Streaming is basically a sounding error in my budget. Now if we’re talking about food or health care…
The same nine streaming subscriptions cost $702/year more than in 2021
181–190 of 398 posts
Re: The same nine streaming subscriptions cost $702/year more than in 2021
#182Still a great ecosystem and value for dollar overall! That's one reason why prices have gone up. No long-term contracts, no additional hardware needed, no hidden fees. Still the option to not see ads for most of the services. You can freely jump from service to services. Plenty of promos out there still, too: for example, I get $10 back per month on an ad-free Disney/Hulu/ESPN bundle through my credit card. That plan…
They will own nothing and be happy Are you a netflix exec by any chance?
Nope, not a Netflix exec. One would imagine if I was, I'd have used Netflix as my example.
I dunno about you, but in my lifetime, if I would have invested in owning VHS, DVD, or HD-DVD, that would not have paid off for me. (I might have owned a lot, but I wouldn't have been happy.)
I guess Blu-Ray has stuck around, but I find that I don't rewatch a ton of movies anyways. I've never felt comfortable buying digital video because I never liked the idea of buying into an ecosystem.
And...discs aren't cheap anyways? Just did a random search - Tron: Legacy (a movie that's been out for awhile, I like, I would re-watch) costs $27.99 to buy a physical copy. So again: $28 to acquire one movie; $31 for me to watch that movie or hundreds of others I want within the course of a month.
Thanks for making me think of this, it's another bullet in support of what I was saying before.
Re: The same nine streaming subscriptions cost $702/year more than in 2021
#183I got annoyed that "the price" of a subscription is really two prices — the one advertised and the one you end up paying — and that nobody keeps the receipts. So I built a tracker that checks 27 providers' public pricing pages daily, and separately curated dated, sourced price histories for streaming services going back to 2010. The streaming number surprised me. Nine services, flagship tiers: March 2021: $95.91/mont…
This was clearly a popular post, but please do be aware that blog posts are explicitly not "Show HNs".
Re: The same nine streaming subscriptions cost $702/year more than in 2021
#184Hence the reason I ditched all of this. 1. Paying subscription for temporarily available content(i.e. pulled shows or music) is not viable for me. 2. They operate in a winner-takes-all model, so the movies/actors/producers/musicians(especially) get nothing out of me if they are not the most popular ones(which they aren't). With that in mind - it's their choice. If the above-mentioned decide to sell digital copies, I'…
They do seem to make it easy to push people over any moral objection to piracy. Often more because of fragmentation than price, but pushing the price makes it easier. And the platforms (Jellyfin as one example) make sharing what you have with family/friends easier now also. I don't have a great view, though, whether this is even visible to the streaming platforms. I suspect they don't really lose much notable revenue…
I'm not fully convinced here. Objectively it's a lot easier than it was 15 years ago and that is partially because now more people have the skills to expand the ecosystem and the resources to focus on creature comforts. Since 2022 and the last 2 years more than ever, I decided to cut ties to all cloud providers and host everything myself for 4 reasons:
1. I have 0 trust in software companies to have the ability to protect my data, even if they have the best intentions. Partially because of 2
2. AI: everything has to be fed into it, whatever it spits out is treated as gospel by most tech companies and people that 10 years ago were taught to question everything.
3. Price.
4. It is actually easy to setup and if you put in some real thinking into it, it becomes both secure and easy to pass around. Jellyfin is a good example. I installed wireguard on my mum's computer, "double click this, click this button, open your browser, click on this icon" and she has access to my library.
Part of the reason for the overinflated prices and budget cuts in those exact companies is this exact thing: many people got fed up with minor convenience at an ever-increasing price and "amazon for this, netflix for that". Many of us grew up pirating because we had no other choice. Now we do have a choice but instead of a decent trade-off in price-vs-convenience, we got a price to pay and ultimately a ton of inconvenience.
Re: The same nine streaming subscriptions cost $702/year more than in 2021
#185What is the alternative to subscribing to streaming services? Can you purchase your movies online and be guaranteed to have access to the movies in the future?
