Lol the boycott worked way too well 
It’s Economics 101, geniuses. Supply & demand.
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There’s way more supply than there was like 10 years ago when streaming was just Netflix. Of course the prices go up.
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Demand has gone down because customers are unhappy with the product. Naturally, the prices go up.
Piracy is gaining ground again. 30 dollars per month is crazy pricing for a streaming service.
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If streaming/downloading isn’t ownership then torrenting isn’t piracy.
time to start getting back into private trackers and usenets.
Yeah… my wife just asked me how much it would cost to upgrade my NAS storage. I’m proud.
I’ve been thinking of getting a NAS, but don’t know if the cost is worth it in the end.
The monetary cost can be near-zero, you can just use an old PC (like 10 yrs old even). The storage will likely be limited in that case but you can then get a 10+ TB HDD for like 100 bucks
Yeah this is a great wait to get started. My use case has ballooned, so my storage needs are much more.
Unfortunately, I don’t have an old PC lying around, if I did it would’ve definitely been repurposed for something already.
I have an old workstation that I use as a NAS. I run truenas on it, it’s damn near infallible. 40TB JBOD array because I like to live on the edge. Redundancy? wtf is that even.
I think it’s worth it just for the sake of having my own storage that isn’t relying on Google, Dropbox, etc… However it can be a bit of a upfront money sink buying all the drives. For example, I have 5x8TB drives in raid6 (~24TB usable) currently and am running out of space. Upgrading them all to 20TB (60TB usable) is gonna cost me $1500-2000.
I self-host Nextcloud, Plex, Jellyfin, and a bunch of other things that leverage my local storage. So for me it’s a bit of a hobby as well.
Upgrading them all to 20TB is gonna cost me $1500-2000.
Lol you’re on the other end of the bell curve, spending-wise. There’s gotta be cheaper alternatives. Are 20TB drives even cost effective yet? I thought the sweet spot was 12-16TB, but that was months ago.
Yeah I realized I meant to say it is a money sink when you start upgrading.
There are definitely alternatives, I’m looking to make the most out of my 5 bay and really future proof it a bit. I’m also exploring buying or building something bigger and packing it with more cost effective drives.
For me it’s borrowing Blu Rays from the library, ripping them with MakeMKV and uploading the finished file to my NAS.
I’d torrent, but even with a VPN my ISP manages to notice. Last time, they put my modem in a “walled garden” and blocked off my internet, and made me agree to a form stating that I deleted the files (which I totally did 😉😉😉)
Usenet or private trackers?
And you could liberate the blurays by sharing them with the people
Usenet or private trackers?
And you could liberate the blurays by sharing them with the people
Where tf do you live? Did you bind your torrent client to your VPN?
Liberals prove they can actually get off their asses and fucking do something for once and they reserve it for some washed up late night show host while not giving a single fucking care for slaughtered Palestinians or an ongoing genocide. Like I’m glad Disney is getting fucked but holy shit
Tbf it was just cancelling a subscription to a mediocre streaming service for like 2 days. I’m sure most would resub immediately and Disney raised prices with that in mind.
How will we get people to come back to our service?
Make it more expensive
Just watch. The consumers will consume
“if it wasn’t expensive, how would anyone know it was valuable?” - me, a money scientist
Punish those who stay
Was watching It’s always Sunny and I literally had to switch over to a pirate stream because the ads were playing every 3 minutes on hulu.
Set up Jellyfinn + Sonarr
We’re just a dollar shy of the $20/month mark now if you don’t want a service stuffed with unskippable ads which I find intolerable. They do offer 4k in their basic plans and comparable ad-free 4k plans from the Zaslav (cursed be his name, destroyer of entertainment) are already $21/month. So I’m sure we’ll see further price increases soon and soon hit $25/month for most of these services ad free as Netflix is already there for their 4k ad free plan.
I have to wonder who pulls the trigger first on no more ad-free or probably more specifically everyone gets a minimum amount of ads and you can pay between 2x - 3x the price to reduce the amount by half. For extra viciousness I’m sure some company will introduce long-term lock-in where you can only buy the ad-free or lower ads plans in chunks of 6-12 months.
Quite glad for Jellyfin and retaining my own media collection.
