And I axed Netflix. So we’re even.
I’m keeping them for my kids until that password thing actually happens, then I am gone.
And my bow
Why would you be even? They got rid of it because for whatever reason people complained about offering a more economical option. Use whatever streaming services you want though. At this point it’s just about content. I don’t get the random Netflix hate from Reddit in particular.
Or we could sail the high seas again.
Wait, you guys stopped? I used to have Netflix, Hulu/Disney+, Max, Prime, Paramount+/Showtime, and Peacock. I should have had access to pretty much any movie I wanted with all those subscriptions. Yet, at least once per month I decided I wanted to watch something either I had or hadn’t seen before and it’d be on some random service I don’t have. I refused to pay for more services so I’d just pirate it.
A week ago I cancelled them all and subscribed to a VPN. Piracy is cheaper, more convenient, and it pisses off the corpos. That’s a win/win in my book.
You should look at how to use the net better. No VPN needed and much faster and more secure.
The net? What are you on about?
Ok I’ll be a bit less vague.
Usenet.
Sonarr.
Radarr.
NZBGet.
Kodi with a few good add-ons
I never stopped. Streaming services are such a joke.
Yoho!
Yeeearrrrrrr!
Yea I tried signing up to Netflix again since they had added the new plans and ads. Didn’t last more than the first/initial month/payment. What hot garbage that experience was. The 90s experience of having a cable person come over and install something would have been more user friendly. They lost a lot of good will from me as a customer that day, I’m not sure I’ll ever go back.
What do you mean by the experience was hot garbage? Signing up for a netflix account? It’s about as straight forward as it can possibly get.
Chiefly, a bunch of compatibility issues arose because their ad tracking had a bunch of requirements for some reason. We went from being able to watch anything on our TV to only being able to watch Netflix in a laptop screen.
Part of that is that we keep older hardware going. But that hasn’t been a problem for any other streaming service up until now.
Not to mention that I was paying for … ads. Nah! I’m old enough to have gone through the same thing with cable TV. No ads at first, and then they crept in, and at some point you were sitting there wondering what you were paying for again.
There are no “ads” on netflix though? Are you calling “here are shows that you can watch on the streaming service that you’re paying for” ads?
I still don’t understand your sign up issue. Were you trying to sign up on a TV? There are no “ad tracking requirements” for any of their apps that run on a tv.
There are no “ads” on netflix though?
There are. That’s part of the whole point of their current payment plan system and its new business model.
I still don’t understand your sign up issue.
It wasn’t a signup issue, it was a usability issue. For whatever reason, their new ad-based system introduced a bunch of tech requirements that meant stream options were all of a sudden limited, in a way, very conspicuously, no other streaming platform I’ve used is. In my situation, every other streaming platform could be played on my tv in some way. For Netflix though, that was either impossible or prohibitively difficult. This was on the ad plan. I’m not even sure if the ad-free plan would have been better, because all the limitations seemed to stem from the tech stack they were using.
Generally it’s agreed the best way to stop piracy is by offering a more convenient alternative. I generally for example don’t pirate video games available on Steam. With streaming services being so disjoint and expensive now I’ve gone back to pirating, at least with cable you can bundle channels.
best way to stop piracy is by offering a more convenient alternative. I generally for example don’t pirate video games available on Steam
I have towed this line for years. Recently Battlefield 2042 was available on steam for a great price so I snapped it up. I’d played it at release via a 1 month trial of EA play and it was absolute trash.
The game is totally fixed! The problem I have, is that I bought it on steam…and it forces me to install and keep myself logged in to the EA app anyway. It fails to launch the game every single time. I have to reboot my computer, manually log out of EA and log back in. It is an absolute shitfight, because EA gargle balls all day.
My point is, I bought the game on steam and I got absolutely duped. I’m all for a bigger library, but not if it means I have to install and use the other crappy apps anyway. Such a disappointment, I won’t be so quick to buy on steam anymore unless they implement a great big flashing red warning that the game is not actually on steam at all.
I swore off buying games from companies like EA, and Ubisoft years ago. I’m still bitter about getting duped with Far Cry 3.
