Consumers are paying more than ever for streaming TV each month and analysts say there’s no reason for the companies to stop raising prices
Consumers are paying more than ever for streaming TV each month and analysts say there’s no reason for the companies to stop raising prices
Finding new subscribers in a saturated streaming video market isn't easy. And with legacy media companies desperate to recoup revenue declines in their linear TV businesses, the cost of your monthly plan is likely to keep rising.
Consumers are paying more than ever for streaming TV each month and analysts say there’s no reason for the companies to stop raising prices::Finding new subscribers in a saturated streaming video market isn't easy. And with legacy media companies desperate to recoup revenue declines in their linear TV businesses, the cost of your monthly plan is likely to keep rising.
Yarrrr, we be seein' about that...
Yeah I don’t have the budget to subscribe to multiple streaming services, let alone cable or even one service. Thank god there’s not a lot I’d want to watch…even if sailing high seas.
Streaming:
-Charges you unreasonable amount of money
-If you cancel the subscription, you lose it all
-If they change the terms, you may lose access to some of the things in your library
Torrent:
-Costs a grand total of 0$
-Allows you to retain content for eternity
-Requires a 5 second effort to enter the name of a show/film in Sonarr/Radarr
The choice is clear.
plus, you fight corporate greed.
Theft removes the original, priacy makes a copy.
lol I'm like 20 clicks into Sonarr's website and I still cant find a simple answer: what is Sonarr?
Agreed. I found it a bit disappointing they skipped to the highlights without describing the big picture first. This is from their GitHub:
Sonarr is a PVR for Usenet and BitTorrent users. It can monitor multiple RSS feeds for new episodes of your favorite shows and will grab, sort and rename them. It can also be configured to automatically upgrade the quality of files already downloaded when a better quality format becomes available.
My main gripe with torrent is that there isn't always a seeder available. This is a major issue if you're looking for a movie that isn't mainstream. There are pirate streaming services but we know that the quality is not usually great. Even if you download from torrent, the quality is not also always great either. I definitely noticed difference in video and sound quality between torrent and what you get from "mainstream" sources. Some torrent say they're 4k or HD quality, but many files are actually cropped so that uploading and downloading is faster.
Edit: Grammar and wording
I'd also give Usenet and Soulseek a try, lots of rare media in there
I’ve got a setup that has gradually improved over the years, I have put a few hundred $$ in that time too.
But, it was fairly easy to get started, my improvements have made the automatic downloads very consistently high quality, and sonarr/radarr do all the searching and filtering for me.
My wife wanted to watch some Winnie the Pooh, within like 5 minutes the first season was ready to watch, and the rest was finished downloading and ready before the 1 episode was over.
And it only took 5 minutes because I had to help the searcher bc all my auto filters are optimized for recent releases. Though I’m gonna set up some filters for older stuff, so it’s not trying to download a 4K hdr file for something that came out 50 years ago and was never remastered to 4K.
Torrent:
-Unless your a millennial with really good memory... requires a (usually) a good paid VPN + 3 hours of reading and setup so you dont get nasty letters from your ISP.
-Requires requisite ports and knowledge of how to get the shows to your TV
-ideally requires a standalone PC, which most households no longer have
-Requires knowledge of additional programs that need to be researched and have paid competition
-Requires knowledge of how to find the source material, with huge gatekeeping between source pools
I am probably forgetting other stuff, especially for Gen Z and now the oldest Gen Alpha. But if I as a millennial feel it's a burden to relearn the steps for something I already was doing a decade or so ago. That must be a massive bar for someone who never had their hand in it, so to speak.
I am not saying it's impossible, just I haven't found a straight forward guide from beginning to end, with all the new technology included. And the first time they get a love note from their ISP, they will likely just stop.
Edit: The vastly different responses with different solutions, only proves to me that this is more complex than people let on. You have some people giving services that weren't mentioned in the OP in euros (not that there is anything wrong with Europe, just a different experience. Do EU IPs even send love notes? Then you get a mix of people saying what the best VPN is and other people saying you don't even need a VPN. Just so much different information, is it surprising that people could feel overwhelmed?
- VPN is easy especially the good paid ones.
- You can use VPN and torrent on your mobile and cast it there are apps for it. Or you can use one of the NAS which will do it for you no need to remember anything.
- You needn't use a PC.
So you are mostly wrong here, I'll let you know my setup that costs me $15 a month.
A 4 core 8GB VPS: $5 a month. Unlimited cloud Storage: €10 a month.
I have Emby (Use jellyfin, I haven't changed out of laziness), Sonarr, Radarr, Jellyseerr all running on a VPS with caddy running a reverse_proxy to point a domain at emby via HTTPS.
No need for VPNs, but you can run OpenVPN on your VPS for maximum value for money if you want to use a high speed VPN.
