One thing that bothers me personally is that nowadays everything is a membership, but what bothers me most about the subscription model is the fact that the price goes up and up indefinitely and many people really don't mind paying $2 or more a month.
I mean, let's take for example the case of Netflix (I know the image is old, but I couldn't find anything better), where it went from costing $7.99 in 2014 a month to $15.99 in 2019, literally double, and it will surely keep going up and up, if this trend continues and it surely will soon people will be paying $30 a month without any problem.
I understand that a market like Netflix (to follow the initial example) is an expensive market to maintain, both for equipment, staff and licenses and it is obvious that the economy is not the same in 2014 as it was in 2019, but how are people ok knowing that the price doubled in 5 years? If that continues in 2024 the price would be $30, and if it was people would still be fine paying it.
I don't use Netflix but I understand why people use it, both because of the recommendation algorithm and the simplicity, but damn, if in a year they say they are going to raise the price $5 a month people would be happy to pay it and I don't understand it, much less those who pay several memberships of the same type (Netflix, Hulu, Peacock, etc).
I originally got netflix for my family, then i started to use it too. Now i cant share it with them and its more expensive. I am working on setting up a home media server and thinking of doing that in a shareable way, but not sure if i have the tech skills to do it or what bandwith would be like. But every month i pay the high fee i feel like a total sucker.
There is a really dedicated online community that maintains a whole stack of open source software which facilitates sharing and DIY streaming of media. Unfortunately it isnt very accessible. The barrier to entry in terms of time and learning is quite high. So even though it is "free" (gratis and libre) it is not easily available.
I've been building a server for this and my work, digging around YouTube for how-to videos is a game changer.
Can either of you share some helpful webpages to set up a server? Is it as simple as a laptop plus Plex?
No idea in practice lol. I'm at the beginning stages and I don't know shit for networking. I've also given up on every attempt at Linux. I had a recycled laptop that I played around with, but it had some severe hardware deficits and would get stuck in a boot loop or something. I have some older motherboards with 4th gen Intel processors (one of which was my daily driver till two weeks ago) that I'm going to transplant into my new server case, but I need my new daily driver case to arrive first because I built it in my server case... Basically I have to shuffle some hardware around, and also wire my place for cat6... At any rate, let me dig around for the instructional videos I've found so far and I'll share a playlist with you.