One thing I want to debate about this is I remember how expensive cable used to be. It was like 120 bucks. Maybe you got like a $70 package or $80 package where you had barely any channels. I ain’t spending that much on streaming services!! I don’t know if I’m an outlier but I got Three and that’s about it. I pay around 40 bucks a month.
Yea these memes are dumb and I feel made by children who never paid for cable.
But the direction is certainly heading towards the realm of cable prices…
- Netflix: $15.49
- Amazon Prime Video: $14.99
- Apple TV+: $6.99
- HBO Max: $15.99
- Disney+: $10.99
- Hulu: $14.99
Total: $79.44 per month
So maybe when you account for inflation it is still only half of what cable costs,.perhaps. but those are the cheaper plans. For HDR support for Netflix it’s like $25, and it’s the reason I cancelled Netflix.
I don’t think the meme is dumb, just ahead of it’s time, but it’s calling out what is certainly happening.
Most streaming services now include ads in the paid subscription.
Inch the ad ratio and prices up another 40% and we are getting pretty close to cable experience/cost. And that’s only a few years away when we look at how much costs have raised over the last 10 yrs.
If each service raises price $1/month every year and you have 6 services, then in 5 yrs you’re paying $30 more per month, prob around $100+.
And the six you listed are the big ones, but there’s plenty of others that have exclusive content. There’s also Criterion if you like classics/arthouse, Crunchyroll if you like anime. Paramount, AMC, Showtime, Peacock, etc etc, etc.
Exactly. I was trying to be conservative by choosing only 6 and sticking to the cheaper plans.
But it is entirely conceivable today that, if someone has literally all the subscriptions, they could be paying more than cable costs.
Another factor I ignored for brevity is, at least when I was a kid, the price of cable was often bundled with Internet and telephone services. I can’t speak to how accurate the numbers would be, but I’m pretty sure my dad was paying $100+ for cable and everything else, meaning the cable likely wasn’t the entire cost of the bill. But I digress…
Streaming has gotten out of hand, and anyone who disagrees with me today will eventually agree within a decade.
Don’t forget you can usually bundle cable with Internet. Right now if I had all of those services plus my Internet it’d be $200/mo.
Yes, but if you’re comparing all prices you’d need to add the cost of your internet (only) to the price of a cable subscription to get apples-to-apples comparison.
You combine 6 streaming services, each of them alone already better than cable, and it is still just as expensive.
And if you don’t like the content on one streaming service, you don’t pay for it.
So cancel some of them and rotate. You probably aren’t watching them all, and they only come out with (good) new content a couple of times a year.
With cable packages you would miss stuff. With each streaming service owning their own content, it’s there whenever you want it.
Quite often it’s a family or household using these services. It’s hard to cancel Netflix/Disney if your kids or partner are using them
It’s a great time to have a conversation about cost, value, and delayed gratification.
Prime is like 5/month here.
It used to be 3 though. Is it triple as expensive where you live? (Us?)
I have never seen Prime sell for $5 a month, not even in the beginning.
9/month in Germany
5/month in NL
3/month in Belgium
4.99€ a month, 45€ a year. I used to pay 36€ a year back when it didn’t give twitch prime.
Seems like we’re getting ripped off in the States, it’s $13.99 a month here or like $120 yearly.
Or watched cable ADs apparently, cable TV ads were like…5 minutes or maybe even longer. Just commercial after commercial, so long that it was viable to use them to go-to the bathroom when you didn’t have DVR lmao
You know how some shows are 23 minutes long and some are 42? The reason for those odd times is because the shows had half an hour or an hour timeslots and the rest of it would be ads, so in an hour show you would get nearly 20 minutes of ads
What’s worse is with long running shows like mythbusters you can see the shows runtime slowly being chipped away in favor of more ads, the 2003 season’s episodes had runtimes of 50 minutes, by 2016 it was down to 42
Exactly. Cable had contracts for X months, and everything was packaged so you couldn’t just get one channel you liked.
