Consumers are paying more than ever for streaming TV each month and analysts say there’s no reason for the companies to stop raising prices::Finding new subscribers in a saturated streaming video market isn’t easy. And with legacy media companies desperate to recoup revenue declines in their linear TV businesses, the cost of your monthly plan is likely to keep rising.
Yarrrr, we be seein’ about that…
Yeah I don’t have the budget to subscribe to multiple streaming services, let alone cable or even one service. Thank god there’s not a lot I’d want to watch…even if sailing high seas.
Streaming:
-Charges you unreasonable amount of money
-If you cancel the subscription, you lose it all
-If they change the terms, you may lose access to some of the things in your library
Torrent:
-Costs a grand total of 0$
-Allows you to retain content for eternity
-Requires a 5 second effort to enter the name of a show/film in Sonarr/Radarr
The choice is clear.
plus, you fight corporate greed.
Theft removes the original, priacy makes a copy.
My main gripe with torrent is that there isn’t always a seeder available. This is a major issue if you’re looking for a movie that isn’t mainstream. There are pirate streaming services but we know that the quality is not usually great. Even if you download from torrent, the quality is not also always great either. I definitely noticed difference in video and sound quality between torrent and what you get from “mainstream” sources. Some torrent say they’re 4k or HD quality, but many files are actually cropped so that uploading and downloading is faster.
Edit: Grammar and wording
I’d also give Usenet and Soulseek a try, lots of rare media in there
lol I’m like 20 clicks into Sonarr’s website and I still cant find a simple answer: what is Sonarr?
Some sites just assume you know. In short, thing that automates and streamlines series piracy. Radarr is for films, Lidarr for music, Readarr for book, Whisparr for porn, Prowlarr allows to better manage sources for all of the above.
So is Prowlarr an alternative to Jackett? I’ve use Jackett before but it was (as best as I could understand) a way to translate different indexer URIs into a common format.
More or less, yes, they serve similar purposes.
Agreed. I found it a bit disappointing they skipped to the highlights without describing the big picture first. This is from their GitHub:
Sonarr is a PVR for Usenet and BitTorrent users. It can monitor multiple RSS feeds for new episodes of your favorite shows and will grab, sort and rename them. It can also be configured to automatically upgrade the quality of files already downloaded when a better quality format becomes available.
Torrent:
-Unless your a millennial with really good memory… requires a (usually) a good paid VPN + 3 hours of reading and setup so you dont get nasty letters from your ISP.
-Requires requisite ports and knowledge of how to get the shows to your TV
-ideally requires a standalone PC, which most households no longer have
-Requires knowledge of additional programs that need to be researched and have paid competition
-Requires knowledge of how to find the source material, with huge gatekeeping between source pools
I am probably forgetting other stuff, especially for Gen Z and now the oldest Gen Alpha. But if I as a millennial feel it’s a burden to relearn the steps for something I already was doing a decade or so ago. That must be a massive bar for someone who never had their hand in it, so to speak.
I am not saying it’s impossible, just I haven’t found a straight forward guide from beginning to end, with all the new technology included. And the first time they get a love note from their ISP, they will likely just stop.
Edit: The vastly different responses with different solutions, only proves to me that this is more complex than people let on. You have some people giving services that weren’t mentioned in the OP in euros (not that there is anything wrong with Europe, just a different experience. Do EU IPs even send love notes? Then you get a mix of people saying what the best VPN is and other people saying you don’t even need a VPN. Just so much different information, is it surprising that people could feel overwhelmed?
This is the age of information. It would take a grand total of a few hours for the average person to watch a video to give them all the knowledge they need to avoid the pitfalls you listed.
People are afraid and lazy, it’s easy to let fear control your decisions.
I think the age of information has passed. If you try googling/search engine any of this you get scraps of information that don’t tie well together.
All I am saying is I could see people throwing up their hands and thinking it’s too confusing or dangerous.