The intrusion of ads into these services has me really confused
I thought the economics of Internet advertising were that it’s like, between a 10th and 100th of a cent per ad view and getting someone to spend like $1 ever will completely drown out the value of advertising
And that was years ago! And ad rates have gone down since then because people realized Internet advertising doesn’t work. I really thought we were trending towards services that would’ve been free with ads charging a small fee, not paid services having ads.
I’m sure it must be a combination of
- the people that make ads being pissed off at streaming content not having ads, so that’s a missed source of revenue for them
- streaming services realizing they’re leaving money on the table by not having ads
- streaming services also making some kind of calculation that says the people who subscribe to their service are also the same kind of people who are fine with watching ads
Don’t know if it was here on Hexbear or elsewhere, but I remember someone bringing up that before it was easy to avoid seeing ads by just recording stuff to VHS or later saving it to a DVR and fast forwarding through the ads. It was a good point to me, if you’re watching your slop on a streaming service there’s no way to avoid watching ads except to pay for it.
That’s also the same reason every sporting event is getting dump trucks full of money parked in front of their HQ for the broadcast rights, they’re the only thing people still watch live.
have you ever tried to watch a show with someone who has recorded it on DVR?
the commercial break starts, they grab the remote and tap a button. for the next 30-60 seconds that are completely locked into the visual screen while images flash of cars, burgers, corporate logos, “SALES”, sexy models, etc, and they are actively engaged watching for some cue of what they want.
it’s like some shit out of Clockwork Orange except completely voluntary. it feels like a step below shouting “i love mcdonalds” or drinking a verification can.
i hate ads as much as anybody, and have dropped services for them being too intrusive, but at least on streaming they give you a timer that says you have 40 seconds or whatever, so you can go refill your mayonaise bowl or grab a jug of Archer Daniels Midland Homestyle Corn Syrup and not have to actively engage in the ultradense subliminal flashcard imprinting parapsychology experiment.
Yeah, I’ve watched shows on DVR before and always thought that was preferable to watching several minutes of ads, but that’s also definitely true.
I bet that’s why so many TV ads end with a full screen shot of the logo, even if you’re fast forwarding you’re still gonna see that logo.
yeah, speaking to the annoyance of manually ff’ing thru commercials…if we had the tech to skip songs in the days of cassete tapes we have the tech now to auto-skip commercials but of course its not implemented into dvrs. i know people would pay for the ability (shit, i would pay double) but somehow we’re still stoneagin it manually
Don’t know if it was here on Hexbear or elsewhere, but I remember someone bringing up that before it was easy to avoid seeing ads by just recording stuff to VHS or later saving it to a DVR and fast forwarding through the ads. It was a good point to me, if you’re watching your slop on a streaming service there’s no way to avoid watching ads except to pay for it.
I mentioned this once, might have been me. I mentioned that for oh 30-ish years people have had time-shifting options and commercial skipping options that started with VCRs and now with streaming and DRM/HDCP plus everything being on demand with the ability to just disable fast forwarding in certain segments you have for the first time no realistic ability to skip commercials. Sure you can watch what you want anytime but we’re at real risk upon the removal of the ad-free tiers of being unable to skip commercials for the first time in decades, since home video hit the market which would be a dream for capitalists.
That has changed and video ads becoming a thing has changed it even more. Banner ads back in the day were not something people could be forced to sit through and there was virtually no targeting. Now that they can target certain audiences and essentially force them to watch, ad dollars don’t have to be spread so thin and therefore they are able to spend more for any specific ad slot. Realistically though, I think it’s to just push people to the higher tiers. If people don’t upgrade, then you’re getting some ad money on the side, if people do upgrade then great. They view it as money “left on the table”. If you’re willing to spend one cent more than you currently are spending they view it as their job to capture that.
I have to wonder who pulls the trigger first on no more ad-free
Technically, this already exists, since even the ad-free tiers on some of these services will show you ads for their own content. They say it doesn’t count as ads because they’re promotions for their own stuff.
Cool
Glad I don’t pay for this shit
Now now they’re not only increasing prices — they’ve also updated the client so that subtitles randomly stop working. The audio syncing issue remains ofc
This is going to be more and more of everything in the west going forwards, both the bread and the circuses will be priced out of the average person’s reach, only accessible to those with wealth.
