Netflix officially removes Basic - the cheapest ad-free tier

That's OK. I've already removed Netflix

How do you watch TV shows and movie now ?
- I personally buy the shows I want and rip them to my media server. It seems to be about $10/season, $10-15/movie, which I think is cheaper in the long run than paying for no-ads on these streaming services.
- I just don't watch many shows and a lot of the stuff coming out I don't find that great anyway so I'd rather do something else with my time than pay more for worse service.

And that's why I have a VPN, so I can yo-ho-ho with a bottle of fuck you!

That is the best sentence I've ever seen.
- I can't take credit, it's a joke I stole from Civvie11 (Amazing game review show, I highly recommend it, especially if you like Boomer Shooters)
  
  The show has the attitude of "If you fail to provide a way to legally obtain your product, you have no right to gain angry when someone pirates it." and constantly brings this up when it reviews games like Nintendo's Geist or Activision's Wolfenstein remake (Which since Activision and ID Software are owned by the same company now could be re-released without issue, but for some reason they're just not)

Piracy is always a service issue

I haven't pirated stuff in years but started again this year. It sucks that my favorite torrent site was shut down though.
- RIP RARBG you are missed
- I started last year again, after they killed the family plan if you don't share a household. Instead of paying $10 to Netflix we now pay $7 for a 2TB cloud storage account where everyone uploads their pirated movies.
- I use Jackett to reduce dependency on specific sites

Every time I hear something about Netflix I always wonder how it is even still running. Still wild to me that they had the entire monopoly on streaming and fucked it up anyways.

Netflix didn’t fuck their monopoly up. They just didn’t have an eternal technological moat. Their monopoly had an expiration date which is why they shifted to content generation.

Nowadays the problem they face is that there isn’t enough people on the planet to grow forever, so in order to keep growing they have to squeeze harder.

Their content is terrible tough, there they did drop the ball.
- Seems like everything they made that was good was cancelled after one season. I dumped them for that, then they went all greed and now I hit the high seas if there's something I really want to watch.
- Maybe a lot of their content is terrible but Delicious in Dungeon is a work of art!
- There are over 8 billion people on the planet and Netflix is an international company. If they decided to not fuck around and find out they could have had the majority of that market for pennies and held it well past today.
  
  They had the monopoly on a golden platter and fucked it up. If they were smart they would have cemented that position.
In their defense, they didn't fuck it up (at first), media publishers saw there was money in streaming and decided that they wanted a bigger slice of the pie. When everyone is trying to take the whole pie for themselves, no one ends up with any pie.

However pretty much every move they have done in the past 5 ish years has been fucking it up.
- No they screwed the pooch hard in the beginning. They could have bought up rights to basically everything for pennies compared to what it is worth now because of the leverage they had before any of those media publishers had options elsewhere.
  
  Netflix was literally in the position to tell them what the price was back then and now they have nothing to bargain with because the market is saturated.
Seriously. I was subscribed from the time they first started streaming... And then years later they remove the entire rating system, and replace it with a system clearly intended to confuse and manipulate their users into thinking they have better and more plentiful content.

I dropped Netflix then and there, and never looked back. They stopped being a great service at that specific moment.

Cool, I was planning to cancel this month anyway. I just finished ripping all of our DVDs and Blurays, so I have quite a bit of content ready to go. I have told my wife and kids I'll buy whatever they want, within reason, and rip it to our private streaming service. I think we'll end up saving quite a bit of money eventually this way, and we have no ads with our self-hosted video service.

Not only no ads but shit you actually want to watch and all right there no hopping from this service to that service to watch a frickin show
- Yup. The main issue is exclusives, but most of those suck anyway. I told them we'll give it a few months and see where we're at.
  
  But between the two, I'm spending $40/month to avoid ads, so it's probably cheaper to just buy what we want to watch instead.
What software are you using to self host and serve your library?
- Jellyfin. I was previously just using minidlna, but Jellyfin has an app for our TV and looks much nicer than the basic interface dlna offers.
  
  I'm running it on an old PC running Linux, and it was pretty easy to set up.
- Don't know about OP, but Plex works great! Get a Synology NAS and run your Plex server on that
I've tried ripping my DVDs and can't get it to work. Can you share details on how you did that?
- I use Handbrake or MakeMKV depending on the disc. MakeMKV I mostly use for Bluray, Sometimes the odd DVD doesn't work correctly with Handbrake.
  
  In Handbrake, I just select the Quality and keep original Audio source, I've not needed to change any of settings.
  
  If you use MakeMKV, Its "raw" so large file size (Some Bluray files I've had are like 40GB), You can run that file through Handbrake to reduce it.

High seas my peeps

This is the way. The only no-bullshit media platform is the one on your hard drive.

I LOVE this bit:

"will stop measuring its success in new subscribers, but in growth byr egional revenue."

We're hitting our self defined goals JUST fine guys!

Seems reasonable from a business point of view. They are approaching a saturation point and changing how they make money so shifting the KPIs only makes sense.

We are officially round the circle.

From cable tv with ad breaks to streaming ad-free and back to streaming with ad breaks.

This was always the plan.
And that's why I just cancelled Disney+ and Netflix. They were reasonably priced before, so I subbed. They hiked, so I left. Just those two together (Disney+ bundle + Netflix no-adds) was almost $40, which when added to my internet package, would basically be paying for cable.