Yeah, I get that stuff like that sucks. Funnily enough, I think it’s a little better on Linux because the EA games app is incapable of running on Linux so Proton boots it just long enough to get the game working, and then it fades back into the background. While Linux gaming is still not perfect, that kind of thing is one of the reasons I prefer it over gaming on Windows.
They do put the warning when a game needs a 3rd party launcher tho?
Not big enough, red enough, or flashing enough. I like steam a lot. I don’t like EA one little bit, or battlenet, or any of those other half-built apps.
I think with gaming that is a factor, but personally I think the larger deterrent for pirating games is at least for multiplayer games you can’t really pirate them while still being able to play online most of the time.
Gabe Newall said himself that piracy is never a price problem, but a service problem.
That’s such a simple yet legendary quote… moreso with each passing decade
Never have wise words rang more true…
Go Gaben!
Yep, and when netflix took off piracy took a dive because of how good it was. Then every studio decided they wanted their piece of the streaming pie so pulled all their content off netflix and released their own streaming service, so now we’re basically back to having to pay $100 a month to get access to everything, just like we were with cable before netflix changed the game. Shockingly, piracy has shot up again.
These companies are so stupid and greedy.
The only games I’ll pirate are ones that are no longer available to buy, because what else am I supposed to do?
It’s morally positive to pirate games that are no longer available for sale. Piracy is stealing, but in this case, you’re stealing from the void so there’s no harm done, and preserving the game is a morally good thing to do.
at least with cable you can bundle channels
For about the same price as it currently costs to bundle all the major streaming platforms. Plus, cable never had anything near the amount of content we have now on streaming.
I think people who compare cable to streaming don’t remember what it was like before streaming
I think they forgot how tv works.
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Steam is definitely not as bad as you’re making it out to be.
I’ve had a very pleasant experience every time I’ve talked to Steam Support. What’s so bad about them?
The way Epic handled competition was by strong-handing exclusives constantly without actually providing a better service. Last time I bought a game from Epic, it didn’t even have a cart system to buy games in bulk. Couple that with the tolerance of cryptocurrency/blockchain and acquisitions of sites like Artstation and Bandcamp, and yeah - people have reasons to not like Epic. I’ve heard stories of people getting locked out of their banks because of the lack of a cart and they were buying a lot of games in a short amount of time. I’ve also heard stories about people’s Epic accounts getting breached because of Fortnite BS.
And I’m saying this as someone who uses multiple launchers. I hated Steam back in the mid-2010s (skipped the middleman and bought GTAV from Rockstar directly) and they were in quite a bad rut with Steam Greenlight and the paid mods fiasco. People were rightfully loudly critical of Steam and at a time, Valve really did not deserve taking a 30% cut. They’ve done a lot since then to recoup that lost trust and deserve the 30% cut, Proton and the Steam Deck being a massive part of that for many people.
Last time I bought a game from Epic, it didn’t even have a cart system to buy games in bulk.
While that seems like a pretty basic feature, I’d wager that they know that people don’t generally buy games in bulk unless they’re free.
People don’t really care about these issues - they want their “team” to win.
Yeah the amount of “No steam no buy” fanboys is absurd. They act like having to open a different program to see their games is like hacking into the matrix. Not to mention that there are already programs like GOG Galaxy that compile all of your games from all your services in to one GUI.
I used to be annoyed about the memory usage of running multiple game launchers but now it’s a bit of a non issue with 32gb ram. I don’t even remember what I had when it was an issue.
Why can we buy games cheaper on other services then?
Steam works and the prices are good and I don’t see them buying exclusives. That’s good enough for me nothing is perfect.
GOG is good if the game you want is on there. I got the ultimate edition of Fallout New Vegas for like £5. It was like £10-15 on Steam at the time. Great deal. The main issue is they’re strictly anti-DRM for offline games so the bigger developers are less inclined to put their games on there, but whatever.
yeah, exclusives are the big one for me. I choose to game on PC because it’s less bullshit. exclusives decidedly fall into the bullshit category and the EGS is full of them
A lot of it is the same we saw with the rise of Steam and the like in gaming
“People are just looking for a more convenient way to buy games and all this DRM is making it easier to pirate. Steam is awesome, but I might need to play in an airgapped environment in Iraq and steam’s offline mode is bad. So I might as well just pirate everything. Fucking Valve”
That said: Tinfoil hat and all, but I really do think the increasing rise of “Ugh, this streaming is so expensive and confusing. I should just get cable” is an astroturfing campaign. Because the two big elements of the SAG side of the strikes are streaming residuals and AI. And the advantage of cable tv is that the networks control who get the residuals. Take a look at where the cast and crew of Friends ended up, and you start to get an idea of why TBS will never stop airing reruns of that show. Same for Seinfeld and, to much lesser extents, Frasier and King of Queens and the like.
