Time to hoist the jolly roger high.
Fortunately, Lando has experience with such things.
Streaming is getting worse, but it’s still way better than cable. Everything is on demand without having to fuss with a dvr, you can subscribe only to the services you want or rotate through them one at a time, and there are no contracts so you can cancel whenever you want.
Things could obviously be better, but we are nowhere close to how bad cable was/is.
I grow weary of all the attempted comparisons between streaming and cable. Even if it cost the same (streaming is still cheaper), you don’t have to call a tech to fix the dvr, which will wipe all your recordings… or pay per tv you own, rather than the number you are actually using. Of and you can watch it when you aren’t even home. Streaming is sooo many 1000’s % better than cable in soo many ways. Is it enshitifing, he’ll yeah. But still way better.
Plus you’re not locked into contracts and bundles. See a show you like on Netflix - subscribe, binge, cancel.
I rotate through all the services like this.
Plus you’re not locked into contracts and bundles.
Yet…
I can absolutely see that as the next step once people get comfortable rotating.
I bailed on Netflix when I realized that damn, I’m going like a month with this on my phone and haven’t really watched much, maybe one anime? Can I get something other than shitty anime, Netflix? Fun action flick from the last 5 years maybe? No? Never the good one, always the knockoff, the shitty sequel, nothing at all? Canceled Mindhunter? Because of course. Okay, no more pay money, and then I didn’t miss it. That decision took a shameful amount of time to make.
This was way before the password share thing. I don’t know what the rest of you are even doing. Stuff for the kids I guess.
I guess I do this bullshit, now, for entertainment, but this Suuuuuucks with a capital S, so the next step is to find the government chip that makes me scroll and metaphorically remove it. Fuck socials, too. Fuck all this shit anymore.
I hate netfucks & co, but in the case of mindhunter, they were innocent for once. Author just lost interest and canceled it. Nothing they could do about it. But it’s a damn shame though.
You still can pay to remove ads sometimes, and you also get to pick what you’re watching instead of waiting for whenever it’s on TV. You also can cancel any time. Things are getting worse, but they’re still immensely better than cable.
Could it be because the executives that used to be in cable are now in streaming?
But they’re the same execs at the same companies.
There is yet one more alternative to pirating, and that is to simply not play the game. I’ve been so much happier since i stopped consuming mass media. No cable, no streaming.
Fascinating! My taste for it has kinda gone away as I’ve got older, to the point I can’t imagine how I could sit my ass down for over an hour. Instead of doing literally anything else.
I do still watch some streaming stuff for video essayists, music, and tutorial/instruction videos (work or personal project related)
Right? Like what do you even get for paying all that money? The next generic marvel movie? Cashgrab nostalgia-bait sequels like fucking happy gilmore 2?? Disney’s next culturally diverse not-quite-princess movie???
Learn to paint. Plant some flowers or vegetables. Build something. Create instead of consume.
I’m luckily young enough i haven’t finished my list of actually good “old” media, so yeah, seven seas all the way
There’s enough good “old” media that I don’t think any of us will exhaust the entire supply in a single lifetime.
Yes. Play old console games with emulators. No ads, no micro-transactions, entirely free.
Oh hacking a 2ds was one of the best decisions I’ve made in a long time. For starters, all 3ds to gbc games run natively, and that’s already a lot more games I could play in a lifetime. Then i can emulate almost any retro console there and it’s dead easy to find replacement batteries and such. 0 bullshit needed. Not an ad in sight.
Plus you never know what’s gonna be on your list in the future. When I was 24, I would have never guessed that turn of the century anime would become my entire shit the very next year
When you realize your streaming services cost more than cable did
Someone never actually paid for cable, huh? Maybe if you had a basic plan with no channels and you’re now paying for all of the premiums, but that’s not really a valid comparison.
