I remember when a Netflix subscription was like having Blockbuster inside your living room.

Now its mostly just Netflix originals which aren't necessarily bad but maybe not worth it's own subscription every month.

Agree in theory, but every time I think I'm about to cancel they drop something great like Squid Game, Dark, or Witcher.

Clint Eastwood did like 90000 movies, why are there only like 3 on Netflix? That but for every actor. Its like on-demand now rather than a catalog you rent.

For this reason, I do have Netflix DVD subscription along with Netflix streaming. At least until now, I feel that there is still vast catalog of movies available to choose from their DVD service unlike their streaming one.

Obviously waiting for DVDs to arrive is a hassle in comparison to watch-at-any-time streaming but that's ok tradeoff for the freedom it gives me to chose a title to watch from its vast DVD and Blue Ray catalog.

I used to be a Netflix DVD customer until last year (so roughly a decade or so?). But between the shrinking catalog and poor quality control (broken or unplayable discs), it became too much. I cancelled my sub and spent the $15/month buying Blu-Ray discs that never get taken out of the catalog. I get them faster (Amazon shipping is far better than NFlix), and since they're new, I rarely have any playback problems.

You should also check out flea markets usually I find blue rays for between 2 and 3 dollars in the case.

They're obviously letting their DVD back catalog rot. I resubscribed for a while during early pandemic but so much is just not available. So, yeah, I just buy DVDs from time to time or pay for a la carte rentals.

Yeah it’s funny I never watch movies on Netflix anymore. I need to rent or buy on Prime Video because the selection on Netflix is basically nonexistent

You should look into how movie licensing works on Netflix, or any network like cruise ships, or airplanes, for example. Each movie is owned by some company that will license it out for a fee, based on length of time and estimated audience size.

https://streamhash.com/how-does-netflix-license-tv-shows-and...

The only reason I still have Netflix is because it's essentially free on my satellite TV package - I think I pay £2 extra a month because it's mostly covered by their "on demand" package, which I wanted anyway.

Agreed but the younger generation has started to grow up on Netflix original shows/TVs.

> I remember when a Netflix subscription was like having Blockbuster inside your living room.

That's a great exaggeration. There was never a time when you could name a film and expect it to be on Netflix to stream.

It's not an exaggeration - back when Netflix sent out DVD's by mail it WAS like having a Blockbuster in your living room (since Blockbuster didn't do streaming)

They still mail dvd's. I have a coworker who still uses their mail plan. I kinda considered it silly at first by now I'm thinking this is the way to go. It's relatively cheap compared to renting movies via amazon etc. He gets them fast. Blu-ray quality is better than streaming in some cases.

Blu-ray quality is almost always higher quality than streaming due to the compression used (even for 4K).

> Blu-ray quality is better than streaming in some cases.

The wording here sounded a bit off to me here; I read it as "usually Blu-ray quality is worse or the same as streaming quality but sometimes it's better" while I think what you probably meant (and would make a lot more sense) was "usually streaming is just as good as Blu-ray but sometimes the streaming quality is bad and a Blu-ray is better".

Is the latter what you meant?

Though there is also the possibility that there's a 4K version of a movie available to stream but not released on Blu-ray. Maybe that's what you referred to?

Blu Ray quality is always better than streaming, by an order of magnitude. Blu Ray 4k has a bitrate of between 92 and 144Mb/s[1], Netflix bitrate at 4K is around 16Mb/s[2] - the resolution is the same but online streaming platforms will need to use loads of compression or most of their user base would not have a fast enough connection to watch video in 4K.

Full HD 1080p bitrates are a similar story, Blu Ray is much higher than streaming (36Mb/s vs around 6Mb/s, respectively)[3][4].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra_HD_Blu-ray

[2] https://big-photography.com/guides/what-is-netflix-4k-bitrat...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray#Bit_rate

[4] https://www.howtogeek.com/338983/how-much-data-does-netflix-...

You're right of course that given the same resolution, a Blu-ray will have a higher bitrate but to elaborate on what I was saying:

- The perceived streaming quality may match Blu-ray because the bitrate is high enough that humans can't tell the difference anymore. This is especially likely to be the case is the content isn't challenging.