So instead of that noise, I'm self-hosting. Screw 'em.
don't forget about the 'bundles'. lock you in to paying for six to keep you from service hopping.

What is Netflix?

Is it that thing that shows up before I watch whatever the fuck I want on one of the dozens of free streaming sites?

Arrr matey.

Streaming sites? My brother in Christ, you need to ditch those unreliable websites that hardly work and go down all the time, and get a proper media center setup. Here are some terms to look up to get you started:

Stremio

Stremio addons: Torrentio, Streaming Catalogs, Trakt.tv

Real-Debrid

That's the basic setup you'll want for a proper good time. Instantly stream any show or movie from any provider for free (Netflix, Disney, Prime Video, HBO, Apple TV, etc.). Get recommendations based on your viewing habits. Compatible with all your devices, including smart TVs. Torrent-based so it won't get taken offline (at least not anytime soon). Torrents are already stored on a server so there's no waiting on seeds (which is what Real-Debrid does. Optional and $3/mo but it makes the experience much smoother, especially if you want to watch something older/more obscure. And it eliminates the need for a VPN. Plus it works for any torrent, not just media).

Trust me, this is the way to go. Once you get everything set up, it's so easy and straightforward to use that my grandmother could navigate Stremio and not even know that it's a pirate service. Good luck and happy sailing. 🏴‍☠️
- I watched furiosa in HD 2 weeks ago.
  
  Zero problems.
  
  I watched house of dragons a few nights ago, no problem.
  
  Last night I watched the original episode of ancient aliens no problem.
  
  I use Firefox, bookmarks (many sites exist), and ublock, and a proxy.
  
  I spend zero dollars. I have zero problems.
  
  I have all the things.
  
  When all the sites get banned, I might take more drastic measure. For now, I have no problem even when one or 10 sites go down.
I have a media server that I use and if I'm going to watch something I think that's the only way to go. With things being the way they are though I'm starting to think that we should just return to books. The "content" industry is just a gambit to extract money from people while turning their brains off.

🏴‍☠️

Line must go up at any cost.

The beatings shall continue until morale improves

Own your files. Play them in native resolution. Accept no compromises.

Since you say native resolution I assume you mean the highest resolution and bitrate available. Because playing the native resolution of a DVD is way way worse than streaming.

Buying everything on Blu-ray and 4K Blu-ray would be very expensive if you watch. It's also not very convenient.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with buying Blu-ray's but don't pretend it's the perfect solution to all the problems.
- Idk, the cheapest Netflix streaming service w/o ads is $15.50/month. Most Blurays are $10-15. So each Bluray is something like a month of Netflix.
  
  If you watch a lot of movies/TV shows and almost never rewatch them, then yeah, maybe a streaming service is a good option. But if you need multiple streaming services to get the content you want, the appeal of just buying physical media increases. My kids mostly watch the same handful of TV series, so I have cancelled our subscriptions (totaling $40 or so) and now I just buy the shows they want.
- I mean torrenting.

Yarr!

Pricing (US Dollar)

Standard with ads*: $6.99 / month

Standard: $15.49 / month (extra member slots can be added for $7.99 each / month) [Full HD]

Premium: $22.99 / month (extra member slots can be added for $7.99 each / month) [Ultra HD]

What does a member slot mean by the way? Is it a person (as in if you want seperate recommendations for you, your wife and kid you pay for two more slots) or is it a home (as in your family, the grandparets, friends you share the account with etc. since they started cracking down on password sharing. Obligatory never had or even used netflix (other than seeing a few movies at friends' places)
- I'm guessing it's for additional households because they disabled password sharing.

send a message, cancel and hit the high seas like we did before they came out.

My Netflix is called rutracker, your Netflix is called The Pirate Bay

My Netflix is called Jellyfin With Suspiciously Acquired Media From Dubious Corners of the Internet.
My Netflix is called aMule, fopnu and qBitTorrent with search plugins.

I've officially removed Netflix

I quit netflix recently after almost 10 years of continuous subscription. When they raised the price again it was a good Occasion although not the reason. I think so was done with it for a while now.

I guess I'll start reading books again - or watch a few films instead of stretched out series.

Net what?

Already canceled a long time ago. When I subbed they had all the good shows in one spot. Then everything got split up among others services and it was no longer worth it.

Plus the content they make themselves is hit or miss. And the misses are in far bigger numbers.

Seems like they brought themselves to a spot where growing more is very hard so they start messing with subscriptions to get more money.

Just curious what they are going to do when that stops working, because I think the next step is just to realize more growth is very hard. And anything they change may add subscribers but it may also cause them to leave, so they have to turn the knobs very carefully.

And people will bitch and moan on the Internet, pay up, and repeat the process next time they try this.

The stock is doing good so there must be plenty of people thinking Netflix is essential. And I guess it is if you have no tech skills at all.
- I don't have a subscription myself, but if I want to watch something they have, I'd rather pay up than spending my time trying to figure out how to pirate it.
  
  For me, it's less about technical ability, and more about how I spend my time.

I cancelled netflix when they removed atla

I already used Stream Fab to get Dark off there, so whatever.

(Dark was so good, I do appreciate the risks the old Netflix took on some programming, even if the company is busy burning that goodwill now.)