One thing I want to debate about this is I remember how expensive cable used to be. It was like 120 bucks. Maybe you got like a $70 package or $80 package where you had barely any channels. I ain’t spending that much on streaming services!! I don’t know if I’m an outlier but I got Three and that’s about it. I pay around 40 bucks a month.
Exactly. Cable had contracts for X months, and everything was packaged so you couldn’t just get one channel you liked.
Now streaming is splitting off into a bunch of services. That’s not great but on the other hand I’m not on a contract. I can stop and start whenever i want. I spend anywhere from $12-25 a month. All i ever wanted was for cable services to be unbundled. If I’m wanting to be subscribed to every service all of the time then yeah that’s going to get expensive. But if i just want to watch 1-2 shows at a time then I’m still much better off streaming than i would’ve been with cable 10+ years ago.
Cable didn’t start out that fucked. People switched from cable because they were tired of it getting more and more packages and more and more pricey. We are seeing the exact same thing with streaming.
Yea these memes are dumb and I feel made by children who never paid for cable.
But the direction is certainly heading towards the realm of cable prices…
- Netflix: $15.49
- Amazon Prime Video: $14.99
- Apple TV+: $6.99
- HBO Max: $15.99
- Disney+: $10.99
- Hulu: $14.99
Total: $79.44 per month
So maybe when you account for inflation it is still only half of what cable costs,.perhaps. but those are the cheaper plans. For HDR support for Netflix it’s like $25, and it’s the reason I cancelled Netflix.
I don’t think the meme is dumb, just ahead of it’s time, but it’s calling out what is certainly happening.
Most streaming services now include ads in the paid subscription.
Inch the ad ratio and prices up another 40% and we are getting pretty close to cable experience/cost. And that’s only a few years away when we look at how much costs have raised over the last 10 yrs.
If each service raises price $1/month every year and you have 6 services, then in 5 yrs you’re paying $30 more per month, prob around $100+.
So cancel some of them and rotate. You probably aren’t watching them all, and they only come out with (good) new content a couple of times a year.
With cable packages you would miss stuff. With each streaming service owning their own content, it’s there whenever you want it.
Quite often it’s a family or household using these services. It’s hard to cancel Netflix/Disney if your kids or partner are using them
It’s a great time to have a conversation about cost, value, and delayed gratification.
And the six you listed are the big ones, but there’s plenty of others that have exclusive content. There’s also Criterion if you like classics/arthouse, Crunchyroll if you like anime. Paramount, AMC, Showtime, Peacock, etc etc, etc.
Exactly. I was trying to be conservative by choosing only 6 and sticking to the cheaper plans.
But it is entirely conceivable today that, if someone has literally all the subscriptions, they could be paying more than cable costs.
Another factor I ignored for brevity is, at least when I was a kid, the price of cable was often bundled with Internet and telephone services. I can’t speak to how accurate the numbers would be, but I’m pretty sure my dad was paying $100+ for cable and everything else, meaning the cable likely wasn’t the entire cost of the bill. But I digress…
Streaming has gotten out of hand, and anyone who disagrees with me today will eventually agree within a decade.
Don’t forget you can usually bundle cable with Internet. Right now if I had all of those services plus my Internet it’d be $200/mo.
Yes, but if you’re comparing all prices you’d need to add the cost of your internet (only) to the price of a cable subscription to get apples-to-apples comparison.
You combine 6 streaming services, each of them alone already better than cable, and it is still just as expensive.
And if you don’t like the content on one streaming service, you don’t pay for it.
Prime is like 5/month here.
It used to be 3 though. Is it triple as expensive where you live? (Us?)
I have never seen Prime sell for $5 a month, not even in the beginning.
9/month in Germany
5/month in NL
3/month in Belgium
4.99€ a month, 45€ a year. I used to pay 36€ a year back when it didn’t give twitch prime.
Seems like we’re getting ripped off in the States, it’s $13.99 a month here or like $120 yearly.
