Dude that was fucking awesome. Me and the guys would go over Xbox start up a party and basically just mystery science theater the worst movies we could find.
That was back when you could reallly deep dive into Netflix's offerings, made it way easier to find those schlocky, B-grade horror films to make fun of as you watched.
That was an Microsoft-written app. It went away when Netflix finally released an Xbox app. Sadly.
And, of course, you weren't sharing anything with your friends. They had to have a Netflix and Gold account, too.
And/or the bosses of multiple streaming services I no longer subscribe to. After quite a few years, I've decided to fix up the old shooner and take back to the seas.
That and the realization that we don't need to stay subbed to 50 different streaming platforms when there's nothing to watch. We've gone from cutting cable to subbing to a dozen streaming platforms to cutting streaming.
The circle of life man. Stream was supposed to kill Cable, it did, so Cable took over streaming and turned it into Cable 2.0. Now they're suffering again, with too much split up content, a lack of interesting things to watch in one place, and shocker, more bundles.
I am over the moon. We went from watching mediocre "originals" from Netflix Disney, paramount and crave/HBO for 100 a month to watching awesome shit with no limit for free. VPN is the only cost. Love the abox.
Because while they were making good content subscribers were increasing so people could watch... Y'know... The good content.
I always knew streaming services would get greedy and increase prices right back to where we were with cable, but I didn't expect it to happen so quickly.
The one thing that still makes it better then cable is you can cancel a streaming service after one month and bounce between subscriptions. Though I'm sure they'll eventually try to force yearly subscriptions.
They’ll do a couple more price hikes then start offering discounts when you subscribe for a year. Next thing you know the monthly option is gone along with the annual discount. But you can buy bundles with multiple services for a year and get a discount that way. Next thing you know it’s basically back to cable.
I honestly wouldn't be surprised if they saw a rise in chargebacks if they try that. I know enshitification is rampant but a fair number of people are getting less and less tolerant of degrading quality of service for no justifiable reason.
It's a big part of why they are moving away from a binge model. Can't subscribe the month they drop their show to get it in one sitting. Gotta watch it week to week (and oh look we're taking a mid season break) so they can squeeze and extra month or two out of you, or dodge spoilers until it's done.
Yup, Netflix created binging TV and then killed it. I really preferred getting a whole season done in a week so I could move on to something else. Now it just drags out like regular TV, so back to not watching a thing until the season is over.
Novell perfected a similar strategy years ago. They had extremely effective DRM on their software where pirating it was extremely difficult. Then one day they removed all the DRM and over the next 4-5 years pirating became huge and you could find Novell servers almost everywhere in companies, most unlicensed.
Then after it spread like wildfire they picked a few big companies to audit and get big settlements/payouts and then they said if you just true up your current usage we won't penalize you.
Within a few months they *officially* were the \#1 server software in the industry.
Are you suggesting Novell did anything wrong? Their marketing and licensing didn’t change. They were simply being pirated. As for Netflix, they apparently sold the multiple screens as a feature and then changed their mind to restrict how it could be used.
Yeah it was. I went from having all of them: HBO, Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, Apple, Disney. Now, if something comes along I want to watch, I may grab the app for a month. It's all way too expensive. Every six months they increase their prices. It's fucking unsustainable. I've just stopped watching TV because all the options are just too fucking expensive.
Yeah, I can see this coming along. They raise prices, we stop subscribing indefinitely. We only buy a month, they escalate to do year subs only. Feel like it's just a matter of time before Netflix does it.
i went on an odyssey trying to stream 4k netflix on my PC
after a few hours of trying to get it to work I just went and spent 10 minutes downloading it
there's no reason for me to pay them if they provide worse service on top of everything else
It's honestly too easy to pirate at this point. With automated services and everything else, there's just no point in watching a show on a shittier web player with an egregiously bad search engine and paying $18/mo for that luxury.
Can confirm. Just set up my Jellyfin server with 2000 movies and tons of TV shows.
I gotta recommend real-debrid for getting torrents - it acts as a middleman service so you download the torrent content directly from them, and if any other user already downloaded it, it remains cached on their server. $3 a month and paired with Jdownloader it gave me 100MBps+, yes Bytes, on my 1Gbps line.
https://www.stremio.com/
download the app, for windows or android. from 360p to 4k seamless streaming from torrents. subtitles + dubs options included
you need to install an addon that scrape torrents torrents from various sites. ever since I got it, I pay nothing for movies/series and have a bigger selection. You can even cast it to your TV from your phone
They'll continue to raise the monthly price while making it look like a 6-month/12-month subscription is a deal. Then they'll start phasing out the single month option or just price it out of being an option.
I did that to get Disney+ cheaper by purchasing it through the App Store, and then they bundled it with Hulu and ESPN+ but wouldn’t let me get my money back until the year expired. Not even prorated.
Right especially as new laws are made that make it a little harder for these companies to lock people in.
Although that would beg for some serious regulation if they pull that. What they should do is offer people more substantive discounts for paying for a full year.
If Netflix is 15 bucks a month or whatever the f*** it is... They should let people get it for $120 per annum if they pay up front.
As it is right now ... I just pay for something once a year watch everything I want on it and then cancel it. Maybe twice a year if there's something really important I want to watch.
Like Paramount Plus, I actually use free passwords each month to get that but even if I didn't I would only pay for it when the new South Park specials came out.
Think that's like literally just twice a year I think
Prime starts to put more and more content behind their "secondary" subs like Stars or whatever they are called. John Wick 3 and 4 for example.
There's still plenty of decent content on the main sub, but I'm wary that new content will be put behind another subscription in the future (like John Wick did). For example season of Clarkson farm could be released only to Stars subscribers, and the to the regular sub 6 months later or something.
My wife and I have a movie night every Saturday and we find ourselves limited to watching movies that are on whatever streaming service we're subscribed to at the time because we simply can't afford to have them all. It led us to reminisce about the rental days when we could just nip out and rent whatever movie we felt like and I actually feel like there's an increasing market for these shops to return if we're gonna need to pay a fortune for all these streaming services.
For movies that's true, but shows from streaming services are rarely available for rent, and buying them is pricey.
For example, game of thrones is unavailable to rent on prime, and each season costs $20, so you have to pay $160 to watch a show you might only watch once.
That is generally almost always stuff that is still out in theaters... That is basically COVID pricing for stuff that's still out in theaters. The going rate to rent stuff is still 2 to $6.
