative models. The sentiment is pretty clear online outside of the aibro sphere.
LOL do they not realize they push more and more towards piracy?
BTW here's the Disney 1937-2008 megatorrent, including lots of movies they "hold in the vault" (aka wont republish)
https: SLASH SLASH thepiratebay DOT org SLASH description.php?id=5657801
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:EF4211584F37CA70A4B1A2E47E7E833C79ABACBA&dn=Disney%20MEGA%20Collection%201937-2008&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.opentrackr.org%3A1337&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fopen.stealth.si%3A80%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.torrent.eu.org%3A451%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.bittor.pw%3A1337%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fpublic.popcorn-tracker.org%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.dler.org%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fexodus.desync.com%3A6969&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fopen.demonii.com%3A1337%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fglotorrents.pw%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.coppersurfer.tk%3A6969&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftorrent.gresille.org%3A80%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fp4p.arenabg.com%3A1337&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.internetwarriors.net%3A1337
They don't care about pushing SOME people to piracy as long as line goes up.
Just make sure to use Tribler!
Oof. I guess sailing the high sees is back on the table.
We are back to cable pricing, but shows and movies are all over the place and now we need multiple apps to track us.
People expecting that the content companies were going to just accept lower revenue forever and not eventually get back to cable pricing were fooling themselves
In fact, the content companies are planning on making more money than they did under cable because since they're selling direct to the consumer, there's no DirecTV/Comcast/Charter middleman taking a slice anymore
Of course they'll sell through those intermediaries and take a cut but it will be much less than the cable companies were getting before, and will just go into the marketing cost bucket
Then they're just eventually going to lose out to things like short-form content and services like live streaming that younger generations are moving towards.
I wouldn't be surprised if they end up basically exactly like cable, where the only people who hang around end up being the older generations in the decade to come.
especially as shows keep tending towards up-market
All the major streaming providers are also adding live content. Once they have the infrastructure built out and the customers, it’s relatively easy to add the live content.
Relatively easy is doing some heavy lifting. There's plenty of reports about the streamer's live content having piss poor performance. Getting VOD streaming to work correctly is totally different than live coverage streaming correctly. The only thing they have in common is the viewer using the same app to view it.
They’re going to lose out to a choose your own adventure-esque experience that locally generated AI content will produce. Why pay a subscription for terrible content when you can make your own personal terrible content?
as addicting as short form content may be its really lacking when compared to fully fleshed out stories. I think big picture there's no way it wins. it'd be like mcdonalds replacing sit down restaurants.
I don't know about expect companies to accept lower revenue, but I certainly expect value for the money paid and I am personally seeing less and less of it. Surely, it is a dance of what the customer is willing to swallow. At this point, wife's habits are the only thing keeping our household from becoming disney-free. It is a shame, because as a platform, Disney+ did have a decent selection after it acquired hulu.
Spot on. They discounted to encourage the transition away from cable and DVR (remember TiVo?) to streaming and then they raise prices to the magical “fraction of monthly budget for entertainment” level that everyone (cable, too) works up to. Every company is going to try to get you to give them all of what you’re willing to pay. When cancellations are greater than new subs, they’ll stop and wait for inflation and rising wages to catch up again. That’s the game. That’s always going to be the game.
Well that sort of happened for the music industry. I think people thought the video industry would follow a similar path where a few providers offer very large catalogs and then pay the media owners per play.
Instead these media owners got greedy and every media producing company decided it also needed to be a streaming company. But further, they licensed the media out exclusively to single streaming companies.
I'm also certain nobody expected that bought digital media would simply evaporate due to licensing.
Don't get me wrong, if the music industry could get away with the same move they would. But there's simply a lot more music and the ecosystem is too well established.
The consumer isn't the side that got screwed in the music industry, the screws got put to the artists in that industry instead
There was precedent, in the form of music. Music did get wildly better than "buy a CD", and the norm for music purchasing is zero DRM and files you own forever. So it wasn't an unreasonable expectation to hope the same would happen for video.
