- cross-posted to:
- piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- cross-posted to:
- piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
You must log in or register to comment.
The era of cheap streaming is over, now begins the era of free streaming
🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️
Bettle Juicing at its finest
Long live 1337x and Stremio.
Didn’t 1337x just get caught injecting bit coin mining software into their stuff?
You’re gonna get a bitcoin mining infection from a video file? lmao
ah yes! the good old video.mp4.exe
But Wednesday’s move to significantly bump prices, marked an acknowledgment by Iger of the media giant’s intent to squeeze more revenue out of streaming by pushing consumers to the advertising-supported plans, which have proven to be more profitable.
“The advertising marketplace for streaming is picking up,” Iger told investors on the quarterly earnings call. “It’s more healthy than the advertising marketplace for linear television. We believe in the future of advertising on our streaming platforms, both Disney+ and Hulu.”
This is extremely important for them. Netflix’s excellent deal for most of its streaming existence was obviously a thorn in the side of many other businesses. Even if streaming services can get you to pay an exorbitant amount of money on an ad-free tier, advertisers are frothing for the chance to advertise to you regardless. They want you to see their ads so badly. And let’s not forget all the big tech companies, Netflix included, were riding high during the free money days of 0% interest loans. Those days are over, and the bill is due. Wall Street wants its money. And we are all the ones who have to pay up. Cheap streaming is officially over.
This is why these companies, including Netflix, have all introduced ad tiers. Not only is it a great way for them to juice their revenue streams, but also every other company wants a permanent residence in your brain, and then some. Given the way things have been going since duo-eras of the COVID pandemic and corporate profit-based inflation, they don’t even need to collude on prices. All the execs need to do is look at the business press and say, “Hey, they’re getting away with increased prices and password sharing crackdowns. We can do the same thing. The pay pigs keep paying!”
I really cannot understand why advertising is such a huge business. Where does all the money spent on advertising really come from?
Big advertising budgets that are funded from the value alienated from exploited workers and consumers. Information asymmetry in the marketplace means that even if you make a superior product at a lower price, you could still be outcompeted by an expensive inferior product if more people know about that worse product and don’t know about your product.
That’s for most basic products anyway. Luxury products like bags and clothes are almost all marketing since the cost to create them is so low compared to their sales price. People buy them because of perceptions created by marketing and not any inherent value in the product itself.
As far as I know internet advertising is an economy destroying sunk cost fallacy. No one makes money off of it, but if they stop basically everything collapses catastrophically, so they just keep pouring more money in to it in hopes that someone will find a way to make it profitable before the bill comes due.
I’ll be completely unsurprised when streaming companies start enticing or forcing us into term agreements.
You know it’s coming. Why would a streaming company want a consumer buying one month, binging a single show they’re interested in, then immediately cancelling the subscription after, when you could guarantee a 6- or 12-month revenue stream for them?
Rents work this way; it wouldn’t be a surprise if the same playbook was adopted by these neo-feudalists.
Might fuck around and start invoicing companies for attention time, comprehension time, storage capacity, and of course the 500$ per instance recall fee.
We can go start pirating again
You guys stopped pirating?
When did we stop?
Yes
🪢 Heave-ho! Thieves and beggars!
Never shall we die! 🏴☠️deleted by creator
I’m not even going to bother with that, all the shows are shit.
Steaming and gaming companies are so bad these day motherfuckers are actually going outside and enjoying life.
I don’t know, my stremio app and torrent client is still working. The era of cheap streaming may be over, but the era of free streaming never ended!
sings Farewell and adieu to you greedy streamers.
Farewell and adieu, to you subscription pains
For we’re now returning to the torrents of the pirates
and we may ner see you curs’d streamers againWe’ll post and we’ll flame like true software pirates
we’ll post and we’ll flame, all over the net
Until we can find us an FTP server
And get all the slop that we’re ach’n to getWe really have a moral duty to make piracy as easy, one button, even grandpa can do it as possible.
Not for any, like, good of humanity reason.
But as part of my revenge against The Mouse.
I realized a year or so ago (after a letter from my isp) that I didn’t actually need to torrent anymore. There are websites like bflix.io (and I’m sure many others) that have basically everything streaming for free. Fuck subscriptions. Would maybe go back to torrenting if I got a vpn sorted out, but you’re not gonna get in trouble for streaming shit on a pirate website, so for now it’s the best solution I’ve found. Certainly not paying any of these assholes. Lol. Fuck outta here with that.
Proton mail has a free VPN that works really well. Switzerland is part of world coverage tier, but Netherlands is just as good at hiding torrenting from ISP’s. And it can even use a ‘stealth mode’ that works fairly well to get around VPN blockers by using unusual protocols for the traffic.
Does proton’s VPN free tier not block p2p file sharing usage?
Is there something like that that works on an nVidia Shield (Android TV)?
Rather not have the Uberspreadsheetboxen running just to watch Village of the Damned again…
Hell, I dunno. I just plug my laptop into a regular old tv via hdmi.
Is there a good way to watch on a proper TV? I find that all such sites are browser based, and I’m not keen on typing in urls with the remote control.
I’m paying for Spotify and Netflix because they are very convenient. I’m not paying for another 5 subscriptions because they maybe have this one show I would like to watch. They worked hard on fragmenting the marked and now they will complain people don’t want to pay for 10 different subscriptions
Music services are almost a necessity to me because of the amount of music I listen to, but it’s also a different animal. They all have mostly the same library, so you won’t typically be subscribing to more than one.
