I was a happy Netflix user until 2018, before that I haven’t really pirated any movies (with very rare exceptions) for almost a decade but I recently started again. I’m was doing my monthly budgeting and realized I was paying for too many subscription services. Netflix, Amazon Prime, Shudder, Disney+, Hulu and Crunchyroll. My family likes to watch different types of content that is distributed on many different platforms.
I was never subscribed to these many services until a couple years ago. I was thinking which service I should cancel when I realized I had the option to cancel all of them this entire time. I’m torrenting again and I started saving a considerate amount.
The only service I’m paying for is Spotify which I think it’s fairly priced and offers all the music my family listens too (and it’s convenient). All the competitors pretty much offer the same content and that’s how streaming services should be.
I remember back in the day using eMule and BitChe (to look for torrents). Now I’m using Deluge as my torrent client and I I get my torrents from 1337x. What sites are you guys using?
Streaming services are bound and determined to make themselves Cable TV all over again. We had it good for a little while, at least.
Streaming services shouldn’t be able to have exclusive rights to content similar to the way cinemas work. That way they would have to focus on making a decent service, which honestly most of them are pretty shit atm.
It all should be like radio. Report what you play and pay for it based on your viewers.
At least with cable TV you can get the highest tear subscription with all the channels. With streaming services you have to subscribe to a decent bunch just to have a broad variety of content, resulting in a much higher price than any cable TV subscription.
It’s a disaster.
Cable cost well over $100 a month many years ago when I cancelled it. And 1/3 of the content is commercials.
Pretty sure you could subscribe to every major streaming service for less than that. And as long as you avoid Hulu, you won’t see commercials.
Things are WAY better now, even though it was better a little while ago when there was just Netflix.
I did the math, subscribing to every major streaming service is about $100. I got an offer to subscribe to Cable with my ISP for $29 a month. Obviously years ago Cable was more expensive but it doesn’t feel like we necessarily improved on convenience which streaming services are supposed to provide.
Content gets pulled constantly from these services and they often require dedicated hardware to stream HD content, Prime and Apple TV being an example. By the time I switch between 4 apps to find what I want to watch I’ve already fallen asleep.
In 2023 it’s just stupid having to rely on so many different subscription services to only have access to a portion of the available content (which gets constantly removed). All considering how anti-consumer these big corporations are I wouldn’t say things are WAY better. A few years ago Netflix alone had much more diverse content, was generally enough for most people and was cheaper overall.
Music services offer 99% of the available content in one app, if you switch to a different service you don’t miss out on content availability. If we had that for videos it would be perfect.
Agree about the comparison with music. I wonder why we didn’t see balkanization there like we do for video.
Because they realized people are willing to pay for extra subscriptions. Production studios created their own services while keeping their IPs exclusive rather than licensing it to third parties. They make more money this way until people stop subscribing to every new service that comes out each month.
Music has the potential of undergoing the same path. I wouldn’t be surprised if major labels like UMG, Warner and Sony pulled content from Spotify and other services and creating their own. Let’s just hope people smarten up so this doesn’t happen anytime soon.
True!