One of my favorite past times is reading people freaking out about the rising costs, while I sit completely unaffected thanks to the high seas.
I never stopped torenting what I wanted to watch, so doesn't effect me at all.
I only restarted when they started pulling all the shit off Netflix and making up their own. Everyone needs a + service now, even fucking Walmart. And the thought of paying for ads on Hulu was not going to happen. Fuck them all.
But they’ve kind of made me enjoy piracy more as I rediscover it. I don’t have to worry about shit like a Community episode getting pulled because they’re scared of getting canceled or because a contract expired and the only downtimes I have now are my own, not because someone else decided to do surprise maintenance on a server I don’t own. I also don’t have to switch between 10 different apps to watch different shows/movies.
Aside from the fact that your favorite shows/movies get deleted whenever licenses expire, or at the whim of Netflix's profitability algorithm, for a hot minute, streaming was everything people wanted back in the 90s. No commercials, a total MSF of about half of what you might have spent on cable if you have every major streaming service, and a trove of shows and movies to watch. Now, they're about to raise prices and shit out a bunch of bland mid content for dumb dumbs to watch. Forget the era of cheap streaming, I fear this is the beginning of the era of no more quality TV and movies.
I genuinely think that the best remedy to this is to give SAG and the WGA everything they want in negotiations. It would fundamentally alter the economics of streaming if they are subject to the same sort of residuals and writer's room requirements as traditional media.
If the media corporations have their way, they're gonna break the strike by outlasting them until they "start losing their homes" from being out of work for so long that they're forced to acquiesce. Then we're gonna really get awful content as no one will be able to take any significant risks to write a weird TV pilot or make a unique movie.
That's the deal for this kind of corporations, they make it cheap until you're addicted than they try to steal your money "legally"...
I'm infuriated by this as it progresses. However, I don't usually have time to stream anything, so I'm infuriated in spirit.
