Good for them, I cancelled my subscription simply because Linux support is so awful. It's impossible to watch in 4k, and even with 1080p you frequently get automatically downgraded to lower res bitrate whenever the window isn't focused. Absolutely daunting.
You know it's funny. Awhile ago I subscribed only to watch Stranger Things, I paid for the 1080 HD plan.
4K is clearly incentivized. Any how, I called to complain at the time. My opinion is the picture instantly got notably better when I tried standard HD again. There seems to be different degradations of 1080 and 4K.
My wife and I canceled Netflix a while ago and went back to DVDs. An FYE store in our area recently had a store closing sale, so we bought three DVD players and snapped up all our favorite DVDs for a few bucks each.
No subscription, no mid-movie ads, and no worrying about this or that service losing the streaming rights to whatever.
Cue up people shouting about how this is horrible and that they're totally going to cancel, only to be followed by Netflix making even more money next quarter.
Well they'd have to lose a huge percentage of people for this not to be profitable quarter over quarter. But it likely cuts in to future growth substantially.
And with what seems to now be an unavoidable economic storm as in-transit tankers dock and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz starts to be felt, there might be a larger than normal amount of people looking to cut costs in the coming year.
Or maybe not, people seem to have stopped responding to economic pressure by cutting costs in the US! When vacations got super expensive, people still spent, and increased their complaining. We will see what happens in 2026.
Netflix is more resilient to economic downturns than you'd think. For many people it's a higher ROI for entertainment when compared to a lot of other alternatives. e.g going to bars / restaurants / movie theaters.
Netflix, cable, etc. and other at home subscriptions tend to be the last things cut because people generally stay home more when the economy is bad so they want their in-home entertainment.
I just don't think that's true anymore. Netflix isn't going anywhere. Twitter and Reddit have taken highly visible user-hostile actions since back in 2023 and people stayed. People have become too passive and docile to switch anymore. The portion of the population that's discerning enough to leave is small.
Pirating is honestly, by-far the least painful experience to watch things.
I recently started watching a series, and I figured I'd check if it's on any streaming services I have access to. I found it on Prime Video, but when I clicked into it, it needed some other separate subscription to a service I'd never heard of to watch it. And even then, it had like, seasons 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, and 8 of the 9 total seasons. If there was any chance I'd subscribe to watch it before, I definitely wasn't now. I couldn't even figure out where the remaining seasons are available to be watched legally. It's especially hard to find this information in Canada because searching "X where to watch" just gives you results of where things are available in America, which has completely different licensing deals.
So I found a torrent for the complete series and I've been watching it pain-free. Piracy tends to be my default now. It even has the advantage that I can frequently find a Bluray rip rather than a reduced bitrate internet stream. Anything I really like and I want to support the creators, I purchase a physical release, or official merchandise or something.
No ads or previews to skip before each episode. Skip button seems to appear at different times.
No waiting for the skip button for recaps or intros. Sometimes they decide not to appear. If you jump 10s, sometimes they don't appear. Most pirated shows are appropriately bookmarked.
No waiting for the "next episode" button to appear. Sometimes they decide not to appear. If you jump 10s, sometimes they don't appear.
Some services make it harder than it should be to get to the episode/season list.
Must use their player. Usually means controls and subtitles appear on top of video. Screen dimmed on pause. Wack-a-mole controls.
That's not even counting the "few outliers" that I seem to encounter frustratingly often.
If you set it up so it's convenient and usable by everyone in your house, including visitors, just like Netflix, it's not much cheaper. Electricity and occasional hard drive purchases add up. I bet mine averages out to ~$300/yr. I'm not sure whether just buying discs for stuff we actually watch, and the occasional 1-month binge-subscription for a series or something, would work out better, or not, but it's not a slam-dunk sure-win for piracy on the cost front.
> Except for a few outliers like you describe, streaming is an order of magnitude less painful.
Sort of. A good piracy server takes some time and effort to set up, certainly more than subscribing to even ten different streaming services would, and of course is beyond what most people can accomplish with computers, period.
However: 1) "I just plug in my laptop an play the movie" probably is less painful than having a bunch of streaming services, though not quite as friendly for all members of the household, and 2) Once it's set up, in actual use by people who aren't maintaining the system, the well-configured piracy server is less painful than streaming services, for those users.
I worked at Netflix, I'm a huge Netflix Stan, but even I have to agree pirating is way easier. Especially now that they started cracking down on account sharing.
Having to constantly re-authenticate in my own home is annoying as hell.
Yup. If my gf is streaming something and an ad appears, I'll trigger the download for it during the first ad break, and then when the second ad breaks, it'll most likely be finished downloading and then we switch to JellyFin.
The only use we have for streaming apps is finding what we want to watch.
Yep, and that's already way more sophisticated than it needs to be. I no longer bother with the collecting aspect and just download everything on the fly, usually takes less than 5 minutes
I'll admit it's a bit of a pain to initially setup, but it's a one time pain. With Plex + arr services already set up, it's definitely easier to pirate than use a streaming provider.
Now, if I want to pirate, I just go to my browser, search for a movie/TV show, tell it to download, and it ensures it shows up seamlessly in Plex.
The benefits:
- Searching is easier
- One interface (Plex) vs many streaming interfaces, each with its own quirks.
- You don't have to worry that they'll take the show away while you're in the middle of Season 3.
Plex is pretty easy to set up. The arr services, though, were a royal pain. If there's some automation that sets it all up for you on your machine, though, then it would be a game changer.
I'm fairly pro-streaming services. I want the content producers to get paid when I watch. However, Apple TV's royal screwups[1] drove me to the edge and I decided to go through the painful process of figuring out all the *arr services.
