All this does is make me more interested in “pirating” their infinitely copyable material. More to the point it’s making my interest in financially supporting them drop to zero if not lower.
With Usenet, Plex* (Streaming Server), Radarr (automated movie downloading) and Sonarr (automated TV downloading and management) it’s never been easier!
*Plex is currently on a slow path of enshittification and the only other good alternative, Jellyfin, still has some ways to go before it can pass “The Spouse Test”. I myself have only had Jellyfin in testing and not yet replaced Plex with it. But that day is coming. Jellyfin is well under active development and I have no doubt it will get to feature and stability parity with Plex
Jellyfin pased my spouse test for local network.
I put her on tailscale for remote access but she’s not a big fan of that.
Why not having your own wireguard endpoint at home? Then you could additionally filter ads using adguard at home and on the go.
I have tailscale at home I could use an exit node. My family doesn’t want ad blocking because then they don’t get their ads for their free to play games.
Honestly the biggest reason not to use VPN home for everything as every time you swap cell phone towers your IP changes and you renegotiate. It’s not so bad when I’m using something that buffers, so it’s also not so bad when I’m driving, but when a passengers loading a website or playing a game with ads and the ads which are already 30 seconds take an extra 30 seconds to load they get all grumpy.
It’s good thinking though I have totally tried to sell people on that
I am constantly connected to my VPN at home if my iPhone is not connected to a WiFi in white list, and I use an IP white list, including DNS, to go through the tunnel and I play no adware games 😂I guess that is why it works so well for me.
But nice to know why VPN on phone behaves like it does if you route everything through it. I think have experienced that before, when I forgot to disable the third party VPN I use to spoof location.
The VPN keeps a constant network connection open. It’s job isn’t just to encrypt the traffic and route the traffic home but also to make sure that there’s no man in the middle activity going on.
Each cell phone tower you are connected to provides you with a new IP. In most cases cell phone towers are less than 2 miles apart. While you’re driving or taking a train or just about any other form of transportation that means you’re going to change IP addresses every couple of minutes. If you’re not connected to a VPN it’s a couple dozen milliseconds to change that IP and start talking to a new tower. But once you throw VPN in the mix your VPN says hey you’re IP changed sorry we need to renegotiate. You send your SSL key up and you’re off It checks it against your SSL key and the other side and rebuilds a new connection. In the best of circumstances this goes pretty quickly. But not quickly enough for certain tasks. Buffering video is fine. Remote screen connections, SSH terminals, anything else that’s extremely on demand underperforms horribly.
Is it not safe to expose externally with ssl yet?
I’m not worried about SSL. I’m worried about a rapidly developed open source project with lots of changes and lots of cooks in the kitchen. All it takes is a buffer overflow and one of a thousand libraries they’re using. I don’t know that they have a dedicated security team or even anyone really looking at that.
I wouldn’t be so worried but it needs to have access to my media which is outside of my DMZ.
And I don’t want to put my media into my DMZ.
I put through the reverse proxy and so far I haven’t had any issues
Same. Wish the world had already adopted ipv6
That is a meme by now😂do it!
Same, mine passed the test. But used only locally.
Where’s Jellyfin failing the spouse test? My spouse preferred it to Plex because she could turn off all the crap on the home screen.
After looking at this list I’d like to pre-qualify what I’m about to say: I have jellyfin and like it, I use jellyfin regularly. I have it pointed to the same catalog as Plex and if Plex ever gets thoroughly enshitified I will leave it for jellyfin
The biggest things I’ve seen (in decreasing order of pain):
transcoding can fail on media that Plex has no problems with
Jellyfin is significantly worse at detecting names and properly assigning metadata. Jellyfin does not have the same ease of fixing that when it happens that Plex has.
I’m not going to go through all the work to reverse proxy it. Nor do I trust opening it to the internet. So for her to access it outside the house she’s going to be using tailscale. Kind of just extra steps for the sake of extra steps.
