I accidentally set up a home server running Plex/Jellyfin, and now I control all my media without paying £18 per month (and probably due to rise soon, like the US pricing) to a company that only has a handful of things I like and regularly takes away content, plus prevents account sharing.
You wouldn't want someone else to accidentally do that, would you?
E: yes people. I get that your setup is expensive. But you don't have to spend a lot. You can host a Plex server on an Nvidia shield with some external storage, you can buy an old crappy PC/laptop on eBay (bonus: a laptop comes with a built-in UPS!). A media server does not require beefy hardware.
Weird. Similar thing happened to me. One day I was thinking, "Damn. These streaming services are getting too expensive. I may have to get back to sailing the high seas if this keeps up." I shit you not, all of a sudden my home server is sucking up all kinds of movies and TV shows and streaming them to my living room. It's like The Brave Little Toaster if the toaster were actually a Dell PowerEdge and it went on a long journey to find the master (me) as much high quality media as possible.
Yeah i bought a small computer off of eBay, installed Proxmox and all this weird software started downloading and categorizing media. It was terrifying.
Pirating is not really much cheaper TBH...my media server, including power, has to run for something like 6-7 years without upgrades or repairs to break even with what Netflix would cost in that same time frame. It's not about saving money, it's about not giving it to them.
Right exactly it can be as expensive as you want it to be. I have 2 12TB drives going. But you absolutely could just buy a $200 mini PC with a 1TB drive in it. Write a simple shell script that purges content first in first out. Cheap.
I host not only all the Servarr apps, but about a dozen more miscellaneous ones on an old unused workstation I stole out of the attic at my old job. It has a shitty quadcore and 16gb of ram that I cobbled together from a couple other workstations I nabbed. The thing wouldn’t even be able to run Minecraft, but it has no issue fetching media from private trackers and Usenet, and then streaming them to my other devices. The only thing I wish I could upgrade is the shitty network card, that can only handle 10mb/s. It’s not too bad, because I only let it download at night when I’m asleep anyway.
Just goes to show you can make a really good setup with whatever old PCs you have laying around. Or steal.
(For legal reasons, I’m not suggesting other people steal computers from work)
Same thing happened to me, but with an Overseerr frontend for my older parents (with my domain just routed to my house with nginx), with a backend of Sonarr, Radarr, Jackett, Unzipperr (not sure if this is the name but it’s vital)…
So many accidental automations like being able to just wishlist something on plex when I’m out and about and have it ready when I get home.
Im slowly wrapping my head around the jellyfish thing ...very slowly. But lets not pretend the server space isnt the price issue. I couod spend 5 years of netflix subs to get to a decent raid protected level.
yes, now I'm paying 10 times more.
Don't mind it though, experience is better in every way possible besides occasional maintenance need, but it's definitely not for everyone.
Could be done cheaper, but it's tradeoffs all the way as with everything in life.
Man, ad free is gonna get fucking expensive over time. I can already see how they will weight the ad tier at “just $9.99” at some point when ad free 4k is $31.99 or something crazy.
@overload@return2ozma we periodically sign up for it when my kids remember something on there they like watching. The children's accounts don't show ads.
It's not confusing when you learn that it's literally the most profitable tier for Netflix. They make more per user from ad-subsidized subscriptions than they do from the ad-free subs.
All they have to do is the dance of "how much can we charge for subs and how many ads can we show before people stop paying for this tier?"