Now streaming is splitting off into a bunch of services. That’s not great but on the other hand I’m not on a contract. I can stop and start whenever i want. I spend anywhere from $12-25 a month. All i ever wanted was for cable services to be unbundled. If I’m wanting to be subscribed to every service all of the time then yeah that’s going to get expensive. But if i just want to watch 1-2 shows at a time then I’m still much better off streaming than i would’ve been with cable 10+ years ago.
Edit: and when i cut the cord in 2010 my cable bill was $120/mo for basic cable + 1 package iirc.
I brought that up too and was downvoted…this platform is ridiculous.
It sucks that Netflix doesn’t have as much as they used to because stuff has been pulled for other services but the value proposition for streaming still blows cable out of the water, even with price increases. Adding free or low cost commercial tiers for more price sensitive people doesn’t give me commercials.
With all the premium channels and three HD-DVR boxes I used to pay over $200, before internet, more than a decade ago with much of that going to a shitty middle man company. And that’s for commercial, appointment TV. Even with the premium stations you had to DVR shit to watch later. I subscribe to a ton of services, even some fringe ones, so I almost never come across something that I can’t watch immediately with no commercials on any device I have access to anywhere in the world. And with annual rates, discounts from my phone company, and kickbacks from credit cards I’m still under $100. And now the money goes to companies that actually produce content, even if some of them suck for other reasons.
With what I’m getting I would pay double what I used to for cable, but as it is I’m paying half. It seems like a lot of people complaining never paid for cable with all the packages/premium stations themselves and don’t remember how much appointment TV sucked.
Adding free or low cost commercial tiers for more price sensitive people doesn’t give me commercials.
The thing is they didn’t add a new, cheaper or free “ad supported” option. They added ads to the current price, and then told us to pay more if we wanted to keep the same experience. This is one of the 7 dread turd pillars of enshittifi ation.
I don’t recall that happening to any of the many services I subscribe to. I’ve always paid for no commercials and I’ve never had commercials without having to change plans, although I think the name has changed sometimes. Maybe my price went up and they added a new commercial tier near the price I used to pay? Could you give an example?
People keep using this term enshitification but my experience has only gotten better and better since I cut the cord and now more companies offer streaming increasing what is available to me. My total price has gone up as more things become available but it’s still less than half of what I paid for cable.
Edit: I just remembered prime video did that. They started charging $3/month for no commercials, but that’s the only one I can think of.
Yeah I was thinking of Amazon, but Netflix briefly demoed it then backed off. At this point most of the providers have at least three ability to stream interstitial content, and we know that advertisers must be banging on their doors waving money at them. I have very little trust in the providers not to mess this up
I pay around 40 bucks a month.
that’s still more than pirating it, even if you pay for a vpn
It’s also a lot more than a metal coat hanger shoved in the top of your crt
Cable didn’t start out that fucked. People switched from cable because they were tired of it getting more and more packages and more and more pricey. We are seeing the exact same thing with streaming.
My mom’s is the most basic she can get in her area, and it costs 218 dollars a month.
Wow, that’s a lot! Is it at least bundled with internet? I haven’t bought cable tv in over a decade, so I’ve no idea what the real price of it is after the intro prices they try to lure me in with.
it is, without the package, it is $30 a month though. She gets phone service from someone else.
Me and my parents certainly never had the super fancy cable packages until way into the first death knells of cable services, where they were practically giving the channels away as a rider for internet packages
People always forget inflation in these discussions too. Inflation has been about 50% since 2007 around when Netflix started to become popular. So multiply those prices by 1.5 and you’ll have a more accurate comparison to today’s prices. Not only that, but the cable bundles that have all the best high definition and spirts packages were well over $200 at the time ($300 in today’s currency).
Streaming not only has better features, better resolution, less hassle, but is 100% still cheaper than cable. And don’t forget that about 50% of airtime on cable was ads. Those cable companies were milking us for every cent and all of our patience they possibly could. People were sick of it for decades by that point and that’s why Netflix was so successful in the first place.
There is yet one more alternative to pirating, and that is to simply not play the game. I’ve been so much happier since i stopped consuming mass media. No cable, no streaming.
Right? Like what do you even get for paying all that money? The next generic marvel movie? Cashgrab nostalgia-bait sequels like fucking happy gilmore 2?? Disney’s next culturally diverse not-quite-princess movie???