Information is everywhere, but so is misinformation now. There’s LOTS of AI-generated articles out there telling people nothing helpful, or straight-up incorrect answers from Google searches.
We have a Piracy board on Lemmy with a beginner’s guide.
- VPN is easy especially the good paid ones.
- You can use VPN and torrent on your mobile and cast it there are apps for it. Or you can use one of the NAS which will do it for you no need to remember anything.
- You needn’t use a PC.
So you are mostly wrong here, I’ll let you know my setup that costs me $15 a month.
A 4 core 8GB VPS: $5 a month. Unlimited cloud Storage: €10 a month.
I have Emby (Use jellyfin, I haven’t changed out of laziness), Sonarr, Radarr, Jellyseerr all running on a VPS with caddy running a reverse_proxy to point a domain at emby via HTTPS.
No need for VPNs, but you can run OpenVPN on your VPS for maximum value for money if you want to use a high speed VPN.
It’s all very straight forward to setup on Ubuntu 20.04 with lots of documentation. My server has been up for 3 months now and I have had 0 issues, friends use jellyseerr to requests shows and movies. Everything else is automated. Can even import lists from IMDb.
Make sure if you want to save space to use h.265 encoding where possible. Additionally, if you don’t want to torrent you can use newservers. But that will cost an additional $10 a month.
Where are you getting a 4 core 8GB VPS for $5 a month with unlimited bandwidth/CPU time?
All the reputable providers have 1GB, single core shared compute for that price.
When you say VPS, do you mean like an AWS or GCP virtual machine?
AWS/GCP is an order of magnitude more expensive for those specs. And they would ban you for downloading copyrighted material without a VPN. So I wouldn’t recommend that. I was able to get a similar set up using Linode but the specs were way worse and I couldn’t do transcoding, and I didn’t torrent using the $5 a month VPS.
It depends on what hardware the host is using, my VPS is capable of transcoding around 4 streams simultaneously.
Ionos, but I have been grandfathered in with price so you won’t be able to get my deal
You’re mistakening the wide range of solutions and tooling for complexity.
The skill issues related to piracy can and should be addressed. This is how we form a truly strong resistance to the madness that is going on.
Your point is valid and it’s important to work it through.
The knowledge is extremely easy to obtain though. There are lots of very detailed guides. It’s not extremely complex, anyway.
It’s just hard to know what information even correctly pertains to me. My comment received a half dozen other comments… some seemingly from the US, others from the EU. Some comments saying every house has a PC (not true) others saying a PC isn’t even necessary. Some comments with how to find a good VPN, other comments saying a VPN isn’t even necessary. Then I got recommendations for a half dozen different services from various comments with no idea if they are all necessary and how they interact with each other.
It may not be extremely complex, but until you get your feet wet, it sure seems like it is. In my day you downloaded what you wanted off of Kazaa or BearShare or the like and then watched it on your PC with VLC. or if you were really fancy you burned it on CDS or DVDS. Then when the bad emails or letters came in, you just told your parents it was the neighbors.
I have never been in a house with out a pc since the 90s.
My sister, my mother, and my brother all have laptop-exclusive households. Most people these days don’t see a need for a standalone pc when they have a laptop they can take from room to room and costs the same as a desktop.
Not to be pedantic but a laptop is a PC
That’s being very pedantic, if you start typing in Laptop V, it autofills PC on searches. Many homes don’t have a desktop, you can do 90% of what you need on mobile nowadays and the other 10% can be done on a laptop.
I don’t think it’s being pedantic in this case. They’re talking about the capabilities of a PC vs something like a mobile phone or a tablet. In this case a laptop is a PC and is fully capable of doing all the things described in this thread.
I know. I said standalone pc to fit the earlier commenter’s point. Desktop would have been the correct choice, but I figured the gist got across. If it was unclear to anybody, I apologize.
No need to apologise I just wanted to clear things up for anyone reading the thread.