It's all very straight forward to setup on Ubuntu 20.04 with lots of documentation. My server has been up for 3 months now and I have had 0 issues, friends use jellyseerr to requests shows and movies. Everything else is automated. Can even import lists from IMDb.
Make sure if you want to save space to use h.265 encoding where possible. Additionally, if you don't want to torrent you can use newservers. But that will cost an additional $10 a month.
The skill issues related to piracy can and should be addressed. This is how we form a truly strong resistance to the madness that is going on.
Your point is valid and it's important to work it through.
You're mistakening the wide range of solutions and tooling for complexity.
Good points, there should be an all-in-one solution which very easily guides you through all the necessary steps
I mean, most of this is wrong?
What are you reading for 3 hours about a VPN?
Why do you need to know about ports? You can literally put shows on a flash drive and plug it in.
A stand alone PC, why? What? Hell I torrent from my phone sometimes.
A lot of this can be done, but this is not the bar for entry by any means.
No reason to stop raising prices for any business, except for the fact that demand goes down as price goes up. People will cancel or downshift to a cheaper service.
downshift to a cheaper service.
Yarr matey
People will cancel or downshift to a cheaper service.
Streaming platforms make more money from you if you use the cheaper ad-supported plans. The price hikes are to get you off the ad-free plans.
I'm begging zoomers to learn how to torrent
I'm kind of amazed how my Gen Z buddies are so adamantly against pirating. They think the cops will bust down their door, literally.
As a gen z kiddo, like half of the software on my pc and 90% of my movies are pirated lmao.
A few of mine got cease and desist orders from their ISP, one got two… so that’s why they’re against it. Some now do VPN, some just hop streaming services. Some just stopped watching as much stuff because: life.
Yarr harr fiddle dee dee. Fuck Netflix, Hulu and Disney
I am slowly cancelling services with each price increase. I uave cancelled Netflix and HBO. Will continue until morale improves.
Why is piracy costing you 4$ a month.
VPN?
not everyone can torrent freely
I'd say piracy is not even free, if done right. I mean, you may want to support JDownloader, MediaFire, Mega, your VPN, and whatnot.
I'm not into piracy (wink), but if I did, I'd pay my monthly Plex subscription, MediaFire account, and tip JDownloader monthly for their effort.
With prices going up and likely subscribers going way down the next logical move for the Streaming Companies is to start cracking down on Piracy again as they already had a go at password sharing.
Now I am not saying they will be successful in prosecuting those that are careful, just that there will be a few high profile cases against groups of people who aren't using the best hygiene when it comes to piracy. Fear is their best weapon against piracy that they actually want to deploy, just make sure you do enough research to make sure you aren't in that harvest of low hanging fruit.
Really? No reason to stop raising prices? My Jolly Roger got something to say about that.
Piracy has never been easier or safer or faster than it is now, and these platforms think driving people away with overpriced subscriptions for shitty content is beneficial for them?
Piracy isn’t easier than not bothering to cancel your subscription for most people. I’m sure they’ll lose some people, and especially the demographic here, but I don’t know about the average person.
And yet I see all sorts of articles saying these platforms complain that piracy is now even higher than before Netflix became a streaming service.
I've no problem with paying for good services, but when I get a better service from a random pirate streaming site than I do from Amazon Prime, why would I continue paying for that?
I'm just sick of things either being exclusive to one service even though they're decades old, or just plain not available.
Oh, and if I'm paying, I don't want ads. Not ever.
I’ve no problem with paying for good services
Exactly. It used to be that netflix was all you needed to get most quality content, and it was a fair deal for customers: you pay a reasonable monthly amount, and you and your family gets convenient access to most streamable movies and TV series.
Now that quality content is spread out and locked out over half a dozen other streaming services, and subscribing to them all is not just a hassle but also incredibly bad value compared to the original offer.
In a healthy competitive environment, you would expect companies to counter reduced value by increasing customer value in other ways or by reducing prices, but instead we got price hikes, lots of low quality filler content, crack downs on password sharing, advertising, various unpopular UI changes and other service reductions decreasing value even further.
To solve this, I think the content producers and streaming services should be split up, because right now they're not really competitors in a true sence but small monopolies who each clutch the keys to their own little franchises. It should be noted for example that music streaming works a lot better: there are various competitors that each hold a viable content library on their own, so you don't need more than one music streaming service. IMO that's because Spotify, Tidal, YT Music, etc. are merely distributors and not the actual producers.
Yeah, the music industry finally got their shit together and made something that was more convenient than just nicking it online. Took their sweet time over it, but I think they realised that it was taking like a minute to download a whole album by that point.
It's really the model of how to do it well. Very little in the way of exclusives locked to one particular service. Occasionally an artist kicks up a fuss over something and pulls all their stuff from one of them, but it's rare enough that I don't care.
Being totally serious, you should copy and paste your comment and email it to your local US Representative.