Learn to paint. Plant some flowers or vegetables. Build something. Create instead of consume.
I’m luckily young enough i haven’t finished my list of actually good “old” media, so yeah, seven seas all the way
Yes. Play old console games with emulators. No ads, no micro-transactions, entirely free.
Oh hacking a 2ds was one of the best decisions I’ve made in a long time. For starters, all 3ds to gbc games run natively, and that’s already a lot more games I could play in a lifetime. Then i can emulate almost any retro console there and it’s dead easy to find replacement batteries and such. 0 bullshit needed. Not an ad in sight.
Or Xonotic.
There’s enough good “old” media that I don’t think any of us will exhaust the entire supply in a single lifetime.
Plus you never know what’s gonna be on your list in the future. When I was 24, I would have never guessed that turn of the century anime would become my entire shit the very next year
Fascinating! My taste for it has kinda gone away as I’ve got older, to the point I can’t imagine how I could sit my ass down for over an hour. Instead of doing literally anything else.
I do still watch some streaming stuff for video essayists, music, and tutorial/instruction videos (work or personal project related)
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/c/piracy or
!piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.comfor your convenience~
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
I get a 404 here… I’m using Boost and I’m on lemmy.world. Would either of those be blocking?
lemmy.world might be blocking it. Just visit lemmy.dbzer0.com
It’s blocked by a lot of instances because they don’t want to deal with potential legal issues from providing pirated content. A lot of lemmy instances are based in places where it’s illegal to share pirated content, such as the United States.
This is the way.
I pirate things I could stream legally. It’s often a better experience.
I do the same. It’s just not worth dealing with the ever-increasing shittiness of streaming services.
My only issue with piracy is it doesn’t add to the number of streams. So it might cause some studios to cancel shows they don’t think are performing well.
They’ll cancel them anyway.
Well thats why i wait untill they are done. Too many canceled shows burned me.
Netflix baited me into a “new” sci-fi horror show. When it got to the end I looked up when the next season would be out.
Not only was it cancelled, it was cancelled without conclusion ten years ago.
Apparently it was only “new” to Netflix, but that didn’t stop them pushing it as new content.
It’s getting to the point that I want to do it just on principle.
But for the most part I just don’t watch stuff at all
If you give me what I want to watch and no ad’s then I’ll pay a fairly high amount for it. The moment there are ad’s I’m out. I’m so sick of ad’s that are forced on me. Slightly unrelated, but billboards should be banned outright.
Isn’t this effectively the same as asking for the higher-tier ad-free subscription? Not that I inherently disagree with you, but I feel like they already offer (part of) your solution.
Not all streaming services have a completely ad free tier
We can do all the ad blocking we want for our digital lives, but ads in the physical world cannot be blocked. I’m somewhat okay with political ads and ads for events, maybe even local business, but ads suck and probably worsen our mental health.
When you realize your streaming services cost more than cable did
Someone never actually paid for cable, huh? Maybe if you had a basic plan with no channels and you’re now paying for all of the premiums, but that’s not really a valid comparison.
🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️😎
I pay 5€ for a VPN just to be extra safe, still way cheaper than all the other stuff
Yup yup.
Fair winds and following seas to you fellow sailor of the high seas!
Yo ho, yo ho, a pirates life for me!
Yo ho ho
Soon the pirates will be dominating the digital sea again.
Pretty sure that many never stopped. There’s certainly more than during the golden age of Netflix, when they were the only service doing it.
Time to hoist the jolly roger high.
Fortunately, Lando has experience with such things.
Yo ho ho.
I bailed on Netflix when I realized that damn, I’m going like a month with this on my phone and haven’t really watched much, maybe one anime? Can I get something other than shitty anime, Netflix? Fun action flick from the last 5 years maybe? No? Never the good one, always the knockoff, the shitty sequel, nothing at all? Canceled Mindhunter? Because of course. Okay, no more pay money, and then I didn’t miss it. That decision took a shameful amount of time to make.
This was way before the password share thing. I don’t know what the rest of you are even doing. Stuff for the kids I guess.