Finamp is a poor replacement for Plexamp, Don’t get me wrong I love the fan project but it’s not anywhere near as good, and it becomes quite painful to use on large audio catalogs.
The Roku client doesn’t have any method to mark things as watched or unwatched or modified playlisted items.
I dislike the sections being static one row high and then having to rotate left and right through multiple things when they could just wrap.
I am super amazed that the project runs as well as it does. It’s a monumental piece of open source work, but there’s a lot of polish problems and I’m not qualified to help them fix them.
Edit: oh and I really really miss these skip intro Skip credits option that Plex has.
Quick notes from an avid jellyfin user. When you have a show or movie or whatever you want, not get identified, there’s a simple identify option you can do on the client on a computer or phone by clicking the 3 dots on the media. You get to search and label it. The only time this hasn’t appropriately assigned metadata for me was for shows with duplicate episodes in one mkv or whatever. That did take a lot of renaming, which did suck and is reasonable to not want to have to do. Especially for massive libraries.
I definitely agree about the roku client not having a marked as watched feature, that should be added.
There’s a lot of work to be done but it’s not just being done in the basic edition. For instance, there’s plugins that allow the skip credits and skip intro functions you want. And there’s ones for fanart, and allowing other databases of Metadata to select from. There’s a lot of plugins and more are being actively developed rather often. Even I’m trying to develop a “continue watching” feature like from Netflix, but it’s going slowly.
Jellyfin definitely takes more finagling than plex, i switched at the beginning of the year, but I’ve had multiple times since where my internet is out and because jellyfin is local network I’m still able to stream my media.
So yeah. Just some info about jellyfin. I get wanting the ease of plex, but I’ve personally really enjoyed adding the plugins and fucking around with everything it has.
I want to go and look at the plugins I wasn’t aware that some of that stuff was available. I was an avid plug-in user until Plex pulled that from me.
Just general glitchiness, odd UI design choices etc. Def needs more polish
When I say Spouse Test I mean from the context of a spouse who just “doesn’t do computers”, if your spouse is technically inclined at all, say as a PC gamer or something and has dealt with sometimes-kinda-annoying software and has some patience, then they’ll probably be fine with it
This makes sense. I had to poke around the UI to figure it out. And, the client occasionally needs rebooted or the cache cleared. I can see how some users would have trouble.
I’d suggest that teaching those users is probably easier than setting up Plex today and then setting up Jellyfin as an emergency service when Plex inevitably begins ad injection or introduces a paywall for local streaming.
I dipped my toes in the self-hosted route and would recommend Stremio + Torrentio + RealDebrid as a much simpler alternative.
Here’s a guide I used - you can probably have it up and running in less than an hour.
Major points:
- Easy setup, easy to use
- Low cost at <$35/year
- Can not share accounts (specifically, RD limits to one ongoing stream at a time)
- Limited customization
I have very limited self hosting experience, and between getting my first hello world service running, problems with my ISP, sorting through the different ways to get content, and not already having TBs if hard drives sitting around, I found it to be pretty challenging.
If you’re already experienced in self hosting (or want to learn) and don’t mind the storage costs, then I’d recommend the Plex/Jellyfin route, but if you just want an alternative to the existing streaming services then I’d suggest looking into Stremio.
Seconded. I’ve used this exact setup for years on an NVIDIA Shield Pro. I understand it isn’t “pure” from a piracy perspective, not the most ideal, in-the-weeds setup, but it sure does just work.
You can always use the older, well established, actively developed, and stable project that Jellyfin is built from; Emby. (Jellyfin is literally Embys code from 10+ years ago)
Yea no. FUCK Emby and their bullshit, Emby is the next Plex and not in a good way. I was there 10 years ago when Jellyfin split off, so AFAIC there are only 2 viable streaming software, Plex and Jellyfin. Emby is dead to me.
I’m curious to know why you think/feel that way.
I found/started using personal streaming solutions around 8 years ago; so post-Emby/MediaBrowser split into Jellyfin.