If the streaming services don't make it a pain, I won't even think about pirating.
(I'll add that there was one time I pirated a Netflix show - even though I had Netflix - and the audio in the pirated version was much better than if I watched directly with Netflix. Not sure why).
[1] Locked out because I couldn't confirm the CVV of a card that I had reported lost almost a year prior. All the attempts to change the card/account failed. Even with a new account, once you'd enter an updated CC, it would tie it to my old account because it would realize I'm the same person.
I didn't just get locked out of Apple TV. I got locked out of all Apple services until that CC expired. I could not even apply for a job at Apple unless I confirmed the CVV. Thank God I don't use Apple devices!
If there was a single service with everything on it then I'd agree with you. Hell, even cable was better where you could just choose packages of stuff you wanted to watch.
But as it is, no. It's more painful for the reasons I highlighted in my comment you replied to. It's an endless slog of hunting down where to find things, managing what you want to be subscribed to, shows and movies disappearing from your watchlist, acquisitions killing off apps and pushing you to new services and apps that are worse than the one before, etc. I don't have to deal with any of that because piracy is a better service.
It’s 2 clicks with tools like Stremio. I use Plex with the arr stack and sure it has more configuration needed upfront but once that’s done you no longer need to figure out which streaming service has what. Plus things like realdebrid mean you don’t even need storage anymore.
I host a Jellyfin + Jellyseer combo for my friends. It makes pirating as easy as Netflix, except you don’t have to worry about “on which platform is this available?”
I don’t understand why with music streaming, every service has all the same songs, but with video streaming, everything is locked to just one service.
If I have a show/movie I want to watch, I first have to go to an indexing site like JustWatch to figure out which streaming service it's on. If it's not on any, or not on one I'm subbed to, I'm already having to go pirate.
Whereas when pirating, I typically just search my tracker for the show I want to watch, sort the results by most seeders, then download the highest one. I just save the .torrent on the shared network folder on my Raspberry Pi (Which literally just shows up as Z:\torrentfiles), and Transmission starts downloading it. A couple minutes later, it's ready and I sit on my couch and watch it.
I will grant you that the initial setup takes a little more effort. I signed up for a private tracker where torrents are vetted. I had to configure Transmission to auto-download. I had to install Kodi. But...meh? That's it? All that takes less than 10 minutes and only has to be done once.
If you're still using pirate software akin to LimeWire where you have to wade through results like "Pluribus-S01E01.mpg.exe" and deal with results where for some reason people renamed files (Back in the KaZaA days, I downloaded "JackAss.avi" expecting it to be the Jackass movie and it was actually Fight Club. WHY!?), then yeah, pirating is a pain in the ass. But otherwise, nah, it's really easy.
EDIT: As others have mentioned, pirated content is simply easier to consume. I can watch offline and have full control over playback. Never any ads or unskippable content.
nah, it's definitely a better UX if you do it right.
There are "shitty" ways to do piracy (usually the sketchy streaming alternatives). But the media management and playback tooling is genuinely great right now.
I still buy most of my media, but I pick up cheap physical copies of things and put them on a NAS for playback through jellyfin.
It's... MILES better than netflix/amazon/hulu/etc. No ads, no bullshit, no marketing, no "self-promotion that's totally not an ad, wink wink". Just your media.
Playback is per-user, it keeps all your stuff just fine, you can resume later from wherever you left off, I can shuffle series (great for kids shows like Arthur or magic school bus), and it's never offline, down, or unavailable.
---
Basically - you're very confused. I have "streaming" it just comes out of my own equipment, playing my own content. All the affordances are there and it has none of the bullshit.
I've been out of that scene for a long time, hasn't Netflix implemented a bunch of anti-piracy methods, or are people just recording HDMI/DisplayPort output and saving it?
Reading around a bit, yes to Netflix adding anti-piracy measures, maybe to folks recording HDMI/DisplayPort.
Apparently, Netflix is using steganography/content watermarks in their 4k content itself to trace users who are pirating. This is from a totally unsourced Reddit thread[0] but they do reference a real company which claims to do this watermarking[1]. The claim is that in addition to Netflix requiring 4k content to be available only on platforms with Trusted Execution Environments[2], Netflix also encodes each ~10 second "chunk" of the video stream into at least 2 different versions: an Y and a Z version. Then, they serve each customer a unique series of chunks when that customer streams their content, e.g. YYZYZZZYZYYZYZYYZZYZYYZ. Then when content leaks, Netflix can examine each chunk of the leaked content to extract the ID of the user who streamed the content. Apparently, Netflix can encode a lot more than just the userID, they can also encode stuff like the individual device ID, the TEE key ID, etc.
I know you might be thinking "I could do something to defeat that" and you're probably right (e.g. take streams from multiple users and intercut them so that the bits of the watermark through time are being constantly shuffled), but I'll also bet that there's many layers of steganography we don't know about, and unless you get them all, you'll not escape scot-free.
But the only real world impact is that the device that was used to stream that 4K content gets blacklisted at the hardware level.
To workaround this, piracy groups try to batch 4K rips because they know that the device will be burned soon after they upload the content. They then acquire another device, and the game of whack-a-mole continues.
Not that I would ever pirate a movie because I'm a good boy, but I remember the Cinavia DRM that affected Blu-ray players thirteen years ago.
I'm not 100% sure how it worked, but I guess it could do a similar kind of steganography-style thing to the audio track, where they would embed keys silently and the blu-ray player would check against that.
I'm not sure if anyone actually ever managed to defeat it, I think they just stopped implementing it in streaming boxes.
What are they gonna do? Ban your account? You don't need to go through KYC to get a netflix account, so what's preventing you from using a prepaid card to sign up for another account?
