Consumers are paying more than ever for streaming TV each month and analysts say there’s no reason for the companies to stop raising prices::Finding new subscribers in a saturated streaming video market isn’t easy. And with legacy media companies desperate to recoup revenue declines in their linear TV businesses, the cost of your monthly plan is likely to keep rising.
Yarrrr, we be seein’ about that…
Yeah I don’t have the budget to subscribe to multiple streaming services, let alone cable or even one service. Thank god there’s not a lot I’d want to watch…even if sailing high seas.
Streaming:
-Charges you unreasonable amount of money
-If you cancel the subscription, you lose it all
-If they change the terms, you may lose access to some of the things in your library
Torrent:
-Costs a grand total of 0$
-Allows you to retain content for eternity
-Requires a 5 second effort to enter the name of a show/film in Sonarr/Radarr
The choice is clear.
plus, you fight corporate greed.
Theft removes the original, priacy makes a copy.
lol I’m like 20 clicks into Sonarr’s website and I still cant find a simple answer: what is Sonarr?
Some sites just assume you know. In short, thing that automates and streamlines series piracy. Radarr is for films, Lidarr for music, Readarr for book, Whisparr for porn, Prowlarr allows to better manage sources for all of the above.
So is Prowlarr an alternative to Jackett? I’ve use Jackett before but it was (as best as I could understand) a way to translate different indexer URIs into a common format.
More or less, yes, they serve similar purposes.
Don’t forget about autobrr, for getting things as fast as electronically possible, increasing your seeding ratio to ungodly levels.
Wow, interesting! Thanks.
Agreed. I found it a bit disappointing they skipped to the highlights without describing the big picture first. This is from their GitHub:
Sonarr is a PVR for Usenet and BitTorrent users. It can monitor multiple RSS feeds for new episodes of your favorite shows and will grab, sort and rename them. It can also be configured to automatically upgrade the quality of files already downloaded when a better quality format becomes available.
Took a buttload of Googling to just figure out what PVR stands for lol… and I’m still not sure I got it right. Seems like it’s Personal Video Recording??
My main gripe with torrent is that there isn’t always a seeder available. This is a major issue if you’re looking for a movie that isn’t mainstream. There are pirate streaming services but we know that the quality is not usually great. Even if you download from torrent, the quality is not also always great either. I definitely noticed difference in video and sound quality between torrent and what you get from “mainstream” sources. Some torrent say they’re 4k or HD quality, but many files are actually cropped so that uploading and downloading is faster.
Edit: Grammar and wording
I’d also give Usenet and Soulseek a try, lots of rare media in there
I’ve got a setup that has gradually improved over the years, I have put a few hundred $$ in that time too.
But, it was fairly easy to get started, my improvements have made the automatic downloads very consistently high quality, and sonarr/radarr do all the searching and filtering for me.
My wife wanted to watch some Winnie the Pooh, within like 5 minutes the first season was ready to watch, and the rest was finished downloading and ready before the 1 episode was over.
And it only took 5 minutes because I had to help the searcher bc all my auto filters are optimized for recent releases. Though I’m gonna set up some filters for older stuff, so it’s not trying to download a 4K hdr file for something that came out 50 years ago and was never remastered to 4K.
Torrent:
-Unless your a millennial with really good memory… requires a (usually) a good paid VPN + 3 hours of reading and setup so you dont get nasty letters from your ISP.
-Requires requisite ports and knowledge of how to get the shows to your TV
-ideally requires a standalone PC, which most households no longer have
-Requires knowledge of additional programs that need to be researched and have paid competition
-Requires knowledge of how to find the source material, with huge gatekeeping between source pools
I am probably forgetting other stuff, especially for Gen Z and now the oldest Gen Alpha. But if I as a millennial feel it’s a burden to relearn the steps for something I already was doing a decade or so ago. That must be a massive bar for someone who never had their hand in it, so to speak.
I am not saying it’s impossible, just I haven’t found a straight forward guide from beginning to end, with all the new technology included. And the first time they get a love note from their ISP, they will likely just stop.
Edit: The vastly different responses with different solutions, only proves to me that this is more complex than people let on. You have some people giving services that weren’t mentioned in the OP in euros (not that there is anything wrong with Europe, just a different experience. Do EU IPs even send love notes? Then you get a mix of people saying what the best VPN is and other people saying you don’t even need a VPN. Just so much different information, is it surprising that people could feel overwhelmed?