I think it was, because that serves as the cautionary tale that tv/movies are determined not to repeat (illustrated early by their refusal to get into bed with Apple as much as the music labels did)
We are worse than cable pricing at this point from what I can see.
It's absurd that piracy is the _best_ user experience. 1 app, 1 place for your content, no licensing deals to worry about, no outrage pulling old episodes, local streaming, the list goes on.
You literally cannot pay (legally) for a better experience, and that makes me sad.
Exactly this.
Streaming services have become the worst of all worlds.
As an EU citizen, even tho I pay for Netflix and Prime, I cannot access most of the content there as even tho it exists on the service because it's not available in my country.
Amazon prime has 2 good shows and just a bunch of D-tier movies or some 35+ year old ones. It's mostly worthless.
Netflix region locks a whole lot of content or removes it after some time. I can't watch some great movies and TV shows because "oh we don't have rights for this region".
Meanwhile, piracy provides a user experience that not just lets me access all of their content - one I'm already paying for - anywhere, but also lets me access movies and shows that would otherwise not be found anywhere else, including regional movies and short movies.
Content rights are micro managed too, unlike ever before so you get things like a streaming service buying a title in one language but not the one you want. This doesn't stop them from returning it in your search results though
Prime's local content issue can be fixed with a VPN.
...and no pre-roll or mid-roll ads, since just about all of the streamers are going to ads in every tier.
It's pure joy to be able to always answer "I haven't seen it" when someone starts with "Have you seen that ad...".
The disrespect that streaming companies show their customers is insane. I'm sure most of the customer don't even know what they are missing, the hoops they have to jump through, the mental load to switch between all those terrible, hostile UIs, etc...
How is that absurd?
Of course with piracy you can have all the content available everywhere forever.
How do you expect a law-abiding company to match that with content they don't own? Unless we abolish copyright.
It's absurd because in a sane world we'd have rules similar to playing music on the radio. If all the content providers provided a stream/video to resellers (and couldn't refuse to license/sell) then we could have a company that did the same thing as pirates can build, legally.
Instead the content is silo'd in a bunch of massive companies that don't care about UI/UX and exist only to force more ads down our throats.
This isn't about being law abiding or not for the sake of it, it's about the best experience _at any price_ is unobtainable without breaking a law.
And yes, I'm in favor of abolishing copyright and/or significantly limiting/curtailing it. Some short exclusivity window (<5 years, ideally <1 year) and then anyone can redistribute it paying small royalties for another <5-10 years, then it's public.
I really like AppleTV, and find it to be a much better experience than pirating ever was. For one, the resolution is always great, secondly, I don't have to know what I want to watch, and third pretty much everything on there is good. My habits have changed though, I don't spend nearly as much time watching tv compared to the college days.
The service? The Hardware? The App on the hardware? (Great job naming Apple...)
I agree that the Apple TV is the best experience one can have. It can be further enhanced by using a single app (Plex/Plezy/Jellyfin/Infuse/etc). Jumping between streaming services and their hostile, horrible UIs is such a pain. The Apple TV app was meant to improve that situation but without buy-in from all the streaming providers (which they will never get) it's always going to be playing second fiddle to the high seas.
They do, in fact, have that buy-in. It’s a prerequisite for having an app that does video on Apple TV: the same video stream provider that does listings for search in-app is also used out-of-app, with results lifted and recontextualized. Everything from Netflix to Disney+ to Crunchyroll is listed in app.
It's not. Netflix is a _very new_ addition (last year) to the Apple TV app (which is ironic seeing how Netflix was highly integrated into ATV before they moved to apps on the ATV).
All of your services might be represented at this point in time but it can (and has) changed over time.
It's funny because everyone predicted this would happen back when Netflix had everything and was $5. "Eventually other companies are going to make their own apps, put in ads, increase prices and we'll be back to $80 a month"
For now we’re still better than cable because you don’t need to stay subscribed to everything just because you want to watch something. Especially in this modern age of “dump a whole season at once and then spend 2 years making the next season”. You can subscribe to something for a month to watch the latest season and then drop the subscription.