While I started with Plex, I very quickly came to despise their always online/centralized authentication system and moved to Emby as the only alternative I’d seen/heard of at the time. From there I learned of Jellyfin and (at least some of) it’s origins; though I’ve had 0 reason/need/desire to actually install Jellyfin as Emby works fantastically.
I’ve been really quite happy with Emby; particularly with their stance of not tracking/collecting userdata and maintaining Emby as a private company focused on their customers instead of investors/partners. I understand some people don’t like the Premiere licensing model they use; but I think it’s a good way for the developers to ensure stable income for their work; and TBH, especially with the lifetime purchase option, I think it’s undervalued. Unfortunately that model is not compatible with opensource (as users just fork it to remove the paywall), which is why Jellyfin exists from what I understand.
This is going to go back quite a ways, and much of my knowledge is old at this point so some details might be off.
~15 years ago Plex as we know it started out as an OSX fork of the 0G Xbox homebrew software XBMC (Later renamed Kodi (For those who don’t know, XBMC was XBox Media Center and would turn the 0g Xbox into the cheapest Home Theater PC you could get at the time, man those were the days lol))
Plex was only briefly open source and then was quickly closed when they incorporated a year or so after they had something functional. They never made any promises about not charging or being open source or anything, so that’s why I’m generally fine with Plex
Sometime around 2012ish Emby came along as THE open source alternative to Plex and things were good. MOST of it was supposed to stay open source as was promised. From the beginning they kept build scripts n such closed source, probably should have caught on them, but heh ya know hindsight and all that.
Then around 2014/5 they took it all closed source, relicensed it and introduced their paywall including locking away already existing features. This is what pissed me and many others off and this is when and why Jellyfin split off promising to be truly fully open source forever. (There was a ton of drama about it at the time, but it looks like Embys Q&A thing a bit back doesn’t even bother to mention it, imagine that lol)
I don’t have a problem with subscriptions on open source software myself, but the way they went about it…yea. fuck em
I don’t have a problem with subscriptions on open source software myself
That’s kind of the root of the issue imo; having a subscription based model doesn’t really work with open source as the project just gets forked every release to remove the subscription.
This leaves Emby with little option but to go closed source if they want income through subscriptions.
So, I’m not sure I understand what you mean with ‘the way they went about it’. Is it the subscription you had an issue with, or the fact that they were no longer open source? What would you have done differently?
And, if you don’t mind me asking: Had you supported (paid) Embys developers prior to them shifting to closed source + ‘Emby Premiere’?
To be clear, I’m not trying to be argumentative or divisive; I’m just trying to understand the animosity towards Emby and why it’s so often left out of the conversation, so to speak. It’s something I’ve never been able to wrap my head around. Thanks for taking the time to chat about this.
having a subscription based model doesn’t really work with open source
It certainly can work, typically, not a whole lot of users would be capable of “just forking it and bypass the paywall”. And of them, most (including myself) would rather just pay up (especially for quality software). Most of those remaining might just not be able to afford it, and probably wouldn’t pay anyways (Your statement is, essentially, the same that giant corporations use against piracy). The actual rude/asshole users would be what’s left, a small minority of a minority.
Is it the subscription you had an issue with, or the fact that they were no longer open source? What would you have done differently?
The fact of going closed source, especially after making statements saying they would pretty much keep it open source (Note: this part of my memory is iffy on this, this could have been just a forum/reddit post/reply from a core dev or something (I would still be pissed about it going closed regardless, because it’s actually written in one of my preferred languages, C# :/))
There are definitely a few different monetization options, they could
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have just done a subscription and kindly asked those with the means financially and technically to refrain from bypassing it (gamevau.lt does this I know for sure, how well it works out for them is…TBD, kinda young project but really cool to checkout if you’re a gamer)
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Write a closed source plugin that would house their closed source premium options, or write each premium feature as a plugin, so intro skipping could be a plugin you just buy on their web store for example
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Do subscriptions for support packages or maybe even hosting
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Have a community, open source branch and a premium closed source branch like pfSense does
Problem is, they sought little input if any from the community, just announced it as a “we’re doing this and that’s it”. No trial runs of alternative plans, surveys or anything. Which they have that right as project owners, but it doesn’t make it any less a rude thing to do
And, if you don’t mind me asking: Had you supported (paid) Embys developers prior to them shifting to closed source + ‘Emby Premiere’?
