I am over being disappointed by streaming sites.
“I wanna watch X, let’s see if Netflix has it…”
*Opens webpage*
“Hmm… Netflix usually sucks, they probably wont have it. I’m just gonna say I’ll watch Y off my hard drive instead. But let’s still confirm that Netflix doesn’t have X…”
Next thing you know, I’m watching Y off my hard drive.
Streaming services suck so much nowdays that I already resolve myself to watching something else before I even finish checking. Gotta shield myself from disappointment. Why would you pay for each channel on a TV? Just get the hard copy at that point…
Eventually you’ll reach the point where instead of checking Netflix for X and settling for Y locally, you’ll just download X and watch it.
This. I feel like watching Das Boot. Okay, it streams on Fubo. Maybe I’ll watch K-19. No, that one is on Peacock. The Hunt for Red October? No, it’s on HBO Max.
Do they really expect me to subscribe to all those different services when I could just put it into Radarr and have it a few minutes later?
Yes, they really do. There’s nothing that business types love more than smelling their own bad ideas and thinking it’s genius.
You can be sure that a CEO on $10 million thinks regular people would think nothing of subscribing to ten different services because he does personally, so what’s the big deal?
I downloaded The Lighthouse and later found out that Netflix has it. I have Netflix, but it’s mostly for the kids.
Heh, that’s usually the plan - except I don’t wanna have to wait for it to finish. But then I go back the next day to get it running before I leave the house, and it’s finished before I can even get out the door!
Set your client to download pieces sequentially. VLC will play it while it downloads in the background. Probably other players too.
I’ve tried to give them my money. Max, Hulu, Netflix… and none of them want it unless they can get my telemetry. American in Europe, so I can’t use US services. Netflix and Prime will only show me the Euro selection. Don’t want that. Use a VPN, you say? All those services block IPVanish and Proton. They want my data not my money. It would be optimal if I paid them to give them my data, but if I can’t give them clean telemetry, they don’t want my money. This tells me they should be paying me for that info. And that’s not going to happen.
So, I tried. I honestly did.
Enter Stremio-Torrentio-Debrid and I can now watch every single thing I can think of. For the pittance I give Debrid, it’s been a game changer. I don’t expect it to last forever, but aligning with you fellow seafaring folks will keep me at the forefront of the game. 🤘🏼🏴☠️
Proton VPN works for me.
But we should not have to pay another company to watch the content owned by a company we are already paying.
All those services block IPVanish and Proton. They want my data not my money.
How do you come to that conclusion from their blocking of commercial VPNs? Sure, of course they want your telemetry as well, but it’s mainly due to the copyright owners/distribution agreements.
real-debrid is crazy good for the price.
I pronounce it like Real Madrid.
Is that not how it’s pronounced?
I dunno tbh. Is it “ray-al” or “reel”?
I fully agree with your sentiment, but I don’t think blocking VPNs and having different content per region is all about your telemetry data. It’s mainly about content rights. They can’t always get deals to show the content in any region, or it may be much more expensive than buying it for one region.
I hate it as much as anyone, but the streaming companies don’t have full rights to all the content and that’s what needs to change to reach the same experience as music streaming.
Yeah, I pay for Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime and yet, I am still downloading shows that are on those services because their shitty DRM schemes limit me to 720p. It’s insanity.
I got a similar story:
I wanted to rewatch the first avatar before the second came out. At the time I had Disney plus, so no problem right? Turns out that here in Germany that only included the German dubbed version, not the ov.
Guess who doesn’t have a streaming subscription nowadays…
Recently I had a server failure… I was in the middle of Sg-1.
So went to prime video to watch it…
It was 4:3 dark and the audio was horrible… Oh and ads. It has ads.
Gross :/
Lol I respect it, definitely not my style though. I purposefully seek out the 720p files to save HD space. Quality dif is unnoticeable to my eyes. Growing up poor is helpful sometimes… yay!
AppleTV: you wanted to watch this movie, that’s great, it’s on Amazon, BellTV, and Crave
Open any of those apps and it’s only available outside my subscription and I have to subscribe to some weird ass TV channel I’ve never heard of and didn’t even have their own app.
The Pancake gets it. The Wise Pancake gets me.