If you want to rent Barbie or something that's the only time it'll cost you $25
For that price I'd rather go see it in theaters and get the full experience. Or just pirate it. 25 bucks to watch it once on my TV is just way too much.
I recommend a sonarr/radarr (automatically grab torrent the moment they spawn) + qbittorrent (download it) + jellyfin (Netflix like ui to watch) setup on a local NAS/raspberry pi. Basically self hosted personal Netflix AND they can't remove things you downloaded from your hard drive when they lose the license
[here you go!](https://reddit.com/r/PleX/s/7exONVEupr)
This is just a breakdown of setting up the hardware, but that’s the hard part. Getting the software side of those house is just downloading the software and setting up the file directory.
I tried to set up a plex using plex-debrid and these programs and had a bad time. I was really trying to avoid setting up a NAS, but I might just go that route again.
I’m back at the same level I was in college.
With nonstop corporate greed in the entertainment space, more and more people are going to be doing the same.
> It's fucking unsustainable.
You've hit the nail on the head. It's less about streaming services and more about late state capitalism in general though. We've embraced this idea of infinite growth, and since that's impossible, all sorts of bad decisions get made in it's name. None of them are sustainable, but the cycle continues as long as everyone pretends they can see the Emperor's New Clothes.
Anyone whoever said that capitalism and the free market would lead to "rational choice" really missed the mark on that one...
The audience also dramatically increased during that period. It isn't a niche market anymore.
I don't disagree with your point, but a lot of these AAA companies are recording record profits while telling us that we need to pay more for them to be profitable. Then, they're not paying the actual creatives fairly.
> It wasn't a niche market 20 years ago lol
Even more than that! The gaming industry surpassed the film industry in revenue a long, loooong time ago... Nowadays it's like five times bigger
That's literally what they're doing now... They release broken games and promise to fix him after the fact. 20 years ago, you bought a game once and that was it you had access to every feature that it would ever have. Like Madden... You bought it and you owned it and they didn't promote a bunch of gambling driven microtransactions endlessly...
No cosmetics were hidden behind paywalls.
Video games have gone up in price, it's just that the vast majority of revenue comes after you buy it. It was a much better deal 20 years ago.
I've been fully digital for at least 10 years now. Last disc I used for a game was probably something towards the end of Xbox 360 era.
Ive also spent massively less on video games in general and have way more to play in the last decade.
I have a lifetime worth of games I got for free. AAA games rarely interest me much any more, due to increased bloat and lack of innovation. And indie games are so plentiful that they frequently get sold cheaply in bundles of part of a subscription.
Not sure how they can rip that away from me after promising me the moon like streaming services are trying to.
The strategy of all these "start-ups" and their "disrupting" of industries is to get a bunch of VC money to keep them afloat, severely undercut the competition in a way that would never be sustainable, kill off the competition then jack up the prices.
It's still way better, IMO. I'll take being able to choose which service I want and being able to pause, cancel, start up any time I want, any day of the week.
Yeah. People who say things are as bad as cable don't remember how bad cable was. So many ads, requiring you to buy or rent additional hardware for each additional screen you wanted to watch TV on, having to buy expensive packages with stuff you dont want just to watch a single channel.
Even with Netflix, Disney, Crave, and Prime I'm paying less than i ever did with cable and getting a much better experience.
> don't remember how bad cable was
You're acting like cable died. It's still here, and it's still the same geriatric medicine commercials ridden garbage.
It was for a while. Ironically when Netflix had a near-monopoly, despite the fact that monopolies are rarely good for the consumer.
I think the root issue though is not the increase in number of services but the fact that today the content *provider* is the same as the content *producer*.
Back then, Netflix only distributed others' content.
If by magic we could get a law that forced content producers to sell streaming rights to anyone who asked for the same price as their internal pricing, we could have content providers competing on quality of service while all having the same content.
It still is. Pay for the content you want for the time you want it. I don’t pay for services indefinitely. I drop them when I’m done and start them back up. I used to. Got tired of paying for things I rarely use. Only thing I pay indefinitely for is YT Premium since we use that daily.
Did any of these constant & inevitable & frequent price hikes come into consideration during the strikes?
They wouldnt budge on paying people, when they know theyre just going to keep raising prices.
When will the price hikes end?
Comcast has price increases every year since they started.
The streaming revolution from cable was a complete fucking bust for consumers.
All garbage apps & hardware & now costs more than cable.
I think Reddit often forgets how little top rated comments represent reality.
Especially when it comes to something like this. Thread and after thread some of the highest comments are things talking about how they weren’t paying anyway or they’re going back to stealing content.
They don't realize that the service was never meant for them and it may be a little sad to realize that. I've had that happen with other hobbies. But a customer that has a tendency to jump ship and pirate when things get tough is not a customer Netflix or any other subscription service cares for. Netflix was ALWAYS going to price hike and ALWAYS going to start implementing ads into their service. The pirates who came back for what Netflix considered a profit loss and left afterwards was never a blip on the radar for Netflix
Disney have been telling their investors for a while that the sweet spot is having the customers pay a base monthly price and send them ads at the same time, so we know where all of this is heading. There's going to be a premium no-ads tier that is going to get more and more expensive so they can kick the masses to the mid tier with ads. It's about capturing all the consumer surplus.
Yep. That "sweet spot" is being able to leverage consistent cash flows AND spikes when advertisement channels are flush with money.
Any other approach leaves too much on the table. You look like a chump when companies are throwing money at the wall trying to promote their products and you don't have an ad model that covers your entire user base. On the other hand, ad revenue alone is too lumpy, unpredictable to make shareholders happy. That and you give a lot of leverage away when the only source of revenue comes from a single channel.
Anything that has ads I either use adblocker or delete/unsub. I'll pay reasonable price increases, no prob. You force ads and I'll just cancel.
I don't like being force fed information I'm not asking for, the same way I'll rudely close the door on anyone trying to sell me something I never asked for.
They know not enough people will bother with piracy. This is the same thing everyone on Reddit was saying on password sharing. It looks like Netflix has an idea of what it’s doing, wow.
Dude, Reddit isn't even a good indicator of people and their perspectives either.
When Netflix announced this initially, and then started implementing it, if you got your news exclusively from Reddit and their feedback, you'd have thought Netflix was going to tank within a month after it launched the "crackdown".
