I've been too poor this whole time, so the hat is firmly attached.
Memes
Rules:
- Be civil and nice.
- Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.
I've been aware long enough of big gaps in the libraries of streaming services that there was never a reason to give it up.
It took until fucking March of this fucking year for Spotify to have any old De La Soul to stream. Good thing I've had a high quality rip of their early discography for fifteen fucking years. Otherwise I would have been shit outta luck on listening to them.
I couldn't stream a killer album from fucking 1989 in 2022. There continue to be massive gaps in their libraries due to licensing issues and people who just don't want to get underpaid by Spotify.
At least the De La Soul situation was understandable. Imagine the amount of time it must have taken to track down and relicense every sample.
Way too accurate. Netflix, when it was the sole main provider, was super good. Then the other companies realised the big bucks they could get from streaming/peddling their own shit.
Thanks to this meme, I killed my netflix account. Nicotine is fine :D
It sucks when competition spoils a market
The whole idea that competition is good is a total libertarian lie. Cooperation leads to the best results. It's just impossible under capitalism.
It is good, if the competing products/services are interchangeable and they need to compete on factors such as price, convenience, or reliability. For example, competing grocery stores, all of which offer by and large the same products. Or competing mechanics, all of which can perform service on your car.
Streaming services don't do this. They have carved up the market and "compete" by making you choose which products you want more.
Imagine two grocery stores, one of which had all the ice cream, and the other had all the chocolate, and neither could carry things that the other stocked. That is what streaming services are doing.
Modern copyright law is essentially a state sanctioned monopoly.
Rights holders should be forced to license the content to anyone that wishes to distribute it. As it stands now, they can lock it in a vault for generations if they wanted.
Competition on price sounds nice because it prevents excessive prices, but it’s also a root cause of poverty and environmental abuse. Cooperating is much better.
Ehh...it's entirely dependent on the product. Music streaming services are actually all comparable to one another and have not suffered the same fragmentation that the TV and movie streaming services have. With music streaming services, you literally just pick whichever works for you and you can get nearly all the same content. It just doesn't work the same for every market I guess.
I've just finished my setup with Radarr, Sonarr, Jellyfin, qBittorrent and nzb360. I've paid 120€ for proton vpn for 2 years, 200€ for m2 ssd for 4tb and a few bucks for domain to access my setup from anywhere. Also, I have a 1gb internet connection for 65€ pm...
So, I'm willing to pay... I don't want to spend all this time configuring scripts and integrations(though it was fun 😁)... But paying for Netflix, Prime, HBO, Disney+ and not being able to watch everything I want, simply makes me angry and miserable.
Duck them all. Arrrrr
I have outsourced much of the setup you describe to a country with lower law enforcement pressure with regards to torrenting. Costs me 15€.
Worth it for me.
Are ya ready, kids?!?
aye aye captain!
Oooooooh!
Who pirates shows and hate netflix?
I subscribe to a bunch of services but still pirate all the shows because it's nicer to have them all in one place
Why do you subscribe then?
Probably for the convenience of partners/children.
Lots of people who aren't super deep into computer nerdy shit get outright confused when faced with options they've never heard of like "Plex." Sometimes it's just more convenient to respect your partner and keep Netflix because it makes sense to them.
Plex doesn't have easy-to-use parental control options and a lot of parents who might have the time to set up a Plex server for themselves may not have the time to muddle through the parental control options than just accepting that most streaming services have a kid-friendly section already set up and easy to access. Plex's matching algorithm isn't perfect, and opening it to your kids means you've got to make sure the matching is perfect. I've definitely had adult shows be recognized by the matching algorithm as children's shows. If you don't catch that, your kid can end up watching something you'd rather them not. It's just a lot more work to manage your Plex parental controls than just using the off the shelf setup from the streaming services.
Neither of these apply to me, but I know folks who have Plex plus subscribed services for these reasons.
Plex actually has better parental controls than Netflix. You can even limit people to specific libraries so just put all the kid stuff in one and you’re good to go.
Really it’s that having everything in one place is more convenient.
I have nutflex but still ended up downloading ld&R because they would not stop fucking up the episode order or playing no more than one at a time before rotating back to a reshuffled episode menu and i JUST WANTED TO WATCH THE FUCKING SHOW
Say the line, Gabe!
Corporations had a good thing going on, they fucked it up.
Corporations had a good thing going on, they fucked it up.
Show me nearly any problem the US has and I will boil it down to Corporate Greed and/or Racism.
I'm usually baffled whenever companies do a long term face-plant for the sake of short term profit. Really goes to show that what academics like to theorize about capitalism isn't reflected in reality. Sure the system might work with people interested in long term gains but it very obviously is run by people that want short term gratification and in general just more of whatever they already have. Mostly that means money, because swimming in money still is not enough for these people.
Loot boxes and streaming are the best examples, the companies could have had a thing where they just print money. All they had to do was to moderate themselves a bit and not extort the customer for the last cent. But no, insane amounts of cash flow/profit are not enough, it needs to be ludicrously insane amounts. And after that some more.
As we approach every service charging $30 a month, there's going to be a point where the average consumer will just give up.
Meanwhile, your seedbox will still only be $5.
Yeah, I used to turn to such activities because it was cheaper, now I do it because it's simpler/easier.
It’s Plex’in time!
Plex is getting worse tough just saying...pushing their own services and now they started blocking certain hosting providers.
Don't forget the price increase and drop in quality.
The price increase I can deal with. The drop in quality and getting rid of password sharing (after they actively endorsed it) is why they lost me.
Especially with Netflix increasing their prices again here in a couple months…
As someone who watches a lot of non-English stuff, I could never put the hat down.
Haha I'm poor
Once this happens to the music industry, we need to make sure the kids are all prepared to open Netscape Navigator, go to AltaVista and search for "Napster". They'll thank us later.