Which is why I expect the outcome will be to do hybrid models. And a lot of the current discourse is about making people think they want to have to “record” an episode of Becker rather than just choose to watch wherever they left off as a VOD.
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an episode of Becker
I haven’t seen that show in so long. It was cancelled way too soon. I may have to, um, acquire it…
It was a genuinely bad show. But Ted Danson is magical and can make the most unlikable and obnoxious sitcom characters into reflections of the soul that stick with you in ways they really shouldn’t.
I liked it, yes, it was because of Ted Danson. I would watch a show where Becker and Dr. Cox from Scrubs just had a sarcasm-off.
Same.
It isn’t the same, but it is well worth catching some Curb Your Enthusiasm clips on youtube. Ted Danson is a recurring character and his interactions with Larry are magnificent.
I’m not sure how you mean the last paragraph, but P+ already removed Star Trek Prodigy, and I think it just stopped “airing” so people might rightly want to “record” the show.
I think a much better comparison than Steam would be Spotify.
I use Plex for all my movies and TV shows for the same reasons you mentioned. All my stuff can be in one place instead of having to pay for Netflix, Hulu, Peacock, Disney+, HBO Max, Amazon Prime, and whatever other fucking shit is out there.
Plex also supports music libraries, but I don’t use that feature. Why? Because Spotify has literally 99.9% of all the music I want to listen to, and aside from maybe like Garth Brooks, the other 0.1% is on Youtube. Spotify did it right by just having a basic service that you can pay for and get everything you want. If I had to subscribe to Spotify, Tidal, Napster (Still a thing I guess?), and 4 other services just to access all the music I listen to, I’d go back to piracy.
With Spotify slowly starting to reach a limit in subscribers, it’s unfortunately only a matter of time until they start pulling what Netflix is doing and finding new ways to get money from customers.
Spotify is already making people pay for sound quality that’s akin to a TDK C90
Then just use Apple Music. Has the same roster of tracks but with better quality overall for free.
Audiophiles out here in denial of the fact that 99% of music is played via Bluetooth.
I don’t care if my streamed music isn’t the absolute best quality when I’m listening on AirPods or in my car.
What does Bluetooth have to do with it? First there are lossless Bluetooth codecs and even if you don’t use one of them, good source material still helps. Imagine a jpeg that was resaved multiple times to get an idea how artifacts stack.
Spotify’s codec should in theory even be good enough to not be distinguishable from CD quality, but somehow some songs just sound like shit anyway. I suspect it’s a problem with how they were digitised.
I’m using the free version of tidal instead. In the beginning I had a problem with some things not being on there, but that has mostly been resolved.
I’m also just using Sennheiser momentum true wireless 3. No fancy audiophile equipment.
What does Bluetooth have to do with it? First there are lossless Bluetooth codecs and even if you don’t use one of them, good source material still helps. Imagine a jpeg that was resaved multiple times to get an idea how artifacts stack.
Spotify’s codec should in theory even be good enough to not be distinguishable from CD quality, but somehow some songs just sound like shit anyway. I suspect it’s a problem with how they were digitised.
I’m using the free version of tidal instead. In the beginning I had a problem with some things not being on there, but that has mostly been resolved.
I’m also just using Sennheiser momentum true wireless 3. No fancy audiophile equipment.
Plex also supports music libraries, but I don’t use that feature. Why? Because Spotify has literally 99.9% of all the music I want to listen to, and aside from maybe like Garth Brooks, the other 0.1% is on Youtube. Spotify did it right by just having a basic service that you can pay for and get everything you want. If I had to subscribe to Spotify, Tidal, Napster (Still a thing I guess?), and 4 other services just to access all the music I listen to, I’d go back to piracy.
Spotify also has a free ad-supported service, which while it does have ads, isn’t as bad as radio, or needs you to go to the effort of pirating the music you want.