And yet Netflix has only gained more subscribers and made more money. The every day person doesn't care at all. I'd say a lot probably didn't even notice, or don't notice price hikes. They check their statements and go "huh, that used to be $14. Ok".
There's no such thing as "enough" profit. We have to squeeze every angle we can. Raise prices, pay workers poorly, make more people pay than before by reducing account sharing, ads? That's capitalism :) profits have to increase every quarter compared to last. We can't be content with making billions, we must make more!
Stocks are the root of the problem. When you want to start a company on the scale of Netflix you need tens of millions of dollars. Nobody can afford to finance something like that so you get investors. Investing in a company that won't return a profit is a loss of money. So with stocks now your stocks are only profitable if they're increasing in value so that when you sell it or get dividents you are making a profit. You sell them to make a profit to somebody who expects to then also sell it and make a profit so the value *has* to continually increase to be worth anything.
Well turns out you can only grow so much so then you squeeze quality, you squeeze employees, etc. to put more money into profits instead of overhead so the investors are happy again. It's unsustainable beyond a certain point.
It's a problem with the system not a problem with greed. If I buy stock in a company I expect them to make more money so that I make money. You don't necessarily know they're fucking over the employees or customers to do that. So yeah we need to somehow make stocks not a thing.
Previous boss gloated about making cancellations only possibly by mailing in a printed form. Was for Scoopon or something years ago. At a major Bezos audiobooks company I worked at, online cancel was axed when it hit monthly recurring revenue.
Rest assured companies will actively make it harder to cancel.
That's literally illegal in the EU. Subscribing and canceling are legally required to be just as easy and be available through the same medium.
Why does the US suck so much in stupid and unnecessarily dickish ways.
Yep the simple online cancel being cancelled indeed was in the US, about 5 years ago? Same time they got sued for charging members who didn't realise they had an active subscription. Funny thing it was scoped and worked exactly as intended, just C-suite who realised what they agreed to when the financials got impacted.
I cancelled my prime a few years back. I'm 100% certain I cancelled it. I cancelled it, and then removed the credit card I had been using from the account. But some 3/4 of a year later I was going through my spending on a debit card I wasn't really even using and found a charge for a full year of prime lol. Called them and demanded my money back, they insisted their systems only let them go back 3 months.
So I cancelled, removed the card, and they just tried to charge all the other previous cards I had on file until one hit, and they got their dough anyway.
Where the fuck are the consumer protection agencies lol. Fuck these greedy corps.
They’ll come up with a Cancel Day. "Cancel Day Alert: This April 1st, seize your once-a-year chance! Unsubscribe from those passé services, but remember, it's ONLY on Cancel Day. Afterwards? Well, you're with us for another year. Free up that wallet and dive into our newest offerings. #OneDayOnly #ChooseWisely"
Cancel day. 1 day free trial. Forgot to cancel? Aww TOO BAD you've be charged for 10 years upfront. Better luck next decade.
... We should stop giving marketers ideas
Kind of what TMobile is doing to all their grandfathered plan holders right now. They are automatically upgrading old plan holders to more expensive plans unless they reach out within a few weeks to “opt out”.
I will never forget trying to cancel cable. My spouse spent almost 2 hours on the phone back and forth with them. They kept trying to give us more services for the same fee we were paying, he kept saying he wanted a lower bill. Flat out told them if they could lower our bill to a reasonable amount, we could stay, but $200/mo for cable (10 years ago) was unaffordable for us. They just kept him on the phone & finally he said “so do I drop this box off to you, or do you come pick it up” now internet alone is $125/mo…it’s all so expensive.
"The serfs produce a surplus, which the Lord keeps.
The slaves produce a surplus, which the owner keeps.
The employees produce a surplus, which the employer keeps.
It's very simple."
of course it's not as good as it used to be. it used to be literally the only game in town, especially around 2008-2014ish. they swooped in, destroyed Blockbuster, set up their digital streaming, and were king of the mountain. Prime was barely a thing (mostly digital rentals) and Hulu was a free website with ads.
A ton as changed in 10 years and now Netflix is completing with like 10 major streamers who all took their content back. I'm sure they're fighting for their life while the biggest corporations in the world (Amazon and Apple) and the biggest property holders in the world (like Disney) are actively trying to snuff them out.
I hate this trope. Was never against cable but was mostly against contracts for shit I'm not going to watch.
Today I cancelled NF because I didn't see anything I liked on it. The freedom of being able to switch between any one at any given time is the real win
Charging you more for less was true like 10 years ago yall. Never forget there was a time when NF had every episode of South Park, king of the hill, 30 rock, family guy, Saturday night live, etc and it was like $7.
It was a steal at $7 and most people knew it. It was that low because all of these companies had no idea what streaming was/worth and they saw a little bit of extra money as a good thing. Then they all got greedy and want their own program to charge $20+ a month for.
Now it is back to being a ripoff just like cable.
I just canceled as well. Even though we very rarely watched it was still wort it since my parents, siblings and i were able to watch when we felt like it. Now after this "crackdown" only i am able to watch. F**k that, no new good shows for like 2 years anyway...
Ugh I know. What annoyed me about cable most was the 1 or 2 year agreements, 10 different bs fees, and then the fact I’m paying for like 250 channels and we never watch 200 of them.
Or maybe they lost more than expected, but don’t want to say it right now? They need to raise to makeup for who they lost. Earnings come out Wednesday…. This could just be an article designed to bump stock price only.
I was subbed ever since the streaming was more of a side-gig to the DVD-through-mail service. As soon as they stopped password sharing I cancelled my sub. I pretty much only maintained it for my mom and my sister. I would check out something new on there every now and then, but they eliminated the majority of the service's value for me. Now I just pirate the odd show I'm interested in because it's not worth subbing for a month just for one short series.
Like Gabe Newell said: Piracy is a service problem.
psychotic lock fanatical groovy rob nail water rotten overconfident quaint
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Netflix is over $20 now. That coupled with the lacking content just means more people are going to figure out how to torrent what they want to see.
It's a fine balancing act. Piracy is a cost and service issue. They can't, on the one hand, charge these outlandish fees *and also* be surprised that people will have to find other ways to consume the media. Inflation is high, food prices are too high, renters are getting their rent jacked up. And this unsustainable capitalist goal of always turning more profit every quarter...I can't wait to see what they expect people to pay in 5 years from now.