This is the age of information. It would take a grand total of a few hours for the average person to watch a video to give them all the knowledge they need to avoid the pitfalls you listed.
People are afraid and lazy, it’s easy to let fear control your decisions.
I think the age of information has passed. If you try googling/search engine any of this you get scraps of information that don’t tie well together.
All I am saying is I could see people throwing up their hands and thinking it’s too confusing or dangerous.
Information is everywhere, but so is misinformation now. There’s LOTS of AI-generated articles out there telling people nothing helpful, or straight-up incorrect answers from Google searches.
We have a Piracy board on Lemmy with a beginner’s guide.
- VPN is easy especially the good paid ones.
- You can use VPN and torrent on your mobile and cast it there are apps for it. Or you can use one of the NAS which will do it for you no need to remember anything.
- You needn’t use a PC.
So you are mostly wrong here, I’ll let you know my setup that costs me $15 a month.
A 4 core 8GB VPS: $5 a month. Unlimited cloud Storage: €10 a month.
I have Emby (Use jellyfin, I haven’t changed out of laziness), Sonarr, Radarr, Jellyseerr all running on a VPS with caddy running a reverse_proxy to point a domain at emby via HTTPS.
No need for VPNs, but you can run OpenVPN on your VPS for maximum value for money if you want to use a high speed VPN.
It’s all very straight forward to setup on Ubuntu 20.04 with lots of documentation. My server has been up for 3 months now and I have had 0 issues, friends use jellyseerr to requests shows and movies. Everything else is automated. Can even import lists from IMDb.
Make sure if you want to save space to use h.265 encoding where possible. Additionally, if you don’t want to torrent you can use newservers. But that will cost an additional $10 a month.
Where are you getting a 4 core 8GB VPS for $5 a month with unlimited bandwidth/CPU time?
All the reputable providers have 1GB, single core shared compute for that price.
When you say VPS, do you mean like an AWS or GCP virtual machine?
Ionos, but I have been grandfathered in with price so you won’t be able to get my deal
AWS/GCP is an order of magnitude more expensive for those specs. And they would ban you for downloading copyrighted material without a VPN. So I wouldn’t recommend that. I was able to get a similar set up using Linode but the specs were way worse and I couldn’t do transcoding, and I didn’t torrent using the $5 a month VPS.
It depends on what hardware the host is using, my VPS is capable of transcoding around 4 streams simultaneously.
The skill issues related to piracy can and should be addressed. This is how we form a truly strong resistance to the madness that is going on.
Your point is valid and it’s important to work it through.
You’re mistakening the wide range of solutions and tooling for complexity.
The knowledge is extremely easy to obtain though. There are lots of very detailed guides. It’s not extremely complex, anyway.
It’s just hard to know what information even correctly pertains to me. My comment received a half dozen other comments… some seemingly from the US, others from the EU. Some comments saying every house has a PC (not true) others saying a PC isn’t even necessary. Some comments with how to find a good VPN, other comments saying a VPN isn’t even necessary. Then I got recommendations for a half dozen different services from various comments with no idea if they are all necessary and how they interact with each other.
It may not be extremely complex, but until you get your feet wet, it sure seems like it is. In my day you downloaded what you wanted off of Kazaa or BearShare or the like and then watched it on your PC with VLC. or if you were really fancy you burned it on CDS or DVDS. Then when the bad emails or letters came in, you just told your parents it was the neighbors.
Good points, there should be an all-in-one solution which very easily guides you through all the necessary steps
I have never been in a house with out a pc since the 90s.
My sister, my mother, and my brother all have laptop-exclusive households. Most people these days don’t see a need for a standalone pc when they have a laptop they can take from room to room and costs the same as a desktop.
Not to be pedantic but a laptop is a PC
I know. I said standalone pc to fit the earlier commenter’s point. Desktop would have been the correct choice, but I figured the gist got across. If it was unclear to anybody, I apologize.
No need to apologise I just wanted to clear things up for anyone reading the thread.
You can do everything you need to do on an old laptop… you don’t need a desktop. You just need to make sure you disable any of the power saving settings so it can stay on all the time but then enable a display-off type of screen saver.
I don’t think most people have an extra laptop sitting around their home. And they definitely aren’t gonna want to do that to their daily driver.
I just don’t think this is feasible for the average person.