I guess I do this bullshit, now, for entertainment, but this Suuuuuucks with a capital S, so the next step is to find the government chip that makes me scroll and metaphorically remove it. Fuck socials, too. Fuck all this shit anymore.
I hate netfucks & co, but in the case of mindhunter, they were innocent for once. Author just lost interest and canceled it. Nothing they could do about it. But it’s a damn shame though.
Could it be because the executives that used to be in cable are now in streaming?
But they’re the same execs at the same companies.
Oh, better far to live and die
Under the brave black flag I fly,
Than play a sanctimonious part,
With a pirate head and a pirate heart
Away to the cheating world go you,
Where pirates all are well to do,
But I’ll be true to the song I sing,
And live and die a Pirate King!
For I am a Pirate King!
And it is, it is a glorious thing
To be a Pirate King
I am a Pirate King!
The return of the pirate
I’ll weigh in.
I saw the writing on the wall when Netflix was forced to remove shows due to licensing.
Like many of you, I was on the “Yay Netflix” bandwagon for a while. And I remember the moment I realized I had to fish my black tri-point hat and eye patch out of the bin. It was the early 2010’s and I was living in a single rental bedroom (student style). I had Netflix and I’m in Canada, but I was experimenting with ipv6, and I realized that Netflix’s ipv6 geolocation stuff was flawed. I wasn’t using a VPN, but my V6 address was a “US” address, so if I turned off IPv4, I could watch US Netflix. I was watching the show “Arrow”, which I got really into early on. After a while, poof, it vanished. A bit of research and the license was pulled. It didn’t take long for me to piece it together. They were going to make the show available on their own streaming platform.
Suddenly, I saw the whole picture. It was like cable, but worse. Each studio was going to have a streaming service and like cable packages, you’d have to subscribe to their streaming service to see their shows, while getting access to a bunch of crap you didn’t care about, then have to find some way to track what shows were on which platforms and stay informed as to when new episodes were released, etc… Same as with cable. I said to myself, hell no.
I got my hat and eye patch, hung my flag, and I’ve been sailing the seven seas since. Fuck that noise.
My main issue with it all (beyond the obvious cost) is managing, monitoring and using multiple services. I wanted a central dashboard of shows that will update with new episodes from shows I watch as they are released. I found Plex. I’ve been using it for something like 10 years or more, and I’m pretty happy about it.
Cable had the merit of channel flipping. You could easily flip from one studios station to another without barriers. Now, you have to go to a completely different app/website/whatever, to change. You probably have to log in, etc. It’s a whole thing. What was a simple push of a button is now an entire ordeal. No thanks.
I knew this would be the eventual outcome and I was entirely right. My friends, if you haven’t already, it may be time to dust off your own hats and eye patches and set sail once again.
When Disney announced they were “looking into their own streaming service” and everyone followed suit, I knew enshittification was coming. It was obvious Netflix only worked because it was one happy medium with everything in one place, it was convenient…
But… I knew once other companies started making their own, it’d create a situation where you had to pay for multiple services to have a decent variety of things to watch. And once they had everyone suckered in, there was room for further monetization.
This is why I consider Tubi the only ethical streaming service.
Dumbly, I consider Disney+ to be the only worthwhile subscription to get. Not because they’re particularly good, but because they’ve eaten most of the “good” studios. They have the most content I’d actually be interested in watching.
But I still hoist my flag. Yarrr.
Their interface sucks though. I feel almost spoiled by the simplicity of the basic interface from Plex. It isn’t complicated at all, and there’s no algorithm to fight to try to find that show you like… On other platforms I sit there struggling to find the link to it and give up and search and search comes up with all kinds of random nonsense that doesn’t seem to have any bearing on the query… It’s a mess.
So I go poke my little sailing ship with the black flag and a VPN, to go find it, the Linux ISOs are dropped into Plex and I get sweet sweet relief from the struggles of dealing with garbage interfaces.
I just look at recently added content and there it is. Play it without issue and sail away.
I still have Netflix, the streaming landscape is marginally less fragmented here. But fucking hell is it a bizarre chore just trying to find where on the home page “continue watching” and “my list” are today.