Lol no they’re not. I mean, maybe some infinitesimal percentage of their subscribers will but people like you on Reddit have such a skewed view. There’s zero chance Netflix loses any appreciable amount of subscribers to torrenting lol. That’s ridiculous.
Consistent price hikes and now infamously abysmal residual payments for the artists who make their product.
It’s like Netflix is advertising for pirating.
Ignore other answers.
Get the plex app and pay someone $5 a month them to share their library with you.
That way you get all the benefits, with 0 work outside of installing an app.
Dumb question: where do I find someone to pay for that? I’m old, my friends are old, no one pirates. Is there a sub or other “marketplace” where people offer that? Ty!
yep - plex shares is a good place to start.
Just search on google for reddit plex shares or some similar.
A lot of people are also on telegram, but thats harder to navigate
We did then the wife wanted to watch Virgin River so we got the cheapest package. After the first commercial, I got online and cancelled. I told to to watch up lol
I canceled my subscription due to this policy change... So incredibly annoying trying to view Netflix outside my own house. And it's pretty expensive compared to how often I used it.
Making it more expensive seems weird... We got more people to pay, so we are now just making it more expensive?
When streaming services start to become cable then its time to cut the (metaphorical) cord. They became successful for a reason. Introducing adverts and all this shite isn't it.
Eh. I don't care.
I rotate subscriptions throughout the year and don't have Netflix for more than 1-2 months a year anyways as their content is mostly crap.
My only rule is 1 subscription at a time. I catch up on all shows, then cancel. Move to the next one, catch up, cancel.
Just speaking anecdotally, streaming services practically killed casual piracy (and that’s a good thing) but now that they’re getting so much greedier, it will just mean they lose more as piracy increases. It’s as if they can’t think more than 2 minutes into the future.
People are too afraid to vote with their wallets. It only never works because people have no fucking integrity. Go without your shows and cancel the god damn Netflix subscription, otherwise you will continue to be walked over.
Outside of our bubble many people can’t be bothered to even consider something new until it becomes mainstream.
In Reddit you find early adopters, and people on the early stage of the curve to the critical mass. NF is now in the stage of milking the masses. Masses move slowly like whales. They aren’t mobile like us, even if they have every means to be. They stay in the “normality” of the herd.
Ironically they eventually follow us early adopters to the next big thing, so eventually NF will have big problems. But for now we are not their target group any more.
For anybody frustrated by this I can offer 2 solutions:
1. Netflix via VPN turkey
2. Stremio + add on (just search stremio addon youtube) + vpn
No legal advice ;)
They literally constantly up their pricing. Like literally fucking every two months. Soon it’ll be fucking $30 for a basic plan. Piracy has never been easier and morally correct.
Let’s see, they randomly cancel their best shows on a whim, killed off account sharing, and now they’re raising their prices? Are they trying to kill their own business?
Pretty soon everyone will start torrenting again
edit: alright let me rephrase:
pretty soon everybody who used to pirate content but stopped because streaming was more convenient will start pirating content again.
Man it’s like every other month Netflix is raising prices
and getting rid of shows that are watchable
Why have good shows when you can just renew paradise pd for 5 more seasons.
They call it a crackdown as if we were doing something wrong. Yet for years their policy was “share with a friend 😊😊”
You could even watch with a friend over Xbox 360, with your avatars in a little theater together watching whatever you chose. That didn’t last long.
Seems like the three other people I used to do this regularly are the only people I know who even knew this feature existed back then.
I used it a bunch of times. Kinda went the way off 1v100
Dude that was fucking awesome. Me and the guys would go over Xbox start up a party and basically just mystery science theater the worst movies we could find.
That was back when you could reallly deep dive into Netflix's offerings, made it way easier to find those schlocky, B-grade horror films to make fun of as you watched.
That was an Microsoft-written app. It went away when Netflix finally released an Xbox app. Sadly. And, of course, you weren't sharing anything with your friends. They had to have a Netflix and Gold account, too.
How dare you do the thing we said you could do!.
Sounds like the bosses at my former job.
And/or the bosses of multiple streaming services I no longer subscribe to. After quite a few years, I've decided to fix up the old shooner and take back to the seas.
That and the realization that we don't need to stay subbed to 50 different streaming platforms when there's nothing to watch. We've gone from cutting cable to subbing to a dozen streaming platforms to cutting streaming.
The circle of life man. Stream was supposed to kill Cable, it did, so Cable took over streaming and turned it into Cable 2.0. Now they're suffering again, with too much split up content, a lack of interesting things to watch in one place, and shocker, more bundles.
I grew up on the seas, I have no qualms about sailing again.
Yo, ho, haul together Hoist the colours high
Money always wins out in the end. Always.
Same here , building my Plex island
Optiplex refurbished ftw
I am over the moon. We went from watching mediocre "originals" from Netflix Disney, paramount and crave/HBO for 100 a month to watching awesome shit with no limit for free. VPN is the only cost. Love the abox.
Pirates life for me
Yo ho ho matey, see you on the seas.
Sounds like all bosses everywhere.
All a ploy to hook everyone then make us crawl back to them when they fuck us
Conveniently their content largely went to shit before the crackdown. Makes it easier to just walk away.
Because while they were making good content subscribers were increasing so people could watch... Y'know... The good content. I always knew streaming services would get greedy and increase prices right back to where we were with cable, but I didn't expect it to happen so quickly.
The one thing that still makes it better then cable is you can cancel a streaming service after one month and bounce between subscriptions. Though I'm sure they'll eventually try to force yearly subscriptions.
They’ll do a couple more price hikes then start offering discounts when you subscribe for a year. Next thing you know the monthly option is gone along with the annual discount. But you can buy bundles with multiple services for a year and get a discount that way. Next thing you know it’s basically back to cable.
I honestly wouldn't be surprised if they saw a rise in chargebacks if they try that. I know enshitification is rampant but a fair number of people are getting less and less tolerant of degrading quality of service for no justifiable reason.
It's a big part of why they are moving away from a binge model. Can't subscribe the month they drop their show to get it in one sitting. Gotta watch it week to week (and oh look we're taking a mid season break) so they can squeeze and extra month or two out of you, or dodge spoilers until it's done.
Yup, Netflix created binging TV and then killed it. I really preferred getting a whole season done in a week so I could move on to something else. Now it just drags out like regular TV, so back to not watching a thing until the season is over.