I’m fairly certain I didn’t, pretty sure they announced it and going closed source and then I began bailing to Plex once I saw their response.
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Having been off the scene for a while, I didn’t know Jellyfin actually came from XBMC, that’s interesting… So with Kodi and Jellyfin on my TV, I have two descendants of the same code, cool.
I loved my original Xbox with a 400gb HDD and movies and games backed up to the disk! My friends did too.
Ah yes, I’m sure this crackdown will have the result of ending piracy forever.
The year of the death of the piracy is now
I mean it’s only right. Don’t we all keep getting paid for work we did years ago?
96% of corps stop with the crackdowns right before they end piracy forever
Don’t let reality stop you from doing something you love
Still not subscribing to all the shit services. I’d rather don’t watch stuff and go outside. Yeah, you heard me right, I’ll rather be going fucking outside!
Touch some grass
Smoke some grass.
FTFY
Just did, lol
I’d happily buy stuff if they’d just give me a mkv file or a disc that isn’t encrypted.
I’ve been back to buying UHDs because I can rip them. Amazing how a good experience got me to pay again.
Personally I prefer when people keep their fucking inside, rather than outside where I might have to accidentally see it.
Good luck locating my hard drive with several Terabytes of movies, TV shows and music.
If other sites would shut down I would share those files even if I need to send pigeons with usb sticks attached to their little feet.
Human culture is to be shared. And that is just a basic moral principle that should be engraved on Human Rights declaration.
But you’ll hurt the film industry. Their last movie only made 100 million, but they expected 200 million 😿
And they had to work so hard to cook the books to make it look like it lost money on it so they didn’t have to pay out their cast and crew, too. Won’t anyone think of the poor executives!?!?
I guess you’re not talking about the Borderlands movie
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1149
luckily. that seems doable
low throughput
That’s a very generous way to put it
Hell yeah. Also, support your local library! I know your local library doesn’t have a free for all streaming service, but they lend books and all kinds of media… Just imagine if we could push it to where your local library DID have a Plex/Jellyfin/Netflix-esque service? Just log in with your library card! That’s the dream…
The message also ends with a specifically worded call to action: “If possible, please use legal paid services. It’s something we should do to show our respect for creators and content producers.”
LOL… they have fucked EVERY artist with the “streaming is a new medium and you get no royalties from it”. Even Black Widow herself had to fight Disney in court to get paid for her very own movie.
Studios can go fuck themselves hard… they won stop piracy and they know it, this is why the always make such a big deal out of whatever little gain they make
Piracy ends when content is offered in a convenient fashion. It’s always been this simple and always will be. Naturally, rich and out of touch people want to believe that more authoritarianism is the solution, because they got rich through their contempt for humanity, so why should this be any different?
The thing is, as we learned with Netflix (and… everything lately), even if it starts off convenient and reasonable, that will last only long enough that they think they’ve cornered the market. So unless something changes to guarantee an ongoing reasonable proposition, i will never trust them again.
Fully agree.
Yes, i’ll be very weary of giving up the control I have through physical drives and jellyfin for some shiny new thing that will never last. Fool me once… etc. etc.
Here is how I see Piracy ending. We’re offered Netflix and forgot about streamers so the government went heavy handed and forced other governments to change all their laws and give up these pirates while seizing sites.
Even though there are smaller pirates, the leaders of it so are mortality wounded killing any progress. We eventually end up with cable television 3.0 and try to go back to piracy. However while we weren’t looking there’s a ton of new laws and tools and ability to stop it that was created while we were watching umbrella academy.