I have a problem paying for DRM. I want to use open source and DRM is the opposite. I like (and buy sometimes) Creative Commons music/audio-books just because it tastes better when artist isn't supporting restricting me. Cory Doctorow is a creative worker who lives and breaths anti-DRM, if you've not explored this. I recommend his old talk "The Coming War on General Computation".
Source on better pirate streaming service?
Any of these will do. Prime is not a high bar to get over. Some may work better than others, and I think it's down to where you are and time of day than anything else.
https://fmhy.pages.dev/videopiracyguide/#multi-server
It's not as good as downloading yourself and running Jellyfin, but it's convenient.
Yeah some of the arr software is pretty fucking cool for being entirely free.
Weird... why is piracy growing then? Every reasonable person should pay $300 to watch the shows they want on the weekend... and then pay a couple more hundreds in the theater.
every dollar you raise, the fewer customers you get. the point is that you should want to raise the price whenever the relative drop in customers is less than the relative increase in price to maximise profits (where marginal cost is marginal benefit :) )
This is why I Plex/Jellyfin.
Yup, came to say they should move to Plex/Jellyfish to get away from the streaming shitshow.
Exactly. It's funny because if one streaming company were more like Valve, they could have all of the content on one platform like Steam has with Valve. Piracy is a convenience problem, after all, not a pricing problem, and it sure as hell isn't convenient to have to be subscribed to 5 or more different platforms just to get all the content I'd want to watch.
Now chart hours of content against cost across the market, and watch it go vertical. Bonus for weighting by critical rating.
Piracy is the only reasonable choice.
Oh how I hate those graphs that could but doesn't start at zero.
It wouldn’t make any sense in this case, their prices never started at 0.
It's about perceived change.
For me it's not the same if 1000 to 1001 shows up as a 50% hike because the diagram starts on 999, as a 1 to 2 hike which also shows up as a 50% with the diagram starting at 0.
They both look the same, but in the first case the hike is 0,1% as in the second it's really 50%.
So for me it's bad journalism or trying to fake things (which here isn't needed IMO).
Thanks for the reminder to cancel Disney+ and HBO Max - I almost forgot! ;)
Still have Peacock, because that's comped through my mobile provider.
My wife does Amazon Prime, Netflix, and Hulu. I had Prime but realized I only ever used it for free shipping, which I can get anyway by bundling my orders and setting ship dates.
Bundling orders and set ship dates - what? This is something I don't know about.
Don't forget sharing is caring. 😉
Streaming services, digital services in general, should be made to compete on having the best platform, not on exclusive content.
It's all the same wires going to the same machines. Internationally, too. I can see maybe allowing for different pricing for countries with very different wage levels, but if it's online, it should be available everywhere.
I'm paying for the services that produce the best content, not simply platforms that host content from others. It would be nice if they shared it to other streaming services, but then they would have little reason to create them.
Streaming services, digital services in general, should be made to compete on having the best platform, not on exclusive content.
The way to get that is to split them and say: a streaming provider can't be a content creator as well. That way, content creating companies would be incentivized to sell their content to every streaming provider at a price that the market will bear, and streaming providers would be incentivized to compete on providing the best experience to their users.
People in this comment section really thinking that the average person cares enough to go learn how computers really work in order to get tv for free
You laugh, but that's exactly what happened with Napster and other file sharing software. It starts with the nerds, then someone makes a good easy piece of software for it, then everyone is downloading cars.
I definitely care enough, but I can't figure it out to save my life. All the online communities just act like everyone's supposed to automatically already know what they're talking about.
That's because it's illegal to discuss -how- to sail the seas in many jurisdictions. You either know or you don't know. The best thing to do is ask a friend IRL to help you out.
Step 1: If you are in the USA (or other oppressive state), learn about & get a VPN.
Step 2: Learn about either torrents (more popular) or usenet. And download a torrent client (free and perfectly legal).
Step 3: Search around for a torrent tracker or indexer where you will search for media content.You can google/chatgpt these steps for further insight but it boils down to these three steps. It can get as complex or as simple as you want it to.
That's why you gotta start a Plex share with your friend group - they get content, you get booze. Win win.
I think people forget that it happens often. Remember napster/sharebear/lime wire. People learn when motivated.
I've tried, but I can't get qbtorrent to work correctly. It's just stalls on every download now.
Maybe try downloading a slightly older version, i had the same issue with a specific update around 4.5ish and downgrading fixed it!
Remind me if this is still valid a year from now
I am actually curious. We like to laugh at the obviously anti-consumer practices these streaming services are pushing, saying they'll end up losing their customers to piracy, but the point of the article is to illustrate that just isn't happening and most people will suck it up and pay more for less. Look at how much Netflix gained by killing off password sharing.
