Netflix is planning to raise prices… again

Save offline or bookmark in case it gets deleted.

Also share it when you can in other places so people know what pages to avoid.

Arghh

I posted another comment with a ton of useful media sources to avoid. You might want to save that comment as well.

And definitely avoid libgen and scihub, lest you accidentally learn something new without paying the exorbitant fees.

You the real MVP.

Cloudstream says you need to install sites from repositories in order to stream. What sites or repositories should I avoid at all costs?

please also don't check about protonVPN.

Any guide on how to find the usenet groups? I'd hate to stumble upon them accidentally, so it's best to be prepared.

Btw, you should also never get a seedbox to torrent anonymously. You also need to stay away from private trackers.

After learning how to do it on lemmy.world/c/selfhosted ! Madness

Depends on the country. In the U.S., instead of chasing users themselves, they have leveraged the Internet providers to act as enforcers. If you torrent something they first send you notice of violation from your Internet provider.

If you continue to torrent, they can
cancel your service or the copyright holder can start legal action.

Honestly, I would never torrent anything anymore. There are great webpages that offer streaming for no cost.

Just get a VPN and torrent like normal in the 2000s. Nothing has changed. Seeding is not really a big deal anymore because everyone's internet speeds are so fast.

They generally ignore it unless you become excessive and then they just warn you, nothing horrible. But if you do it over a VPN, they can’t do anything. Or do it from a cloud instance from Amazon, or Google, and then download the files locally from there.

I personally love QBtorrent and the built in search engine, plus if you look for it there are block lists you can quickly install into it that blocks you from connecting to known IP addresses of copyright enforcers but I'd still recommend a VPN anyways for good measure from your ISP but those are cheap and easy too.

I definitely seed a lot more than I did in the 2000s but I have fiber and unlimited data so that's an easier ask.

There are supposedly great private torrent sites but I've been ok with the ones everyone else uses and haven't figured out if I need to do different.

I MUCH prefer Jellyfin to Plex. Jellyfin seems to have active development whereas Plex is more interested in adding in a ton of "features" (aka garbage) that I never ever wanted and continues to leave YEARS old bugs out in the wild. I think it won't be long until Plex enshittifies itself to death. They clearly have a financial situation that is not aligned with its users.

I tried but the technical gap from Plex to Jellyfin was too intense for me to try and make work at this time of my life. Plex works well for my purposes and I paid for the phone apps when needed ($6 per device I think).

I admire and support Jellyfin as FOSS and hope I can jump on when I have more time to make it work.

I can't for the life of me get HW encoding working with Jellyfin. Plex was just plug and play.

i7-11800H

worth checking out until you get to the cry for developers that they posted yesterday. fuck switching my media serving to a dying platform

I have the same but the one thing I can't get working is accessing overseer from outside the network (ie internet). I've read guides of course but at some point they start talking about domains and certificate signing and I start to have a siezure.

That's because people were creating their own 'streaming services' using pirated content and selling access to it using Hetzner servers, which is very bad for all parties involved because it brings a lot of negative attention when actual profits are being generated from distributing pirated material.

People thought hosting copyrighted content on someone's cloud and making it available to others was a good idea? 🤦🤦‍♀️🤦‍♂️

This is why we can't have nice things.

Plex is cracking down on pirated content.

I'm just as jaded and cynical as the next guy, but I think that this is a mischaracterization of that email. People were hosting Plex servers with thousands of users and terabytes of pirated content on Hetzner and selling access. I don't read them taking action as a signal for them blocking local libraries in the future.

That’s their entire userbase. Bold call haha

Good to know, hopefully this creates a drive to make alternatives a little more user friendly to set up

Gotta sell out to get more VC cash somehow /s

Google/learn about/consider these things

VPN, Usenet provider (i.e. EasyNews), Usenet indexers (i.e. NZBgeek), Usenet client (i.e. NZBget), Managing your library (Sonarr, Radar, Prowlarr, Filebot),

Media server & streaming (i.e. Plex, Jellyfin)

I watch through my firestick or android phones

I might be missing something, but there are lots of guides once you figure out what you're looking for. A little technical know-how makes things go smoother and faster though.

Also, what makes Usenet safer?

Running a VPN makes torrenting just as safe and you'll be paying a subscription fee for Usenet so it's a wash in my opinion.

I second this and I’m in the same boat as you

Sure, check through this comment thread as a few have already been mentioned.

"Do we really need all these CDNs everywhere?"

It‘s laughable to expect corporations to act against their only purpose. As soon as a company sells shares it takes the route of infinite growth which is impossible. First they grow their user base and once they start to inevitably stagnate, they start milking their costumers, shaving off features and laying off workers in order to grow their income. It is really the only way for them to remain existent when the market is saturated. They cannot stay in business when they make billions a year when these billions aren‘t even more billions than last year. You can‘t attract new investors that way and therefore cannot continue to exist. Enshittyfication only just started. It cannot possibly get better when they can‘t expand their user base, only worse. They know they will self destruct eventually, but that doesn‘t matter as long as shareholders get their piece of the cake and jump ship to sink the next one. Just being a massively profitable company is bad business if you‘re not growing. That‘s the state of capitalism we‘re in.