Each studio was going to have a streaming service
And they all have different apps, mostly written from scratch, all of wildly varying quality. Some of the pirate apps like Weyd and Syncler have a significantly better user experience compared to most streaming services.
I get roughly zero commercials on Netflix. That probably varies somewhat depending on how you access it - I use a super old Chromecast bc my super old TV’s app doesn’t work anymore.
On the other hand, most shows I used to watch on it are gone now, leaving me either to watch the Shitflix content that’s left, or just 1-2-3-it elsewhere.
Commercials are present on Hulu on lower paid tiers and now on prime unless you pay extra every month. The latter is new.
And present in Netflix as well at lower tier subscriptions.
It’s not so bad to have one subscription service that is like $15-20/month, or even less with ads.
Where it really adds up is having to pay for all of them, like Disney+ and Paramount+, and that is also (relatively) new. One of the reasons I got Netflix in the first place was to watch Star Trek shows… but now those are elsewhere, as too is most everything else, and I’m wondering what all I am getting from Netflix anymore.
Here’s my list:
(1) fantastic streaming tech, I almost never have buffering issues these days (possibly significantly lower resolution but it switches seamlessly)
(2) ability to download an episode to watch offline, e.g. at a gym and it even auto-advances to download the next one in a series.
(3) Netflix produced content, except this tends to be crappy content (not always, but… not worth the pricetag definitely, for me)
(4) Anything that Netflix is successfully able to license from other places, which unfortunately tends to rotate and sometimes doesn’t even get whole entire series (like you’ll get up to a certain season and then no more).
It is licensing that ruined television for everyone, not Netflix, but still… am I getting my value? We’ll see as time goes on.
I get all of your points with pirating as well withoit paying anything
True. But that takes significant effort to set up. And I did forget to add one more benefit to paying Netflix - I get to give back, to encourage good quality content to continue to be created.
So whenever I have trouble connecting to a high sea, or just want a more guaranteed experience, it’s a reliable standby:-) … caveat: for the content that it actually has on there:-(.
But that takes significant effort to set up.
not really
-
connect to vpn
-
go to preferred free streaming website
encourage good quality content to continue to be created.
that would be true if Netflix actually made good content. right now you give netflix money for a few good shows and an overwhelming amount of slop (that’s even more the case for disney+). if you want to support certain content you like just buy the bluray or go to the cinema
I dunno about you but for me sometimes websites don’t want to stream. It is pretty darn easy, when it works, but so is Netflix, which works far more often, and does things like tap out halfway through a show extremely infrequently to never.
Also the former requires an internet connection. A better comparison for you to have used is not streaming but downloading. If you download entire seasons at a time, then you won’t have connection issues watching it later. Though Netflix is legit great about that too, with one-click downloading of an entire season at once. So Netflix kinda wins there too, plus being far easier for someone who doesn’t know what “self- hosting” even means to set up.
It really is great software.
About content though… yeah, it’s really hit or miss. Which is somewhat complicated by all the hype around TV shows these days - who wants to watch Mandalorian? Game of Thrones? Star Trek shows? The actual good Marvel ones? None of that is on Netflix, but are they really “good” to begin with, or is that just what “they” want us all to be watching? Anyway, there’s some fantastic stuff that is truly great that is available on Netflix. To name a few: The Magicians, The 100, The Babadook, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Sandman, yes and things that don’t start with “The” also! Orange is the New Black, Ghost in the Shell, Midnight Mass, … well, I’m sure there’s more, probably 😎.
Netflix is not for everyone. But it is good for some, or perhaps I should say some of the time. And for the rest there’s always sailing. :-P
The download function is the only pro for Netflix (and that’s only aviable for the limited amount of content Netflix has licensed). If I have buffer issues, I can just switch to another website.
There’s also the ethical aspect. I don’t want to support Hollywood in its current state. I won’t give money to a company that accidentally and occasionally produces a good show while deliberately fucking up many big projects on a large scale because they don’t care about making good content anymore, only money.
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Amazon Prime does commercials too. You have to pay more to get rid of them.
