221–230 of 556 posts
I will always pirate shows. I cut the cord 11 years ago due to my objection of cable company billing practices. The entire industry is greedy. I was a netflix subscriber for awhile but I burned thru all the good stuff and left.
"May" drive them back? This has already happened in my circles.. People who had cut the cord but all but walked away from casual piracy and signed up for Netflix and HBO (and probably Prime Video because they had Amazon Prime already) are openly talking about the fact they're definitely not signing up for more streaming services, and are seeking out torrenting again for the stuff that's being pulled from Netflix (esp…
The last remaining video rental stores are closing down just as streaming services become so fragmented that making a short trip to rent any major film or TV series you want for a few dollars is starting to look okay again.
10'ish years ago I remember people being mad at the cable companies for bundling all the channels together into all-or-nothing options. Why did I have to pay for ESPN when I just want the SciFi channel? Here we are today with lots of options where you only pay for what you want and now people want them all bundled back together again!
We have the technology to make the content of those 300+ channels available to me in a piecemeal a la carte fashion, but cable companies say if I want to watch ESPN I have to pay for 100 other channels. If I only want to watch Game of Thrones, I have to pay a bit under $20 a month to get a whole bunch of other stuff from HBO I will never watch.
I want to pay for only what I watch, but the cable and streaming services want me to pay for whats available to me. That is the big disconnect IMHO. There is no technical reason we can't have one service (like netflix) that has the world's digital content on it, and I can search and pick what I want to watch on it and pay for it and have the content owners get a cut of it. Netflix was kinda close for awhile, but then due to their licensing deals started pushing and pulling titles at random, and then different studios are now trying to put up Chinese walls to ensure that they have exclusive rights to content. I feel everyone loses here, and I myself can't imagine ever paying for a separate service just to watch star wars or Disney movies. There seems to be a real network effect here of just making everything available.
Currently, I have an RPi 4 running Sonarr/Radarr, NZBGet, Transmission, and Emby, with a reverse proxy on top so I can access it all remotely[1]. But an RPi is not enough when it comes to transcoding and larger storage, so I'll be upgrading to a custom-built microATX server. The estimated total cost for parts is ~$600, including 6TB of storage. Monthly recurring cost is about $7, not counting energy consumption.
I'm also starting to use Kodi + RD to make it easier to stream stuff without downloading it.
[1]: My config is available on my GH profile.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's also the option of refusing the new services. When I think on what I'll do as content keeps fragmenting across services, I keep coming back to one answer...watch less video content. The time before easy streaming wasn't that long ago, and if the content makers and distributors aren't going to play ball, then I can entertain myself in plenty of other ways. The bigger losers are going to be parents that have a…
That's a good point. I'm almost ready to drop Netflix, as the overall quality of the content has dropped substantially in the last 2 years.
Also recently for whatever reason they started to drop my login session on a pretty regular basis (~twice a week for the last month).
After a long day sometimes you just want to flip Netflix on and watch that movie you added to your list a few nights ago.
But getting greeted with the login screen on your non-smart TV (I use a smart DVD player) is sometimes enough to avoid Netflix completely because it's so annoying having to type a 20+ character email address and a 20+ character password on a TV remote.
My ISP (UK, Sky) has recently started blocking torrent/magnet sites. So I'm not convinced.
Finding the sites themselves is easy with a VPN, reverse SSH shell or proxy. Make sure all of your torrents are encrypted and it'll be more difficult for them to actively block packets (which is the way it will eventually go).
I subscribe to HBO. A subscription service that I have to pay for. Now they're going to introduce another subscription service called HBO Max which is going to cost more and may overlap with, but may not entirely include, content from HBO Go/NOW. Does this mean I have to buy into another subscription from the same company to access their 'new'/'original' content?
Honestly, I'm maintaining the services I currently have but not adding anything new. I have subscription fatigue. A cable subscription, HBO, Showtime, Netflix, and Prime are enough to fulfill my moral quota. Plex/Radarr/Sonarr will manage the rest of my television entertainment needs.