The TV streaming apps broke their promises, and now they’re jacking up prices

Grownbravy , 10 months ago

::: spoiler Cant have mid-stream ads on a torrent

Yet yes-honey-left

Reocken , 10 months ago

24 years of continuous piracy. All I pay for is a seedbox. Paying these scummy corporations nothing each month feels great!

orca , 10 months ago

May I ask what are the benefits of a seedbox?

emeralddawn45 , 10 months ago

So with a seedbox its basically an offsite swrver that you tell to download the files you want, rhen you download them direct from the seedbix. Because theyre dedicated servers you get better download and upload speeds for preserving your ratio, you don’t have to use local storage to seed things, and it can be safer if your seed box is in another country because your isp doesn’t see any torrent traffic.

danielquinn , 10 months ago

…but if you’re paying for that seedbox with your credit card, aren’t you creating a pretty clear paper trail between you and your piracy?

emeralddawn45 , 10 months ago

If the seedbox is in a country that doesn’t care about torrenting and is hosted by a company that doesn’t care, they’re the only ones who would be aware of it. It’s not illegal to pay for a server or to download files from your server.

danielquinn , 10 months ago

What countries don’t care about torrenting? Surely most countries with decent bandwidth are signed up to WIPO?

emeralddawn45 , 10 months ago

Lots of countries don’t care about torrenting , at least not the way the US does. Without the riaa/mpaa going after individual users can you point me to a single high profile legal case involving an average downloader? People in alot of other countries don’t even bother with a VPN. Not sure why you’re bringing up a un group as I’m pretty sure that’s mostly for diplomatic disputes, I’ve definitely never heard of it used to prosecute someone for downloading movies. This info is all widely available online. I’m happy to have answered a one off question for you but if you’re just trying to be difficult I have no interest in continuing to answer your questions when the info is very easy to obtain with a quick search. There’s lots of torrent friendly countries out there where the movie studios don’t make legal policy.

danielquinn , 10 months ago

I’m honestly not trying to be difficult. I live in the UK and used to live in the Netherlands so my concerns are largely with European jurisdictions. In both countries the government has taken steps to prevent piracy and the UK recently changed its laws to ensure 10 years prison time, though that’s for “commercial” piracy only. They’ve also brought in Draconian new surveillance laws explicitly to combat piracy.

I bring all this up because I’m honestly confused. A lot of the seedboxes I see are based in the Netherlands (fantastic bandwidth there!) but I know that people living there are generally quite fearful of being caught torrenting (newsgroups are more popular for this reason). It seems reasonable to me that given that the authorities across Europe generally play well together that they’d share enforcement of this sort of thing, so I don’t understand how feralhosting manages to function then.

I mention WIPO just because it’s an international agreement that all signatories would make efforts to prevent IP violations, so I assume that this means that most countries would at least share information on this stuff.

It just seems weird is all. A seedbox in Egypt, sure, they’re not likely to care about American copyrights all that much, but the Netherlands? Germany? How does that even work?

emeralddawn45 , 10 months ago

Idk I think it’s just not worth those countries time to waste resources on individual piracy, just to enforce American copyright. The Netherlands is probably worried about protecting their own content, and regardless, it’s the seedbox company taking most of the risk. You lived there so you’d probably know better but I haven’t heard of anyone in the Netherlands being prosecuted, and definitely not anyone in North America being prosecuted for what’s on a NL server. Idk its always risky I guess but seedboxes seem to minimize the risk similar to a VPN and come with other benefits if you’re into private trackers etc.

Awoo , 10 months ago

Good news for Lemmy. Pirate the fuck out of everything and never ever feel any guilt about it comrades.

🏴‍☠️ ☠️ 🏴‍☠️ ☠️ 🏴‍☠️ ☠️ 🏴‍☠️

Civility , 10 months ago

😔

emizeko , 10 months ago

chomsky-yes-honey remembering when cable television didn’t have advertisements

Parent , 10 months ago

I thought this was a facetious comment, but you’re right nytimes.com/…/will-cable-tv-be-invaded-by-commerc…

CrowAirbrush , 10 months ago

My memories go as far back to when a full commercial block was 60 seconds and only happened once in the middle of a movie and usually around once per hour on regular tv.

aaaaaaadjsf , 10 months ago

Stremio is pretty cool. Allows for streaming torrents with a lot of seeders. Watch most TV series and movies on there nowdays

Melonius , 10 months ago

Any good guides on setting it up?

