Streaming Has Reached Its Sad, Predictable Fate | What should I watch? is now a much easier question than How do I watch it?::<em>What should I watch? </em>is now a much easier question than <em>How do I watch it?</em>

      • WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I was always 100% on board with paying 50-100 bucks a month for being able to watch anything I wanted, whenever I wanted, in perpetuity — for the rest of my life.

        Instead, capitalism chose to fracture all content behind multiple paywalls that don’t even host the content I want to watch, or censor/change it so that I can never watch the OG versions I want to watch, so I’ve instead been spending 50-100 bucks a month on computing hardware to download it and host it myself for over a decade.

        I’ll continue to fucking do it too, because these soulless sociopath leeches don’t deserve a cent from me. They don’t even fucking pay their content creators or staff a decent wage, and will spend 10x more just to screw their workers. At this point I’d prefer them to fail and collapse, so I’ll continue not giving them money — I’m doing my part!

        • Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          Can we stop over-simplifying corporate greed as “capitalism”?

          Ten years ago Netflix gave is the solution all of us wanted, and that was also capitalism.

          • selflock@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            I wholeheartedly agree. Capitalism isn’t the issue here, corporate greed and not understanding the market is the issue. A free market allows better solutions to come into play, hopefully driving the price down of a greedy service.

    • errer@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Use your local library! Thousands of Blu-ray/DVD titles for free you can check out and rip freely. And then you don’t have to worry about any nasty letters from your ISP.

      • Confused_Emus@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I honestly didn’t even include a DVD/BluRay drive in my PC build, so can’t really use those. And I tunnel all that traffic through Proton VPN, so ISP isn’t an issue.

        • errer@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          They’re pretty cheap, I have one that can read 4K blurays. About $70. I get access to all sorts of hard to find movies, and my library will even order blurays for me if they don’t have it in their catalog (up to 30 per year)

      • Lettuce eat lettuce@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        Love this! Supporting your community library and building your trove of booty at the same time lol.

        I also like to collect physical media from my favorite artists, so I also rip from those disks and get the best of all worlds :)

      • return2ozma@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Most libraries always give you access to Kanopy to steam movies/documentaries. Just need your library card and the app.

    • imgonnatrythis@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Yeah, this is much less chaotic. It’s not even about the cost so much as the convince now.

      BTW I use the plex discovery search to find stuff across streaming services. This deserves a shoutout here. Could be better but I haven’t found a better solution. Google voice search on my nvidia shield used to be good at this but it’s really degraded lately.

      • phillaholic@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        It’s particularly bad at MAX right now. Several times I’ve been told a title was available and it wasn’t.

      • HeyListenWatchOut@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Plex - in the way users here are describing (important context since Plex’s management has recently shifted heavily to trying to be like Pluto.TV with less emphasis on its original purpose) works as an application that acts like a library for your own media collection.

        There are 2 required parts to it :

        1. A “server” or “host” which acts as your library.
        2. A client - like an NVIDIA Shield, your phone, PlayStation, Roku, or eve your Fire Stick.

        Without your own server with content stored on it, or at least a friend’s server credentials you can connect to, you are limited to the “Pluto.TV” type ad-driven media collection.

        So the answer is “yes it works on a fire stick,” but you will need #1 also for it to be the single source library for your content and not just another ad-riddled garbage service.

      • CaptainFortissimo@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Yes. There is a legit plex app on fire stick and roku. It comes with free live TV and on Demand content, but you can also run your own server on your network with your own downloaded content. If you have an IPTV service you can stream that through plex as well.

        Note that Jellyfin is a similar app/server that works the same way and is totally free. Plex is also free, but there are additional features behind the pay wall like GPU decoding, PVR service for IPTV, and others.

  • SmoothIsFast@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    The irony of a pay-walled article from one of the 50+ news websites requiring subscriptions complaining about fragmented streaming services is palpable.

  • imgonnatrythis@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    I see an irony in the fact that I can’t read this damn article without paying for yet another media / news subscription service. Stop linking to pay walls Lemmites!

    • Copernican@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      There’s no real financial model to support good journalism. People should be aware of the food sites out there so they can make a decision to subscribe. Also, I hate the flood of trash articles that just link the pay walled articles and quote 2 sentences from it. At that point I’d rather a lemmy poster link the paywalled article and provide the choice quotes themselves in the comments to save me the ad fest and ad consent pop ups just to read 2 quotes and a bunch of fluff.

    • Jo Miran@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      'They could not live with their own failure. Where did that bring you? Back to me." – Piracy

    • turmacar@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Warning. Do not look for Servarr apps or how to set them up on a home system of your choice like Unraid or it’s alternatives. Doing so may be a violation of local copyright law.

      • radau@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 year ago

        Yeah and whatever you do definitely don’t use Jellyseerr for Jellyfin setups or Overseerr for Plex setups

    • ChouxFleur@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Disney felt like a tipping point for me (and Netflix’s new role as a production company). It was only when that came about that people like Paramount started offering their own services (idk how true that is but it’s certainly how it felt).

      I still pay for Disney+ right now, but a big part of the appeal of streaming for me was having lots of stuff in one place. Now it’s just cable/satellite all over again.

      • WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I never left the high seas because I knew the sociopaths running these corps would screw everything eventually. It was obvious with the way they treated music streaming…

        Even though I completely stopped pirating music a decade ago, since I could listen to everything I wanted to on Spotify, when I paid for Netflix I’d still torrent the content I liked. Now that content is no longer on Netflix, but they are still on my hard drives, and I can watch them wherever I want.

        If consumers stopped paying for streaming services en mass, they’d be forced to change their business model, but they’ll keep making money by screwing both consumers and their workers because consumers are people, and people are idiots.

      • phillaholic@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        It’s just cable/satellite all over again.

        Not really though. We can get it ad-free, and watch content on our schedules, not theirs.

  • DoucheBagMcSwag@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 year ago

    This was a Very inevitable situation due to the fragmentation of Programs that are scattered across multiple Networks.

    If only there was a solution to this problem of greed….

    • nevemsenki@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Don’t support companies who would try to geoblock you if they could.

      Also, using a VPN to circumvent rules is against the TOS on most services. Don’t support that with your wallet.

      • Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 year ago

        I’m pretty sure you’ve got it wrong. Their TOSes can get fucked, with a VPN you do not need to even USE those services to watch everything on them.

  • tpihkal@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Ne’er should one relinquish control of thine own vessel. Back to the seas shall we voyage mateys!

    Also, 12ft.io

  • the post of tom joad@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    My favorite part of every conversation about a new show someone tells me i “just have to see” is when they “oh yeah do you have xstreamingservice?” And i tell them i have me ways

  • archonet@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Friendly reminder that PLEX is a great, free service, you just have to put in the effort to build up a media collection. High capacity HDDs are very cheap now, so storing a large media collection isn’t particularly expensive.

    They also offer a lifetime “Plex pass” which adds some neat, but non-essential features, like auto-skipping intros and credits sequences for instance. It’s not necessary, but it’s a nice way to show support for what they do.

  • realitista@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    I’ll pay for a few streaming services that can keep something I want to watch in stock year around. For the ones that can’t, their shows go onto a seedbox with plex and sonarr.

    • TurboDiesel@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      This is the way. I pay for Sling TV because there are some shows (Drag Race, SNL, Sunday Fox cartoons) that I prefer to watch while they’re still in the zeitgeist, YouTube Premium, and Hulu. That covers pretty much all of my watching habits and I don’t feel left out of anything.

      For anything else, there’s piracy™️