Speaking from experience, I had Netflix for years without thinking about it, starting at $8/month. At that price I didn't care if I watched it or not. Then it went to $10, $12, etc. Once it got to $15-16 (I forget), I cancelled it.
I now sign up for 1-2 months a year to catch up on shows I like and just rotate which streaming services I have. Yes, this is anecdotal.
It's hard to find data on how common rotating streaming services is. I would guess not common. I found this from 2021 showing the number of streaming services the average US household has [1]. It's worth noting that this was based on lockdown-era data.
The number if still quite high. I still have 3-4 mainly because my ISP gives me 1 and Amazon Prime bundles it. Were it not for those, I'd probably stick with 2. This is imperfect data because is it the same 4 or are some or all of these rotated? We just don't know.
Most of the data around this is how streaming is cannibalizing satellite and cable. But at this rate Netflix will cost $30+ in 10-15 years. Will it still have growing revenue and the same subscriber numbers? There is price elasticity here.
This makes sense to me as a strategy for most users.
I cancelled a year or two ago, but not for the price changes alone. I didn't like the new interface much, and I found myself endlessly scrolling through the same things looking for stuff to watch.
I'm not sure if Netflix vastly removed most of its content, or they just made discoverability a nightmare, but it felt often like I 'ran out of stuff to watch.'
It's hard to justify 20 something a month for what is essentially a few 6 episode shows that will last one season, and maybe 4 or 5 passable movies in a year. It seems rather silly to me to pay for that all year.
I think this is a lot more common and I suspect people decide to do monthly and that they'll cancel after catching up on shows ... and then they don't cancel. So I'm sure the streaming services don't care that people do this because they might come out ahead anyways.
There's barely anything worth watching on Netflix anymore but somehow their stock is rising and they manage to increase subscription prices. I had been subscribing on and off for the past few years but recently almost never because anything worth watching (for me anyway, although I don't have some weird intricate taste in media content) is elsewhere.
I get mine with ads via VZW with HBO Max for $7/month; if it were not for that, I wouldn't keep it. Sure; I sometimes watch things on there, but it's really an awful library these days.
This is a no brainer for Netflix and any other streaming service. I have NO IDEA what I pay for all my streaming, whether it comes thru a credit card/cell phone benefit or not, nor even who pays for it (e.g. me, or my partner, or someone in my extended family).
I think this is true for many. Hence paid services that will keep track of subscriptions for you. I saw somewhere a proposal to force subscription services to refund you if you didn't interact with it at all during the payment period. That seems reasonable. If it's only profitable through people's inattention, it's a leech and shouldn't exist.
My wife is a big movie/drama series watcher. She will occasionally flips through Netflix catalog, but will always check first if the series has finished or not. If it isn't, she'll not bother. There are so many series that Netflix started but didn't finish. That and a lot of fodder movies Netflix produced.
So in the end, my wife usually doesn't end up watching anything on Netflix. We only have that account because it was sponsored by T-mobile. Otherwise, we'd not be subscribing to Netflix.
What would be great is if the EU makes some kind of regulation (it worked for usb-c?) about some kind of interoperable streaming platform pricing that forces a kind of standardization across platforms and allows at least a little bit of customization.
Let me opt into or out of ads, and let me "switch channels" across multiple different streaming services on a standardized interface with predictable pricing. Is that so crazy?
The issue is the Netflix doesn't really have that much more of a compelling catalog than anyone else, their tech is not a differentiator anymore, I might like the stuff on there right now more than Disney+ but that might change later.
The fact that what's keeping anyone on Netflix is only a slightly bothersome switching cost is probably bad news for them long-term.
Why do we need to regulate how companies make their products if people are not forced to use them or are not a basic necessity? Don’t like Netflix? Too expensive? Don’t buy it. Vote with your wallet.
In the general form you post your question there are several answers, for example because the price of anarchy is too high (charger plugs), or the products at dangerous (drugs), or to avoid externalities. Whether there are good arguments in the case of streaming is a different question.
I would love for a service to automate cycling through services. Some small fee to automate getting a month or two of service from a selection of providers and just rotate. I don't need year round Netflix, Hulu and Disney but I think I'd be in trouble if I cancelled all of them.
Anyone wanna startup?
I already canceled last year. It's too bad, because there is a lot of Netflix content that I like. It just seems that it takes much more time clicking around to find it, and I don't have time for that. I used Netflix on Roku, and the UX is abysmal.
Question for anyone who works in this space: is the reason why most (all?) streaming services I see have the same exact UI problems because they are copying each other, or is it because of some constraint in the Roku API which doesn't allow them to fix them? For example, on Netflix, Amazon and Youtube, if I click down to a new row, (say, from Recommended for You to Action Movies), many of the icons shown will be for content that was already offered in the rows above. Like, I've already said no to this movie five times in the last minute, why do you keep asking? It's pure waste. I figure at least one of the streaming services would do things differently (and thus gain market share), but I haven't seen one. Is it due to platform limitations?
you can get a seedbox with 1T of storage for about 6€/month.
That gives you access to basically all popular movies and tv series in 4k, most media in 1080p and spotty access to older/niche releases you'd not be able to watch on mainstream streaming platforms.
I remember signing up to Netflix to watch house of cards back in the early 2010s and being absolutely blown away.
I don’t think there’s been a single show on Netflix I’ve genuinely looked forward to in the past couple of years. It’s like they completely gave up on quality content and just shovel out the most mediocre slop. I’m amazed people still pay these ever increasing prices.
In the early days, Netflix benefited from other media companies not recognizing streaming for what it was: their replacement. They licensed content to Netflix cheaply without thinking about how it would impact DVD sales or cable tv subscriptions.