YoungBelden , 10 months ago

idk if it has other capabilities, but to use on android basically just install it from the play store then install a bunch of community plugins for various sites. torrient io scrapes most public trackers

can cast to TVs too if your phone/tv has the capability

Gailthesnail , 10 months ago

stremio has gotten way worse after rarbg went down. doesnt seem to scrape torrentgalaxy correctly even with the torrent already cached and i have no idea how to fix it

fckreddit , 10 months ago

Trusting promises of corporations is like believing that a wild cobra won’t bite you. It’s definitely possible, highly unlikely they will keep the promise.

Custoslibera , 10 months ago

Of course Netflix was going to increase prices and reduce their offering. What did anyone think would happen? They’d just decide that a stable profit was good enough?

deleted , 10 months ago

I’ve already made the decision to sail the high seas in 2017 and selfhost my media.

Best decision I’ve ever made.

Sonarr + radarr + jellyfin

GeekFTW , 10 months ago

I never stopped, but I doubled down a good 10 years ago when Netflix first announced they were gonna put an end to people getting around geolocking. I'm Canadian. I'd pay (at the time) for US Netflix 100%. Canadian Netflix wasn't worth the cost of the pot to piss in.

Spun up a Plex server, set up Sonarr, Jackett/Prowlarr, Radarr, Tautulli, and now I am Netflix for 20 people lmao.

Edit: And I'd have it no other way.

deleted , 10 months ago

That’s the way!

I feel your pain as I had Canadian Netflix around 2015. I was bummed when I knew that the new seasons of Suits (iirc) wouldn’t be available in Canadian Netflix for a couple of months.

I had to watch it in putlockers while I was paying for a freaking streaming service.

GeekFTW , 10 months ago

Such a mess lol. I take pride in knowing that every movie, tv show, comedy special, album, game (up until the ps era cause i'm not made of hard drive money), comic book, novel, piece of software, basically anything I ever enjoyed over the course of my life (as well as a couple terabytes of random data hoarder shit) are sitting 2 feet away from my fingers at all times.

somas , 10 months ago

@deleted

Does your ISP still provide Usenet access or do you subscribe to a Usenet provider?

Paying $9 a month for Usenet makes me wonder if I shouldn’t just keep paying for Hulu

iHUNTcriminals , 10 months ago

What do you mean? What does isp have to do with Usenet?

vodka , 10 months ago

My ISP has their own usenet servers. I get access to all the good shit via it, for free.

somas , 10 months ago

@iHUNTcriminals

@owiseedoubleyou @deleted

Usenet access used to be included by ISPs. It’s been a long time since that was standard. I’m not sure which Usenet providers are worthwhile now.

rufus , 10 months ago

yeah. but i think most of them excluded binaries, even back then.

somas , 10 months ago

@rufus

@owiseedoubleyou @deleted @iHUNTcriminals

No, binaries were included. That was the main way binaries were exchanged for a time.

rufus , 10 months ago

I’m pretty sure around where i live you did not get the alt.binaries groups except if you went to a proper usenet provider and payed. the ISPs didn’t want to pay for all of the storage. but this was a long time ago and i wasn’t yet interested in stuff like that. maybe i misremember.

deleted , 10 months ago

I don’t think my ISP provides it.

Id suggest you to setup sonarr and radarr behind a vpn as it’s a set and forget setup.

Fully automated.

somas , 10 months ago

@deleted
Oh? You don’t have to setup a usenet provider to Sonaar work?

I’m out of the loop then. You have any recommendations for modern setup tutorials?

whofearsthenight , 10 months ago

Most (if not all?) of the *arrs can use torrents. edit: as for guides, i would just check out yams.media.

UlyssesT , 10 months ago

stonks-up must always go up, at increasingly faster rates. According to liberal bootlickers, that’s not just working as intended but a sort of ethical wash that justifies anything as long as stonks-up

pankuleczkapl , 10 months ago

Piracy has steadily been getting more accessible and easy to use (see: Jellyfin, Plex, Sonarr, Radarr, Lidarr etc.). There is basically no reason anymore to pay for any digital context, especially considering the streaming services are screwing over both the users and the creators. I like to support game developers that make really enjoyable games, but I can’t and won’t tolerate any shitty subscriptions that offer increasingly less content for increasingly exorbitant prices

jaykay , 10 months ago

Streaming services are dead to me rn. I’m paying £10/month to watch what I want when I want by using usenet (including electricity). Instead of paying for Netflix prime hbo Apple TV etc etc for over £10/month EACH.