True, but the point is that at each level of abuse they impose to their customers, more and more will leave for piracy, and you don't need to go far. A jailbroken firestick with plex installed and a friend who is technically savy and has his own plex server when one can see a bunch of movies (not to mention the free ones on plex)
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I already unsubscribed from prime and if Disney+ is changing to the Netflix way of "no no no you cannot share your account" than that will be gone too. I already thought about unsubscribing from Netflix as well.
But I guess me and my friends are not the norm with a plex server that gets feeded by ~10 persons who like to buy blurays :DBe careful with who you tell about that. The recording agencies love to make examples out of file sharers...
well those are all legal backup copies for private use. It's not like I'd share it with randos on the internet :D
We're also getting more than ever from streaming. That is if you like shitty remakes and sadistic defacto porn.
Ohhhhhhhhhh... it's a pirates life for me. We have never subscribed to any of this shit. Savings have allowed us to eat avacado toast.
One option that exists for the price-averse is going for the low-subscriber streaming services. This doesn't give you the popular shows everyone else is watching, but it's suitable if your goal is to just entertain yourself with something distracting for a while.
I was briefly subscribed to Shudder, a niche horror flick service that doesn't cost much and has a few decent items on there.
Crunchyroll is relatively cheap for anime, has been buying up other properties to give itself a large library. That said, there are accusations that the money doesn't ever reach the original creators. HiDive is another anime service with some weird options.
There's free services like Pluto TV, usually ad-supported (but hey, a lot of the paid options are giving ads)Haven't read it, but there's also articles out there about other options, should people decide the major entries are too expensive, and they don't want to go for piracy. Knowing your options is always good.
Anything good on shudder?
The best thing I found was a horror thriller simply called Revenge. A woman is violated and left for dead by a three-man hunting club. Then, against all odds, she hunts them back and kills them all. Small cast but very intense and bloody.
Raise prices. Blame "the liberal agenda". Profit.
Some observers see another reason for the frequent price hikes: to push subscribers to their breaking point, and compel them to opt for a lower-priced, or even free, ad-supported plan instead.
Disney CEO Bob Iger said as much during an August earnings call: “We’re obviously trying, with our pricing strategy, to migrate more subs to the advertiser-supported tier.”
I'll cancel my account before I willingly subject myself to advertising. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
I'm already in the process of replacing my streaming services with cheaper alternatives.
It blows my mind that advertising could be worth more than a subscription.
Their evaluation of advertising must be tied with brand recognition and other general brain washing tactics.
I think it is possible advertising is over valued. There I've said it. I'm not alone in this: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-work-part-2-digital-ep-441/
I'll give you a reason, pirating. Pirating with obfuscated networks (VPN, onion, etc) will never die. People just put it down because the convenience was worth the price. When it no longer is, ships will sail the seas again, and having everything already digital in these services will make it that much easier.
torrenting over tor would be exhaustive for the onions.
I2P
Hulu is currently the only streaming service I still pay for, and that's mainly because TV shows are a removed to pirate (disk space and download times being the main annoyance), but it won't take more than one or two more price hikes for the balance to shift so that it's worth the effort to just go full pirate instead of forking out so much cash.
The fact that Disney just fully bought Hulu bodes very poorly too - I'll bet anything that it's going to get folded into Disney+ soon as a "pay an extra 15/month to access Hulu content, but only through your Disney+ membership sort of deal"
Here's a tip: I went to cancel my Hulu subscription, and they offered on my way out to instead lower my price for 6 months. I decided to go with it.
I can't guarantee the same would happen for others, but ultimately it's all gonna be a haggling situation.
Its the same thing cable did.
Charge the analysts more first. I’m sure they’ll charge their tune.
Nope, because every time another one raises the price we cancel it. It’s working out quite well
Arrrrrr
Laughs in $0 a month payments for streaming services
Remember March 2012, when SOPA and PIPA were about to pass, and many websites were blacking out as a form of protest, some people were advocating for a "Black March" to have everyone boycott Big Media, pirated or not, for the entire month? Yeah sure it didn't spread like wildfire because of course, the population is already too addicted to popular culture to drop it cold-turkey, but at this rate people may be forced to give it a go by force.
Wouldn't it be great if one company would get with each of the streaming services and put them under one umbrella. They could rent you a device that is mandatory for the service. While charging you a large subscription fee. Even better yet that could lock additional content behind another paywall. Direct TV and the cable companies need to hurry before someone beats them to it.
Only reason I still have Netflix is that T-Mobile pays for it for me. I also used to have Funimation, but Crunchyroll taking over stopped adding captions to translate written text from new dubbed anime. Especially anime that uses a lot of written segues and such that is important to understanding what's going on. So I had to pirate anyway. And now so many services are removing features, especially as they merge, but still continue to raise prices. There just aren't any services worth the cost anymore and I'm not willing to pay hundreds of dollars. That's one of many reasons! why I dumped cable ages ago.