That’s being very pedantic, if you start typing in Laptop V, it autofills PC on searches. Many homes don’t have a desktop, you can do 90% of what you need on mobile nowadays and the other 10% can be done on a laptop.
I don’t think it’s being pedantic in this case. They’re talking about the capabilities of a PC vs something like a mobile phone or a tablet. In this case a laptop is a PC and is fully capable of doing all the things described in this thread.
I mean, most of this is wrong?
What are you reading for 3 hours about a VPN?
Why do you need to know about ports? You can literally put shows on a flash drive and plug it in.
A stand alone PC, why? What? Hell I torrent from my phone sometimes.
A lot of this can be done, but this is not the bar for entry by any means.
It’s not hard. Mullvad is €5/month. In torrent client, set up Mullvad proxy. Go to thepiratebay or any other tracker to download. Watch.
You can also do it on your old laptop and use it as a home media server. Android TV can access network shares, I’m sure some of the others can too.
In torrent client, set up Mullvad proxy.
I guess this is the kind of shit people are talking about. Wtf does this even mean.
Wow theft is free!? Who would have thought!
Piracy is a service and pricing issue. Plenty of people willing to pay, proven by the fact the streaming services were so successful in the first place. They’re just not willing to take substantial pay hikes when they’re going hungry.
No, piracy is an entitlement issue.
Streaming services are still successful, that’s why they’re able to raise the prices. But most of them have been operating at a loss for a long long time to drive user adoption. This is the part where people have to decide if they’re willing to pay what it actually costs.
You are not entitled to this media. These companies don’t owe you anything.
…what is that supposed to be?
I imagine it’s you portrayed as the soyjak but it’s so well drawn I can’t imagine its effectiveness
WTF is a soyjak
How I imagine your brain works based on your previous comment.
You think my brain works…like a windmill?
boo-hoo-hoo poor mega corps, I’m pretty sure the CEOs of these companies were paying by their own money the price difference of the true cost and the decreased subscription price of all the customers and they will walk out poorer. Not with millions in their pockets.
boo-hoo-hoo poor mega corps
I’m genuinely baffled that you interpreted any of what I said as garnering sympathy for streaming platforms or their CEOs. They don’t need your sympathy, nor does it have anything to do with what I said.
I’m genuinely baffled that you interpreted any of what I said as garnering sympathy for streaming platforms or their CEOs.
then explain me why you mentioned the “operating at a loss” thing. What does it prove in your argument? What does this offer in the dialog and please explain me if the CEO of a said company which is “operating at a loss” walks out with millions in their pockets or not. And also what will happen in the owner of a small business which is also operating at a loss. Then compare these two “operating at a loss” and tell me if they are even slightly comparable.
The point is that the company has to be profitable. It’s not complicated. The point of companies is to be profitable. If they’re not profitable, they cease to exist, which isn’t good for anyone. Those are the only options they have: become profitable or cease to exist. I know you people like to think money is just conjured into existence with magic but that’s not the way anything works.
Piracy is a capitalism problem.
People don’t pay what it actually costs, people pay that + the revenues the company brings home. And that’s a lot now.
Operating at a loss is a standard practice that is not only meant to drive user adoption, but to (whoops!) remove competition with smaller bags to pay losses from. So we end up with a few services that do whatever they want.
This is not okay.
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No reason to stop raising prices for any business, except for the fact that demand goes down as price goes up. People will cancel or downshift to a cheaper service.
There’s a scene in Fight Club about how auto companies approach recalls, and a similar method is applied for these price hikes. The company predicts how many people will leave or change plans or whatever with their changes and they price it out so that they end up making more money.
And for a small example let’s say you have two customers paying $10/month for a service. If the price increases by $11, and one customer leaves, you are now making $21/month from the service.
Now it’s not as simple as that in the real world, but that’s the general idea.
The issue here is that even if a vocal minority leave these streaming services, or social media there’s still a large amount of people putting up with their shit.
And as a bonus you have less customers to provide support to!
That’s literally what they teach you about basic economics at school…
The standard graph of price increasing on one side and customer demand decreasing on the other, and how companies try to find the crossover point.
Sorry mate this is not some special fight club logic. It’s not even really accounting or economics logic, it’s just kinda common sense.
What price should I sell my lemonade for? I’ll have more customers if I sell it cheaper…
The part which seems lost on most commenters is that these companies have huge and very sophisticated market research campaigns. They can predict with great accuracy how their demographics will respond.