Nice to see polish people on lemmy :)

Acid , 10 months ago

Piracy and software was already really easy to use a decade ago ( sick beard / couch potato ) it’s just that the services at the time were good enough that you could watch practically everything on Netflix +1 so it wasn’t really a problem to stomach the cost. now I need 7 different subscriptions to watch shows I’m interested in which is a ball ache

AndreyAsimow , 10 months ago

more on the topic

Rom , 10 months ago

Also love how they’re all going to make a cheaper plan with ads so they can either double dip or push you towards the more expensive plan. Nothing but making things shittier for the end user, love that innovation.

JelloBrains , 10 months ago

Disney's Bob Iger openly said that he would prefer more people use the ad tier because it was more profitable.

matey , 10 months ago

Netflix’s ad tier is also more profitable.

rich , 10 months ago

I cancelled all my subscriptions and just pay for a seedbox instead.

Only two subscriptions I have now are Spotify and Game Pass…because they are actually worth it.

anemoia_one , 10 months ago

Even Spotify though continues to Jack their prices with no extra benefit. I’ve hoped for lossless audio from them for so long, but instead they just charge more for a bad UI driven by engagement instead of user experience

wegettosss , 10 months ago

Try switching to apple music. It is cheaper and the quality is way better. UI is also waaaaay better than spotify’s. Also, I learned that if you dont have any money on your card connected to google play store apple music will be just fine for extra month. So you can use apple music 2 months for price of one month.

anemoia_one , 10 months ago

Thanks for the recco! Though I’ve actually been using Tidal for the last few months because they’re one of the few lossless audio services, just annoyed because I was a Spotify customer for years waiting for lossless and instead they bumped prices without improving their services

wegettosss , 10 months ago

Spotify users propably got used to it haha

TempleSquare , 10 months ago

I don’t mind Spotify increasing.

Inflation is real. And nobody wants to see the service turn into a Little Caesars “$5 Hot N Ready” pizza that erodes in quality, rather than gradually price increase with inflation.

The advantage we have with music streamers is that nearly ALL the content is on ALL the services. So, if one service goes bananas with pricing, we can jump ship to a cheaper one.

But TV is siloed into mini monopolies. The only source of capitalism competition they face is use choosing to do without. And frankly, if I’m gonna be forced-fed ads, I choose to do it on YouTube which costs me $0 and not $7.99 a month.

Netflix is gone. And as someone who leaves The Simpsons running 24/7 on Disney+, I’m frankly getting thiiiiiiiiiis close to dumping their asses, too!

christophski , 10 months ago

Spotify increased the price of everybody’s subscription by £1/$1. They have some 200 million subscribers. That’s at a minimum an extra $200m a month. Is that really necessary?

anemoia_one , 10 months ago

The thing is, I would totally pay more for lossless audio on Spotify, but they didn’t give me that option. They just increased their price without any benefit to their service. And their CarPlay integration is horrid. I can pick a song on tidal and it plays instantly without issue. With Spotify I have to open the app and play it from my phone and even then it only works like half the time. I’ve been a Spotify customer since they first launched in the US but there’s now no reason to keep my subscription

abbadon420 , 10 months ago

My boss pays for my spotify and my google opinion award pay for my disney+. That’s all the subscriptions I have

Grieves , 10 months ago

What exactly is a seedbox and how much is it?

MaggiWuerze , 10 months ago

It’s basically a web based software that handles the download of torrents for you and then offers a download link for you to get it on your machine

pankuleczkapl , 10 months ago

Well, more precisely it’s a piece of hardware, and it remotely manages torrenting whatever you want, and then you can securely download it wherever you are using the software part

TiphaineRupa , 10 months ago

Wait, aren’t seed boxes just VMs that run on the infrastructure of some internet hoster that doesn’t give a crap about the users utilizing it for torrenting? But AFAIK on most seed boxes the user needs to configure the VMs themselves to some degree. So it acts as some beefed up proxy server to torrent stuff without you compromising your own ip address + you have access to high bandwidths and some tb of storage to store your downloaded stuff

pankuleczkapl , 10 months ago

It depends, you can rent an already set-up server/VM just for torrenting and related purposes, but of course nothing prevents you from setting it up in any VM wherever you rent. Just know that some providers that don’t explicitly offer a seedbox for purposes of unknown legality will not appreciate it and may terminate the lease.

rich , 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

It’s, in layman’s terms, server space you rent out and can use for your downloads. torrent clients like transmission are usually built in. I pay £5 a month for 2tb space and enough bandwidth to keep a good ratio.