- The perceived quality may be higher than Blu-Ray because 4K is available for streaming but not as a Blu-Ray release. So the comparison isn't 1080p streaming vs. 1080p Blu-ray but 4K streaming vs. 1080p Blu-ray. If you plot perceived quality vs. bitrate against each other for multiple resolutions, you usually find that it makes sense to increase resolution at lower bitrates than you might expect. I'd honestly expect that 16Mb/s 4K would look better to viewers than 40Mb/s 1080p. Plus, 4K is usually encoded using a more modern and efficient codec than the ancient ones we use for 1080p Blu-ray.

But note that I'm talking about perceived quality here. Higher bitrates might lead to higher computed quality metrics like PSNR and SSIM but past a point, those metrics no longer have any correlation to human perception and that point is lower than you might think.

I get your point, just to play devil's advocate though: up until a few years ago, there was an often repeated argument that "the human eye can't see more than 30fps" (it was used to justify the fact that many console games were capped at 30fps back then)... Today, many gamers use a 144hz monitor and would never go back to a lower refresh rate.

I wonder if the same story will happen with regards to lossy video compression, I mean perhaps, once our tech will be so much better that we will be able to use lossless formats for video, people will look back at the formats we have today and think that they look bad.

Remember VHS? I used to think they looked alright back then :-)

I think that the lower adoption of Blu Ray vs. streaming is purely due to convenience, not quality. Most people don't want to deal with physical media. In the same way that uncompressed audio is better than Spotify and similar services, yet almost no one buys audio CDs any more.

In Audio, there are now services that let you download uncompressed and/or lossless audio (Bandcamp, Beatport etc.), they are not as mainstream as Spotify but they are moderately successful and have their place in the market.

I wonder if the same thing could happen for movies: offering higher quality downloadable movies, without the physical medium. Perhaps cinephiles could be interested. Maybe it will happen when average bandwidth, at least in the developed world, approaches the equivalent of a 4K Blu Ray bitrate: no one wants to wait for a long download to end, people want just-in-time streaming.

(Note: Blu Ray, unlike Audio CD, is not lossless, it's just that it's got much less compression than the typical streaming services).

I don't think the claim that the human eye can't see more than 30fps was ever supported by evidence, it was just "common knowledge" like other falsehoods such as certain parts of the tongue only detecting certain tastes. I think it was actually based on the minimum frame rate necessary for a human to perceive motion instead of a slide show. Scientifically, a quick Google indicates that humans can see up to around 90Hz for more normal cases and 500Hz for a specific edge-case [0].

When it comes to video compression though, industry practice is largely based on the result of user testing. There are well-controlled tests where a bunch of people are put in a specific test environment and shown videos encoded using different parameters and there are larger scale A/B tests where a streaming platform will tweak parameters and see how they affect metrics like time spent consuming content. So I'm confident that the compression of today matches the users and hardware of today.

However hardware can change and I expect that's what will drive increases in video quality. For example the encodes of today are biases to some extent by the fact that people watch videos on tiny screens like phones or tablets, which are likely a bottleneck for quality perception. If people start consuming more content on say VR headsets, streaming platforms may see the need to increase quality. 8K is also a possible driver (especially for very large displays).

Connectivity is also a big deal. Lossless music is possible because the bitrate is relatively low but streaming 4K blu-ray is out of the question for many people at the moment. In the future though it's definitely a possibility.

[0]: https://www.nature.com/articles/srep07861

Yes I mostly meant the latter but like you said, occasionally there are 4k streaming versions when there is only 1080p on blu-ray. Most of the time I don't feel the 4k versions are that much better looking though.

Sound is also mastered differently on blue rays than on streaming - streams are optimized for TV and phone speakers and maybe headphones, Blu-rays have home theater quality sound.

I only have Netflix disc rental (blu-ray, one disc out at a time, costs about $10/month).

The library is huge and goes back decades. There are usually good user reviews at the Netflix web site for guidance. I suspect there are thousands of theatrically released movies that Netflix only offers on disc, not streaming.

In the last ten years, I've rented almost 900 movies (including a few TV shows like Breaking Bad) on disc, so that's well below $2/rental. I live about 50 miles from the nearest distribution center, so turnaround is almost always just two days, because the post office scans the returned disk when I post it, so Netflix sends out the new one the next day, even before they receive my return. They did pull a fast one a few years back by silently stopping outgoing shipments on Saturdays, but I live with it.

Discs have great resolution, often have bonus features, and almost always have closed captioning, which I appreciate more and more as I age. And the credits don't get reduced to a thumbnail on screen so the next show can be promoted. And I don't have to log in, or enable wi-fi on my TV.