That is worse than cable if you had something like TiVo. Back with a cable subscription you were "locked in" but it was cheaper than buying all the subscriptions. We have taken a massive step backwards in UI/UX when it comes to TV, piracy is the only thing that beats TiVO but TiVo (old TiVo, before Cable Card was killed) beats pretty much everything else today.
Yeah its also interesting seeing the niche apps that pop up that basically pick what to watch for you and where everyone watches the same thing at the same time. Seems like converging on old school television.
Ok but we've saved thousands of dollars until it finally happened.
It's fine to extract from the subsidies as long as you have an exit ramp. Always have an exit ramp planned for when the gravy train ends (because that's always the goal, achieve market share or dominance and then crank on profitability as hard as possible). The defense against enshittification is a stack you can own and operate end to end.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48835392
(Jellyfin + Soundcloud + Bandcamp + sonarr/radarr/lidarr in this context; if you have Plex, that is also an option; you can also stick web content into this system with yt-dlp)
On the bright side, it’s just TV. I watch it like everyone else, but with the awareness that literally any hobby that replaced it would be a better use of my time.
On the other hand, we're back to cable pricing except everything is on demand and there's no need to match any channel timetable when you want to watch a show. So it's not all bad.
In a way I feel today's environment is less conducive to pirating than it used to be. So many fewer people have any kind of "always on" computer these days, they're using phones and tablets instead. Not to mention locked down App Stores, etc.
Solving the linear scheduling problem is welcome. Allowing each MSO/Content maker to profit is also welcome. Creating islands of content exclusive to that platform and then raise prices after record breaking profits and mergers to create a monopoly? Not welcome.
Cable companies purposefully enacted legislation more than a decade ago to prevent innovation until they could provide these streaming platforms for their oligarchs. Cable companies then sell to them and now are board members of the new platform.
Don't give them any ideas. Dynamic viewing might be next.
They already started slow rolling episodes that are already done, no doubt they'll create periodic view windows for things that you'll miss, then make that same content "extra charge" outside those windows, to try and extract extra payments or make you wait until after the next billing date to watch something.
We've had DVRs since 1999 so scheduling hasn't been an issue for a long time. And the commercials with a real TV DVR are skippable, unlike with streaming.
That's today... give them time.
In slovenia, one of the media houses demanded from telcos (iptv providers) to disable skipping ads when timehshifting shows (for the first 3 days), so even if you're watching a show that was on yesterday, you can skip forwards/backwards all over the show, but you can't skip over the ads (currently you can skip forwards over the ads only "a lot" (like 10 minutes), then slowly skip backwards until you reach the end of the ads, but it's a pain).
So yeah... cameras tracking your eyes (that you're not turning away or going to pee during ads) are next, and then the "drink the verification cam".
( https://siol-net.translate.goog/novice/slovenija/nova-pravil... )
We've had dvrs for forever though, we just used to record a lifetime's with of content and then view it when we wanted, and slip the commercials!
On the other other side, a lot of content is unavailable in more permanent forms, so if you want to watch something again, you're entirely at the mercy of the content provider. e.g. The Norsemen on Netflix. If I ever want to watch that in the future, I need to subscribe to Netflix and hope they still have it in their catalog. I can't find a blu-ray or dvd.
Don't forget: Cable pricing but also with ads.
I mean that's just "cable pricing" as, unless I'm missing something, cable has ads.
I'm old enough to remember that the original pitch to get people to pay for cable TV (which was a big barrier in the 1960s/70s) was "Yes, there's a monthly fee - but no ads!). The only time I see cable TV is when I'm staying in a motel, and I'm just astonished by the ad load.
Cable had ads too, and you couldn't pay more for ad-free.
What's the best "Apple-like" solution here?
There must be Pro Sailing kits already under the price of a few of these things.
Any good starting point for a fisherman not interested in stashing fish but just capturing and releasing?
I would argue we have a duty to do so, as a counter incentive to the network and streaming execs for making it so annoying and inconvenient to watch anything. I do not pay for YT TV w/ NFL Sunday Ticket, but there was one weekend last year where ESPN and Google were fighting, and no NFL games were shown on YT TV.
