Technology @lemmy.world ForgottenFlux @lemmy.world 10mo ago

All the ways streaming services are aggravating their subscribers this week

arstechnica.com All the ways streaming services are aggravating their subscribers this week

Disappointing streaming changes are happening so fast that it's hard to keep up.

Below is a look at the most exasperating news from streaming services from this week. The scale of this article demonstrates how fast and frequently disappointing streaming news arises. Coincidentally, as we wrote this article, another price hike was announced.

We'll also examine each streaming platform's financial status to get an idea of what these companies are thinking (spoiler: They're thinking about money).

Netflix starts killing its cheapest ad-free plan in June

Sony bumps Crunchyroll prices weeks after shuttering Funimation

Peacock is raising prices

Fubo cuts 19 channels

In a seemingly desperate push, many streaming services prioritize revenue and profits ahead of building the best streaming service for customers.

We could go on about how this might force people to reconsider their subscriptions, but we should publish before another service makes yet another policy change.

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I’ve cancelled Netflix. Just wasn’t using it enough for the price. Instead I will entertain myself by downloading Linux distributions on BitTorrent.
- I had to upgrade the 4x8TB drives in my Synology NAS box to 4x12TB to hold all of the extra Linux ISO's I was downloading.
  
  There are just so many distributions.
  
  Got a recommendation for a Nas? My 12tb is getting so full of Linux distros, I have to expand faster than I thought
- Awesome! But I hope you aren't using the actual program "bitTorrent" cause that shit had a litany of privacy and security issues that I don't even know where to start describing. A good one nowadays is qBitTorrent
  
  I exclusively use qbittorrent to download Linux distros.
  
  cause that shit had a litany of privacy and security issues
  
  You don't solve that by using another program. You try to reduce the damage by using the torrent client in a dedicated virtual machine and reset the machine to the original image at regular intervals.
Why does it feel like lately more and more articles fit Not The Onion or A Boring Distopia?
- We've been completely reduced to revenue streams for those that already have unimaginable wealth and it's killing us. The transparent abuse and exploitation is so beyond parody it wraps around to sounding like a joke. Then you realize it isn't a joke and get more depressed
  
  Best part is how we went down the exact same path 100 years ago and learned absolutely nothing from it.
- Because we're shoulders deep in late stage capitalism. It won't be long before we start seeing consumer scarcity. People are living paycheck to paycheck and can't afford much beyond basic needs. There are only so many hours in a day that people can work, so that's not stretching much further. We're rapidly approaching the breaking point. In a world with finite resources, a system seeking infinite growth will eventually collapse.
  
  In a world with finite resources, a system seeking infinite growth will eventually collapse.
  
  That's why some of the most powerful capitalists are starting to look up. Our great-great-grandchildren are going to be indentured servants on an asteroid mine. They know what's coming. They'll pack each SpaceX Starship with 100s of them just like they did 200 years ago. That thing ain't no exploration vessel. It's a future slave ship. Private companies don't do "exploration" unless it's to find more things to make a profit on.
- Because it feels like the triggers are finally being fired from the corporate capitalists in the world. They've bided their time and when they feel things are tender enough to practice their most devious schemes, then they'll fire upon it.
  
  They do this whenever there is a generational shift, in culture and how we do things. They're always carrying their ideas over and applying them in even more devious ways.
  
  While we all like to laugh at, joke about and make memes of these things. It stops being a joke when you become personally inflicted by it.
- It’s the tech business model. Slowly building up a sustainable business has been replaced with coasting on investment money while attempting to capture an entire global market. Because these products can scale so easily. Now they’re entering the “oh shit we need to make money now” phase of the business model.
  
  It’s not evil capitalists. It’s people acting rationally. The incentive structure leads to this behaviour. Eventually these services will consolidate into 2 or 3 major ones, like they do in every global tech market. Everyone will complain about it. But they’ll keep paying for it, because what other (legal) choice is there?
  
  It’s not evil capitalists. It’s people acting rationally. The incentive structure leads to this behaviour.
  
  IOW, don't hate the player, hate the game.
And yet they'll be scratching their heads trying to figure out why more people are returning to piracy.
- No, they know why, what they're trying to figure out is how to easier detect and punish those who pirate for "stealing" their hard purchased profits.
Late-stage capitalism going full steam ahead.
I canceled my Hulu+Disney+whatever package this week, as well as my Netflix. Piracy all the way.
- What do you use?
  