It's kinda like how IBM didn't see the value in software and that let Microsoft become Microsoft.
I am still trying to recover from whatever Witcher season 3 broke in my brain by its audaciously low quality.
I was kicked out of the suspension of disbelief so hard I can't unsee things about the production process now, like makeup, continuity, costuming, sound design.
It was like the whole crew from script to editor just gave up, totally bizarre for headliner content.
Severance (Apple TV) and Fallout (Amazon Prime) are pretty amazing TV shows that came out somewhat recently. Nothing on top of my mind came out of Netflix for which I really felt the need of resubscribing.
I miss the quality of TV shows we reached with Mr. Robot, Silicon Valley, Utopia (UK), and Westworld :(
I pretty much declared streaming show bankruptcy after sitting through Severance season 2 last year.
I know a lot of people liked it and maybe I'm just cynical, but to me it seems like every "serious" streaming show eventually falls victim to the "stretch a 2 hour movie's plot across a 12 - 16 hour season" strategy. They know it works because enough people binge watch or feel compelled to finish a series they've started.
At this point, if I'm watching a show then it's something where the episodes are sufficiently satisfying self-contained stories (e.g. something like Star Trek, X-Files, sitcoms). If I want something with a more involved plot, then I'll watch a movie. These formats are better because the limited runtime requires the creators to be intentional about what they dedicate screen time to. Meanwhile in a modern "story-driven" streamslop show it's painfully obvious when they're just padding out the runtime with fluff to make it to 8 episodes.
Of course there are exceptions to this, and there are stories for which a miniseries or a long-form series is the ideal video medium to convey them. But what happens so often is that you get 1-2 seasons of compelling storytelling followed by N more mediocre seasons that keep getting made because enough people keep watching. And the latter are just not worth the time investment.
I won't be cancelling by subscription because I don't have one :) I have found I get way more value out of subscribing for 1-2 months to a service and then switching to another or going a few months without any.
At this point, netflix will keep raising prices. Because they can, and because they have to as a public company beholden to shareholders. I'm not sure there are other markets or other products/services they could expand into, i think they've already reached a point of saturation.
I've been subbed since 2008 (before streaming with DVDs).
My bill has increased for each increase they introduced. The last bill for the standard 1080p no ads plan was $19.56 (before this new price update). It was about half that when I first signed up.
To be honest I'm going to cancel, not because I can't afford it but because they keep raising their prices very frequently and it has hit the point now where I'm not interested in paying more so they have lost a lifetime customer.
I find it funny how they also only show you the last 1 year of billing history. It's a nice dark pattern to not let you easily see how much prices have gone up over the years. You have to go through the account cancellation menu just to see when you first joined.
Honestly, having parted for the seven seas years ago, every time I check I'm surprised how much the frog's been boiled.
General quality seems on par with soap opera slop, shows look like they've become a genre itself with different structure and even lightning, there's more trash tv there than there used to be in cable (which saying something), etc.
I cancelled Netflix long ago, they started cancelling their best shows (like 1899, etc) and producing absolute garbage. I mean just look at the quality of early/peak Netflix to now. Stranger Things is a great example, the decline is visible not just in the story but in the visuals. The documentaries are also bad now, I watched the "Manosphere" at someone's house, and while you can agree with the premise that these people are deranged, it was clearly a cash grab and didn't really move the needle. Then the catalogue has been gutted, and it's just mostly garbage now. Just awful stuff.
The last truly remarkable series they had was Dark. Everything since has slid into being for low attention span people on their phones, and for that reason I no longer give it my attention, or money. I guess it's working out for them, since they keep printing money...but I think it won't last forever. Look at Disney, the decline can come quick once the cracks turn into fault lines.
While I haven't watched it, the fate of _1899_ is why I've pretty much given up on TV --- I'm _not_ going to watch anything until I know that:
- the story has been completed (_Dark Matter_ is the poster child for this)
- the ending makes sense as part of a coherent whole (the _Battlestar Galactica_ reboot still enrages me)
then, maybe I'll find time to devote to something --- until then, I've got books to read, code to write, projects to build, home improvements to make, and a yard to weed/maintain and trees which need to be harvested for lumber....
Good for them, I cancelled my subscription simply because Linux support is so awful. It's impossible to watch in 4k, and even with 1080p you frequently get automatically downgraded to lower res bitrate whenever the window isn't focused. Absolutely daunting.
You know it's funny. Awhile ago I subscribed only to watch Stranger Things, I paid for the 1080 HD plan.
4K is clearly incentivized. Any how, I called to complain at the time. My opinion is the picture instantly got notably better when I tried standard HD again. There seems to be different degradations of 1080 and 4K.
Resolution is easy to see, but what you really want to pay for is the bitrate.
My wife and I canceled Netflix a while ago and went back to DVDs. An FYE store in our area recently had a store closing sale, so we bought three DVD players and snapped up all our favorite DVDs for a few bucks each.
No subscription, no mid-movie ads, and no worrying about this or that service losing the streaming rights to whatever.
Wait until you discover the local library! DVDs for days, and they let me check out a Netflix device now and then.
Cue up people shouting about how this is horrible and that they're totally going to cancel, only to be followed by Netflix making even more money next quarter.
Well they'd have to lose a huge percentage of people for this not to be profitable quarter over quarter. But it likely cuts in to future growth substantially.
And with what seems to now be an unavoidable economic storm as in-transit tankers dock and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz starts to be felt, there might be a larger than normal amount of people looking to cut costs in the coming year.
Or maybe not, people seem to have stopped responding to economic pressure by cutting costs in the US! When vacations got super expensive, people still spent, and increased their complaining. We will see what happens in 2026.