There have been times where I will pay to "own" instead of rent a tv show I really like, and then a year later that streaming service loses the rights to it, and so do I.
Funnily enough, the high seas remain unsailed around here because content got so formulaic I rarely see the point.
I can't remember the last time that talk about a show in my inner circle made me check it. Season 1 severance maybe? It feels forever ago, it used to be an almost weekly thing.
Would be interesting to see a chart with the reviews of their original content relative to their reported profits, I suspect they do not align at all.
Same company that also announced that their supposedly "ad-free" plans will now be allowed to include ads and promotional content before and after content.
These streaming services learned nothing from cable are just pushing people back to pirating
There is constant pressure towards enshittification.
Maybe they haven't learned anything. Or maybe they crunched the numbers and decided losing a percentage of users to piracy was worth the risk? The only thing that is crystal clear is the greed - no amount of money/profits will ever be enough.
As a user, probably the best thing to do is get a library card and read books published prior to 1980 or thereabouts. Much of the movies/shows produced these days is not that good anyways, and anything that is good gets canceled after a season or two
For the streaming services, its far easier to negotiate a contract with one advertiser than it is to raise your price for X customers and reach the same revenue increase. If they don't believe they'll lose more customers than they gain revenue, the move is inevitable.
Capitalism requires users to vote with their wallets. And advertising still isn't enough of a deterrent to most users to vote differently. Books and grass don't have ads.
Surprisingly, increasing user hostility is a filter of users' tech savviness and IQ. I doubt most HN dwellers will tolerate price increases or ads or anything like that. They can pirate shit, and they can block ads. They're better off compared to the rest of the population who is not tech-savvy enough or smart enough to bypass these user-hostilities. These companies basically extract revenue out of people who are relatively poor.
This seems backwards. The salaries around here are relatively high, so a marginal increase in monthly entertainment costs wouldn't be noticeable in the first place. People can get self-righteous if they want, but these are entertainment services, not essential goods.
Only speaking for myself, but these streaming services would need to increase costs A LOT to make me invest valuable time replacing them.
"here"
It's a big world out there, whatever "here" means.
That last sentence makes me wonder, do you enjoy ads?
I went to a Super Bowl party a while back and the half time show glitched continuously. Random weird glitches for the rest of the time. => note to self: don't pay for this.
I could be wealthy beyond my wildest dreams and still be turned off by their obnoxious changes.
The "relatively high" salaries also mean that 20 minutes of ads in a 60 minute session "costs" more. It's not quite as simple as applying my hourly rate to the ads, but it's at least a decent place to start the analysis, and by that metric it doesn't take long before the ads are the dominant cost of the service. It gives me a lot of virtual money to deploy to the task of turning to entertainment that doesn't annoying vast quantities of my time to squeeze out fractions of a penny from me because they can do it in bulk.
Someone should spend money on a marketing campaign teaching people how to be tech literate (while skirting the law, and making implications).
Someone like Nathan Fielder would have the balls for this.
If you live in the DMV, you can get a free DC library card. You then get free access to Kanopy - a good streaming service with no ads. That could scratch the streaming itch without having to pay for these expensive services.
Lots of libraries offer Kanopy (though it seems like a lot of them have dropped it; I think it's actually pretty expensive for them to offer).
The Kanopy model is fascinating. Library members get free views but there are limits as the library has to pay for those views. Our county library system has a Kanopy subscription at each library and county residents are eligible to become members at every location. Kanopy supports adding multiple library cards, so you can boost your limit.
Disney+ and Hulu is probably the best value I get out of all the streaming services I subscribe to. Easily worth it for me.
I disagree.
(is this the level of discourse we're going for here?)
Canceling my hulu
Several times I got a free or discounted Disney+ subscription. Every time I watch a few shows on it, then let it go once those promotions ended. It's just not worth the money no matter the price tier, even at older prices (that considering in my country it's already cheaper than in the US), and even less so with any kind of ad thrown with it.
I didn’t realize Disney+ had twice as many subscribers as Hulu. Hulu has been around a lot longer than Disney+. Goes to show the value of the content mix.