You can do everything you need to do on an old laptop… you don’t need a desktop. You just need to make sure you disable any of the power saving settings so it can stay on all the time but then enable a display-off type of screen saver.
I don’t think most people have an extra laptop sitting around their home. And they definitely aren’t gonna want to do that to their daily driver.
I just don’t think this is feasible for the average person.
Good points, there should be an all-in-one solution which very easily guides you through all the necessary steps
It’s not hard. Mullvad is €5/month. In torrent client, set up Mullvad proxy. Go to thepiratebay or any other tracker to download. Watch.
You can also do it on your old laptop and use it as a home media server. Android TV can access network shares, I’m sure some of the others can too.
In torrent client, set up Mullvad proxy.
I guess this is the kind of shit people are talking about. Wtf does this even mean.
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Piracy is a service and pricing issue. Plenty of people willing to pay, proven by the fact the streaming services were so successful in the first place. They’re just not willing to take substantial pay hikes when they’re going hungry.
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How I imagine your brain works based on your previous comment.
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Piracy is a capitalism problem.
People don’t pay what it actually costs, people pay that + the revenues the company brings home. And that’s a lot now.
Operating at a loss is a standard practice that is not only meant to drive user adoption, but to (whoops!) remove competition with smaller bags to pay losses from. So we end up with a few services that do whatever they want.
This is not okay.
boo-hoo-hoo poor mega corps, I’m pretty sure the CEOs of these companies were paying by their own money the price difference of the true cost and the decreased subscription price of all the customers and they will walk out poorer. Not with millions in their pockets.
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I’m genuinely baffled that you interpreted any of what I said as garnering sympathy for streaming platforms or their CEOs.
then explain me why you mentioned the “operating at a loss” thing. What does it prove in your argument? What does this offer in the dialog and please explain me if the CEO of a said company which is “operating at a loss” walks out with millions in their pockets or not. And also what will happen in the owner of a small business which is also operating at a loss. Then compare these two “operating at a loss” and tell me if they are even slightly comparable.
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No reason to stop raising prices for any business, except for the fact that demand goes down as price goes up. People will cancel or downshift to a cheaper service.
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And as a bonus you have less customers to provide support to!
That’s literally what they teach you about basic economics at school…
The standard graph of price increasing on one side and customer demand decreasing on the other, and how companies try to find the crossover point.
Sorry mate this is not some special fight club logic. It’s not even really accounting or economics logic, it’s just kinda common sense.
What price should I sell my lemonade for? I’ll have more customers if I sell it cheaper…
The part which seems lost on most commenters is that these companies have huge and very sophisticated market research campaigns. They can predict with great accuracy how their demographics will respond.
The part which seems lost on most commenters is that these companies have huge and very sophisticated market research campaigns. They can predict with great accuracy how their demographics will respond.
That’s pretty much what the above person said lol
They have a good idea of how many people will leave before they do it.
downshift to a cheaper service.
Yarr matey
People will cancel or downshift to a cheaper service.
Streaming platforms make more money from you if you use the cheaper ad-supported plans. The price hikes are to get you off the ad-free plans.
I’m begging zoomers to learn how to torrent
I’m kind of amazed how my Gen Z buddies are so adamantly against pirating. They think the cops will bust down their door, literally.
As a gen z kiddo, like half of the software on my pc and 90% of my movies are pirated lmao.
I mean i’ve met a lot of millenials like that too. I’m not exactly sure where it stems from
Noobs using public trackers then getting scary letters from their ISP.
A few of mine got cease and desist orders from their ISP, one got two… so that’s why they’re against it. Some now do VPN, some just hop streaming services. Some just stopped watching as much stuff because: life.
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Everyone torrented in the 00’s, and Netflix was born from that.
No way they’ll let the whole market crash before trying to get some customers back.
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Yarr harr fiddle dee dee. Fuck Netflix, Hulu and Disney
I’ll have you know I watched two fucking vrbo commercials just to watch that 240p video!
Arrrrr
Install Ublock Origin… This is the way…
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Why is piracy costing you 4$ a month.
