With the simultaneous rollout of restrictions on account sharing and price increases/addition of advertising, I’m cutting back severely on streaming services.
I allowed my streaming subscriptions to grow without thinking about it. Without trying to remember the constant merging and bundling, I was subscribed to probably a dozen services at one point. They ranged from Netflix and HBO and Hulu to Shudder and Showtime. I had Paramount, Criterion, Disney, Peacock, and others. I’d do the typical thing where I’d search for a movie, find it is exclusive to a platform, and grab the free trial and forget to cancel. I excused it if I found a movie even every couple of months on it. There were still nights where it’d take an hour to find something I wanted to watch. I was probably closing in on $200/month all told, and I don’t have sports subscriptions.
I’m interested in learning what other people are doing regarding the price hikes and service compromises. Are you cancelling? Are you taking advantage of bundles with your internet services? Are you rotating on some interval? Or are you not changing at all?
I cancelled Netflix the day they blocked my elderly parents from accessing my account.
I was paying for 4 streams, it shouldn't matter 1 stream was at my parents house, they were still getting their money.
Don't worry Netflix, we still get to enjoy your content via torrents and my parents still get a convenient streaming app full media via Plex, so you can eat shit Netflix!
I canceled Netflix, but I stayed on their mailing list so I know about new shows I might like to watch. My frigate is now a submarine that goes beep, beep. (it has sonarr, I guess would be the main point I'm trying to make here)
Before ditching Netflix I added all my current shows to a calendar/tracking website, which I check every few days and grab anything new, new new shows, in just rely on word of mouth and/or social media.
I pirate everything like a chad. Fuck paying for shit like Spotify, Hulu etc
There was a point in time where I paid for Netflix because it was simply easier than downloading everything.
That point has long passed, and I no longer pay for streaming.
Speaking as a Linux user who started pirating again last year for the first time since I was a teenager, yes it is very hard. Things have changed a lot. I had to relearn everything.
The internet is not the same place it was 20, 10, or even five years ago.
Just look up "show 123movies" and you get a free stream. Easy.
I know that site exists, but heres what I had to do to find it
- I started with the method that worked for me in high school: searching Google for "Showname Ep. 1 online free download". Nothing.
- Search reddit for clues to why all the piracy sites have disappeared. Fail to find anything because you haven't even identified the problem.
- Give up, go to bed.
- Next week, remember DuckDuckGo exists. Search for the same thing on DuckDuckGo. Get a bunch of link aggregator sites linking me to piracy sites that require a subscription.
- Search for a while, give up, go to bed.
- A few weeks later, look up "The Daily Life of the Immortal King ep 1 free online download" on the Brave search engine. The second result is a 123Movies page.
- Bookmark the site and try to use it for everything.
I used to pay for Netflix because it was easier to have one service to watch everything, than it was to pirate.
I've obviously stopped.
Piracy really is a service problem for me.
I'd like to yarr, especially anything no longer available via any streaming, but I'm well past my Napster days and pretty positive I'll screw it up, either privacy wise or safety wise.
I do know how to avoid keywords after that ISP-reddit court debacle, tho...
i never had them, i just pirate everything. frankly it's less hassle most of the time, i just download what i wanna watch to my laptop and plug it into the tv, saves me the headache of using their apps too. Also found out recently that there's a modded version of spotify for android that gives the premium features without a subscription and have been really enjoying that.
Netflix’s crackdown affected me (I was the moocher) and I canned Hulu before some price hikes (I was the provider) and put the money towards a VPN.
I spend the computing power converting some media to play on my PS4 (plus finagling with subtitles) but once it’s done it’s done.
I think this post begs the question: What is everyone's private trackers? Also let me in.
I rotate things around, unsubscribe regularly and resubscribe if there’s something there I want to watch.
Curious how they're a "scam"?
Media rights, exclusive content and pricing are often ridiculous, but the end users gets what they're paying for.
Copyright/IP should exist for no more then 7 years then it should be public domain.
But the scam comes when Netflix mislead consumers about what was available on the service. Netflix for a long time marketed itself as a place where you had access to most every movie you wanted. But the streaming service quickly became inferior to the physical media service (rip). So for 15+ years, there were tens of thousands of titles available on the DVD service, that were not available on the digital service. And there was no indication that there was a difference between the two. So if you wanted to watch "Heat" on Netflix, you could. But only via the the physical media, not on-demand. Now you can't actually watch Heat at all. Same with basically every movie from before the 90's.
Additionally the "scam" comes from the disjunction between the consumer expectation from the marketing and the reality. You can of course watch a movie on Netflix on one day, but the next day you have to "explore title related to the move you were looking for." Which I see as a scam. If i'm going to pay for a streaming service, every movie I want, should be available forever if it's ever available at all.