Not what everyone wants to hear, but I think there’s more headroom for price increases than the HN crowd likes to admit. Compared to how much people spent on cable or satellite TV, these prices feel like peanuts.
Except it quickly becomes close to cable when you start adding all the streaming services up.
If you have a cable subscriptions, pretty much all of the apps will allow you to use the app by connecting with your provider. When I cut the cord, I was reminded of how many of the apps I was using were covered this way. At this point, rough math in my head suggests the a la carte app subs are higher than the single cable sub.
Disney has a wide-ranging, vast library of content. All the classic Disney stuff, Disney Channel movies, Marvel, Star Wars... Not saying it's worth it, but it's a wide appeal. I can only thing of 5-10 great Hulu shows; I don't really know what to watch on there.
D+ exists outside of the US only: Everywhere else al things owned by Disney that are streaming are in D+, like ABC and FX series. Also, nobody streams more than children that have Moana in the background, and thus watch it 4 times a day. It makes it far stickier.
Hulu is not long for this world anyway, as Disney has been trying to merge them for years, if you believe investor calls. They'll probably be just one streaming service within the year.
Whatever HN says, you can expect the average person to do the opposite.
"I didn’t realize Disney+ had twice as many subscribers as Hulu. Hulu has been around a lot longer than Disney+. Goes to show the value of the content mix."
Brand awareness is more likely. No one knows wtf a "Hulu" is outside the US, and even parts of the US too (it was never the biggest player).
Parents see "Disney" and sub for a free** babysitter.
**With all these price hikes this dynamic may have shifted.
I mean they can do this to people who have you children who live on disney+, but this will make others think twice about the subscription
Plex / Sonarr / Radarr FTW.
Eh. Kodi, Torrserver, and Jacktook, Jacktor if you rather stream torrents and not have to deal with storage. Fairly easy to keep track of your shows and view on demand within Kodi.
This but Jellyfin way before Plex, which is always revenue hungry. You bought a lifetime pass? That's cute, try on some advertising unless you disable it.
They'll continue to make anti-consumer choices in order to attempt to drive growth. Jellyfin has done nothing but improve.
To clarify I am not a Plex fan but am too lazy to move away.
What's a reasonable setup for sailing the seas safely?
It's not only the price hikes and the atomization/fragmentation of content, what made me cut the wire was that I couldn't get high quality in my computer unless I used X browser for Y service.
If you’re lazy and don’t mind dealing with a few ads, search yandex for ‘[content name] free stream’ and use one of the many pirate stream sites that show up in the results. Adblocker highly recommended.
I have access to a well-seeded 20+ year old private tracker but usually use the above method to stream content for free these days.
In general terms, set up a seedbox VM that is configured so it can only access the internet through Tor/VPN. Join a private tracker (I recommend IPT). Only allow file transfer one-way to your NAS or whatever, then use something like Jellyfin to pull from that.
A day or so of setup (if you're completely new) and you'll need a usenet sub (recommended) or torrent site (or sites, quality may vary on open trackers) but the *arr stack can be automated[1] to make sure you have the best quality versions of each episode/movie fairly easily.
1. https://trash-guides.info/
Depends how much you want to automate, but all you really need is a VPN (or so I am told). There are some good docker containers that bundle the VPN, Transmission, and a dead-man's switch for the connection (allegedly)
I switched from Plex a year or so ago. Jellyfin has been great for sharing with friends, and having them share with me.
* The Free Software Media System | Jellyfin // https://jellyfin.org/
Just a note, sailing the seas safely is fairly easy today but unless you want a more involved setup and only want to keep unwatched or unwatched plus a few "keep forever" shows, the cost of hardware is not going to be much "cheaper".
I have a friend who calculated up their hardware costs (before ram/ssd/hdd-ageddon) and paying for all the streaming services costs came in lower over the span of something like 10+ years. That said, they have the best UI/UX experience I've seen and don't see ads so I'd still count it as a win.
Oh sure, you can use an old laptop (or seedbox-type thing), an external drive, and get pretty far but if you want to replicate streaming services for all the shows you care about, it's not cheap.