Or watched cable ADs apparently, cable TV ads were like…5 minutes or maybe even longer. Just commercial after commercial, so long that it was viable to use them to go-to the bathroom when you didn’t have DVR lmao
You know how some shows are 23 minutes long and some are 42? The reason for those odd times is because the shows had half an hour or an hour timeslots and the rest of it would be ads, so in an hour show you would get nearly 20 minutes of ads
What’s worse is with long running shows like mythbusters you can see the shows runtime slowly being chipped away in favor of more ads, the 2003 season’s episodes had runtimes of 50 minutes, by 2016 it was down to 42
My mom’s is the most basic she can get in her area, and it costs 218 dollars a month.
Wow, that’s a lot! Is it at least bundled with internet? I haven’t bought cable tv in over a decade, so I’ve no idea what the real price of it is after the intro prices they try to lure me in with.
It sucks that Netflix doesn’t have as much as they used to because stuff has been pulled for other services but the value proposition for streaming still blows cable out of the water, even with price increases. Adding free or low cost commercial tiers for more price sensitive people doesn’t give me commercials.
With all the premium channels and three HD-DVR boxes I used to pay over $200, before internet, more than a decade ago with much of that going to a shitty middle man company. And that’s for commercial, appointment TV. Even with the premium stations you had to DVR shit to watch later. I subscribe to a ton of services, even some fringe ones, so I almost never come across something that I can’t watch immediately with no commercials on any device I have access to anywhere in the world. And with annual rates, discounts from my phone company, and kickbacks from credit cards I’m still under $100. And now the money goes to companies that actually produce content, even if some of them suck for other reasons.
With what I’m getting I would pay double what I used to for cable, but as it is I’m paying half. It seems like a lot of people complaining never paid for cable with all the packages/premium stations themselves and don’t remember how much appointment TV sucked.
Adding free or low cost commercial tiers for more price sensitive people doesn’t give me commercials.
The thing is they didn’t add a new, cheaper or free “ad supported” option. They added ads to the current price, and then told us to pay more if we wanted to keep the same experience. This is one of the 7 dread turd pillars of enshittifi ation.
I don’t recall that happening to any of the many services I subscribe to. I’ve always paid for no commercials and I’ve never had commercials without having to change plans, although I think the name has changed sometimes. Maybe my price went up and they added a new commercial tier near the price I used to pay? Could you give an example?
People keep using this term enshitification but my experience has only gotten better and better since I cut the cord and now more companies offer streaming increasing what is available to me. My total price has gone up as more things become available but it’s still less than half of what I paid for cable.
Yeah I was thinking of Amazon, but Netflix briefly demoed it then backed off. At this point most of the providers have at least three ability to stream interstitial content, and we know that advertisers must be banging on their doors waving money at them. I have very little trust in the providers not to mess this up
I pay around 40 bucks a month.
that’s still more than pirating it, even if you pay for a vpn
It’s also a lot more than a metal coat hanger shoved in the top of your crt
I brought that up too and was downvoted…this platform is ridiculous.
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/c/piracy
for your convenience~
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
I get a 404 here… I’m using Boost and I’m on lemmy.world. Would either of those be blocking?
lemmy.world might be blocking it. Just visit lemmy.dbzer0.com
It’s blocked by a lot of instances because they don’t want to deal with potential legal issues from providing pirated content. A lot of lemmy instances are based in places where it’s illegal to share pirated content, such as the United States.
This is the way.
Do what you want 'cause a pirate is free, yarr harr fiddle dee dee!
Sorry, what are we talking about?
At least with streaming services, you don’t have to call every year to get a better price.
The price just reliably increases every year. Simple and straightforward.
Ad-free Disney Plus yearly subscription on day one, Nov 2021: $75.
Ad-free Disney Plus yearly subscription after two years, Nov 2023: $168.
3-year duration VPN subscription 2023: $75A captain who hated high fees For services out on the seas They sailed their own ship On a rollicking trip To escape the gougers with ease
Arrrrrr!