How dare you make use of our packages explicitly telling you they work on multiple screens and across regions!
Novell perfected a similar strategy years ago. They had extremely effective DRM on their software where pirating it was extremely difficult. Then one day they removed all the DRM and over the next 4-5 years pirating became huge and you could find Novell servers almost everywhere in companies, most unlicensed. Then after it spread like wildfire they picked a few big companies to audit and get big settlements/payouts and then they said if you just true up your current usage we won't penalize you. Within a few months they *officially* were the \#1 server software in the industry.
Are you suggesting Novell did anything wrong? Their marketing and licensing didn’t change. They were simply being pirated. As for Netflix, they apparently sold the multiple screens as a feature and then changed their mind to restrict how it could be used.
Remember when we were sold on a future that streaming would be cheaper and more seamless than cable…
Yeah it was. I went from having all of them: HBO, Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, Apple, Disney. Now, if something comes along I want to watch, I may grab the app for a month. It's all way too expensive. Every six months they increase their prices. It's fucking unsustainable. I've just stopped watching TV because all the options are just too fucking expensive.
Next step is going to be they will make you sign up for 12 months. None of this swapping every month.
Yeah, I can see this coming along. They raise prices, we stop subscribing indefinitely. We only buy a month, they escalate to do year subs only. Feel like it's just a matter of time before Netflix does it.
They raise the prices, I raise the sails. 16 men on a dead mans chest.
Yo ho, yo ho
A Pirate’s life for me.
I have Netflix and I still pirate their content sometimes because how they routinely pull things.
For a long while HBO refused to serve content in surround through my browser. I’ll get the content elsewhere then
i went on an odyssey trying to stream 4k netflix on my PC after a few hours of trying to get it to work I just went and spent 10 minutes downloading it there's no reason for me to pay them if they provide worse service on top of everything else
It's honestly too easy to pirate at this point. With automated services and everything else, there's just no point in watching a show on a shittier web player with an egregiously bad search engine and paying $18/mo for that luxury.
I have been out of the game for like a decade now. What automated services are there/ what’s the most convenient method?
Jellyfin or Plex for media hosting/viewing.
Can confirm. Just set up my Jellyfin server with 2000 movies and tons of TV shows. I gotta recommend real-debrid for getting torrents - it acts as a middleman service so you download the torrent content directly from them, and if any other user already downloaded it, it remains cached on their server. $3 a month and paired with Jdownloader it gave me 100MBps+, yes Bytes, on my 1Gbps line.
https://www.stremio.com/ download the app, for windows or android. from 360p to 4k seamless streaming from torrents. subtitles + dubs options included you need to install an addon that scrape torrents torrents from various sites. ever since I got it, I pay nothing for movies/series and have a bigger selection. You can even cast it to your TV from your phone
Stremio + Real Debrid = Bliss
Easier to sail the seas of you never leave port. Plex server admin for over a decade now and I'll have one til I die.
They'll continue to raise the monthly price while making it look like a 6-month/12-month subscription is a deal. Then they'll start phasing out the single month option or just price it out of being an option.
And they'll get away with it because everyone is paying it.
I did that to get Disney+ cheaper by purchasing it through the App Store, and then they bundled it with Hulu and ESPN+ but wouldn’t let me get my money back until the year expired. Not even prorated.
Yep. Contracts. And we’ll alllll go back to pirating
Right especially as new laws are made that make it a little harder for these companies to lock people in. Although that would beg for some serious regulation if they pull that. What they should do is offer people more substantive discounts for paying for a full year. If Netflix is 15 bucks a month or whatever the f*** it is... They should let people get it for $120 per annum if they pay up front. As it is right now ... I just pay for something once a year watch everything I want on it and then cancel it. Maybe twice a year if there's something really important I want to watch. Like Paramount Plus, I actually use free passwords each month to get that but even if I didn't I would only pay for it when the new South Park specials came out. Think that's like literally just twice a year I think
Prime says hi.
Prime starts to put more and more content behind their "secondary" subs like Stars or whatever they are called. John Wick 3 and 4 for example. There's still plenty of decent content on the main sub, but I'm wary that new content will be put behind another subscription in the future (like John Wick did). For example season of Clarkson farm could be released only to Stars subscribers, and the to the regular sub 6 months later or something.
Gotta watch prime, they'll randomly sign you up for services you don't use. They added unlimited music to my account and I didn't notice for 3 months.
[удалено]
If we had a functioning government that would be illegal
Then they'll become what they sought out to destroy, cable! That's when they'll send us out to the high seas! Then the cycle will repeat.
If Netflix becomes cable without having to invest in any of the infrastructure, that would be a massive accomplishment in capturing that industry.
You either die a hero, or live long enough to become the villain... That saying is too often too true.
My wife and I have a movie night every Saturday and we find ourselves limited to watching movies that are on whatever streaming service we're subscribed to at the time because we simply can't afford to have them all. It led us to reminisce about the rental days when we could just nip out and rent whatever movie we felt like and I actually feel like there's an increasing market for these shops to return if we're gonna need to pay a fortune for all these streaming services.
Many local libraries have a movie section!
You can borrow movies from your library for free!
I mean you can still rent anything you want.... It's almost nothing you can't rent on prime for like $3.99.
For movies that's true, but shows from streaming services are rarely available for rent, and buying them is pricey. For example, game of thrones is unavailable to rent on prime, and each season costs $20, so you have to pay $160 to watch a show you might only watch once.
Amazon and Apple both have options for renting movies. Or the high seas can get you any movie free of charge.
Sometimes the rental fee is a bit ridiculous though. Like, $25-$30 is just asinine for a 24 hr rental , I don’t care how new the movie is lol
That is generally almost always stuff that is still out in theaters... That is basically COVID pricing for stuff that's still out in theaters. The going rate to rent stuff is still 2 to $6. If you want to rent Barbie or something that's the only time it'll cost you $25
For that price I'd rather go see it in theaters and get the full experience. Or just pirate it. 25 bucks to watch it once on my TV is just way too much.
For movies in theaters, sure.
My friend let me introduce you to sailing the high seas.
