With the simultaneous rollout of restrictions on account sharing and price increases/addition of advertising, I’m cutting back severely on streaming services.
I allowed my streaming subscriptions to grow without thinking about it. Without trying to remember the constant merging and bundling, I was subscribed to probably a dozen services at one point. They ranged from Netflix and HBO and Hulu to Shudder and Showtime. I had Paramount, Criterion, Disney, Peacock, and others. I’d do the typical thing where I’d search for a movie, find it is exclusive to a platform, and grab the free trial and forget to cancel. I excused it if I found a movie even every couple of months on it. There were still nights where it’d take an hour to find something I wanted to watch. I was probably closing in on $200/month all told, and I don’t have sports subscriptions.
I’m interested in learning what other people are doing regarding the price hikes and service compromises. Are you cancelling? Are you taking advantage of bundles with your internet services? Are you rotating on some interval? Or are you not changing at all?
I cancelled Netflix the day they blocked my elderly parents from accessing my account.
I was paying for 4 streams, it shouldn’t matter 1 stream was at my parents house, they were still getting their money.
Don’t worry Netflix, we still get to enjoy your content via torrents and my parents still get a convenient streaming app full media via Plex, so you can eat shit Netflix!
I’ve been using Stremio with Real-Debrid for about 6 months now and I don’t see myself going back. It’s too perfect.
Could you elaborate? I looked up both services and it seems to just be a media front end and a downloading tool. How does that get you the actual files to watch.
Debris services (Real-Debrid, AllDebris) basically cache most popular torrents and give you direct https links to the video streams. Frontends for these services include Stremio, Syncler, etc. I adore both, but Stremio is much more lightweight which works better on my GoogleTV / FireStick. You select what you want to watch (the apps sync with Trakt, fwiw) and it immediately shows you the versions it has available that are cached. I choose 4K Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos whenever it’s available.
Thanks so much!! Seems like a cool service. Reminds me of popcorn time, which I don’t think works anymore. Are you still routing all your traffic through a VPN when using that? Seems like a privacy nightmare should any action be taken against those companies.
Naw, I don’t bother with a VPN since I’m not torrenting anything. I just set my router’s DNS to something other than the ISP’s default.
About 3 months back I cancelled Netflix (after being in it for many years) and moved to free Tubi.
I never subscribed to the scam of streaming services to begin with and no one should.
Curious how they’re a “scam”?
Media rights, exclusive content and pricing are often ridiculous, but the end users gets what they’re paying for.
Copyright/IP should exist for no more then 7 years then it should be public domain.
But the scam comes when Netflix mislead consumers about what was available on the service. Netflix for a long time marketed itself as a place where you had access to most every movie you wanted. But the streaming service quickly became inferior to the physical media service (rip). So for 15+ years, there were tens of thousands of titles available on the DVD service, that were not available on the digital service. And there was no indication that there was a difference between the two. So if you wanted to watch “Heat” on Netflix, you could. But only via the the physical media, not on-demand. Now you can’t actually watch Heat at all. Same with basically every movie from before the 90’s.
Additionally the “scam” comes from the disjunction between the consumer expectation from the marketing and the reality. You can of course watch a movie on Netflix on one day, but the next day you have to “explore title related to the move you were looking for.” Which I see as a scam. If i’m going to pay for a streaming service, every movie I want, should be available forever if it’s ever available at all.