Also stopped pirating games when steam came around. And I stopped pirating shows and movies with the rise of streaming services. Now though, I’m looking into standing up a media server.
I respect that. I’m not setting up a media server because I would expose myself to legal liability, but the people brave enough to actually distribute the content I’m consuming have my full respect.
i have crappy internet and there’s no way to preload a movie with netflix so the service is useless to me. i have to torrent
That’s unfortunate but understandable.
I buy steam games, even ones I’ve already pirated, for a few reasons.
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Quick and easy downloads
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Seamless updates
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Almost all my other purchased games in one place.
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Cloud saves
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Durability, just knowing my games will be available to download on my next PC for the foreseeable future.
And I pirate just about everything I watch mainly because I’m not willing to play musical subscriptions to watch the shows I want to see at the end of a long day.
If the film industry had a service that offered a similar experience to a Plex share, I’d pay quite a bit for it. But instead they have this system designed to extract maximum value from every viewer, and I’m tired of it.
Gabe Newell was right on the money when he said piracy is a service issue, not a price issue.
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I don’t think Netflix could get any more convenient than it already is though.
Convenience would be knowing whether the show I’ve queued up to watch will remain on the service, or getting warned well ahead of time if it’s going to expire. Or having every season of a serialized show available or at least something showing that not all of it is on the service before you get deep into it and suddenly cut off halfway through. Or easy access to my watch history and likes, as well as more robust settings (or heck, any settings) to tailor the way content is shown so I can get a consistent user experience whether I’m browsing new shows or diving back into the next episode of something.
I think Netflix could get a lot more convenient.
That’s very fair. My bad, I was narrow-minded and only thought about the UI.
They could let you share your login with your family members that don’t live in the same house for a start, rather than making them create their own account having to pay $8 (or whatever it is in your country) per family household on my account.
As that person said, it should be like Plex - I pay for access and then I can share it with family without an extra charge. Netflix is now costing me like $50 a month just so myself and some of my family members can watch it. We probably won’t be subscribed for much longer, and will just rely on my Plex library.
To add onto this, when someone who can’t afford something pirates something, there is no lost sale because there never was a sale there to begin with. It didn’t take any money away from the company since they were never going to see any money from that person.
With that said, the only piracy I partake in is for archival purposes, and like you I buy Steam games regardless because it’s too convenient like you said.
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You still can…
I think Hulu has a decent bundle with Disney, and Paramount with Showtime isn’t bad.
That’s like 4 for 20 bucks. And lots of cell plans come with one free. So it wouldn’t be hard to get a lot of options for 20-40, which is still way cheaper than cable.
Netflix is just starting to get real expensive. If they’d have kept some of their originals from the last couple years I wouldn’t think of canceling, but since they cancel those shows a week after a season drops, I’ll probably drop Netflix soon.
still asking too much, I’ll keep sailing the seas if that’s how much it costs. Plex and jellyfin currently fill this role for free
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Everyone’s finances are different.
I cancelled Netflix last month and had only kept it that long for family members.
After cancelling, I got a welcome back email because they’re apparently happy to let anyone logged in reactivate the subscription…
So I contacted them again to cancel, get a refund and ask what happened.
Then I decided I wanted to remove my card details from the account, but apparently you can only do that by contacting support…
So they think it’s okay to let anyone restart the subscription from a TV without entering a password, but they’ll make you contact support to remove card details…
Probably a good reason why you shouldn’t share your sub but netflix should have an easier setting to disable it so it is on them.
I mean, the sub is designed to be shared within a household, that’s why they have profiles…
The problem is Netflix letting a sub profile reactivate the subscription without providing a password.
Chargeback
Would almost definitely be rejected.
“You” cancelled your subscription. “You” renewed it. Netflix gladly charged you
It doesn’t matter that “you” in this case is the owner of the CC and their mother. “You” purchased a month of netflix and got it.
And on the off chance your credit card company DID just give you the money back and penalize netflix without asking any questions? Then this becomes fraud and netflix have good lawyers AND would love to put the fear of god into account sharers.
I’d give the solution, but I’d be put on multiple lists.
Why would changing a password put you on a list?
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Okay then, I was just wondering if this was the right time to point out that the home addresses of Netflix board members are publicly available information.