The part which seems lost on most commenters is that these companies have huge and very sophisticated market research campaigns. They can predict with great accuracy how their demographics will respond.
That’s pretty much what the above person said lol
They have a good idea of how many people will leave before they do it.
downshift to a cheaper service.
Yarr matey
People will cancel or downshift to a cheaper service.
Streaming platforms make more money from you if you use the cheaper ad-supported plans. The price hikes are to get you off the ad-free plans.
I’m begging zoomers to learn how to torrent
I’m kind of amazed how my Gen Z buddies are so adamantly against pirating. They think the cops will bust down their door, literally.
As a gen z kiddo, like half of the software on my pc and 90% of my movies are pirated lmao.
I mean i’ve met a lot of millenials like that too. I’m not exactly sure where it stems from
Noobs using public trackers then getting scary letters from their ISP.
A few of mine got cease and desist orders from their ISP, one got two… so that’s why they’re against it. Some now do VPN, some just hop streaming services. Some just stopped watching as much stuff because: life.
Why? You realize if everyone torrents there will be nothing to torrent, right?
Everyone torrented in the 00’s, and Netflix was born from that.
No way they’ll let the whole market crash before trying to get some customers back.
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Lol no. That’s not how an economy works. When you sell less of a thing you then have to adjust price to make it favorable again. Companies aren’t just going to say “If we can’t charge $350 a month we might as well just turn off this massive money machine.” No, they will charge $200 and accept making less money over making no money.
That’s not how an economy works.
You’re correct. Theft has nothing to do with the economy.
No, they will charge $200 and accept making less money
It doesn’t matter what they charge when everyone steals it for $0.
You’re correct. Theft has nothing to do with the economy.
Ummm theft, aka shrink, is very much a part of any business.
Hiring theft prevention is an entire field of work around this very concept. How can you say theft has nothing to do with the economy when there is an entire industry around theft prevention…
It doesn’t matter what they charge when everyone steals it for $0.
You missed the part where people stop stealing if the price is reasonable. It’s the reason why pirating went way down when Netflix first came out. People are willing to pay, not be taken advantage of. Are you not reading these comments, people saying they will pirate if there is another hike? There is clearly a line, if they cross it then they lose customers.
You missed the part where people stop stealing if the price is reasonable.
LOL “reasonable” according to whom?
God the fucking galle you must have to say “ah that’s too expensive to pay for so I’ll just steal it! And if they bring the price back down I’ll totally pay for it out of the kindness of my little heart because I’m just such an ethical person!”
Stop lying, you’re not paying for shit.
Yarr harr fiddle dee dee. Fuck Netflix, Hulu and Disney
I’ll have you know I watched two fucking vrbo commercials just to watch that 240p video!
Arrrrr
Install Ublock Origin… This is the way…
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Why are you pirating dogshit?
I am slowly cancelling services with each price increase. I uave cancelled Netflix and HBO. Will continue until morale improves.
Why is piracy costing you 4$ a month.
VPN?
not everyone can torrent freely
I’d say piracy is not even free, if done right. I mean, you may want to support JDownloader, MediaFire, Mega, your VPN, and whatnot.
I’m not into piracy (wink), but if I did, I’d pay my monthly Plex subscription, MediaFire account, and tip JDownloader monthly for their effort.
I do pay a little for Usenet and my NZB indexer, about $115 per year all said and done. And I pay for hardware and electricity, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Any recommendations for usenet provider?
I use Eweka.
With prices going up and likely subscribers going way down the next logical move for the Streaming Companies is to start cracking down on Piracy again as they already had a go at password sharing.
Now I am not saying they will be successful in prosecuting those that are careful, just that there will be a few high profile cases against groups of people who aren’t using the best hygiene when it comes to piracy. Fear is their best weapon against piracy that they actually want to deploy, just make sure you do enough research to make sure you aren’t in that harvest of low hanging fruit.
Really? No reason to stop raising prices? My Jolly Roger got something to say about that.
Piracy has never been easier or safer or faster than it is now, and these platforms think driving people away with overpriced subscriptions for shitty content is beneficial for them?
Piracy isn’t easier than not bothering to cancel your subscription for most people. I’m sure they’ll lose some people, and especially the demographic here, but I don’t know about the average person.
And yet I see all sorts of articles saying these platforms complain that piracy is now even higher than before Netflix became a streaming service.