So instead of downloading to my pc, I download torrents to the seedbox (at a blazing fast speed) and then download files from there to my pc whenever I feel like it, again at stupid good speeds.

I have FTP access, so I’ve just added it as a folder/mounted drive on my windows and Linux mint file explorers. Works great. Also have it on my smart TV as a web address for quick streaming of whatever I downloaded.

Edit: this also eliminates the risk of downloading Torrents locally.

00 , 10 months ago

That sounds great!
Which Seedbox Service do you recommend?

slaintrax , 10 months ago

Look up real-debrid with Stremio if you wanna skip the download part. It’s like renting someone elses seedbox.

rich , 10 months ago

I use seedhost.eu, can’t really recommend others as this is my first! But it’s been great so far, easy to use and access

I use transdroid on my mobile for torrent management

Sleazy_Albanese , 10 months ago

Is it advisable to have a VPN though to access the seedbox though?

facow , 10 months ago

Shouldn’t need one if you trust your seedbox provider to not log. And even if you don’t trust them you’d need to find a VPN to trust more and they’re almost all super sketchy.

Appoxo , 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

Same for me. Had Netflix and Prime.
Cancelled Prime. Student plan ran out and wanted to spend less (on Amazon and buying random stuff.
Cancelled Netflix. Didn’t use it, convinced my mother to let it go (only after saying how much it costs).

Renting a seedbox for 15€ per month, Spotify for music and since this month I burried my life long hate for YT premium and now also have that (and wish for a plan without yt music for 3-4€ less).
Reason why I did YT premium was, because I already watched more YT than Netflix anyway. And it’s near daily for about 2-3h. Well worth it (for way too much money).

Acid , 10 months ago

For YouTube premium I just did the whole vpn to turkey and pay for a year upfront which was like £12 for the year

yum13241 , 10 months ago

How about you use Revanced?

Acid , 10 months ago

Cause I use an Apple TV and an iPhone?

yum13241 , 10 months ago

Your fault for buying into the anti-consumer Apple ecosystem

Acid , 10 months ago

Sure and with that trade off I have a rock solid experience with no issues at all.

Sometimes you get tired of android and the jank and want shit that just works so you can get on with your day and just focus on other things.

yum13241 , 10 months ago

Apple is a huge mess tbh, you have NOT done tech support for Apple stuff, it’s a pain. Android, otoh, is a breeze. I’ve always found Apple stuff jankier.

Acid , 10 months ago

I haven’t needed to tech support on any of my Apple stuff in the entire time I’ve owned them, I have at home both a Linux server and a Mac mini running as a headless server. Guess how many times I’ve had to fix the Mac mini 0.

My iPhone I’ve had 0 issues with and my M2 Air which I use for work has had 0 issues.

I don’t really see a situation where the sorting out a mac would be troublesome it’s pretty much all simple as hell.

Oh and fun fact, I have done tech support for apple stuff on a daily basis as part of my job as a store manager of a retail tech store and I’m constantly thrown problems from Android/iOS Devcies as well as MacOS, Linux & Windows Devices and guess which ones give me the most problems.

yum13241 , 10 months ago

Sorting out a Mac is troublesome. Errors that give you no information, lack of easy access to advanced utilities, and of course, it bring all in the name of “It Just Works! ™”. I found myself cursing at a Mac, but never had on literally any other operating system ever. Even TempleOS is easier to troubleshoot.

Errors on every major OS:

<span style="color:#323232;">Windows: The application could not start because of missing dll X (0xb). Reinstalling the program may fix this problem.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Linux: Could not find libfluidsynth.so.1. Reason: No such file or directory!
</span><span style="color:#323232;">macOS: Could not connect to this network.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Android: App not installed. There's also another "There was a problem parsing the package" which either means it's corrupted or your phone is from the Stone Age.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">iOS: Literally reboots your iPhoney every 3 minutes because the fucking microphone is broken.
</span>

Now let’s see what those errors tell me.