I use an old PS3 as my blu ray player, works great with a Logitech remote control, supports HDMI output. I also have a blu-ray external disk drive for my laptop if I'm on the road (only about $100 as I recall).

Since Netflix is primarily responsible for putting Blockbuster, Hollywood Video, and various local video stores out of business, I'd be really pissed if they ended the disc rental service.

> Discs have great resolution, often have bonus features, and almost always have closed captioning, which I appreciate more and more as I age.

Don't they get scratched these days? I remember the DVD days of Blockbuster, and also thinking "DVD as a technology is just not ready for rental" every time I got a disc that was scratched and/or had sticky stuff glued to it.

DVD has an issue with scratches, but bluray and later discs have a scratch resistant coating that works extremely well.

Netflix must remove it then, because 50% of the BR discs I rented before cancelling that part of my NF subscription were unplayable.

Nope. Out of those 900 discs I rented, I've only had to return maybe 2 or 3 as unplayable, and Netflix will immediately send out a replacement or the next disc in your queue, without waiting to receive the return.

Netflix still offers their DVD service.

Does anyone use it? I am thinking that people are so accustomed to immediate online gratification that waiting a day or three for a DVD in the mail is just not something a lot of people will do anymore. That means you are going to have to think ahead about what you want to watch, and plan a time to do it, rather than just flopping down on the couch and surfing to find whatever catches your eye.

And many people don't even have DVD players anymore. I don't.

I do. There are a bunch of movies I have on my list that fall into the one day I want to watch this category. I do have the cheapest plan because they closed the Chicago-area distribution center and it was hard to get enough DVDs per month with shipping times for anything more generous to be cost-effective.

I don't personally as I don't even have a disc drive in my house but when looking online, people in rural areas use it apparently.

Makes sense considering the state of rural internet in many places.

>And many people don't even have DVD players anymore. I don't.

The only reason I do is because gaming consoles double as DVD players now. I assume that's a leading force in why others might have DVD players, too.

RedBox provides all the new DVDs nearly instantly, and for anything older it's often pretty cheap to buy them used on Amazon.

> Does anyone use it?

I think film students and the like. It's become a niche product, not a mass-market one.

Back in the day, people had these things called "lives" with irl friends and loved ones. Back then, watching a movie was a special thing you did that brought people together, they didn't need to binge 10 hours of content every night. A few movies a week was plenty.

But you can do the same thing with your friends with streaming services? How would that relate to whether or not DVDs are niche?

Part of why it's niche is they basically abandoned that line of business. Remember that they even tried to spin it off into its own separate company, and only changed their minds after a huge backlash.

Many companies fail to adapt and stick with old business models. Netflix did the exact opposite and took their dvd business behind the barn and shot it in the head.

The DVD service had pretty much everything as far as I can recall. So streaming + DVD was a pretty complete offering with balanced convenience and catalog.

The early streaming catalog was pretty huge compared to what it is today. They were the only name in town and there wasn't anywhere for IP rights holders to pull out and park their content instead, so there was a lot of TV shows and movies from major studios on the streaming service. DVD service had seemingly everything every made into a DVD.

From what I recall from those early days though is the streaming catalog was constantly shuffling what was available. You could bookmark some movie you wanted to watch, and then a couple weeks later, it suddenly wasn't available anymore - 2 months later it would return.

Certainly convenient though if you didn't care much when you saw something.

But there might have been a time where it was reasonable to expect every movie to be on DVD and mailed to you.

You're showing your age. There was a time when you could ask Netflix for any number of DVDs for almost any movie and have it sent to you.

I figured that by inside your living room they were referring to streaming rather than to disc rental. I agree that disc rental services (regardless of provider, in my experience) have very good selections.

̶A̶l̶s̶o̶,̶ ̶h̶e̶r̶e̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶U̶K̶,̶ ̶N̶e̶t̶f̶l̶i̶x̶ ̶n̶e̶v̶e̶r̶ ̶o̶f̶f̶e̶r̶e̶d̶ ̶a̶ ̶d̶i̶s̶c̶ ̶r̶e̶n̶t̶a̶l̶ ̶s̶e̶r̶v̶i̶c̶e̶.̶ edit: I'm mistaken, they used to. There's just one provider left here that does (called Cinema Paradiso).

Yes, it did.

Thanks, you're right, I've edited my comment.

>There was never a time when you could name a film and expect it to be on Netflix to stream.

