With the simultaneous rollout of restrictions on account sharing and price increases/addition of advertising, I’m cutting back severely on streaming services.
I allowed my streaming subscriptions to grow without thinking about it. Without trying to remember the constant merging and bundling, I was subscribed to probably a dozen services at one point. They ranged from Netflix and HBO and Hulu to Shudder and Showtime. I had Paramount, Criterion, Disney, Peacock, and others. I’d do the typical thing where I’d search for a movie, find it is exclusive to a platform, and grab the free trial and forget to cancel. I excused it if I found a movie even every couple of months on it. There were still nights where it’d take an hour to find something I wanted to watch. I was probably closing in on $200/month all told, and I don’t have sports subscriptions.
I’m interested in learning what other people are doing regarding the price hikes and service compromises. Are you cancelling? Are you taking advantage of bundles with your internet services? Are you rotating on some interval? Or are you not changing at all?
Can’t cancel what I didn’t have.
I had netflix for a month, because my nephew wanted to watch something. I bought one of these one month cards. At some point i thought: wait, isn’t my month over already? Why is netflix still working. They charged me through my internet provider. I had no idea that was even possible
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With gusto
Cancelled long ago. Now only subscriptions I still pay for are Spotify and Proton Plus. The rest I just get it from the high season.
Yeah it’s insane how expensive everything gets. I’m subscribed to a bunch of streaming services (like Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max, etc) and sometimes I use them a lot but HBO, for instance, I’ve only used a few times and it’s just sitting there on our smart TV taking up space and draining our bank account. But I got it when there was a really good deal and if I cancel and resubscribe I have to pay the full amount. Then again, I’m probably wasting more money with it now than I would’ve if I’d just cancelled and then resubscribed when I actually used it. Oops.
But yeah, I’m definitely not going to pay more for those services than I am now, so if the pricing gets even more ridiculous I’m out.
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Spotify with spotube and SoundCloud for music hulu, disney+ and Nebula (mabye even Netflix) for movies
200$ / month is insane, wow. From what I can tell, lots of people seem to start pirating way more. It looks like it’s common to be subbed to your favorite streaming service and put the rest on Plex.
Remember we’re a very small circle here, and the groups we run with are also pretty close knit, lots more in our groups may mean something but compared to everyone else it’s probably less than a blip.
I think it’s more common for people to rotate which service they’re subscribed to each month.
But piracy is still increasing in popularity.
I never use these. My wife does though, so keeping them is her call.
My husband and I canceled them all 3 days ago. We had Netflix, Prime, AppleTV+, Max, Paramount+, Hulu, Peacock, and Disney+. We’re moving back to Europe in November, so they all had to go. But even if we were to stay in the US, I’d probably just keep Prime, so I could just rent what I wanted to see and nothing else. Instead, I’ve stocked up with a few classic sci-fi Blu-rays to take with us in Europe, and we will have 2 US-coded BD players to keep us playing them until old age.
I’ve never paid for a streaming service in my life. You’re a sucker if you do.
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No because I never subscribed to any. I mooched off my father’s subscriptions :U
I did switch away and have been trying to convince him to use my Emby homeserver though.
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I’m on a pirate subscription. I use Premiumize with Stremio for movies and TV shows on demand and paying for an iptv service for live sports and ppv.
I never subscribed to the scam of streaming services to begin with and no one should.
Curious how they’re a “scam”?
Media rights, exclusive content and pricing are often ridiculous, but the end users gets what they’re paying for.
I get what you’re paying for, too. 🏴☠️
People don’t know what words mean anymore. Everything is hyperbole
Copyright/IP should exist for no more then 7 years then it should be public domain.
But the scam comes when Netflix mislead consumers about what was available on the service. Netflix for a long time marketed itself as a place where you had access to most every movie you wanted. But the streaming service quickly became inferior to the physical media service (rip). So for 15+ years, there were tens of thousands of titles available on the DVD service, that were not available on the digital service. And there was no indication that there was a difference between the two. So if you wanted to watch “Heat” on Netflix, you could. But only via the the physical media, not on-demand. Now you can’t actually watch Heat at all. Same with basically every movie from before the 90’s.
Additionally the “scam” comes from the disjunction between the consumer expectation from the marketing and the reality. You can of course watch a movie on Netflix on one day, but the next day you have to “explore title related to the move you were looking for.” Which I see as a scam. If i’m going to pay for a streaming service, every movie I want, should be available forever if it’s ever available at all.
I’ve been using Stremio with Real-Debrid for about 6 months now and I don’t see myself going back. It’s too perfect.
Could you elaborate? I looked up both services and it seems to just be a media front end and a downloading tool. How does that get you the actual files to watch.
Debris services (Real-Debrid, AllDebris) basically cache most popular torrents and give you direct https links to the video streams. Frontends for these services include Stremio, Syncler, etc. I adore both, but Stremio is much more lightweight which works better on my GoogleTV / FireStick. You select what you want to watch (the apps sync with Trakt, fwiw) and it immediately shows you the versions it has available that are cached. I choose 4K Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos whenever it’s available.
Thanks so much!! Seems like a cool service. Reminds me of popcorn time, which I don’t think works anymore. Are you still routing all your traffic through a VPN when using that? Seems like a privacy nightmare should any action be taken against those companies.
Naw, I don’t bother with a VPN since I’m not torrenting anything. I just set my router’s DNS to something other than the ISP’s default.
Ok, you got me. Do I need to have a VPN active while streaming via Debrid (or any third party add-on) to stay safe? Also, I can’t find “Real-Debrid” among the addons of stremio, only “Debrid Search”, is that the same? Anyway, thanks for making me aware!
You install the third party add on “torrentio”. There are guides out there
Only if you have torrenting enabled in the Real-Debrid add-on for Stremio. I disable torrenting, since I only want to use Debrid cache files.
Torrentio is the add-on where you add your Debrid connection and disable torrenting and narrow down your quality selections. Enjoy!
Awesome, thanks!