When the platform dies.

“first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. “

Source

Incorrect.

It will stop when our species exterminates itself out of greed.

Climate change will probably only thin our numbers by the billions as a result of of the owner's greed, but then they want to profit off AI, and CRISPR, and innumerable other potentially profitable means to our self-extinction.

The greed will stop when all the humans are dead almost certainly by our own hands, and humans are actively working to accomplish this.

Are we reading the same thing? Netflix has more competition now than it ever has. When Netflix had cheaper prices when it has no competition than it does now. Piracy has been making a huge resurgence as well.

I don't understand how people are ok with ads? They annoy me so much. It's wasting your time so it can attempt to manipulate you into buying stuff with the money you can't afford to spend.

To be fair, we only have their word for how many subscribers they have.

Well... New tech should make higher storage densities mainstream again in 1-2 years. Seagate just released 32TB HAMR drives for commercial use

I thought it was a balance between new shows getting better engagement than old shows, and contracts lasting 3 seasons, which required re-negotiations in favor of the talent. Basically a business model hyper-focused on subscriber growth metrics instead of subscriber retention.

I agree, but IMO part of the problem is people watching just whatever to pass time - and this is also going into the stats.

Actually, I don't think they care about retention at all, because to the industry retention = stagnation. They only care about new subscribers because that "shows" growth. They much prefer hearing "We increased subscriber counts by 10%!" over "We kept 100% of subscribers YoY!"

I wouldn't doubt there's collusion. It's very convenient that none of these services are taking advantage of this and are seemingly raising all of their prices simultaneously.

They tapping into the juicy "afraid to commit" market.

My seedbox price has never increased.

They also actively pigeon hole users into a small portion of their content, they've been stripping away all search and discovery functionality over the years. They are going down the route of "our algorithm is perfect and knows exactly what you want so why would you want to do anything else"

I bet there's a ton of content you'd actually enjoy that Netflix will never recommend to you because it's outside of what the algorithm thinks you want to see

I agree, I just hate that when they do have good shows they cancel it immediately 🤦. I cringed when they canceled 1899 and inside job.

I'd actually love a streaming service where you just pay like a flat price and it adds it library, the more you pay the longer the rental term up to like a full ownership price and the ability to download. Microtransaction the streaming service which makes me feel a bit yucky but at least I'd have control over how much I spent and you could build a more permanent library that someone else hosts

They're not great, but I haven't seen any ads on ad free. Their interface is weird as hell and it almost seems like they purposely bury things you've recently been watching which is weird.

No, bullshit. It was like 3 shows due to old licensing. This is not a thing

They used to do that for a handful of shows due to streaming contracts, but last time I checked (~2019) it was literally two shows. Is it more now?

No it doesn't. At most it shows what channel produces the show you are watching and when to expect more episodes, and it takes less than 5 seconds

Yeah cause collective strikes of a vocal minority work out so great in the end lol

Im at a stage where I am more than happy to pay for really good shows. It really isn't about price, just value. It's just been ages since NF made anything stellar.

They said about The OA (I loved season 1)...

Neflix describes The OA as "a big creative swing we were proud to take," but says that when it comes to deciding what to renew and what to cancel, "viewing versus cost" is always what it takes into account.

This philosophy means we get loads of average crap. They aren't a regular network, why the hell are they acting like it.

I've said before, because it's linked with delivery, Prime seems to be the only service willing to take risks, and they make some great stuff because of it. HBO seems to be a distant second.

Netflix's lowered revenue growth is the highlight. That's what they and their investors focus on, with subscriber satisfaction being an afterthought. The price hikes haven't shown any effect on that downward trend either. But hey, keep hiking I say. Fires burn bigger when fuel is added and these people can't differentiate water from gasoline. Having washed my hands of this company, I'm looking forward to further scrambling when revenue growth is nil and then negative and the stock drops and drops and the corporatists wail.

I'm sure they did the math they've calculated that the increases will offset the loss is subscribers. From the article it looked like the royalties will increase so less subscribers paying more is even more profitable.

The customers are suckers who will take a lot. Look up skylink satellite tv provider, and their "always free" tier that's currently 6,90€ a month.

They gave it for free just around the time analog tv was being decomissioned. And after they've captured the large userbase, who couldn't switch back, they pulled the trigger.

If you go with Mullvad (which is one of the best private VPN providers) you even save some money, as it's just 5 EUR/month. You can also take the 20 bucks that you would have given to Netflix and pay a seedbox company like RapidSeedbox to torrent anonymously.

Eventually they'll figure if they can get one person to pay 10 billion dollars a month, they can lose all their other subscribers and still hit their quarterly goals.