Now the final nail is using media to create a foot-in-the-door technique where media convince the public to hate a new thing. Once that zeitgeist is established laws will then slowly be created by as suggested by lobbyists which are really just a facade that would give more power to take out pirates.
Anyone know the names of the pirate Bay owners? a/Anyone hear any news on those guys. Podcasts? Articles? Viral Reddit posts? In my mind it’s probably one of the top ten craziest political strong arming and over reaches in the past decade. Here is the story that I can’t find for some reason. Pirate Bay placed a server inside a bank in Switzerland. The Swedish laws prevent the government from touching anything inside the bank. Freedom type thing that the USA love. This means the Swedish government couldn’t be forced to shut down the server. Until Mike Pompeo on behalf of Hollywood flies to Switzerland and says you’re going in or America is going to make you pay. So they change the law for America and seize the servers. My point is this is pretty fun incredibly interesting story. But we don’t get these stories we get another season of making handsome real life serial killer show on Netflix. Pirating dies by suppressing it slowly over time until there’s no more pirates and the ability to regain the knowledge lost its gone and trying to look up how to crack anything results in the FBI at your door and you on a no fly list. Just like other pirates and creators of technology (look up how tor creators get harassed) and these stories all get suppressed.
jellyfin with sonarr and radarr and now jellyseerr make the whole process simple. usenet and nzb are the way now i just wait 10 min to get the film/series i want and then watch it. a minor delay I’m more than happy with. I’d be happy to pay if, and it’s a big if, the studios can catalogue all their shows in one place. i can watch without adverts. i can pay per episode if i want. I’d rather pay 50c an episode than pay for the whole service. let me curate what I want to watch on my terms. until then, the high seas win every time
The fact that nzbs are old as fuck and not one service has been taken down is weird.
They bust torrent sites every day and they don’t even host anything.
News hosters have literally petabytes of warez and nothing.
And don’t get me started with real-debrid
It comes down to where the copyright material is stored. The actual media hosted by torrent users is by the users and as we know over the last 15 years, that backfired entirely. So the easiest way is to take down the tracker.
The files for NZBs are hosted on newsgroups and while obfuscated, is much easier to automate DCMA notices to. Also, the good NZB sites (like private trackers), are tightly controlled so their files are rarely hit vs a lot of ones who have open signups.
Yo-ho-ho. The wife and kids love the pirate life as well. They just search what they want on Radarr or Sonarr and it pops up on Jellyfin in a few minutes. We were spending around $200/no on services with a lot less choice and lower quality.
Any good guides out there please on getting started with these…?
Best guide for it is by TRaSH.
Equipment-wise, you’ll want:
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Lots of HDD storage. A 1080p movie is about 10GB so if you have an idea of how many movies/shows you want you can figure that out, but once you start I guarantee you’ll keep going so be sure you give yourself more room!
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A device in your network connected to your router and is on 24/7 — I use a Synology NAS, but you could use a Rasperry Pi or a PC that you leave on. It’s much easier if it can run Docker!
You can start with torrenting if you want it to be 100% free, then if you like how it’s going and want much faster downloads and better availability you can dip into Usenet — I spend under $100 on an indexer and provider.
The most basic setup uses:
- qBittorrent as the torrent downloader
- Radarr as the movie manager
- Sonarr as the TV show manager
- Prowlarr as the indexer manager
- Plex as the media server
Depending on how much you like tinkering with stuff, you can get into Usenet downloaders like sabnzb, requesting services like Overseer, notification services like Notifiarr… and more.
The easiest way to get going is with Docker and using docker-compose files when they’re provided in documentation.
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I did it with a raspberry pi 4 and direct installs. If I had it to do over again, I would have a more powerful small server and use docker inages. There are a lot of docker guides out there but I don’t have experience with it yet.