Yeah its not a panacea. IMO there is no full turnkey solution that doesnt involve cobbling multiple services together (ie jellyfin, seer, etc). Then you have high cloud prices that, in order to save money, would require a local setup with old hardware to be cost effective.
You shouldnt be spinning up cloud resources to host your media stack. You should be buying used hardware off cycle and cobbling it together. All of which costs time to operationalize it, ie tweaking gpu drivers on linux to get that old hardware working.
It only really makes sense if youre a real enthusiast, or amortize it across your family, friends, etc. But then youre breaking a bunch more laws and as a working professional that just isnt worth the liability for the value provided.
The real answer I think is simply to consume less content.
I have no idea what you're talking about. have plex on my beefy Linux PC and before that was using a Mac with an Intel i7. unless you need to transcode you can use what ever ancient hardware you have, there are people using raspberry pi's for running plex/jellyfin
I guess it really comes down to:
1. How much content are we talking about?
2. How many people use your server?
Yes, QuickSync is amazing but hard drives alone (for a larger collection) are incredibly expensive (today). Even before prices shot up I know people that sunk $8K+ into hard drives alone.
I think we need to segregate data hoarders from people who want maybe 100-200 movies. At pre-insane levels, $8k of storage would have been petabytes of non mirrored space. Back in the day, I routinely watched movies compressed to fit on a CD at 700mb. Sure, that is now laughable quality, but most people don’t care about 8k with Dolby digital at 100+Gb per film.
A single 20TB drive can hold quite a bit of media.
Not quite. Before the insane prices I was able to get 4x 20TB for $1,200, so $300/20TB, so $8000/300 = 26.6, call it 27 drives, so 27x20 = 540TB, a little over half a petabyte, not "petabytes" (before mirror/raid/etc).
If you were buying that over time and keeping your price-per-harddrive about the same, you'd come up with much lower (since you would have been buying smaller drives in the past. Also smaller/older drives have to be rotated out due to age/wear/too-small so it's not all additive.
But you are correct, there is a difference between "data hoarders" and people that pirate and it's an important distinction (eww, that sounds a little AI-y, but I wrote it).
The arr stack. prowlarr, radarr and sonarr. Pain to set up, but once it's there, it's very* convenient to use.
(Couple with Plex/Jellyfin).
One could also pay for a usenet provider, this is much better than p2p. You pay a monthly fee and the usenet provider hosts all the linux distros :) one might desire. You just download and never distribute.
Once you set it up with Sonarr and Radarr and Plex/Jellyfin you will never go back to HBO, Netflix, blah blah blah blah.
Define safely. A VPN and a browser gets you streams and a VPN and a torrent client gets you downloads.
Media is so expensive now that it inspired me to take up sailing instead. It’s nice to get outside.
Did you buy a boat with the money not being spent on media, or using that money to pay for renting? Either way, it made me think of the old saying, "the two happiest day's in a man's life are the day he buys a boat and the day he sells that boat".
I'm seeing "average" people adopt piracy at astonishing levels because of these decisions. I went over to a friend's house the other day and his relative sent him one of those Android TV devices with access to all the pirated content you could ever want. I would never have imagined him to be ok with it. This has been happening in my social circle at an accelerating rate. People that would have scolded me for doing the same 10 years ago are now doing it.
The unfortunate reality is this is why we have residential botnets. Your friend is probably paying for his free TV by attacking things over the Internet.
Oh no, that's terrible! Please send me an example of one of those devices so I know what not to buy.
You don't need a special (often compromised) device, and usually there is a service you will have to pay for as well.
Search up IPTV on any social media and you'll start getting loads of ads for these services, for like $25 a month for a trillion channels, a catalog of VOD content, etc. You can use a simple client like Chillio on Apple TV as the client and have a safe stack.
I subscribed to one. And just to be clear, I subscribe to and pay $ for every streaming service available in Canada, and a maxed out cable plan. My cable company (Cogeco) serves up some pixelized dogshit low bitrate/obsolete codec feed for both NFL football and F1 racing. Via some dodgy IPTV provider (there are a million names and resellers but they're all ostensibly the front for the same service) I get amazingly crisp, excellent visuals, better accessibility, etc. It's crazy. Technically and usably an infinitely better option, at a fraction of the price.