That's not what your parent comment was suggesting. It was saying that Netflix's streaming collection was the same as Blockbuster's physical DVD collection, which was big but not unlimited (i.e. "every film you can think of")

The GP comment referenced the netflix "subscription", not streaming. Netflix used to have the content brought to you on DVD if it wasn't available to stream.

They actually still offer the DVD service which has a much broader selection (basically any and all new releases just like RedBox plus a lot of stuff from the past 20-30+ years) but it's basically a stand-alone service now that costs between 7.99 - 14.99/month depending on how many simaltaneous DVDs you want to have out and the format (DVD vs Blu-ray)

https://dvd.netflix.com/Movies

Netflix has a huge amount of content with pro paedophile tendancies. So many of their shows have underage sex or themes thereof. I have yet to see anyone catalogue these, only point them out in favourite shows.

(Aware of the cuties debacle, but this is a rather overt example, aforementioned are sometimes subtle.)

Whaaaa?

What does “pro paedophile tendencies” even mean? Can you give concrete examples of this? I’ve never heard this accusation before…

There's really odd undertones in a lot of Netflix shows

Big Mouth (a cartoon) is about child sex

Emily in Paris, character lead has sex with a 17yo on screen.

There are more, I just can't bring them to mind at the moment. Perhaps I should begin to document them.

Hmm... Black Mirror (the Netflix episodes) had child sex in, End of The Fucking World had child sex in it; although both with negative consequences so poor examples.

Maybe it's coincidental, but it is something I've started to notice more and more.

Keep it in mind next time you watch some shows on Netflix and perhaps it will stand out.

Big Mouth is a show about puberty with awkward teenagers discovering their sexuality and fucking cushions.

Not quite sure how that's pedophilic. Not any adults being attracted to kids. Just horny teenagers being horny teenagers.

Not seen Emily in Paris so I can't comment.

And you already covered EotfW and Black Mirror showing its a bad thing.

Not sure I'd call that pedophilic either unless simply touching the subject of pedophilia is somehow "promoting" it.

A show I had one episode left of went off Netflix on 1/1. I tried to find it EVERYWHERE, I even downloaded iTunes on my PC. “Not available in your region” left right and center. I luckily found a torrent and it was legitimately the only way I could find the content beyond buying DVDs on eBay.

Perfectly fits this 10 years old comic classic from Matthew Inman:

https://www.theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones

I was living in Ireland for a little while and wanted to watch Game of Thrones. At the time, piracy was literally the only possible way to watch it; there was no legal avenue whatsoever (including purchasing cable from HBO, etc) that included it.

I still haven't seen Game of Thrones.

That’s crazy. Would a VPN work? I think it would have for me, since my show was available in the UK, but I was not really into buying and setting up a VPN when my wife wanted me to just find the damn show.

VPNs and cloud services' IP ranges are mostly blocked nowadays (by AS number and so on). You can setup your own wireguard vpn running e.g. on a Raspberry Pi on someones cable Internet, of course.

that comic is 10 years old? damn im getting old. lol. i remember that one. hilarious then , hilarious now.

I wasnt sure either until I looked it up. There's a funny ad on the torrent site in the comic about winning an iPad 3, which was sold in 2012 :-)

There's probably money in helping these companies realize when they have left large portions of their content unlicensed in entire geographic regions.

It is. They call them VPNs and apparently they tell us it’s for “privacy”.

100% It's worse than the old days of only having cable and having to pay a small fortune. I'm not going to pay the same (or more) and then have to jump around between 12 different apps.

We literally went back to cable because other than the ideology, it wasn't beneficial. For the streaming services I do want, I can actually order then through Xfinity and keep things simple.

I recently stayed somewhere with cable and relatives were watching content for the holidays. I was reminded of just how obnoxious having 30+ minutes of ads for 1.5 hours of content is. I’d rather just not have any content.

Yeah I can't watch anything with unskipable ads anymore. It's just not worth it. The one exception is live sports, but that's not soo bad because there are timeouts anyway. I just hit mute when the ads are running.

I watch NFL RedZone, which jumps game to game to follow the action, with no commercials. Obviously that only works when you have that many games going at once. (Also ironically one of the reasons why I switched back to cable, as it really wasn't on the streaming packages that made sense for us)

I agree it's not perfect. I was just tired of having to train an ML model and spin up a 24-node Kubernetes cluster just to figure out what services I needed to watch the particular combination of shows my wife and I like.