I had to do a bunch of complicated stuff like mounting my remote storage and such. I’ve been playing with Linux a long time. If you’re not experienced with Linux, I’d do docker.
You start getting setup with Usenet, gimme a holler and I’ll send you a drunken slug invite. It’s the best indexer I’ve found, and I think I’ve let all my other indexers lapse.
Do a bunch of reading before you start, before you purchase anything.
Considering how the big corporations are “cracking down” on pretty much anything they want is a clear indication that the shift already happened, the internet is no longer a “free space”
Today the internet is mostly owned by big corporations or billionaires more directly, and they subject no only it but the whole world to their whishes.
The capitalist world is a piece of shit, the good things happen despite capitalism, then capitalism comes along and sabotages and ruins everything to sell you something worse.
Everyday that phrase seems more real " you will own nothing" because you won’t be allowed to own anything, just take a look at the streaming platforms, or any other platform , they remove , they revoke , they block, they delete, they control what you can and can’t do and you can’t do anything about it.
We need a bright web.
Personally I can’t see it, what have they taken away from me?
I own way more now than I did 20yrs ago when the web was still a bright young thing.
Anything you purchase that is attached to a service and you don’t have any physical copies, you don’t actually own.
Which is pretty easy to avoid, honestly. All my music, movies, and games are on external hard drives they can’t access. Same with all of my editing software.
That needs to be the default for digital again.
Nevermind the decades of these sites compensating for studios just not giving a sh*t about making their content accessible to the rest of the world.
Studios need to remember that their shows are advertising for merch and toy sales. That’s where the money is. If I pirate your show, then you don’t have to support the infrastructure to provide me a stream (which would look like shit because you’re not google). I buy posters and tshirts and stickers. Some people buy minifigs and funcopops and other plastic tat that’s cheap to make but sells for, well, whatever that crap sells for.
Furthermore, I wouldn’t mind paying $10 or $15 /month for ONE streaming service if it was able to maintain good picture quality at 1080p AND had all the shows/movies I wanted to watch in one convenient place. Extra emphasis on ‘convenient’. Even more emphasis on it actually having content I want to watch. When I watch a show, I like to watch the entire thing in like, two days. Then I’ll not watch any shows for two or three months, until something gets my attention. I don’t want to pay for a service I don’t use, cancelling and reactivating a service every couple of months is too much hassle, so I’ll just wait until the show is done airing and download it all and watch it at my pace.
surprisingly, I miss dvds.
All-in-one convenience is the only reason I pay Spotify, my only streaming service. Thought about dropping them, but it would be a monstrous hassle gathering, and continuing to gather, all those MP3s. Plus, I can download that content and use it in the woods with no internet connection. Sold.
Video content? What a clusterfuck. I steal every bit of it. Hell, I got Amazon Prime and don’t bother looking at video offerings. Default: 🏴☠️
Video was nicer when you could buy a piece of physical media to watch your movie on.
Even then, you still had to contend with such nonsense as region locks later on. Can’t have people watch the movie earlier than release because the production company decided to delay release a while. That would be apocalyptic.
I also used Spotify but it has a serious problem. There’s no guarantee your contents will be always available. I had music there that, for whatever reason, was removed and I can no longer listen to it. Not to mention music that was never available there. I don’t want them to control what I can and can’t listen.
Now I only use Jellyfin. It works great (except on Android Auto, but they’ll get there). Sure I have to download the MP3 but you only have to do it once and then it will always be there. Just use spotDL and rip the music right out of Spotify with all the metadata.
Spotify is getting worse as well, at least on desktop.
“we are moving the album to a right sidebar, it now only occupies more of your screen”
“we liked the right sidebar so much that we are moving the queue over there as well, we’re also removing useful info like album and artist”
I shouldn’t have to use spicetify just to get basic features back
Libraries have em. For free. And you can rip them too.
What is immoral about this is that they will essentially use paying customer’s money to chase down an unachievable goal.