I do not advocate violent or illegal activities. I encourage readers to utilize critical thinking and sound judgement.
I would like to say eat the rich, thanks
Only if you plan to never do business with them ever again. I did that for a ps4 game on the PlayStation store that didn’t work with no refunds, and Sony locked down my account until I paid them that money. Pretty sure they warned that next time they won’t be so nice. Pretty fucked up.
It’s not fucked up at all. Doing a charge back for what you did is basically stealing. You kept the game and got your money back.
If it didn’t work and there were no refunds, then what the hell else do you do? There was stealing, but it wasn’t this guy.
Sure, but there are no PS4 digital games that “don’t work”.
I honestly can’t remember the exact situation, but I believe it was related to mistakenly buying something that was an add-on or dlc for a game I didn’t own, thinking it was a bundle with the game AND the add-on. It may even have been my fault, though it was certainly misleading.
But it was about $13 on an account that has spent literally thousands. They blocked my account and I couldn’t connect to their network with my ps4/ps5 until I bought ~$13 in PlayStation store credit and added it to my account.
Great way to treat a loyal customer. It’s almost like they know very well that they have all the power in this dynamic, and that I wasn’t going to give up thousands of dollars in games over 13 bucks.
When they get a customer locked in like that, they know they can get away with anything, and they do.
You can call it what you want, but it’s not unethical. I’m not even sure what they did would even be legal in Europe
I only kept the game, because they have no mechanism for returning it. I didn’t want the game.
You’re also ignoring the power dynamic here. The consumer has zero power in situations like this. A charge back is one of the few tools we have to try to avoid being taken advantage by corporations.
What, am I going to sue Sony Computer Entertainment, and best them in court? Or is it more likely that they’re aware that they hold all of the power in this dynamic?
Any “power dynamic” is not the point. You bought something and then tried to circumvent it to get your money back while keeping the content.
Does Sony’s refund policy suck? Yep, it does.
Is what you did essentially stealing? Also yes.
Doing chargebacks is a common scam btw. People will buy something, get the item or service, then do a charge back to get their money back, with the bank/provider doing it and then putting the burden on the retailer to prove that the person got what they paid for, which is often impossible.
Think about it like buying something on eBay, getting it, then asking ebay for your money back saying that you never received the item.
Just about everywhere does that. People love throwing around the charge back option on the internet but it often fucked you over. Some companies use 3rd party payment processors so it can not only ban you from the company you charged back but also anything else using that processor.
Yeah doing a charge back is a last resort and should only be used when you’ve actually been screwed over and you don’t mind the account/service that you’re doing the charge back against being permanently banned.
I use privacy.com, free service, let’s you create a virtual card for each subscription, then pause or cancel a card.
This way if I cancel Netflix I can also pause the card, if they try and bill be it’d be processed as a failed transaction.
Free teir only let’s you make 6 cards / month but after a couple months you should be able to get everything moved over.
(Also cards are locked to the vendor so if the card gets compromised it can’t be used anywhere else)
Only time I ever did a chargeback like that was from a health app with virtual doctor visit. App was so bad that I wasn’t able to communicate with the person due to crashes every time you type a letter and attachments crashing that they left the call. Took like 4 months but my bank sided with me. Fortunately if they ban me from that app I don’t think much is lost lol
Change the password before you deactivate again?
Can I offer you a free tier in these trying times?
You are a saint.
When asked for comment a Senior Executive, who asked not to be named, responded, “At that price point we’re rather have them pirate the shows than have to deal with the customer service and billing headaches.”
We axed Netflix two years ago.
I was a Netflix DVD subscriber before they released a Wii streaming disc then started streaming Netflix back when it was glorious with all your favorite shows. Eventually I downgraded to the cheap $8 plan for a single user at 1080p resolution which was fine - my old television is still 1080p native resolution.
Then they quietly raised the price… and dropped the resolution to 720p without telling me. Finally I had enough - after more than a decade I finally cancelled my Netflix account last year and haven’t looked back.
I don’t miss their “netflix originals” which only last for one or two seasons before getting canned because netflix needs more viewership to justify the investments.
Truth be told, I don’t watch must television (or even youtube) in general - I have better things to do with my time than vegetating on a couch watching a tv screen.