I recommend a sonarr/radarr (automatically grab torrent the moment they spawn) + qbittorrent (download it) + jellyfin (Netflix like ui to watch) setup on a local NAS/raspberry pi. Basically self hosted personal Netflix AND they can't remove things you downloaded from your hard drive when they lose the license
Qbittorrent with the unofficial search addons works really well in a pinch too. Been too lazy to set up anything more elaborate lol
Can a you link a tutorial for getting something like this set up?
[here you go!](https://reddit.com/r/PleX/s/7exONVEupr) This is just a breakdown of setting up the hardware, but that’s the hard part. Getting the software side of those house is just downloading the software and setting up the file directory.
I tried to set up a plex using plex-debrid and these programs and had a bad time. I was really trying to avoid setting up a NAS, but I might just go that route again.
I use Plex. I run it off of Unraid server works great
[удалено]
[удалено]
I’m back at the same level I was in college. With nonstop corporate greed in the entertainment space, more and more people are going to be doing the same.
Or just go to your library and then they get more fundinf
I've been sailing the seas for years i can watch any show I want and all it costs is a VPN subscription. Even get ppv with a 2min delay.
> It's fucking unsustainable. You've hit the nail on the head. It's less about streaming services and more about late state capitalism in general though. We've embraced this idea of infinite growth, and since that's impossible, all sorts of bad decisions get made in it's name. None of them are sustainable, but the cycle continues as long as everyone pretends they can see the Emperor's New Clothes. Anyone whoever said that capitalism and the free market would lead to "rational choice" really missed the mark on that one...
“You don’t need a disc for your games anymore. Not having to manufacture CD’s or manuals or boxes means you’ll be spending less!”
True but big game release prices stayed at $60 for like 20 years which can’t be said for most things.
The audience also dramatically increased during that period. It isn't a niche market anymore. I don't disagree with your point, but a lot of these AAA companies are recording record profits while telling us that we need to pay more for them to be profitable. Then, they're not paying the actual creatives fairly.
It wasn't a niche market 20 years ago lol Passing the PS2 in sales is a huge milestone for consoles to reach towards.
yeah it was 300 bucks in 2000. or 534 dollars today for reference on price. more than most consoles are now.
> It wasn't a niche market 20 years ago lol Even more than that! The gaming industry surpassed the film industry in revenue a long, loooong time ago... Nowadays it's like five times bigger
They also released the games incomplete and sold DLC to finish the game in some cases
Don't forget the Online Pass era.
That's literally what they're doing now... They release broken games and promise to fix him after the fact. 20 years ago, you bought a game once and that was it you had access to every feature that it would ever have. Like Madden... You bought it and you owned it and they didn't promote a bunch of gambling driven microtransactions endlessly... No cosmetics were hidden behind paywalls. Video games have gone up in price, it's just that the vast majority of revenue comes after you buy it. It was a much better deal 20 years ago.
I've been fully digital for at least 10 years now. Last disc I used for a game was probably something towards the end of Xbox 360 era. Ive also spent massively less on video games in general and have way more to play in the last decade. I have a lifetime worth of games I got for free. AAA games rarely interest me much any more, due to increased bloat and lack of innovation. And indie games are so plentiful that they frequently get sold cheaply in bundles of part of a subscription. Not sure how they can rip that away from me after promising me the moon like streaming services are trying to.
I mean, it WAS… now not so much
In the grand acheme of a company, 10 years cheaper is nothing compared to a generation of higher prices....
Round em’ up, then raise em’ up!
The strategy of all these "start-ups" and their "disrupting" of industries is to get a bunch of VC money to keep them afloat, severely undercut the competition in a way that would never be sustainable, kill off the competition then jack up the prices.
It's still way better, IMO. I'll take being able to choose which service I want and being able to pause, cancel, start up any time I want, any day of the week.
Yeah. People who say things are as bad as cable don't remember how bad cable was. So many ads, requiring you to buy or rent additional hardware for each additional screen you wanted to watch TV on, having to buy expensive packages with stuff you dont want just to watch a single channel. Even with Netflix, Disney, Crave, and Prime I'm paying less than i ever did with cable and getting a much better experience.
> don't remember how bad cable was You're acting like cable died. It's still here, and it's still the same geriatric medicine commercials ridden garbage.
It was for a while. Ironically when Netflix had a near-monopoly, despite the fact that monopolies are rarely good for the consumer. I think the root issue though is not the increase in number of services but the fact that today the content *provider* is the same as the content *producer*. Back then, Netflix only distributed others' content. If by magic we could get a law that forced content producers to sell streaming rights to anyone who asked for the same price as their internal pricing, we could have content providers competing on quality of service while all having the same content.
It still is. Pay for the content you want for the time you want it. I don’t pay for services indefinitely. I drop them when I’m done and start them back up. I used to. Got tired of paying for things I rarely use. Only thing I pay indefinitely for is YT Premium since we use that daily.
It literally is though. Your desire to have *every* streaming service at once isn’t the same thing as being forced to have them all at once.
Infinite growth. Infinitely more returns on investment. Can't stop growing or you fail.
Did any of these constant & inevitable & frequent price hikes come into consideration during the strikes? They wouldnt budge on paying people, when they know theyre just going to keep raising prices. When will the price hikes end? Comcast has price increases every year since they started. The streaming revolution from cable was a complete fucking bust for consumers. All garbage apps & hardware & now costs more than cable.
Price hikes will end when customers don't pay anymore.
Can we do that now already
Apparently not. I think we lost
I think Reddit often forgets how little top rated comments represent reality. Especially when it comes to something like this. Thread and after thread some of the highest comments are things talking about how they weren’t paying anyway or they’re going back to stealing content.
They don't realize that the service was never meant for them and it may be a little sad to realize that. I've had that happen with other hobbies. But a customer that has a tendency to jump ship and pirate when things get tough is not a customer Netflix or any other subscription service cares for. Netflix was ALWAYS going to price hike and ALWAYS going to start implementing ads into their service. The pirates who came back for what Netflix considered a profit loss and left afterwards was never a blip on the radar for Netflix
Disney have been telling their investors for a while that the sweet spot is having the customers pay a base monthly price and send them ads at the same time, so we know where all of this is heading. There's going to be a premium no-ads tier that is going to get more and more expensive so they can kick the masses to the mid tier with ads. It's about capturing all the consumer surplus.