I much prefer searching for something in the TV app and having my options to buy/rent/subscribe than have to deal with the cable monopoly.

Yeah and have you noticed how the industry doesn't really want you to watch old stuff? Obviously they want to keep peddling new movies and series, so it does make sense, but I think it should be easier to find old classic movies. I often have to resort to torrents for this reason alone.

That's why I still believe in owning physical media (applies to both music and movies). It's the highest quality available at the time (at least until a higher-res version comes out), and can never be updated/censored/"remastered" or otherwise removed from my library.

I think NBC would actually love it if you would please pay every month to watch the office over and over.

Friends and Seinfeld regularly make headlines for having their syndication rights sold to Streaming Service A or Streaming Service B for $100 kajillion or whatever.

Then why did they remove it from Netflix?

Because they started their own streaming service, NBC Peacock.

It seems they are following the McRib model. Taking it off the menu for awhile probably generates more views overall than simply leaving it on all the time. Plus you can license it out to another streaming service while it's off yours.

But surely it makes more sense to peddle old movies and TV shows because you've already made them. Isn't that why content creation is so lucrative - you make it once and then sell it for years and years?

But at least for Netflix, they didn't make the old content. If you watch content made by the streaming site, it likely costs them less.

Well, streaming services are being balkanized at such a rate that soon most of the content on each service is by the company the runs the service. That is, if it isn't already.

>should be easier to find old classic movies

Was referring to above; Netflix didn't create any of those. But yes, over time they'll have old entries in the Netflix catalog.

Their first original (House of Cards) was only 9 years ago

All of that is way cheaper (currently) than cable.

The biggest problem is finding what you want. Need a TV Guide for streaming, so I can search for say "The Martian", and it would tell me "This is on netflix in your country", or "this isn't available on subscription, but you can rent it on amazon for x.xx or buy it on apple tv for y.yy"

https://www.justwatch.com/

justwatch is my go-to destination to see where to get a movie or TV show.

The biggest problem for me is that my local cable company is the cheapest/best internet provider. So, no, it's not cheaper for me than cable. Internet without cable is almost the cost of the "bundle". (it's evil) I just have cable on 1 of 4 TVs, but still.

Also you can't get most streaming content on cable, or the sports content I get on cable without 4 streaming services (ESPN+, Peacock, Paramount+ & Hulu).

So I've got a cable package w/ sports + a couple streaming services. Sometimes I'll pick one up for a month or 2 and drop it just for something I want to see. Sometimes I rent something from Amazon.

It's just a mess.

But the search is pretty easy. My Rokus, Amazon sticks, or even cable box search fine for me.

Tivo has been doing this for years. I can search for a show, see if it's live, upcoming in the next couple of weeks to record or if it's available on Amazon/Hulu/Netflix/Vudu to stream or buy. Then just click it to go straight there.

Also has a nifty feature where you can list all available episodes of a show across all seasons and it will mix in your live recordings with streaming options. I honestly don't know why Tivo doesn't get a lot more love. Cable when you aren't paying per-TV fees for boxes is pretty great. Just a couple of bucks a month for a cable card in the Tivo and then you hook up Tivo Mini units on all of the other TVs in your house to access the main box.

Still you have to go out of your way AND spend money, vs just opening your favorite torrent tracker, searching for whatever you want, and choosing the quality/codec/language. I've honestly never understood the appeal of not pirating.

Giving money to people creating the stuff you like to watch?

The Apple TV does this, essentially.

It does, but Netflix is the one provider (that I know of) that's decided to entirely opt out of Apple TV integration, so I can't add any of their shows to my universal queue and have to specifically switch to Netflix to see what I'm in the middle of or want I to watch next.

I have a premium subscription but end up forgetting to watch Netflix because they won't integrate with Up Next. I pick something from my queue - I mean you usually watch TV when your brain is fried and it's not going to remember everything. Don't know why they're so adamant about this.

They want the netflix interface to be the only queue you use by default when your brain is tired.

If they are just a content provider to apple, they lost.

I have the same complaint about Netflix.

I’d really like apple tv to stop showing me things on streaming services I don’t have, and at the same time not show me the options grime the ones that I do.