Just goes to show you, companies have no integrity. If they truly were about providing the best experience for paying customers, they’d be like valve and just focus on their own service’s quality.
Exactly, piracy is a service problem.
I cancelled my Disney+ subscription of 2+ years because offline playback isn’t reliable and they raised prices to the point where it’s cheaper for me to buy the physical media I want, rip it, and use Jellyfin to play those offline. If I wasn’t so stubborn about paying for content, I’d just pirate it and do the same.
Why are you using Jellyfin to play offline media? Isn’t the point of Jellyfin to have access to your media through a network?
I stream it to my TV and other devices, and my plan is to download them offline in the app for our tablets so we can watch stuff on the road. I’d really rather not stream my videos over LTE or whatever in the middle of nowhere (we like road trips). We can stream from the server at our destination (assuming we set up wifi or whatever).
Ah, offline downloads via Jellyfin, makes sense now.
For me it’s easier to rip it once and then have it available on my tv, phone, or computer. It can also remember what episode is next. Plus no annoying mandatory commercials every time you put the disk in the player.
Right but, and I understand you aren’t the person I was originally replying to, they said offline. Offline, so NOT on all these devices out there in the world. That would very much imply ONLINE.
If youre only streaming it within your home network that could still be very much offline…
So you do not have a home Internet connection?
Have you not heard of a router? Sure i have an internet connection but i wouldnt have to. Lots of people have subnetworks that are isolated from outside network access, and my router would still be able to stream from my computer to my laptop even if my internet was down or i unplugged the modem. The last time they did scheduled maintenance on my internet thats exactly what i did, i streamed things that i had previously downloaded and saved on a different computer.
It’s just for home lan use.
Well perhaps there shouldn’t be 45 different streaming services then? If it was just one streaming service that I could pay you for and then everything I wanted was on that site then there wouldn’t be a problem would there?
Also that would solve the problem of content being removed from streaming services because they got a better deal on some other service that I’m not subscribed to.
Or if there were 45 services, but they all basically had everything, rather than all of them having basically nothing
Music has this right. Don’t like spotify? Try Tidal, Qobuz, etc. They all have the same music, but slightly different models to attract different users (Spotify has free and paid tiers, Tidal does high quality, Qobuz does streaming plans as well as individual song purchases).
Exactly. I’d be fine with picking my favorite streaming service and adding on a bundle for some additional content. As in, I could get Netflix for $10/month, and add Disney+ content for another $5 or whatever.
That way I can pick the service I want without losing the content I want, and the content creators still get paid for their content while keeping prices for most people low.
That’s kind of how Steam works, I can buy any game I want and both Steam and the dev get paid. Or I can buy the game through the dev directly and the dev gets a bigger cut. I’ll choose Steam if the experience there is better, or I’ll choose the dev if they provide a good experience. That should be how streaming works…
God, it’s cable TV packages all over again. Streaming was supposed to destroy this problem, not become it!
The problem with cable TV was that I still can’t watch what I want, when I want. With streaming, I can. But the more services there are with exclusives, the more apps I need to get the content I want.
If I can pick the content I want at any streaming service, then the choice becomes about which streaming service I want, not what content I want. I hate juggling apps, and I’d rather pay a bit extra on one app to get more content than continually switch apps.
If we had to subscribe to Spotify and Amazon and Tidal and all the others to have all the artists we wanted to listen to, then I’d pirate those too.
Convenience is what I’m after, free is just a bonus.
A lot of these streaming services are ultimately owned by the same company. Ever had a favorite show, where only seasons 1,3 and 5 are available on one “service” and only seasons 2 and 4 are available on the other? This lets the owner of the series double-dip customers on subscription fees.
Reminder that when you pay crunchyroll they use your money to pay for western animation instead of anime production, biggest myth ever that we were supporting the industry.
They license the anime so they do pay the studios that create anime. I know for a fact that anime studios factor in the ability to license shows in the decision on what to produce and budget.