With the additional channels available on Prime, they tend to offer a free weeks subscription and they reset about twice a year so you can do it again.
With 25Mbps internet, for me harddriveflix is often the streaming service with the highest bitrate…
25Mbps? Gimme that. I have 1-5Mbps during the day.
Overnight downloads go brrr…
I’m with you on that. There are some gems on streaming sites still, but lots of half baked content to sift through.
I’ve actually started buying DVDs again to add to a plex archive. A lot of not-current shows and movies are in my budget and I don’t have to worry about availability. I will say Plex tells me what service has what content in my watchlist which is nice, but doesn’t work for everything.
My SO and I were searching for a show and just gave up; too much of a hassle. Downloading would have been easy if we wanted, but after doing the searching dance, we just didn’t care anymore and threw on a show we know and enjoy.
we just didn’t care anymore and threw on a show we know and enjoy.
Yep! Ya know back in the old days we had to just watch whatever was on TV! Or go buy a VHS! But nowdays we have entire media libraries on our computers that, as a VHS collection, would be the kind of shelf someone would brag about. I suppose I should feel grateful for that. But I wanna have it! Blockbuster died for a reason… maybe not the one we thought?
A true pirate would build a macrovision remover circuit and make a copy of their friends tape instead of buying one.
I set up my plex so it auto searches and downloads things added to the watch list, that and I follow a few lists in trakt for upcoming shows and movies so between the two it’s much more content that any streaming service we uses to have
Commercial streaming sites are so bad. The “pirate” streaming sites have so much content from so many different countries, providers, and in so many different languages, it blows my mind how short-sighted commercial streaming websites are. They could be making so much more money by having one single video hosting service where all the production companies put their products on. Basically, a video streaming warehouse.
Imagine, no matter which country you’re in, which currency you pay in, which OS or browser you use, all you have to do is go to one single website where you pay a tenner every month and you’ve got any and all TV shows, movies, maybe even merch for the media you watch, etc. . Imagine you could even give money to keep a show alive. Tip a few extra coins here, a few extra there, or blow a few hunnies on merch of your favorite show.
Instead, they have 100 different silos. Fuck that.
Or even something akin to how music works where Apple Music / Spotify / YT Music generally has the same stuff across different services
The quality is often terrible too. I’ve literally been watching Netflix and the pixellation/stuttering has been so bad that I’ve shut off the film, spent 2 minutes downloading it, then just carried on watching the downloaded version from where I left off.
Streaming services are all so backwards when it comes to quality. They think resolution is the only thing that matters, to the point it is actually degrading the quality of the product they are offering, and is also wasting bandwidth and resources.
So I’m not the only one! Can’t remember when this was since Netflix was cancelled a while ago, but back then it wasn’t even possible to select the quality or get the true quality. 1080p was actually streaming 720p. IMO, that should be worthy of a fine, but ain’t nobody got the time. Much quicker to just find it elsewhere.
I’m in the middle of watching Letterkenny on Hulu. I’ve been barely tolerating the 10 seconds of forced splash screens each episode that tell me I’m watching something on Hulu and the TV rating. The last straw that’s moving me to my own copy is Hulu’s sudden inability to keep track of my episodes watched. So if I don’t immediately watch the next episode I have to enter this repetitive dance of manually navigating to the proper episode next time or watching all these stupid splash screens twice and fast forwarding the whole episode in hopes it will save it, but usually it still won’t.
Figure it out.
Libraries use a couple streaming services (such as Kanopy), so check them out.
And there are tools for saving what you stream from them. Here’s one for Kanopy.
You still have a Netflix subscription after they cracked down on account password sharing? I admire your will power.
Not cracked down on my sub that I share with my mother, although I do often log in from there on my laptop
And with Overseer, when I do not have X or Y in stock, I just ask nicely and within 2-5 minutes I have my movie/episode
I haven’t looked at any streaming service in at least 5 years.
Want to watch something > Open Ombi > Search title > click ‘request’ > (request is processed by the arr stack) 15-25min later receive notification ‘request ready to watch’ > Open emby from anywhere > stream request from my home pc.
Most of the time the media’s already been acquired from previous requests from users, monitored imdb lists, friend recommendations randomly tossed in throughout the week, etc; and can just be streamed immediately.
My IPTV service it’s working like a charm…