Netflix is more resilient to economic downturns than you'd think. For many people it's a higher ROI for entertainment when compared to a lot of other alternatives. e.g going to bars / restaurants / movie theaters.
Netflix, cable, etc. and other at home subscriptions tend to be the last things cut because people generally stay home more when the economy is bad so they want their in-home entertainment.
Customer resentment is slow to build up, but once the inertia is visible it's usually too late.
I just don't think that's true anymore. Netflix isn't going anywhere. Twitter and Reddit have taken highly visible user-hostile actions since back in 2023 and people stayed. People have become too passive and docile to switch anymore. The portion of the population that's discerning enough to leave is small.
I canceled about two years ago. Most of the stuff on netflix has already been watched. The new content is hit or miss.
Better off paying for Disney and downloading the rest.
Also, more people getting into pirating their content.
Pirating is honestly, by-far the least painful experience to watch things.
I recently started watching a series, and I figured I'd check if it's on any streaming services I have access to. I found it on Prime Video, but when I clicked into it, it needed some other separate subscription to a service I'd never heard of to watch it. And even then, it had like, seasons 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, and 8 of the 9 total seasons. If there was any chance I'd subscribe to watch it before, I definitely wasn't now. I couldn't even figure out where the remaining seasons are available to be watched legally. It's especially hard to find this information in Canada because searching "X where to watch" just gives you results of where things are available in America, which has completely different licensing deals.
So I found a torrent for the complete series and I've been watching it pain-free. Piracy tends to be my default now. It even has the advantage that I can frequently find a Bluray rip rather than a reduced bitrate internet stream. Anything I really like and I want to support the creators, I purchase a physical release, or official merchandise or something.
> Pirating is honestly, by-far the least painful experience to watch things.
No it's not. It's just the cheapest. Except for a few outliers like you describe, streaming is an order of magnitude less painful.
Yes, it is.
No ads or previews to skip before each episode. Skip button seems to appear at different times.
No waiting for the skip button for recaps or intros. Sometimes they decide not to appear. If you jump 10s, sometimes they don't appear. Most pirated shows are appropriately bookmarked.
No waiting for the "next episode" button to appear. Sometimes they decide not to appear. If you jump 10s, sometimes they don't appear.
Some services make it harder than it should be to get to the episode/season list.
Must use their player. Usually means controls and subtitles appear on top of video. Screen dimmed on pause. Wack-a-mole controls.
That's not even counting the "few outliers" that I seem to encounter frustratingly often.
> No it's not. It's just the cheapest.
If you set it up so it's convenient and usable by everyone in your house, including visitors, just like Netflix, it's not much cheaper. Electricity and occasional hard drive purchases add up. I bet mine averages out to ~$300/yr. I'm not sure whether just buying discs for stuff we actually watch, and the occasional 1-month binge-subscription for a series or something, would work out better, or not, but it's not a slam-dunk sure-win for piracy on the cost front.
> Except for a few outliers like you describe, streaming is an order of magnitude less painful.
Sort of. A good piracy server takes some time and effort to set up, certainly more than subscribing to even ten different streaming services would, and of course is beyond what most people can accomplish with computers, period.
However: 1) "I just plug in my laptop an play the movie" probably is less painful than having a bunch of streaming services, though not quite as friendly for all members of the household, and 2) Once it's set up, in actual use by people who aren't maintaining the system, the well-configured piracy server is less painful than streaming services, for those users.
I worked at Netflix, I'm a huge Netflix Stan, but even I have to agree pirating is way easier. Especially now that they started cracking down on account sharing.
Having to constantly re-authenticate in my own home is annoying as hell.
Only if you don't know about it, but otherwise it's literally two clicks, not even sign-in required
Yup. If my gf is streaming something and an ad appears, I'll trigger the download for it during the first ad break, and then when the second ad breaks, it'll most likely be finished downloading and then we switch to JellyFin.
The only use we have for streaming apps is finding what we want to watch.
Yep, and that's already way more sophisticated than it needs to be. I no longer bother with the collecting aspect and just download everything on the fly, usually takes less than 5 minutes
I'll admit it's a bit of a pain to initially setup, but it's a one time pain. With Plex + arr services already set up, it's definitely easier to pirate than use a streaming provider.
Now, if I want to pirate, I just go to my browser, search for a movie/TV show, tell it to download, and it ensures it shows up seamlessly in Plex.
The benefits:
- Searching is easier
- One interface (Plex) vs many streaming interfaces, each with its own quirks.
- You don't have to worry that they'll take the show away while you're in the middle of Season 3.
Plex is pretty easy to set up. The arr services, though, were a royal pain. If there's some automation that sets it all up for you on your machine, though, then it would be a game changer.
I'm fairly pro-streaming services. I want the content producers to get paid when I watch. However, Apple TV's royal screwups[1] drove me to the edge and I decided to go through the painful process of figuring out all the *arr services.
If the streaming services don't make it a pain, I won't even think about pirating.
(I'll add that there was one time I pirated a Netflix show - even though I had Netflix - and the audio in the pirated version was much better than if I watched directly with Netflix. Not sure why).
[1] Locked out because I couldn't confirm the CVV of a card that I had reported lost almost a year prior. All the attempts to change the card/account failed. Even with a new account, once you'd enter an updated CC, it would tie it to my old account because it would realize I'm the same person.
I didn't just get locked out of Apple TV. I got locked out of all Apple services until that CC expired. I could not even apply for a job at Apple unless I confirmed the CVV. Thank God I don't use Apple devices!
If there was a single service with everything on it then I'd agree with you. Hell, even cable was better where you could just choose packages of stuff you wanted to watch.