<span style="color:#323232;">Windows: A DLL is missing. Either it got corrupted or the user fucked up.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Linux: App is linking against a super old library. Update the app or compile it to use a newer library.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">macOS: LITERALLY NOTHING. Super vague, but at least the Android one below only appears when you are sideloading (you should know what you're doing)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Android: While the error itself is vague, it usually means "no space left" or "bad signature". Again, if you see this error, you should know what you're doing.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">iOS: I couldn't tell unless I knew the mic was broken.
</span>

Guess how many times my Dad had trouble with Bluetooth on macOS. More than I can count, to the point of needing to steal my mic from me.

Acid , 10 months ago

lack of easy access to advanced utilities

Me and you have very different experiences to this, at work I’ve found MacOS the easiest of the three to sort out.

I’ll give you a recent windows example, A PC comes in for repair with a b450 MSI board no audio on the Front panel or the rear I/O. Naturally we install all the drivers off the MSI web page except windows won’t even detect the sound card. Throw on a Linux USB live environment instantly detected.

Naturally we’re like no worries let’s use the inbuilt Windows tool to reset the PC with a cloud download, nope that doesn’t fix it. Required a complete reinstall from a USB. This was windows 10 22h2 iirc.

At work I see Windows/Mac/Linux daily and Windows, gives me the most trouble on a daily basis. With Mac/Linux most things you can fix from the terminal pretty quickly, or with Mac just use the inbuilt reset tool no matter how much a customer fucks up their machine.

yum13241 , 10 months ago

The problem is I don’t want to reload macOS over every tiny fuckup like in the SymbianOS days.

pmarcilus , 10 months ago

Nah, in the case of Spotify, I’ve ady lost all my faith on the music industry and remain on the sea for a while now. I rather take times to listen to the music instead of giving even a quid to those mf.

Potatos_are_not_friends , 10 months ago

I absolutely loved the idea of Game Pass. I had it for two years. I actually stopped buying Steam games.

I was annoyed of their whole file structure (like it’s extremely difficult to move saves from a PC Game Pass game to a Steam/Epic Game). It’s using some weird Windows DRM and has constant connection issues with the Microsoft server. But the value was good and I accepted that hiccup.

After the Steam Deck dropped, I quit PC Game Pass.

As a busy parent, Steam Deck is way too convenient and the future of PC gaming is portability. And once the Steam Deck reaches critical mass, if PC Game Pass isn’t on there, it’ll be the Bing of gaming and play second fiddle.

gk99 , 10 months ago

I have Disney+ for Marvel and Star Wars, $4 Google Play rent or theater watch everything else because I’m not a big TV/Movie guy.

Had Gamepass Ultimate, dropped them when they shut down the family plan, raised the price of Ultimate by $2/mo, cut the value of gold-to-ult conversion pretty significantly, and ditched the monthly games in favor of a perpetual list of games I mostly already own.

My new preferred plan is PS+ Premium+PC Gamepass, in part because the game offerings on PS+ are actually pretty good, but also because I realized that I can very sustainably get PC Gamepass from Microsoft Rewards. They have an auto-redeem plan with a low enough point value that, if I were to do nothing except the daily Bing/Edge searches, I’d rack up enough points for the next month in 25 days. That’s pretty significant for something I can mostly do sitting on the shitter.

barrbaric , 10 months ago

Corporations gradually making something worse so they can sustain profits?

surprised-pika

🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️

autotldr Bot , 10 months ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:

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Discovery’s David Zaslav have also indicated that their services were initially priced “too low” in an effort to draw a huge and unendingly expanding subscriber base.

In the early-to-mid 2010s, a subscription to Netflix and Hulu and your friend’s borrowed HBO password could get you access to the vast majority of all the TV that was worth watching.

Netflix had a huge archive of older shows plus a slowly growing library of its buzzy releases like Orange Is the New Black, Jessica Jones, and Stranger Things.

Not content to let Netflix have what looked like a lucrative new market all to itself the companies that made and distributed TV decided one by one as the decade wore on that it was time to create their own apps and generate their own subscription revenue.

Tech companies also decided to jump in, with Amazon Prime Video pushing into expensive scripted dramas and Apple TV+ becoming relevant by dint of throwing untold gobs of money at all kinds of projects.

Netflix announced its first subscriber loss in a decade in early 2022, cratering its stock; despite some recovery, it’s still only worth about two-thirds what it was at its peak in late 2021.

---

I’m a bot and I’m open source!