Google does this - just search for the movie name and put the word streaming after it. https://www.google.com/search?q=the+martian+streaming

I use justwatch for this

Yup. Apple TV for most things and Just Watch for obscure stuff or if there's a chance it could be on Netflix. Just Watch has some major blindspots. I have had multiple searches that return wrong titles.

roku search is exactly this

It's not illegal to download movies/music from the Internet in most jurisdictions I know of (Europe). It doesn't extend to computer programs though (i.e. using them). It's also usually illegal to make copyrighted (materially) media available for others (outside of group of family/friends), so torrents are tricky.

But it was quite a success for RIAA/MPAA to stick a label of criminal to everyone who downloads free audio-visual content even if it's not true. Though, let's not aid them in their quest by throwing sentences like 'illegal content' too frequently around.

Getting prosecuted for downloading material or using it is rather rare. Unless you are a business. But sharing it is really messy which is why I don't really do torrents anymore. Not that I download much anything.

yeah pretty much, I've even found myself pirating things that are actually on the services I pay for because playing a file is just a better user experience

I also find collecting to be satisfying, there's something nice about knowing that Netflix can't just decide to take Arcane away from me

Other advantage of piracy is that you can actually get the quality you want.

In Australia I can’t get anything better than 1080 for some unknown reason, it’s not because it doesn’t exist in higher quality - torrent sites often list 4K resolution files. Presumably it’s the potato-quality internet in this country.

There's a site I've come to really appreciate, justwatch.com which is a great way to see who (if anybody) has a particular movie or TV show available. What's nice is that they include the library-based streaming services like Hoopla and Kanopy. I have a 2/month DVD Netflix subscription still the queue for which I use as my master to-watch list, but I'll check the top few movies on the list from time to time to make sure I can't watch them with one of the streaming services I already have.

I was taking stock of all the streaming services I have recently (too many now) and realized Netflix is one I can easily do without. I'm not super into their originals and many movies I do want to watch aren't on the service anyway.

Netflix is also the most expensive service that I am subscribed to. Netflix is €14 and Amazon Prime is only €6. I basically only watch Netflix for a few of their originals (which are arguably aren't that great).

My big issue with the Netflix model is that I'm subscribing to a content smorgasbord where the only thing they have in common is the distributor. With Disney+ at least I know I'm getting specific brands (Marvel, Pixar, etc).

Same. We are back in the TV bundle channel era, unfortunately.

True, but the price seems a bit lower (for now). A fully loaded cable account back in the day for me was $180 (including internet).

Now days you can get internet for $50 or $100 (depending on location, speed etc).

Then if you wanted say 5 of the various platforms, that's going to roughly be $50 to $70 more. So that's still a likely savings.

And on top of that, all new movies are basically being PRODUCED by these networks, so for the most part you don't need a theater (or their prices).

And on top of all that, instead of just fully subscribing to all of them, just get one at a time. Want the new Dexter series, get Showtime. Done with that? drop it until season 2 is out.

So it definitely can be a lot cheaper than the old days.

I haven't had a cable subscription in years. I think almost 5 or 6 years now. It's been a combination of streaming, movie rentals (streaming), and BitTorrent downloads.

And yes, it definitely can be cheaper if you willing to actively manage what subscriptions you need and don't need one month at a time.

Also, most importantly, there are no more advertisements.

Is it even close to that? You can bundle a ton of services and still come out cheaper, plus you avoid ads. The biggest difference is also that you can mix and match services at will, so if you arent using one, you can just drop it for a few months.

Its significantly better than cable TV still. I also dont get people reminiscing about one streaming service dominating, we shouldnt be wishing for monopolies. Everyone coming out with their own platform should drive up competition and give us better quality services

A streaming subscription is much cheaper than a cable subscription, no? If you're a very heavy consumer of streaming video, doesn't it make sense that you'd pay more? I don't see why anyone should expect to get to stream everything they could want for a minimal monthly fee.

Having to switch apps is a trivial inconvenience. Seems to me that price-point is what we should be focusing on, and I'm fairly confident things have improved greatly.

More generally, I'm sceptical of any argument that laments the lack of a monopoly.

For many this is not wishing for cable again, rather going _back_ to pirating, which was itself better than cable.

Certainly myriad streaming services are better than cable- but are they better than pirating? Harder to be confident of that now than a few years ago

>but are they better than pirating?

Absolutely not. I am absolutely confident of that statement. One box of drives, a small machine to act as a Plex server, and VPN is all you need. Pre-made, high quality tools exist to automate everything. It's almost completely friction-less.