I think we need to remind companies why streaming started…time to sail the seven seas yet again, fellas!
I get roughly zero commercials on Netflix. That probably varies somewhat depending on how you access it - I use a super old Chromecast bc my super old TV’s app doesn’t work anymore.
On the other hand, most shows I used to watch on it are gone now, leaving me either to watch the Shitflix content that’s left, or just 1-2-3-it elsewhere.
Commercials are present on Hulu on lower paid tiers and now on prime unless you pay extra every month. The latter is new.
And present in Netflix as well at lower tier subscriptions.
It’s not so bad to have one subscription service that is like $15-20/month, or even less with ads.
Where it really adds up is having to pay for all of them, like Disney+ and Paramount+, and that is also (relatively) new. One of the reasons I got Netflix in the first place was to watch Star Trek shows… but now those are elsewhere, as too is most everything else, and I’m wondering what all I am getting from Netflix anymore.
Here’s my list:
(1) fantastic streaming tech, I almost never have buffering issues these days (possibly significantly lower resolution but it switches seamlessly)
(2) ability to download an episode to watch offline, e.g. at a gym and it even auto-advances to download the next one in a series.
(3) Netflix produced content, except this tends to be crappy content (not always, but… not worth the pricetag definitely, for me)
(4) Anything that Netflix is successfully able to license from other places, which unfortunately tends to rotate and sometimes doesn’t even get whole entire series (like you’ll get up to a certain season and then no more).
It is licensing that ruined television for everyone, not Netflix, but still… am I getting my value? We’ll see as time goes on.
I get all of your points with pirating as well withoit paying anything
True. But that takes significant effort to set up. And I did forget to add one more benefit to paying Netflix - I get to give back, to encourage good quality content to continue to be created.
So whenever I have trouble connecting to a high sea, or just want a more guaranteed experience, it’s a reliable standby:-) … caveat: for the content that it actually has on there:-(.
But that takes significant effort to set up.
not really
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connect to vpn
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go to preferred free streaming website
encourage good quality content to continue to be created.
that would be true if Netflix actually made good content. right now you give netflix money for a few good shows and an overwhelming amount of slop (that’s even more the case for disney+). if you want to support certain content you like just buy the bluray or go to the cinema
I dunno about you but for me sometimes websites don’t want to stream. It is pretty darn easy, when it works, but so is Netflix, which works far more often, and does things like tap out halfway through a show extremely infrequently to never.
Also the former requires an internet connection. A better comparison for you to have used is not streaming but downloading. If you download entire seasons at a time, then you won’t have connection issues watching it later. Though Netflix is legit great about that too, with one-click downloading of an entire season at once. So Netflix kinda wins there too, plus being far easier for someone who doesn’t know what “self- hosting” even means to set up.
It really is great software.
About content though… yeah, it’s really hit or miss. Which is somewhat complicated by all the hype around TV shows these days - who wants to watch Mandalorian? Game of Thrones? Star Trek shows? The actual good Marvel ones? None of that is on Netflix, but are they really “good” to begin with, or is that just what “they” want us all to be watching? Anyway, there’s some fantastic stuff that is truly great that is available on Netflix. To name a few: The Magicians, The 100, The Babadook, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Sandman, yes and things that don’t start with “The” also! Orange is the New Black, Ghost in the Shell, Midnight Mass, … well, I’m sure there’s more, probably 😎.
Netflix is not for everyone. But it is good for some, or perhaps I should say some of the time. And for the rest there’s always sailing. :-P
The download function is the only pro for Netflix (and that’s only aviable for the limited amount of content Netflix has licensed). If I have buffer issues, I can just switch to another website.
There’s also the ethical aspect. I don’t want to support Hollywood in its current state. I won’t give money to a company that accidentally and occasionally produces a good show while deliberately fucking up many big projects on a large scale because they don’t care about making good content anymore, only money.
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