But as it is, no. It's more painful for the reasons I highlighted in my comment you replied to. It's an endless slog of hunting down where to find things, managing what you want to be subscribed to, shows and movies disappearing from your watchlist, acquisitions killing off apps and pushing you to new services and apps that are worse than the one before, etc. I don't have to deal with any of that because piracy is a better service.
It’s 2 clicks with tools like Stremio. I use Plex with the arr stack and sure it has more configuration needed upfront but once that’s done you no longer need to figure out which streaming service has what. Plus things like realdebrid mean you don’t even need storage anymore.
I host a Jellyfin + Jellyseer combo for my friends. It makes pirating as easy as Netflix, except you don’t have to worry about “on which platform is this available?”
I don’t understand why with music streaming, every service has all the same songs, but with video streaming, everything is locked to just one service.
I canceled my Netflix subscription when the TV app was crashing every time I try to use my USB headset when playing their content. Prob some DRM b.s.
How is pirating harder than streaming?
They're, at worst, equal.
If I have a show/movie I want to watch, I first have to go to an indexing site like JustWatch to figure out which streaming service it's on. If it's not on any, or not on one I'm subbed to, I'm already having to go pirate.
Whereas when pirating, I typically just search my tracker for the show I want to watch, sort the results by most seeders, then download the highest one. I just save the .torrent on the shared network folder on my Raspberry Pi (Which literally just shows up as Z:\torrentfiles), and Transmission starts downloading it. A couple minutes later, it's ready and I sit on my couch and watch it.
I will grant you that the initial setup takes a little more effort. I signed up for a private tracker where torrents are vetted. I had to configure Transmission to auto-download. I had to install Kodi. But...meh? That's it? All that takes less than 10 minutes and only has to be done once.
If you're still using pirate software akin to LimeWire where you have to wade through results like "Pluribus-S01E01.mpg.exe" and deal with results where for some reason people renamed files (Back in the KaZaA days, I downloaded "JackAss.avi" expecting it to be the Jackass movie and it was actually Fight Club. WHY!?), then yeah, pirating is a pain in the ass. But otherwise, nah, it's really easy.
EDIT: As others have mentioned, pirated content is simply easier to consume. I can watch offline and have full control over playback. Never any ads or unskippable content.
nah, it's definitely a better UX if you do it right.
There are "shitty" ways to do piracy (usually the sketchy streaming alternatives). But the media management and playback tooling is genuinely great right now.
I still buy most of my media, but I pick up cheap physical copies of things and put them on a NAS for playback through jellyfin.
It's... MILES better than netflix/amazon/hulu/etc. No ads, no bullshit, no marketing, no "self-promotion that's totally not an ad, wink wink". Just your media.
Playback is per-user, it keeps all your stuff just fine, you can resume later from wherever you left off, I can shuffle series (great for kids shows like Arthur or magic school bus), and it's never offline, down, or unavailable.
---
Basically - you're very confused. I have "streaming" it just comes out of my own equipment, playing my own content. All the affordances are there and it has none of the bullshit.
I've been out of that scene for a long time, hasn't Netflix implemented a bunch of anti-piracy methods, or are people just recording HDMI/DisplayPort output and saving it?
It's easier to torrent stuff than to get 4K in Netflix on Linux.
Can't even get 4K on most streaming services on macOS now... It's not just Linux anymore.
Netflix lets you in Safari[1]; Disney+ limits you to 1080p[2]; and Hulu limits you to 720p[3].
[1]: https://help.netflix.com/en/node/55764 ("Mac computer with an Apple processor or Apple T2 Security chip").
[2]: https://help.disneyplus.com/article/disneyplus-video-quality ("Please note 4K streaming is not available on computer browsers").
[3]: https://help.hulu.com/article/hulu-video-quality ("Hulu.com streams in quality up to 720p").
Even the 4K you get can hardly be considered 4K, awful bitrate.
Too bad most people are okay with this so it's never gonna change.
If people were not okay with it, it still wouldn’t change anything unless there was competition. There’s no incentive.
Reading around a bit, yes to Netflix adding anti-piracy measures, maybe to folks recording HDMI/DisplayPort.
Apparently, Netflix is using steganography/content watermarks in their 4k content itself to trace users who are pirating. This is from a totally unsourced Reddit thread[0] but they do reference a real company which claims to do this watermarking[1]. The claim is that in addition to Netflix requiring 4k content to be available only on platforms with Trusted Execution Environments[2], Netflix also encodes each ~10 second "chunk" of the video stream into at least 2 different versions: an Y and a Z version. Then, they serve each customer a unique series of chunks when that customer streams their content, e.g. YYZYZZZYZYYZYZYYZZYZYYZ. Then when content leaks, Netflix can examine each chunk of the leaked content to extract the ID of the user who streamed the content. Apparently, Netflix can encode a lot more than just the userID, they can also encode stuff like the individual device ID, the TEE key ID, etc.
I know you might be thinking "I could do something to defeat that" and you're probably right (e.g. take streams from multiple users and intercut them so that the bits of the watermark through time are being constantly shuffled), but I'll also bet that there's many layers of steganography we don't know about, and unless you get them all, you'll not escape scot-free.
[0] - https://www.reddit.com/r/Piracy/comments/1rqkyjg/with_a_lot_...
[1] - https://irdeto.com/video-entertainment/irdeto-anti-piracy
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_execution_environment
Yes, apparently this is what Netflix is doing.
But the only real world impact is that the device that was used to stream that 4K content gets blacklisted at the hardware level.
To workaround this, piracy groups try to batch 4K rips because they know that the device will be burned soon after they upload the content. They then acquire another device, and the game of whack-a-mole continues.
There are some interesting discussions in this HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46803451
Not that I would ever pirate a movie because I'm a good boy, but I remember the Cinavia DRM that affected Blu-ray players thirteen years ago.