No. Sony has recently removed 551 movies that people "bought". Sony's distribution license ran out with a studio and they didn't renew it. They seem to have gotten away with it so far, so there's no legal protection for "buying" digital at the moment.
With that attitude from the corporations, why wouldn't anyone pirate?
Re: The same nine streaming subscriptions cost $702/year more than in 2021
#186From an aesthetic point of view, I am getting pretty tired of this obviously LLM generated static site content template design in 2025/2026. 98% of the time when I see one of these it's a bunch of "content" generated by Claude or similar. Quoting the site: "Written by Rashid N. Rashid N is the editor of HonestlyRanked. He reviews every figure this site publishes against its source before it goes out, and has never ac…
"honestlyranked.com"
Even the URL captures the ubiquitous "honestly / genuinely / let me be up front" verbal tick that Claude can't resist. That is, "Rashid" likely couldn't even be bothered to come up with his own website name. I hate it.
Re: The same nine streaming subscriptions cost $702/year more than in 2021
#187From an aesthetic point of view, I am getting pretty tired of this obviously LLM generated static site content template design in 2025/2026. 98% of the time when I see one of these it's a bunch of "content" generated by Claude or similar. Quoting the site: "Written by Rashid N. Rashid N is the editor of HonestlyRanked. He reviews every figure this site publishes against its source before it goes out, and has never ac…
I can understand that its tiresome, but its also not new. Every medium, livejournal, blogger, etc page in the look nearly exactly the same. Or Twitter Bootstrap sites. I'll give them some credit here: its at least been worked into a terse format unlike a lot of the docs I get from people who seem to think AI's ability to add verbosity is somehow a virtue.
Honestly, this feels like we're in the Geocities era again. Tons of people are making stuff again.
I'm excited by that.
And even LLM design tropes are better than seeing the same platform design on every page. The same Instagram, Reddit, X pages over and over and over forever. It's monotonous design. Platforms suck in more ways than that, though - you're forced into their constraints, algo bait, spam, hyper-drama, Reddit mods, contrarian view downvoting, etc.
It feels like we're entering the 90's - 2008 era again. The indie web. Microformats and self-distribution and hacking and remixing.
Re: The same nine streaming subscriptions cost $702/year more than in 2021
#188I am still happy with my decision to never get entertainment subscription services. I buy CDs (that I rip) and BDs (that I let someone else rip, since that's a science in itself). This guarantees me access forever and I get to sell down the line, if I feel like it. It is way cheaper long term.
> It is way cheaper long term. I would think this is only true if you watch a small number of shows and rewatch them often
They're $20-50 for complete series on dvd on Amazon right now. That's 14-35 new shows to get every year for the same price. I believe it's cheaper. This is why so many companies push subscriptions. If DVDs made them more money than they'd be pushing you to buy them.
Re: The same nine streaming subscriptions cost $702/year more than in 2021
#189I am still happy with my decision to never get entertainment subscription services. I buy CDs (that I rip) and BDs (that I let someone else rip, since that's a science in itself). This guarantees me access forever and I get to sell down the line, if I feel like it. It is way cheaper long term.
>It is way cheaper long term. How few songs do you listen to, and movies/shows do you watch, for this to possibly be true?
It should be easy to calculate this for your own needs based on your playlists. The advantage of buying is that you build up your own catalog of artists that you listen to regularly which means you don’t have to keep paying for them. So, at first, buying the albums would be more expensive but after a few years it would become much less expensive. The exception would be if you are always looking for the latest tracks by a large number of artists but I don’t think that’s most people.
Older popular music can be purchased second hand or as a various artists album which also saves money.
Re: The same nine streaming subscriptions cost $702/year more than in 2021
#190Ok a price increase but: "nine streaming subscriptions". No one sane will do nine streaming subscriptions. The market is insane in itself for assuming that.
I have 8 of them plus YouTube TV and Prime Video.
Some of it is a function of my household's love of sports, and their fragmentation across the services. Some of its just sheer laziness to pick one and stick with it or rotate the subscriptions.
I don't think I could realistically drop lower than 3 on this list though: Spotify gets used constantly. One TV/Video streaming service. My wife would likely divorce me if I cancelled YouTube Premium.