Ok but we've saved thousands of dollars until it finally happened.

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.

1. Destroy the competition 2. You're finally a monopoly 3. Profit!

In the meantime Netflix content is getting worse, possibly they reached the threshold which customers can't excuse the expenditure.

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.

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.

Also no revising the show due to expired music licenses, change in the director's mood, etc.

Movies are expensive to make, and watching them on streaming gives almost no money back to the studio. The intention is that if you want to watch a movie, you should pay the $5-10 it costs to do so on any of a number of platforms. Then you get the great user experience of putting any movie you like into the search bar and pressing "play", and the studio gets appropriately compensated. Putting a movie on a streaming service is a way for studios to double dip, to get a smaller amount of money from people who don't care which movie exactly they watch. If you have a particular movie in mind to watch, or don't like the fare on whichever service you're subscribed to, you should be paying a la carte for movies instead. If you aren't, don't pretend it's some moral stand and not just you being a cheapskate.

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.

...and no pre-roll or mid-roll ads, since just about all of the streamers are going to ads in every tier.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

Don't give them any ideas. Dynamic viewing might be next.

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.

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.

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... )

Cable had ads too, and you couldn't pay more for ad-free.

I mean that's just "cable pricing" as, unless I'm missing something, cable has ads.

The pre-stuffed, pre-configured, plug-n-play, extra-spooky-box method described in the article is just one of many methods.

Someone I know buys cheap "IPTV" service by the year. Access is paid for by buying potted plants or something else that looks random on some web store and is delivered in the form of a .m3u playlist that hides behind a username/password pair.

The usual way they use it is with slimey-feeling closed-source sideloaded apps on mass-market streaming devices from such unknown companies as Amazon and Google, or directly on a smart TV itself. Wherein: Despite the dingy back-alley ambience of the subscription and installation processes, the UI is snappy and responsive in use.

And the slimey software is also avoidable. Since it's all based around a playlist that is hiding behind basic http auth, it also works with open-source projects like Dispatcharr, which in turn can emulate an HDHomeRun network-connected OTA TV tuner. This combination can then present new possibilities, like live streaming TV for Plex users.

(It'd all be very interesting to me if I had any motivation to sit down and absorb live television like a slug, but I didn't do much of that even when I worked for a cable company and got the uber-premium package for free as a perk.)

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.

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...

The additional system load of downloading and subsequently streaming some video isn't particularly intense, even with real-time transcoding.

The same old 6th-gen i7 desktop rig that I do everything else with also does this job quite well. It's not beefy by any modern measure, and I'd have built it and kept it going (and powered on) even if I never had any intention of running these background processes on it.

The only added hardware expense is one external hard drive (redundancy? hah, no -- not for this). This cost a couple of hundred bucks a several years ago, which is the equivalent of surprisingly few trips to Taco Bell.

One certainly can spend a quite lot on nice kit to accomplish any goal, but that's not an indication of any necessity to do so.

If a film of acceptable quality averages around 2GB (yay h.265), then a 10TB hard drive can hold 5,000 average films.

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

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.

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.

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/

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.

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.

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.

To clarify I am not a Plex fan but am too lazy to move away.

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.

> You can have live TV with a cheap antenna with a better image quality than any streaming platform.

OTA video quality isn't that great anymore. ATSC is 20mbps per RF channel, but most broadcasters multiplex video streams into that and use mpeg-2. ATSC3 can do more (or less) bits on the same RF channel, and uses a better codec, but at least for me, tuning channels is even slower than ATSC, half of the broadcasters won't let me use their signals, and the audio codec is difficult to use.

Admitedly, my tvs don't have atsc3 tuners which would have helped, but I bought a network tuner from the same vendor as my atsc tuners and ended up wishing I hadn't.

When I can watch the same event over the air or via a streaming service, my expectation is quality would be better with streaming, but I'll use OTA cause it gives me slightly better feels. Between interference from low band LTE and 5G on refarmed spectrum, reception issues from foliage and airplanes, and technical issues at the broadcasters, I don't know that reliability is higher either... But it feels wasteful to use bandwidth for something that's already being beamed to my house.

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.

Didn't bother me a few years ago while the price was reasonable. Now with all the price increases it adds up

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.

"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.