I got rid of Netflix when they said my bill would be $20 a month and I rarely used it. I just find other ways to find shows and load up my Plex server. Sometimes have to wait for blu ray releases but I have a long enough watch list to keep me going.
I used to have a rule that if it was ‘readily available’ to stream then I wouldn’t get it for Plex.
Now, media rights shift in such a spectacularly dumb fashion that I’ll just get whatever I want because there no longer is an expectation that it will be available long-term on any provider. Local copies just don’t have that problem. I have things that are just considered lost media because they’ve been deleted by their providers like Infinity Train (CN/HBO/MAX) and Pantheon (AMC). Totally wiped official presence from the internet.
All the money I would have put towards Netflix for a year instead goes to drive space and capacity.
Yeah I had that happen too with Westworld being wiped from HBO so they could “show it to other markets”. We’ve reached cable 2.0, not sure what comes next but they’ll have to find something to slow the rise of piracy again.
The problem is that kids are too lazy to torrent and have accepted the overly corporatized internet. They grew up on phones, with loud, annoying, unblocked ads. If it works they’ll just continue to throw money at it, even if the service is garbage. They literally just don’t know better. Most of them just watch 480p streams if they do pirate at all, but otherwise are just accepting of how shitty everything is because they never experienced anything better.
Yeah, I effectively have a private Netflix library of whatever content I want, ranging from anime to stuff that doesn’t get released officially, fan projects like AI upscales for Star Trek series that were deemed not worthy of getting proper remasters, or audio restorations like Daria which had a lot of great Seattle grunge they didn’t re-license for the DVD release, the despecialized Star Wars trilogy which is the closest to the theatrical cut as can be, axing all the special effects and CG additions from the 90s and onward.
The way to get started is basically to get a VPN and do some research into torrent sites. Torrenting is pretty basic - you can eventually start complicating yourself with automated torrenting with Sonarr and Radarr, but that’s when you have a dedicated setup with a decent amount of space. I personally am part of a forum that shares direct download links to content but that is also something more advanced like the equivalent of getting into a private tracker for torrents.
Same. I realised I’d been paying for months and barely watched it. So I canceled (Maybe 2 years ago). I’ve maybe downloaded two shows that I would have missed since then and one of those I gave up on–Black Mirror S6, the other was Midnight Mass.
I got rid of Netflix when they said my bill would be $20 a month and I rarely used it. I just find other ways to find shows and load up my Plex server. Sometimes have to wait for blu ray releases but I have a long enough watch list to keep me going.
I used to have a rule that if it was ‘readily available’ to stream then I wouldn’t get it for Plex.
Now, media rights shift in such a spectacularly dumb fashion that I’ll just get whatever I want because there no longer is an expectation that it will be available long-term on any provider. Local copies just don’t have that problem. I have things that are just considered lost media because they’ve been deleted by their providers like Infinity Train (CN/HBO/MAX) and Pantheon (AMC). Totally wiped official presence from the internet.
All the money I would have put towards Netflix for a year instead goes to drive space and capacity.
Yeah I had that happen too with Westworld being wiped from HBO so they could “show it to other markets”. We’ve reached cable 2.0, not sure what comes next but they’ll have to find something to slow the rise of piracy again.
The problem is that kids are too lazy to torrent and have accepted the overly corporatized internet. They grew up on phones, with loud, annoying, unblocked ads. If it works they’ll just continue to throw money at it, even if the service is garbage. They literally just don’t know better. Most of them just watch 480p streams if they do pirate at all, but otherwise are just accepting of how shitty everything is because they never experienced anything better.
What’s the best way to “get started” with this? Can you get the equivalent experience of something like Netflix that way?
Yeah, I effectively have a private Netflix library of whatever content I want, ranging from anime to stuff that doesn’t get released officially, fan projects like AI upscales for Star Trek series that were deemed not worthy of getting proper remasters, or audio restorations like Daria which had a lot of great Seattle grunge they didn’t re-license for the DVD release, the despecialized Star Wars trilogy which is the closest to the theatrical cut as can be, axing all the special effects and CG additions from the 90s and onward.
The way to get started is basically to get a VPN and do some research into torrent sites. Torrenting is pretty basic - you can eventually start complicating yourself with automated torrenting with Sonarr and Radarr, but that’s when you have a dedicated setup with a decent amount of space. I personally am part of a forum that shares direct download links to content but that is also something more advanced like the equivalent of getting into a private tracker for torrents.
Same. I realised I’d been paying for months and barely watched it. So I canceled (Maybe 2 years ago). I’ve maybe downloaded two shows that I would have missed since then and one of those I gave up on–Black Mirror S6, the other was Midnight Mass.