I'm not 100% sure how it worked, but I guess it could do a similar kind of steganography-style thing to the audio track, where they would embed keys silently and the blu-ray player would check against that.
I'm not sure if anyone actually ever managed to defeat it, I think they just stopped implementing it in streaming boxes.
>you'll not escape scot-free.
What are they gonna do? Ban your account? You don't need to go through KYC to get a netflix account, so what's preventing you from using a prepaid card to sign up for another account?
I can’t lie It’s a pretty neat way to track who’s recording
Speaking from experience, I had Netflix for years without thinking about it, starting at $8/month. At that price I didn't care if I watched it or not. Then it went to $10, $12, etc. Once it got to $15-16 (I forget), I cancelled it.
I now sign up for 1-2 months a year to catch up on shows I like and just rotate which streaming services I have. Yes, this is anecdotal.
It's hard to find data on how common rotating streaming services is. I would guess not common. I found this from 2021 showing the number of streaming services the average US household has [1]. It's worth noting that this was based on lockdown-era data.
The number if still quite high. I still have 3-4 mainly because my ISP gives me 1 and Amazon Prime bundles it. Were it not for those, I'd probably stick with 2. This is imperfect data because is it the same 4 or are some or all of these rotated? We just don't know.
Most of the data around this is how streaming is cannibalizing satellite and cable. But at this rate Netflix will cost $30+ in 10-15 years. Will it still have growing revenue and the same subscriber numbers? There is price elasticity here.
[1]: https://www.thewrap.com/u-s-households-with-4-streaming-serv...
This makes sense to me as a strategy for most users.
I cancelled a year or two ago, but not for the price changes alone. I didn't like the new interface much, and I found myself endlessly scrolling through the same things looking for stuff to watch.
I'm not sure if Netflix vastly removed most of its content, or they just made discoverability a nightmare, but it felt often like I 'ran out of stuff to watch.'
It's hard to justify 20 something a month for what is essentially a few 6 episode shows that will last one season, and maybe 4 or 5 passable movies in a year. It seems rather silly to me to pay for that all year.
I think this is a lot more common and I suspect people decide to do monthly and that they'll cancel after catching up on shows ... and then they don't cancel. So I'm sure the streaming services don't care that people do this because they might come out ahead anyways.
Do you think they think they're going to meaningfully effect Netflix's bottom line?
Or are they just trying to chat online about the purchase decision topic at hand?
You do realize capitalism can continue as long as there's at least 1 customer and they keep buying?
There's barely anything worth watching on Netflix anymore but somehow their stock is rising and they manage to increase subscription prices. I had been subscribing on and off for the past few years but recently almost never because anything worth watching (for me anyway, although I don't have some weird intricate taste in media content) is elsewhere.
I get mine with ads via VZW with HBO Max for $7/month; if it were not for that, I wouldn't keep it. Sure; I sometimes watch things on there, but it's really an awful library these days.
This is a no brainer for Netflix and any other streaming service. I have NO IDEA what I pay for all my streaming, whether it comes thru a credit card/cell phone benefit or not, nor even who pays for it (e.g. me, or my partner, or someone in my extended family).
They are profiting off of my ignorance.
I think this is true for many. Hence paid services that will keep track of subscriptions for you. I saw somewhere a proposal to force subscription services to refund you if you didn't interact with it at all during the payment period. That seems reasonable. If it's only profitable through people's inattention, it's a leech and shouldn't exist.
My wife is a big movie/drama series watcher. She will occasionally flips through Netflix catalog, but will always check first if the series has finished or not. If it isn't, she'll not bother. There are so many series that Netflix started but didn't finish. That and a lot of fodder movies Netflix produced.
So in the end, my wife usually doesn't end up watching anything on Netflix. We only have that account because it was sponsored by T-mobile. Otherwise, we'd not be subscribing to Netflix.
What would be great is if the EU makes some kind of regulation (it worked for usb-c?) about some kind of interoperable streaming platform pricing that forces a kind of standardization across platforms and allows at least a little bit of customization.
Let me opt into or out of ads, and let me "switch channels" across multiple different streaming services on a standardized interface with predictable pricing. Is that so crazy?
The issue is the Netflix doesn't really have that much more of a compelling catalog than anyone else, their tech is not a differentiator anymore, I might like the stuff on there right now more than Disney+ but that might change later.
The fact that what's keeping anyone on Netflix is only a slightly bothersome switching cost is probably bad news for them long-term.
Why do we need to regulate how companies make their products if people are not forced to use them or are not a basic necessity? Don’t like Netflix? Too expensive? Don’t buy it. Vote with your wallet.
In the general form you post your question there are several answers, for example because the price of anarchy is too high (charger plugs), or the products at dangerous (drugs), or to avoid externalities. Whether there are good arguments in the case of streaming is a different question.
I would love for a service to automate cycling through services. Some small fee to automate getting a month or two of service from a selection of providers and just rotate. I don't need year round Netflix, Hulu and Disney but I think I'd be in trouble if I cancelled all of them. Anyone wanna startup?
Jellyfin.
I always thought that was just a Plex alternative. I’ll have to give it a second look.
I already canceled last year. It's too bad, because there is a lot of Netflix content that I like. It just seems that it takes much more time clicking around to find it, and I don't have time for that. I used Netflix on Roku, and the UX is abysmal.