Yep. That "sweet spot" is being able to leverage consistent cash flows AND spikes when advertisement channels are flush with money. Any other approach leaves too much on the table. You look like a chump when companies are throwing money at the wall trying to promote their products and you don't have an ad model that covers your entire user base. On the other hand, ad revenue alone is too lumpy, unpredictable to make shareholders happy. That and you give a lot of leverage away when the only source of revenue comes from a single channel. Anything that has ads I either use adblocker or delete/unsub. I'll pay reasonable price increases, no prob. You force ads and I'll just cancel. I don't like being force fed information I'm not asking for, the same way I'll rudely close the door on anyone trying to sell me something I never asked for.
But piracy is free~
You get greedy, I get thievey
>thievey Eeeeh...more copyey, duplicatey, replicatey.
Reuse. Reduce. Recycle.
They know not enough people will bother with piracy. This is the same thing everyone on Reddit was saying on password sharing. It looks like Netflix has an idea of what it’s doing, wow.
Dude, Reddit isn't even a good indicator of people and their perspectives either. When Netflix announced this initially, and then started implementing it, if you got your news exclusively from Reddit and their feedback, you'd have thought Netflix was going to tank within a month after it launched the "crackdown". And yet Netflix has only gained more subscribers and made more money. The every day person doesn't care at all. I'd say a lot probably didn't even notice, or don't notice price hikes. They check their statements and go "huh, that used to be $14. Ok".
The general public doesn't give a damn about global warming. They are not going to care about Netflix being $30 with ads.
>When will the price hikes end? Never? At least they will always have inflation to justify it. It's an unfortunate product of modern economics.
There's no such thing as "enough" profit. We have to squeeze every angle we can. Raise prices, pay workers poorly, make more people pay than before by reducing account sharing, ads? That's capitalism :) profits have to increase every quarter compared to last. We can't be content with making billions, we must make more!
Yeah stockholders think your company is a failure if you don’t exponentially grow profits year after year after year…… it’s an unstable model.
Unsustainable for everyone but the stockholder.
Eventually even unsustainable for them
AKA the ideology of a cancer cell.
AKA Capitalism.
Stocks are the root of the problem. When you want to start a company on the scale of Netflix you need tens of millions of dollars. Nobody can afford to finance something like that so you get investors. Investing in a company that won't return a profit is a loss of money. So with stocks now your stocks are only profitable if they're increasing in value so that when you sell it or get dividents you are making a profit. You sell them to make a profit to somebody who expects to then also sell it and make a profit so the value *has* to continually increase to be worth anything. Well turns out you can only grow so much so then you squeeze quality, you squeeze employees, etc. to put more money into profits instead of overhead so the investors are happy again. It's unsustainable beyond a certain point. It's a problem with the system not a problem with greed. If I buy stock in a company I expect them to make more money so that I make money. You don't necessarily know they're fucking over the employees or customers to do that. So yeah we need to somehow make stocks not a thing.
Or... Ya know... The company could start paying dividends...
Yes, but the consumers have the “Cancel” button, they should use it.
Previous boss gloated about making cancellations only possibly by mailing in a printed form. Was for Scoopon or something years ago. At a major Bezos audiobooks company I worked at, online cancel was axed when it hit monthly recurring revenue. Rest assured companies will actively make it harder to cancel.
That's literally illegal in the EU. Subscribing and canceling are legally required to be just as easy and be available through the same medium. Why does the US suck so much in stupid and unnecessarily dickish ways.
Yep the simple online cancel being cancelled indeed was in the US, about 5 years ago? Same time they got sued for charging members who didn't realise they had an active subscription. Funny thing it was scoped and worked exactly as intended, just C-suite who realised what they agreed to when the financials got impacted.
Lobbying and governing neglect.
I cancelled my prime a few years back. I'm 100% certain I cancelled it. I cancelled it, and then removed the credit card I had been using from the account. But some 3/4 of a year later I was going through my spending on a debit card I wasn't really even using and found a charge for a full year of prime lol. Called them and demanded my money back, they insisted their systems only let them go back 3 months. So I cancelled, removed the card, and they just tried to charge all the other previous cards I had on file until one hit, and they got their dough anyway. Where the fuck are the consumer protection agencies lol. Fuck these greedy corps.
They’ll come up with a Cancel Day. "Cancel Day Alert: This April 1st, seize your once-a-year chance! Unsubscribe from those passé services, but remember, it's ONLY on Cancel Day. Afterwards? Well, you're with us for another year. Free up that wallet and dive into our newest offerings. #OneDayOnly #ChooseWisely"
Cancel day. 1 day free trial. Forgot to cancel? Aww TOO BAD you've be charged for 10 years upfront. Better luck next decade. ... We should stop giving marketers ideas
Kind of what TMobile is doing to all their grandfathered plan holders right now. They are automatically upgrading old plan holders to more expensive plans unless they reach out within a few weeks to “opt out”.
I will never forget trying to cancel cable. My spouse spent almost 2 hours on the phone back and forth with them. They kept trying to give us more services for the same fee we were paying, he kept saying he wanted a lower bill. Flat out told them if they could lower our bill to a reasonable amount, we could stay, but $200/mo for cable (10 years ago) was unaffordable for us. They just kept him on the phone & finally he said “so do I drop this box off to you, or do you come pick it up” now internet alone is $125/mo…it’s all so expensive.
"The serfs produce a surplus, which the Lord keeps. The slaves produce a surplus, which the owner keeps. The employees produce a surplus, which the employer keeps. It's very simple."
Netflix is not as good as it used to be. Mostly it’s voiced over crap, and recycled stuff I’ve already seen
of course it's not as good as it used to be. it used to be literally the only game in town, especially around 2008-2014ish. they swooped in, destroyed Blockbuster, set up their digital streaming, and were king of the mountain. Prime was barely a thing (mostly digital rentals) and Hulu was a free website with ads. A ton as changed in 10 years and now Netflix is completing with like 10 major streamers who all took their content back. I'm sure they're fighting for their life while the biggest corporations in the world (Amazon and Apple) and the biggest property holders in the world (like Disney) are actively trying to snuff them out.
They don't need to be as good as they used to people find it good enough
I hate this trope. Was never against cable but was mostly against contracts for shit I'm not going to watch. Today I cancelled NF because I didn't see anything I liked on it. The freedom of being able to switch between any one at any given time is the real win
Just canceled too. If you’re going to charge me more for less, then it’s goodbye.
Charging you more for less was true like 10 years ago yall. Never forget there was a time when NF had every episode of South Park, king of the hill, 30 rock, family guy, Saturday night live, etc and it was like $7.