"Oh but you might fund organized crime!" -- yeah, when most media empires are oligarchs pushing their politics and kleptocracy on people, I have more faith in those organized criminals than I do garbage like the Ellison family.
Your dogshit provider must be better than the one I was using. Live sports was usually good, but sometimes very flaky. Video on demand files were served with uniform rate limiting that was too low to handle scenes with people on horseback riding through confetti parades. Also, no bandwidth adaptation (which wasn't a real issue for me, but is needed for many users). Captioning was very weird... IIRC I would have to either have no captions or all captions, there was no option for captions only for non-english you're supposed to read to follow the plot.
I mean, you really don't. They are mostly infected with malware, it will probably try compromise as many devices on your network as it can to make them part of a botnet and try to access as many files as it can.
https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/cyber/alerts/2025/home-inter...
Friends don't let friends use those shady streaming boxes
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/11/is-your-android-tv-strea...
I can see how they could tell themselves it's not the same. This is a device that just shows a library of content that they can watch. There's no needing to know that P2P, warez, torrents, seeding, etc even exist let alone know what they are or how they work. They couldn't sell these devices if it was illegal, right?
This will be what makes companies start pursuing legal action. Once it's not mostly people in poor countries who are pirating, companies will try to reclaim that lost revenue. I'm not sure if they can do anything about torrenting, but I would be surprised if TV devices like what you mentioned are still available in a couple years.
Those things are probably infected with malware.
https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/cyber/alerts/2025/home-inter...
I'm looking now to cancel my Netflix/Apple TV/Disney+/Prime subscriptions and have 1 at a given time for a few weeks/months while watching some particular series.
Who needs 4 streaming subscriptions at once?!
Didn't bother me a few years ago while the price was reasonable. Now with all the price increases it adds up
Go wild. Cancel 'em all.
My family has been assembling a DVD collection for the past couple years and it's really starting to pay off. Wow, I own this media and can play it whenever I want without ads, and fear of it randomly disappearing or having scenes cut out of it? It really feels like magic.
I've got a record player coming tomorrow. My song streaming service of choice keeps jacking up prices and now feeds me AI slop; it's time for a change.
I suspect kids growing up right now will experience a renaissance of physical media from fed-up parents.
So price of the service goes up, revenue goes up... quality goes down and service is worst... and this is kind of recurrint theme with other companies... what's the option here?
And remember same will happen with healthcare, education, products like cars or phones...
I already cancelled Netflix and HBO, I guess Hulu is next. It feels almost like a yearly 10-20% increase across streaming services and the content hasn’t improved. There’s just more crap to filter out. I think I may just be happy with Criterion only once I’m done with a couple of shows on Apple TV.
I use the language immersion for learning languages. And with the streaming platforms you can't get cc captions in the original language. There is many foreign media thay is on the platform but not on your country, there is extension that are useful for making flashcards or small clips, but for some reason you can't watch whatever you want to watch in the original resolution if you're on the browser and if you use linux they dare to limit you to 720p. Compare this to just downloading anything you want and using mpv with any extension you want that does whatever you want it to do.
They just take away all the legal non-sucky options :(
They are daring us to make choices instead of having everything. Zero sum thinking.
I still pay less than when I had a cable bundle with the caveat that, then, I didn't have premium channels and, now, don't have live TV. In my personal book, I'm still ahead in the game.
You can have live TV with a cheap antenna with a better image quality than any streaming platform.
I can not pick up anything with an antenna, cheap or otherwise.
I'm at the foot of of a hill that's between me and where broadcast antennas are 40-50 miles away. I had no TV when I moved in until Comcast eventually put in cable. The seller had even tried putting an antenna up in the attic which did no good. So I would need to subscribe to a live TV streaming service which isn't worth it for me as I don't really watch sports much.
But I'm glad you're so confident of your knowledge of my situation.