Question for anyone who works in this space: is the reason why most (all?) streaming services I see have the same exact UI problems because they are copying each other, or is it because of some constraint in the Roku API which doesn't allow them to fix them? For example, on Netflix, Amazon and Youtube, if I click down to a new row, (say, from Recommended for You to Action Movies), many of the icons shown will be for content that was already offered in the rows above. Like, I've already said no to this movie five times in the last minute, why do you keep asking? It's pure waste. I figure at least one of the streaming services would do things differently (and thus gain market share), but I haven't seen one. Is it due to platform limitations?
you can get a seedbox with 1T of storage for about 6€/month. That gives you access to basically all popular movies and tv series in 4k, most media in 1080p and spotty access to older/niche releases you'd not be able to watch on mainstream streaming platforms.
PBS is $5/mo
I remember signing up to Netflix to watch house of cards back in the early 2010s and being absolutely blown away.
I don’t think there’s been a single show on Netflix I’ve genuinely looked forward to in the past couple of years. It’s like they completely gave up on quality content and just shovel out the most mediocre slop. I’m amazed people still pay these ever increasing prices.
In the early days, Netflix benefited from other media companies not recognizing streaming for what it was: their replacement. They licensed content to Netflix cheaply without thinking about how it would impact DVD sales or cable tv subscriptions.
It's kinda like how IBM didn't see the value in software and that let Microsoft become Microsoft.
I am still trying to recover from whatever Witcher season 3 broke in my brain by its audaciously low quality.
I was kicked out of the suspension of disbelief so hard I can't unsee things about the production process now, like makeup, continuity, costuming, sound design.
It was like the whole crew from script to editor just gave up, totally bizarre for headliner content.
Severance (Apple TV) and Fallout (Amazon Prime) are pretty amazing TV shows that came out somewhat recently. Nothing on top of my mind came out of Netflix for which I really felt the need of resubscribing.
I miss the quality of TV shows we reached with Mr. Robot, Silicon Valley, Utopia (UK), and Westworld :(
I pretty much declared streaming show bankruptcy after sitting through Severance season 2 last year.
I know a lot of people liked it and maybe I'm just cynical, but to me it seems like every "serious" streaming show eventually falls victim to the "stretch a 2 hour movie's plot across a 12 - 16 hour season" strategy. They know it works because enough people binge watch or feel compelled to finish a series they've started.
At this point, if I'm watching a show then it's something where the episodes are sufficiently satisfying self-contained stories (e.g. something like Star Trek, X-Files, sitcoms). If I want something with a more involved plot, then I'll watch a movie. These formats are better because the limited runtime requires the creators to be intentional about what they dedicate screen time to. Meanwhile in a modern "story-driven" streamslop show it's painfully obvious when they're just padding out the runtime with fluff to make it to 8 episodes.
Of course there are exceptions to this, and there are stories for which a miniseries or a long-form series is the ideal video medium to convey them. But what happens so often is that you get 1-2 seasons of compelling storytelling followed by N more mediocre seasons that keep getting made because enough people keep watching. And the latter are just not worth the time investment.
* Silo (Apple TV)
* Pluribus (Apple TV)
* Paradise (Paramount+)
* Landman (Paramount+)
* A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (HBO Max)
First few seasons Netflix keeps it together before crapping the bed:
* Witcher (Netflix)
* Stranger Things (Netflix)
* Mindhunter (Netflix)
I also really liked Foundation on Apple TV
Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47536393
I won't be cancelling by subscription because I don't have one :) I have found I get way more value out of subscribing for 1-2 months to a service and then switching to another or going a few months without any.
At this point, netflix will keep raising prices. Because they can, and because they have to as a public company beholden to shareholders. I'm not sure there are other markets or other products/services they could expand into, i think they've already reached a point of saturation.
are existing subscribers grandfathered in or no?
Nope.
I've been subbed since 2008 (before streaming with DVDs).
My bill has increased for each increase they introduced. The last bill for the standard 1080p no ads plan was $19.56 (before this new price update). It was about half that when I first signed up.
To be honest I'm going to cancel, not because I can't afford it but because they keep raising their prices very frequently and it has hit the point now where I'm not interested in paying more so they have lost a lifetime customer.
I find it funny how they also only show you the last 1 year of billing history. It's a nice dark pattern to not let you easily see how much prices have gone up over the years. You have to go through the account cancellation menu just to see when you first joined.
The debt subsidies are over, time to pay the piper.
> The debt subsidies are over
So is all the content worth watching. I haven’t paid for Netflix in years.
Honestly, having parted for the seven seas years ago, every time I check I'm surprised how much the frog's been boiled.
General quality seems on par with soap opera slop, shows look like they've become a genre itself with different structure and even lightning, there's more trash tv there than there used to be in cable (which saying something), etc.
I cancelled Netflix long ago, they started cancelling their best shows (like 1899, etc) and producing absolute garbage. I mean just look at the quality of early/peak Netflix to now. Stranger Things is a great example, the decline is visible not just in the story but in the visuals. The documentaries are also bad now, I watched the "Manosphere" at someone's house, and while you can agree with the premise that these people are deranged, it was clearly a cash grab and didn't really move the needle. Then the catalogue has been gutted, and it's just mostly garbage now. Just awful stuff.
The last truly remarkable series they had was Dark. Everything since has slid into being for low attention span people on their phones, and for that reason I no longer give it my attention, or money. I guess it's working out for them, since they keep printing money...but I think it won't last forever. Look at Disney, the decline can come quick once the cracks turn into fault lines.
While I haven't watched it, the fate of _1899_ is why I've pretty much given up on TV --- I'm _not_ going to watch anything until I know that:
- the story has been completed (_Dark Matter_ is the poster child for this)
- the ending makes sense as part of a coherent whole (the _Battlestar Galactica_ reboot still enrages me)
then, maybe I'll find time to devote to something --- until then, I've got books to read, code to write, projects to build, home improvements to make, and a yard to weed/maintain and trees which need to be harvested for lumber....
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