Piracy has never been easier or safer or faster than it is now
What?! It was way easier and safer in the era of Napster, edonkey and emule. Easy discoverability and companies didn’t pay any attention yet. Since then it’s a cat and mouse game.
Get a good VPN and you’re set.
That’s not easier than not needing a VPN in the first place.
I’ve no problem with paying for good services, but when I get a better service from a random pirate streaming site than I do from Amazon Prime, why would I continue paying for that?
I’m just sick of things either being exclusive to one service even though they’re decades old, or just plain not available.
Oh, and if I’m paying, I don’t want ads. Not ever.
I’ve no problem with paying for good services
Exactly. It used to be that netflix was all you needed to get most quality content, and it was a fair deal for customers: you pay a reasonable monthly amount, and you and your family gets convenient access to most streamable movies and TV series.
Now that quality content is spread out and locked out over half a dozen other streaming services, and subscribing to them all is not just a hassle but also incredibly bad value compared to the original offer.
In a healthy competitive environment, you would expect companies to counter reduced value by increasing customer value in other ways or by reducing prices, but instead we got price hikes, lots of low quality filler content, crack downs on password sharing, advertising, various unpopular UI changes and other service reductions decreasing value even further.
To solve this, I think the content producers and streaming services should be split up, because right now they’re not really competitors in a true sence but small monopolies who each clutch the keys to their own little franchises. It should be noted for example that music streaming works a lot better: there are various competitors that each hold a viable content library on their own, so you don’t need more than one music streaming service. IMO that’s because Spotify, Tidal, YT Music, etc. are merely distributors and not the actual producers.
Yeah, the music industry finally got their shit together and made something that was more convenient than just nicking it online. Took their sweet time over it, but I think they realised that it was taking like a minute to download a whole album by that point.
It’s really the model of how to do it well. Very little in the way of exclusives locked to one particular service. Occasionally an artist kicks up a fuss over something and pulls all their stuff from one of them, but it’s rare enough that I don’t care.
Being totally serious, you should copy and paste your comment and email it to your local US Representative.
I have a problem paying for DRM. I want to use open source and DRM is the opposite. I like (and buy sometimes) Creative Commons music/audio-books just because it tastes better when artist isn’t supporting restricting me. Cory Doctorow is a creative worker who lives and breaths anti-DRM, if you’ve not explored this. I recommend his old talk “The Coming War on General Computation”.
Yeah some of the arr software is pretty fucking cool for being entirely free.
Source on better pirate streaming service?
Any of these will do. Prime is not a high bar to get over. Some may work better than others, and I think it’s down to where you are and time of day than anything else.
https://fmhy.pages.dev/videopiracyguide/#multi-server
It’s not as good as downloading yourself and running Jellyfin, but it’s convenient.
Many thanks kind stranger!
Weird… why is piracy growing then? Every reasonable person should pay $300 to watch the shows they want on the weekend… and then pay a couple more hundreds in the theater.
every dollar you raise, the fewer customers you get. the point is that you should want to raise the price whenever the relative drop in customers is less than the relative increase in price to maximise profits (where marginal cost is marginal benefit :) )
This is why I Plex/Jellyfin.
Yup, came to say they should move to Plex/Jellyfish to get away from the streaming shitshow.
Exactly. It’s funny because if one streaming company were more like Valve, they could have all of the content on one platform like Steam has with Valve. Piracy is a convenience problem, after all, not a pricing problem, and it sure as hell isn’t convenient to have to be subscribed to 5 or more different platforms just to get all the content I’d want to watch.
Now chart hours of content against cost across the market, and watch it go vertical. Bonus for weighting by critical rating.
Piracy is the only reasonable choice.
Thanks for the reminder to cancel Disney+ and HBO Max - I almost forgot! ;)
Still have Peacock, because that’s comped through my mobile provider.
My wife does Amazon Prime, Netflix, and Hulu. I had Prime but realized I only ever used it for free shipping, which I can get anyway by bundling my orders and setting ship dates.
Bundling orders and set ship dates - what? This is something I don’t know about.
Even without Prime, you can get free shipping if you spend over a certain amount.
So instead of placing multiple small orders and paying shipping, I’ll wait until the combined dollar value qualifies for free shipping.
Also on check out, you can specify a delivery date with free shipping.
And then everything comes in separate packages with different parcel services anyway… Amazon really has become shit.