Yeah, exactly. I can appreciate that people don't like how these services are raising their prices. If you don't think you're getting your money's worth, then cancel. If you want to turn to piracy instead, then I know I don't care. But people comparing these streaming services to cable really don't seem to understand just how bad cable was (and still is). It was way more expensive, you got way less content, and the quality of the experience was way worse.
I swear, the people who compare these streaming services to cable are all too young to remember that the average cable experience was flicking through channels until something remotely reasonable was on (and it was likely an episode or movie you've already seen many times before), you'd hop in part way through the content (so hopefully it was something you've seen before so you knew what was going on), you wouldn't be able to pause anything obviously, and about a third of your viewing time was forced ads. And all of this could be costing you over a hundred bucks a month in 2000s money in a locked-in contract lmao
TiVo et al. helped somewhat. But at one point I realized I hadn't watched anything on my TiVo in months and the landline on my triple play Comcast plan wasn't worth the cost as a backup or because I had to train my dad to call my fricking cell phone.
I get way more video than I have time to watch and I do monitor things so if I'm really not using a service I can always drop it. I care very little about having access to EVERYTHING which I never had before streaming anyway. If I really miss anything, it's DVD by mail.
Compound doubling make inversors golden, so this is a hard but worthy sacrifice CEOs are willing to impose on consumers.
Does this mean Blockbuster-like video stores are going to make a comeback?
Streaming markets have really felt like price fixing scenarios over the past few years. I can't think of any exceptions that haven't been regularly and aggressively raising their prices like every 6 months at this point as if they are all coordinating.
Why the hell can't we have streaming businesses that reach some equilibrium threshold for how much content they want to produce, the quality of said content, and then focus on optimizing production and tech to both reduce prices and increase profits over time accompanied with scaling subscriber growth.
Is this a loaded question? People are getting hooked by high(ish) quality shows for relatively low prices. Once hooked you need to make them binge content (algorithm). Once hooked you can sell the ** for higher price.
You know what to do. Just don’t watch shit :)
I cancelled Disney+ years ago, am grandfathered into a Spotify/Hulu combo package, and I cancelled ESPN+ after they stopped their Bundesliga coverage. I haven't seen a Disney film in ages, part of me wonders how this company survives outside of nostalgia and college football.
I think people who buy disney aren't going anywhere. Where else are they going to get their fix? They can charge whatever they want and disney adults will pay for it. Lighter load on their servers too lol.
I do think interesting dynamics come into play when the customer base ages though. You saw this happen with kids and cartoons, kids do not even watch normal tv shows anymore. It's all youtube or streamers.
what moves if any has disney done to capture the youth group there
I canceled almost all streaming services this year and kept YouTube Premium, and honestly it’s the best decision I’ve ever made. Watching costs spiral out of control of just absolutely garbage is insane to witness. I cannot imagine spending hundreds of dollars a year to watch __any__ of the what is largely low effort, low budget trash barely a step beyond the crappiest reality TV. And for the rare diamond in the rough I can almost buy those separately, à la carte, and not have to give a crap when it canceled after a singe season.
I used to sort of scoff at the idea of streaming services being a bad deal, now I can’t even imagine paying for them. They’re so awful. They make me wish we had cable still!
The *arr family of software (sonarr, radarr, prowlarr, bazarr) are so convenient that I sometimes feel bad for these content companies. I'm traveling for a few weeks now and my server is just updating all of the shows I subscribed too and movies I may have added months ago that are just coming out now. I don't watch much tv (few hours a week) but over the years I've had so many friends and relatives that have wanted to get on my server and have requested shows/movies to be added. There's software that can automate that step as well but I haven't installed it because I'm worried about how quickly the drives would fill up - currently at about 40TB.
Maybe I’ll be skewered for saying this. It $22 a month for combined Disney and Hulu isn’t bad value for my family (we have small kids so Disney is more worth it for us).
What really surprises me is how little value I get from Netflix by comparison. It used to be the streamer but when I think of the prestige dramas I’ve enjoyed recently I’d place Apple TV and Hulu above Netflix. Their catalog is getting overrun with cheap reality TV.