The problem with streaming video services is that most people watch a couple genres, and there’s content in every genre on every streaming platform. I watch a lot of scifi, for example. So I would need to subscribe to Apple TV for Silo and Foundation, Paramount+ for Star Trek, etc…
It’s an ironic end to the streaming wars. After pouring billions and billions of dollars into constructing supposedly revolutionary streaming platforms, and decimating the business models that had offered the industry stability for decades, the ultimate product looks awfully similar to what companies and consumers were trying to break free from in the first place.
I’ll still take streaming any day over cable.
No contract and you can put everything in rotation. Sign up for a month, binge, cancel, next.
Sign up for a month, binge, cancel, next.
That’s not going to last. As soon as they run the numbers and decide it’s worth it, they’ll create ways to lock you in.
The streaming companies are starting to get wise to that. They’ve started splitting seasons and releasing them separately so that you have to be subbed for 2 months.
I’d just wait until the second part is out, sub one month.
Sure until they start adding game mechanics like daily login rewards and episode “loot boxes” that give you a chance to increment your streaming battle pass so you finally have a shot at rolling for the show you actually want.
I got a holographic original extended Daenerys sex scene!
But you won’t see it at the same time as some others, the horror!
That’s a real concern if you’re at all worried about spoilers. It’s so easy just to have shit spoiled even if you try to avoid it. Passively hearing about it from school/workmates, social media, or even radio. The stupid radio spoiled the ending of Breaking Bad for me and I never got over it, I guess.
Well I’ll subscribe for the second month.
Or they could release one per week, two batches isn’t really “starting to get wise to that” imho. Either way, being patient is the best and only paying for one month
I think it’s just the beginning. They’ll split seasons eventually into 3 or more parts. Or if you wait till all seasons are released, they’ll paywall earlier parts. They know people won’t wait that long, especially with how easy it is to have things spoiled by social media or among friends/co-workers.
Not if they start to limit you to 3 episodes of a particular series per week
The difference between watching something programmers and on demand is big. I still detest the newer prices though coupled with the decline in interesting content.
era of torrenting unaffected
Honestly people should probably be thinking about future-proofing things and putting as much media as physically possible on to drives in anticipation of whatever the next wave of bullshit. At some point Samizdat2.0 will probably be the only way to preserve and share media under the capitalist censorship regime. They’re just going to keep cracking down and cracking down and cracking down until no one can move without bleeding for the privilege.
As they said in the bad old days: Keep circulating the tapes.
Until we can pull this whole bullshit edifice down, kick it in the kidneys a few times, and set it on fire the only way to protect media from the companies that “own” it is going to be little people with really big RAID arrays.
Is that true? Most of the best public trackers got shut down. Anything left has bots recording your IP and you’re getting a letter from your ISP.
If you’re not on a private ratio tracker or paid tracker it’s basically a non starter. So I’m not sure about unaffected era the last 10 years have been brutal for pirates via torrent.
VPN has been necessary for pirating for a long time. And fortunately a VPN is cheaper then any streaming service, and has other benefits besides.
If you’re torrenting without a VPN you’re doing it wrong. Also you should look at Usenet instead.
What’s the situation with usenet these days ? I preferred nzbs over torrents for several years but it just became impossible at around the time nzbmatrix chucked it in.
Better than ever! Seriously.
Indexers like NZBGeek, Drunkenslug, and NZBFinder have resulted in me getting almost anything I want, short of some obscure Australia series from the 80s. Providers are doing 2000+ days retention and I’m only using 1 myself, never even needed to get a backup on a different backbone.
Well that’s good to hear. Tormenting sucks in Australia.
And Soulseek.
You just need a VPN. Public trackers are generally fine.
I mean this is basically inevitable. We know that capitalism doesn't actually seek the lowest price as its evangelists usually preach, but the highest - and so there is no way that streaming will not balloon over time to a price comparable to the cable TV plans of the past.
🏴☠️ yo ho yo ho a pirate’s life for me 🏴☠️
Capitalism seeks the highest profit, but what that means depends on the customers.
With the Netflix password sharing crackdown risky bet, customers answered loud and clear: they are more than willing to pay more money to access the same content instead of standing their ground on the decision.
When there is actual competition and customers are demanding of what the offering should be, that’s when we see prices go down.
There are an increasing number of markets where monopolies and deals between companies leave people without any choice to make at all, but I don’t think the market of streaming services is an example of this.
In fact, consumers who bundle just a few streamers together in 2023 will find that the final cost is effectively the same as basic cable. Couple that reality with the introduction of ads into streaming and the end product eerily resembles on-demand cable.
I stepped away from having any home infrastructure other than a proper firewall about a decade ago when streaming was so affordable and content was so bountiful on the few streaming platforms that existed. Now I finds myself considering diving straight back into setting up a NAS and hosting locally at home again. Is Plex still a decent choice to stream from your collection while traveling?
Plex is still a good choice. I find that Jellyfin has better performance, recognizes and organized my media better, but it’s more complicated to set up remote access on jellyfin.
I would prefer to move to Jellyfin long-term but I need to get access to port forwarding from my landlord first.
The era of free streaming is still going strong.
All hail the new golden age of piracy!
Sad thing is that most people are far too lazy and will just pay the streaming cost
No worries, I wasn’t paying anyway!
🏴☠️ 🏴☠️ 🏴☠️
I jumped ship at price hikes and no account sharing.