VPN?
not everyone can torrent freely
I’d say piracy is not even free, if done right. I mean, you may want to support JDownloader, MediaFire, Mega, your VPN, and whatnot.
I’m not into piracy (wink), but if I did, I’d pay my monthly Plex subscription, MediaFire account, and tip JDownloader monthly for their effort.
I do pay a little for Usenet and my NZB indexer, about $115 per year all said and done. And I pay for hardware and electricity, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Any recommendations for usenet provider?
I use Eweka.
I am slowly cancelling services with each price increase. I uave cancelled Netflix and HBO. Will continue until morale improves.
With prices going up and likely subscribers going way down the next logical move for the Streaming Companies is to start cracking down on Piracy again as they already had a go at password sharing.
Now I am not saying they will be successful in prosecuting those that are careful, just that there will be a few high profile cases against groups of people who aren’t using the best hygiene when it comes to piracy. Fear is their best weapon against piracy that they actually want to deploy, just make sure you do enough research to make sure you aren’t in that harvest of low hanging fruit.
Really? No reason to stop raising prices? My Jolly Roger got something to say about that.
Piracy has never been easier or safer or faster than it is now, and these platforms think driving people away with overpriced subscriptions for shitty content is beneficial for them?
Piracy isn’t easier than not bothering to cancel your subscription for most people. I’m sure they’ll lose some people, and especially the demographic here, but I don’t know about the average person.
And yet I see all sorts of articles saying these platforms complain that piracy is now even higher than before Netflix became a streaming service.
Piracy has never been easier or safer or faster than it is now
What?! It was way easier and safer in the era of Napster, edonkey and emule. Easy discoverability and companies didn’t pay any attention yet. Since then it’s a cat and mouse game.
Get a good VPN and you’re set.
That’s not easier than not needing a VPN in the first place.
This is why I Plex/Jellyfin.
Yup, came to say they should move to Plex/Jellyfish to get away from the streaming shitshow.
Exactly. It’s funny because if one streaming company were more like Valve, they could have all of the content on one platform like Steam has with Valve. Piracy is a convenience problem, after all, not a pricing problem, and it sure as hell isn’t convenient to have to be subscribed to 5 or more different platforms just to get all the content I’d want to watch.
Weird… why is piracy growing then? Every reasonable person should pay $300 to watch the shows they want on the weekend… and then pay a couple more hundreds in the theater.
every dollar you raise, the fewer customers you get. the point is that you should want to raise the price whenever the relative drop in customers is less than the relative increase in price to maximise profits (where marginal cost is marginal benefit :) )
Now chart hours of content against cost across the market, and watch it go vertical. Bonus for weighting by critical rating.
Piracy is the only reasonable choice.
Thanks for the reminder to cancel Disney+ and HBO Max - I almost forgot! ;)
Still have Peacock, because that’s comped through my mobile provider.
My wife does Amazon Prime, Netflix, and Hulu. I had Prime but realized I only ever used it for free shipping, which I can get anyway by bundling my orders and setting ship dates.
Bundling orders and set ship dates - what? This is something I don’t know about.
Even without Prime, you can get free shipping if you spend over a certain amount.
So instead of placing multiple small orders and paying shipping, I’ll wait until the combined dollar value qualifies for free shipping.
Also on check out, you can specify a delivery date with free shipping.
And then everything comes in separate packages with different parcel services anyway… Amazon really has become shit.
Oh how I hate those graphs that could but doesn’t start at zero.
It wouldn’t make any sense in this case, their prices never started at 0.
It’s about perceived change.
For me it’s not the same if 1000 to 1001 shows up as a 50% hike because the diagram starts on 999, as a 1 to 2 hike which also shows up as a 50% with the diagram starting at 0.
They both look the same, but in the first case the hike is 0,1% as in the second it’s really 50%.
So for me it’s bad journalism or trying to fake things (which here isn’t needed IMO).