  I’m not a cop btw
  
  I haven’t done this myself because it’s obviously very illegal, but I’ve been told you set up a server with docker and set up the following containers:
  
  gluetun for VPN (exit in Switzerland with a fallback to Spain) as these countries have the laxest regulation re downloading licensed media.
  
  radarr for film
  
  sonarr for tv
  
  other *arr instances for subtitles, music, ebooks etc
  
  qbittorrent piped through the Gluetun container
  
  jellyfish, plex or XBMC in front as a player.
  
  But what do I know? I haven’t done it myself and only download large Linux distributions because I love distro-hopping.
  
  USENET, Sonarr and Radarr. It's a godsend
  
  Stremio & Real Debrid is soooo much easier than the self hosted approach, and is a piece of piss to set up
  
  Personally I set up my own plex server, and have been recruiting family to switch from paid streaming services to me, plus I have a few friends and family with servers so between us we have plenty of coverage and fallbacks
  
  Plex server on a purpose built Linux box with about 34tb. I mostly use Usenet for sourcing stuff, because it's so quick and comparatively private, but I also use torrents for some harder to find stuff. I also buy a lot of the more obscure music I want from Bandcamp and just download the highest quality version.
  
  I ran in parralel with my streaming services for a month, just in case I ever had trouble finding current shows we're watching, but I've never had trouble finding good quality rips of shows the same day they are released.
  
  I just can't tell you how good it feels to look at my TV, movies, and music collection and know that it's mine. Every episode and song and film is mine to store and protect, and not subject someone else's license agreements.
  
  suspicious
  
  FMHY
  
  Pb + plex = win
  
  Stremio + Real debrid.
  
  Stremio is a platform to watch any media you like (works very similar to Plex), you can use it as it is, and install the plugins that are more useful to you (torrentio for example). If your country has strict laws, then you can use real debrid to convert the torrents to direct downloads, you just need to open an account in real debrid, pay a few dollars a month (no need to pay for a VPN as direct downloads are ok), and link your account to stremio, and then you'll have access to lots of content.
  
  But I only use it to watch the latest linux distributions, nothing like spending a Sunday afternoon watching Fedora 40 while it's raining outside.
I honestly think they offered good deals for a couple of years to lure the new generations into a false sense of security and make them forget how to pirate :D
- They absolutely did. I used to pirate all my media 20 years ago, but then streaming became so convenient and relatively cheap that I just didn't bother with it anymore.
  
  Now, they've pretty much pushed me back out to sea with their ever increasing prices and decreasing content that's worth watching. I'm not paying $15-20 per service, when they insist on fragmenting it to hell so I'd need 3-4 subscriptions to watch the things I want.
- The joke is on them, piracy was motivated by the extreme convenience of streaming to make it as convenient as ever.
  
  One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue. The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.
  
  Gabe Newell
  
  https://www.gamesradar.com/gabe-newell-piracy-issue-service-not-price/
  
  Still as relevant today as it was 13 years (dear god) ago. Sure, not every pirate would pay for media, just like not every pirate pays for games, but charging increasingly more money for a worse product is going to push people towards a solution that basically allows you to search for and watch anything you want, ad-free.
  
  There's people practically begging to spend money for certain shows and movies to be available, but they're just not available on any streaming service. What else are they going to do?
- Seven seas Renaissance
So, who wants to help a landlubber learn to sail the high seas?
- Best place to start if you're serious. https://trash-guides.info/
  
  Frugal Usenet is a good cheap and reliable option for Usenet downloading or search out some torrent trackers of your preference. If you go the Usenet route, let me know, I can send you some indexer invites.
  
  I've run most of the arr apps on windows but Linux with docker is less upkeep and easier to perform updates.
  
  I am serious because fuck this streaming shit.
  
  I keep seeing Usenet mentioned for downloading media, but I've never tried it; I've stuck with torrents because they're free and what I'm familiar with. Is paying for Usenet access worth it, is it more straightforward to use with the *arr stack, is there more content available?
  
  I wish I hadn't quit on acid lounge for so long... my account was closed due to inactivity (Netflix was a nice option way back then)
Where the fuck is this all heading? There isn't any new medium to deliver media to people that will revolutionize content delivery. It's already delivered directly to the device its viewed on. Back to $20 per individual movie like DVDs were before streaming took off? Except 10 more steps away from actual ownership of what you buy?
- I just started using the public library apps this week. Piracy has gotten too difficult for me recently.
  
  Stremio and realdebrid just google those together and I promise you'll be happy you did!
- Unironically, yes. Everything we had 20 years ago, but worse.
  