Pirating is easier, better, and faster now than it has ever been. The push to splinter streaming services is only speeding up its adoption, again. Cable is the old cable, streaming services are the new cable, but with more barriers and more difficult setup.

I'm not sure who downvoted you, but I cannot agree more.

For giggles, I just went ahead and priced this out:

One-time costs:

* Plex Pass: $80

* NZB indexer access: $10 (for 2 or 3)

Ongoing monthly costs:

* File server (three-year deprecation): $55

* IPTV: $15

* Unlimited Usenet account: $3

This took an afternoon of setup, but has just worked since. Heck, the other day I discovered a new season of a show had apparently been released – because it completed downloading and filled Plex overnight.

Drop the plex cost and use jellyfin

I bought a one-time Plex pass, so there's no ongoing cost. I've yet to see any significant reason to change away from it yet. Is Jellyfin better beyond the price?

This looks amazing. I have got to try it. Hopefully it works as seamlessly as Plex does.

I had been using Plex for many years and got sick of the way they try to force things like podcasts and web shows on you. I knew that advertising and library scanning was on the way if it wasn't already there so I switched to Jellyfin a couple of years ago. I have a number of friends and family that use my server as well and none of them have complained.

I tried Jellyfin. Although it is great for an open source project, it lacks polish. Especially on the android TV app, there are multiple obvious problems. I encountered too dealbreakers within the first half hour of usage:

- Resume does not work reliably

- Subtitles are ugly and un-configurable

I will keep monitoring it from time-to-time, and switch from Plex as soon as these 2 problems are fixed. Thanks for recommending, I have been on the lookout for such an app for a long time.

Or XBMC/Kodi. There are many well established free client softwares.

Where do you get Usenet for that cheap?

I was wrong – it was $3.99, so $4 :)

I picked up Thundernews when there was an "unlimited for $4" sale going on, and have used it ever since. Keep an eye out for their sales, because they don't seem to expire them. They resell UsenetExpress so pick up a block account or two from another provider for fills as always.

Most people I know just share accounts, nobody is paying for all of these subscriptions, just one or two.

Getting harder to do. I even have a family plan for YouTube TV and sometimes get the "too many people watching" blocker.

My only problem at this point with going back to piracy is that the torrent sites I used to rely on are dead, and if there's a modern replacement for Covenant that actually works then I don't know what it is.

Covenant on Kodi was the first and last time I actually felt like TV was in the future.

The thing that bothers me is that the subscription services cannot give full attention to the quality of their apps on all devices. Un-pausing HBO Max on my Roku Plus only works 50% of the time.

And don't get me started on Netflix auto-preview (which cannot be disabled on my device).

I had netflix from 2003 to 2020, and still got DVDs until 2018 when I moved to an area with broadband. It has been a ride: from it's rapid decline from having all sorts of art-house films (Preminger, Castle, Fassbinder) on DVD, to having almost nothing, to it's near 100% self-generated content which is largely meh. But those first years were epic. I must have watched 800 films the first year, limited only by USPS latency.

I've been surprised at the number of people who run/have access to Plex servers nowadays, so sounds like what you've seen.

Yeah, I have completely reverted to piracy, due to those reasons.

Also, many of these platforms made the strange decision to not accept subscriptions from locations outside the US in the beginning. I tried to subscribe to Disney+ and HBO max when they started, but was denied due to location.

Probably works now, but I don't care. They had their one chance.

Before, we used piracy because the media wasn't easily accessible (physical media). I now see piracy having an uptick in the future because the media is all paywalled. Five years ago, anything you wanted to watch was on Netflix, Hulu, or TPB. With the success of those platforms, all the IP holders have started their own streaming platforms which is great, but it's lead to a massive fragmentation of the market. No one is going back to paying those cable prices of $120+ a month for content by signing up for all these services, so piracy it is.

Same, I'm one of them. I now donate to the developers of the *aar web apps instead.

I had Netflix and Prime till recently in an effort to promote the defragmentation of streaming services as a show of unity but, its getting worse. And these guys do not need my money while the service they provide gets worse and worse.

How many of these people complained about the cable bundle? I dropped cable and have a few streaming services and save $50+ a month. (No, I don't have live TV which would bring it back up to close to my previous rate.)

if you choose to go this route, jellyfin is a great privacy-respecting media server. plex is great, but requiring an email or third party account on a self-hosted app is just weird.

Also Plex logins require their infrastructure to be up. If it's down you can't log into your self hosted app.