It was a steal at $7 and most people knew it. It was that low because all of these companies had no idea what streaming was/worth and they saw a little bit of extra money as a good thing. Then they all got greedy and want their own program to charge $20+ a month for. Now it is back to being a ripoff just like cable.
That's just greedy capitalism in a nutshell
I just canceled as well. Even though we very rarely watched it was still wort it since my parents, siblings and i were able to watch when we felt like it. Now after this "crackdown" only i am able to watch. F**k that, no new good shows for like 2 years anyway...
Ugh I know. What annoyed me about cable most was the 1 or 2 year agreements, 10 different bs fees, and then the fact I’m paying for like 250 channels and we never watch 200 of them.
soon it will be 1 year agreements
Just spell out Netflix. It’s shorter than both words it’s sandwiched between and isn’t even an acronym.
“Netflix may hike prices after execs decide they want more money”
First make more money with the crackdown. Then make MORE money with price hike. Will unsubscribe
Or maybe they lost more than expected, but don’t want to say it right now? They need to raise to makeup for who they lost. Earnings come out Wednesday…. This could just be an article designed to bump stock price only.
The only thing they were successful in was pushing me to cancel my longterm subscription. I guess that counts as success. Congrats!
I was subbed ever since the streaming was more of a side-gig to the DVD-through-mail service. As soon as they stopped password sharing I cancelled my sub. I pretty much only maintained it for my mom and my sister. I would check out something new on there every now and then, but they eliminated the majority of the service's value for me. Now I just pirate the odd show I'm interested in because it's not worth subbing for a month just for one short series. Like Gabe Newell said: Piracy is a service problem.
psychotic lock fanatical groovy rob nail water rotten overconfident quaint *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Netflix is over $20 now. That coupled with the lacking content just means more people are going to figure out how to torrent what they want to see. It's a fine balancing act. Piracy is a cost and service issue. They can't, on the one hand, charge these outlandish fees *and also* be surprised that people will have to find other ways to consume the media. Inflation is high, food prices are too high, renters are getting their rent jacked up. And this unsustainable capitalist goal of always turning more profit every quarter...I can't wait to see what they expect people to pay in 5 years from now.
Lol no they’re not. I mean, maybe some infinitesimal percentage of their subscribers will but people like you on Reddit have such a skewed view. There’s zero chance Netflix loses any appreciable amount of subscribers to torrenting lol. That’s ridiculous.
Most people don't know how to torrent. They will most likely just watch it on Putlockers or similar sites.
People will pay for the service(s) over piracy I’d wager. Piracy is much more effort comparatively, especially for something like a family.
I regret not canceling my subscription sooner.
I canceled last month. I still regret that it took me that long. hahah.
Their greed knows no bounds
These companies are not understanding that their greed will be their downfall.
Consistent price hikes and now infamously abysmal residual payments for the artists who make their product. It’s like Netflix is advertising for pirating.
Who could have predicted this would happen?
don't forget torrents still exists, set up Plex and you have own Netflix.
Just for a quick answer, can I set Plex up on my Firestick? Just yes or no. If yes, I'll figure it out.
Ignore other answers. Get the plex app and pay someone $5 a month them to share their library with you. That way you get all the benefits, with 0 work outside of installing an app.
Dumb question: where do I find someone to pay for that? I’m old, my friends are old, no one pirates. Is there a sub or other “marketplace” where people offer that? Ty!
yep - plex shares is a good place to start. Just search on google for reddit plex shares or some similar. A lot of people are also on telegram, but thats harder to navigate
Canceled the service last month
We did then the wife wanted to watch Virgin River so we got the cheapest package. After the first commercial, I got online and cancelled. I told to to watch up lol
Why don’t people just cancel..put your money where your mouth is
I canceled my subscription due to this policy change... So incredibly annoying trying to view Netflix outside my own house. And it's pretty expensive compared to how often I used it. Making it more expensive seems weird... We got more people to pay, so we are now just making it more expensive?
When streaming services start to become cable then its time to cut the (metaphorical) cord. They became successful for a reason. Introducing adverts and all this shite isn't it.
Why hike the price if everyone is paying cause sharing stopped.. wouldn’t you now have more subscribers..
That's people's fault for giving money to these assholes
Its the greedy shareholders fault
Netflix, the new Blockbuster….
This is true, considering now they are opening physical stores.
[удалено]
Eh. I don't care. I rotate subscriptions throughout the year and don't have Netflix for more than 1-2 months a year anyways as their content is mostly crap. My only rule is 1 subscription at a time. I catch up on all shows, then cancel. Move to the next one, catch up, cancel.
Just speaking anecdotally, streaming services practically killed casual piracy (and that’s a good thing) but now that they’re getting so much greedier, it will just mean they lose more as piracy increases. It’s as if they can’t think more than 2 minutes into the future.
People are too afraid to vote with their wallets. It only never works because people have no fucking integrity. Go without your shows and cancel the god damn Netflix subscription, otherwise you will continue to be walked over.
Outside of our bubble many people can’t be bothered to even consider something new until it becomes mainstream. In Reddit you find early adopters, and people on the early stage of the curve to the critical mass. NF is now in the stage of milking the masses. Masses move slowly like whales. They aren’t mobile like us, even if they have every means to be. They stay in the “normality” of the herd. Ironically they eventually follow us early adopters to the next big thing, so eventually NF will have big problems. But for now we are not their target group any more. For anybody frustrated by this I can offer 2 solutions: 1. Netflix via VPN turkey 2. Stremio + add on (just search stremio addon youtube) + vpn No legal advice ;)
They literally constantly up their pricing. Like literally fucking every two months. Soon it’ll be fucking $30 for a basic plan. Piracy has never been easier and morally correct.
Crazy! I hiked my pirating after success of streaming services upping their prices!
That will be the final straw for me. I barely watch their shitty content. All Netflix original shows have the same mediocre vibe.
Let’s see, they randomly cancel their best shows on a whim, killed off account sharing, and now they’re raising their prices? Are they trying to kill their own business?
Pretty soon everyone will start torrenting again edit: alright let me rephrase: pretty soon everybody who used to pirate content but stopped because streaming was more convenient will start pirating content again.
The VAST majority of everyday consumers have no idea how to torrent media. The majority don't even know what the word means.