  Worse for us. Better for the corporations.
- It has lead me back to having a media tower and using Jellyfin to keep track of where I was.
- Greeding corporations saw something was popular and profitable 10 years ago and are now doing everything they can to take a slice of the pie and get their fingers it. With more hands in the pan, there is less pie to go around, so they squeezing every last dollar they can out while lying to consumers about why. The income on these ventures is so laughably high and many production costs of the few original programming offered so low that they could cover everything on 5 dollars a month if not less. But if they did that they couldn't give their executives million dollar bonuses, which is the only reason they are in the business.
- DVDs but they can also come to your house and snap the disc in half without offering a refund. Now that's customer service!
ref. Sony/Crunchyroll/Funimation – Sony is erasing digital libraries that were supposed to be accessible “forever”
Stop giving these clown your hard earned money... They don't respect the paying customer.
My over-the-air tv antenna saves me $60/mo.
- I've really been thinking about that.
  
  what kind of lineup do you get?
  
  reception: clear? (And, only generally, tell me about your environment and population density? Eg 'wooded rural, hilly, just me and bigfoot')
  
  outages?
  
  is it easy to find what's on? Is it accurate?
  
  commercials, right? Good ones?
  
  Any responses - Rufus or anyone else - appreciated.
  
  Signal quality all depends on where you live. An outdoor antenna will get the most channels (I get 44 channels). Most TVs now have a built in tv schedule app. Samsung TVs integrate ota program schedules into their free SamsungTV app.
- I'd love to do this, but I don't get many channels where I live :(
!selfhosted@lemmy.world
And this was exactly how they had it designed.

We all thought we were free from the burden of cable television.

But we should've known that while Netflix was doing it's song and dance having been the cheapest subscription for years, everything was gearing up to be exactly like cable television.

I would enjoy PlutoTV and Tubi while you can, if I were you if you're not already. You never know when they'll start having to unroll tier systems or just drop out completely.
We could go on about how this might force people to reconsider their subscriptions...

That's one way to put it lol.
You'd think management at Netflix would look at the effect their changes have had on income, and uh, take that in to account planning future changes. Or something, right?
- Apparently their income has increased so as far as they are concerned they are.
  
  Amusingly my wife is ready to cancel because she got an add for one of their shitty mobile games instead of end credits while watching on her tablet in bed
.
- What a sad view
- Honestly, there is cheap stuff out there to do besides watch screens so much. Draw, write, cook, carve, read, walk. It's better for the mind all around. Absolutely, go pirate some shows. But taking a step back from the content stream hurts them too.
They let people believe that streaming is cheap, but it is not. A server can send streams to many people at the same time, but not so many as it seems and sever up time is a cost, in terms of energy and in terms of sysadmin time. Maintenance of the network is also expensive, especially in the US where most of the people live in low density neighbourhoods.

To that you have to add the cost of the big data servers that check everything people look at and profile their customers.

The dirty cheap subscriptions were meant to attract new customers, the service was heavily subsidized. The companies looked profitable just because other companies bought more ad space than necessary. Overadvertising is the preferred method to give stealth subsidies, but it is a cost for the other businesses of the network. After a while they have to shift those costs to the customers.
- Yeah, that could be true. But seeing as how 99% of companies are following the same business model of squeezing more and more profit out of people, I'm gonna go with Occam's razor on this one and say they're most likely just trying to make more money because they can. As long as it keeps working, they'll keep doing it.
  
  To get an idea of the cost choose any cloud service and see how much you pay for the server usage by the hour. Try to llok at all the other costs involved in the business, production of dedicated content is not cheap. All the company staff, the administration and the billing have a cost.
  
  Do not go by assumptions, measure, try to get an idea of the real costs.
- When I worked at an internet provider, Netflix sent us a cache (I'm sure they have several at that ISP now). I can't imagine it cost them more than a few thousand dollars, as it was just a bare bones box full of hard drives. We gave them free power, internet, and rack space in our data center. Every night during the slow period it would fill up with whatever they thought would stream the next day.
  
  There was nothing to do with neighborhoods, the cache served customers all over Maine and they didn't pay us anything. Netflix's costs are more likely content and licensing.
- Netflix have been making a profit since 2003 and only recently introduced ads. They are just trying to squeeze more profit.
- Netflix is a public company, you can just go look at how wrong you are about this.
  
  They took in $9.3 billion in Q1 2024, and spent $702 million on "technology" and $3.7 billion on adding "content assets"
  
  Their net profit was $2.3 billion, for one quarter. They could afford to just charge less money, but the line must go up.
- Those poor multi-billion dollar...
  
  Nope, I cannot even finish typing that sentence.
  
  Fuck 'em.

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