And this is exactly what is pushing people back to piracy. It's easier to get all your movies from the pirate bay than it is to find it legally and pay for it.
Yup I have access to 3 streaming services. When we look for something it's the same story fail on 1 fail on 2 fail on 3 find it in 5 mins via other means
Honestly I put up with doing that when the prices were better. After damn near 15 years I had to dust off the hat and sail the seas. It forced me to learn how to set up a home server which I've never even entertained the idea of until now.
Kind of a cool hobby, you will have your problems in the begging but as soon as everything is set up stable, it is quite convenient. I personally use openmediavault (Debian based) as my host OS and Docker containers for all services I host. I can highly recommend Jellyfin for your own media streaming service
I used the guide from this guy when I built mine and it was immensely helpful in getting the storage system up and running. That docker-config file shared in another comment is also pretty handy.
I have a fledgling Plex server, on windows not Linux, and it has been shockingly easy so far. I would say I'm better than the average person at tech stuff but I'm far from some uber nerd who knows the ins and outs of everything computer related and I'm doing just fine so far
I've got a docker-compose file that will spin up a full Usenet stack plus Transmission on a VPN and Plex if you want it. Way easier to implement than installing them all as services on Linux.
What really annoys me is paying for the biggest Netflix package to get 4K content, then you watch a somewhat recent (non-Netflix) movie like The Equalizer (2014) and it's 1080p or less with a terrible bit rate.
That movie is available in 4K HDR. I know because I downloaded it to my Plex server and switched to watching that after 15 minutes of watching macroblocking and pixelation artefacts via the legal method.
What annoys me ever more is that despite paying for the 4K tier of the streaming platform, and the 'best tier' on my Internet plan. If I were to watch a not insignificant amount of 4k movies - I would hit my 'data cap' and be unable to use the Internet at all for the rest of the month.
I'm so fucking done with the garbage AI articles that give nothing. Do nothing. Just waste time and space to try to eat up and revenue I don't even give because I have ad blocker sup to wazoo. If I had any way to punish them for the damage it's doing to the internet I would in a second.
I feel exactly the same way. I was searching on google for niche item x to buy. First couple of results were paid ads, then came 10+ dropshipping sites I've never heard of before. I miss the old internet
It's a consequence of only thinking one quarter at a time.
If all the content creators pooled their content into one platform and split the profit based on viewership, they'd be making far more money on the deal. I'd gladly pay $50/month for access to everything in one place.
Genuine games being sold with cracks to remove the DRM instead of recompiling it without the DRM because the DRM doesn't work on modern machines and they can't be arsed to recompile and actually fix anything so even they resort to piracy.
Yeah I still haven't forgiven EA for making me waste 15 fucking dollars on a fucking sport demo disc that didn't fucking work on my computer, and I had to reinstall it uninstall it so many times that I used up all five of my installs, because apparently you don't get those back when you want install. Fuck you EA
I type it in Radarr or Sonarr and let my -arr stack work its magic. Depending on how popular a show or movie is, I can watch it in a few minutes on my Kodi TV. Wouldn't really call it annoying.
I'm in an invite only site that I'm not going to name and there hasn't been a single instance of something not being uploaded there that I wanted to watch.
I've been using it for many years and never once has it been wrong. Hell they even show you things added that day that are on your streaming services. Like down to individual episode releases.
Disc prices are stupid now as well. Streaming seemed to kill off the year old bargain bin discs, so instead of picking something up for £3 or £5, the 4K discs are all like £25 each. They can suck my balls if they think I'm paying that.
Bring back DVD prices, and I'd cheerfully own some 4K discs again.
This is by design. It's the intent of copyright law to make getting copyrighted content a miserable deal for the customer and a great deal for the copyright holder, because the thinking goes that this encourages content creation. No technology is gonna change that, only changing the law will.
Try living outside the USA, lots of times stuff is just plain unavailable and if it is available the only way to know is just manually checking every service since googling just tells you where is streaming in the US.
I haven't had the need to sail the seas, since BluRays are still being pressed, and the local library has a bunch of them. Free of charge. Also found a use for my old PS3.
My NAS chokes on 4k content so it’s all 1080p for streaming. For 4k I put them on my old gaming PC because it has a GPU that can actually push the content smoothly
There's three that I sub to: selfhosted, runityourself, and selfhosted. Not sure what's with with the latter two, I subbed to them both to be safe lol.
I just stopped watching movies. I refuse to pay for 7 different streaming services. I refuse to watch 720p content with terrible bitrate on my Linux system. It helps that most movies and series that came out in the last 15 years are straight up garbage. If I really like and want to watch something I get the bluray, so I can re-watch it in the future.
This is why I pirate anime and then buy manga to support the authors. I’m not gonna give streaming services a dime when piracy site I use has better features and services.
I will pirate movies I already own the physical disks for. It's quicker and easier than finding the disk (and likely having to sit through the ads that are on it).
I started buying blu rays for the movies I really care to watch more than once. I can rip it to my Plex server and if I decide I don't want it I can go back to the local used movie shop and trade it in for some new discs.
Yeah honestly I'd rather some VPN provider get my $15 so I can torrent in peace rather than giving it to one of ten different streaming providers so they can pay some executive to dream up new ways to extract value from me for sitcoms from the 90s.
Eh the only thing is copyright holders might complain to your ISP, who might send you a nasty letter. I'm not sure if they actually close accounts over it
There are a few instances of people getting sued, but usually your ISP will get a DMCA notice and send it to you and so long as you remove the content they've DMCA'd you're usually fine. I also believe that in Canada there's a $5000 limit to the damages they can recover so it's usually not worth it for them to hire a lawyer, which again, I am not.
Never understood that. First off, I would download a car and secondly the only people that see that ad are the ones who did not pirate the movie/show, so wrong audience.
Not if you rip them or put them into a software player. You can automate the ripping easily today and you are on the fine side morally speaking and get extras and deleted scenes if you want them.
It's honestly a single click at this point with many of the GUI clients offered by VPN providers, and there's so much competition out there that VPN service is one of the few things in the world actually getting cheaper.
Definitely the future of television I had in mind was me having to google every movie I want to watch to see if it's currently in one of it's one-month windows on any of the seven streaming services I pay for. This is way easier than buying a DVD. I love it.
I mean I usually just google it, or, most smart TVs now have this built in feature where you can just search it and it appears on whatever relevant service usually. The problem arises when it becomes region locked, or when you can't afford seven services which are now costing like 15 bucks a month for no ads, or how every service uses a different frontend for their video pipeline and they all work like trash and are laggy garbage. It's still way better than normal TV or buying DVDs, though, the only upside to DVDs was bonus features, otherwise they just take up a bunch of space and it costs like 40 or 50 bucks for a new movie.
Just taking a moment to say there are dozens of places out there hosting these current shows and movies and not giving a single wide about copyright. Piracy isn't even necessary anymore, just dig through some sketchy websites some of them even upload before the torrents come up
Oh yes, it was so much easier to get in a car, drive to the store, check if they have it in stock, deal with the checkout person, drive back home, deal with that annoying wrapper, pop the disk in the drive, watch the 5 different ads at the beginning of the DVD, to then finally watch the movie.
Way easier than a Google search. This generation has it so hard.
I don't follow your logic. You were describing the perfect 80s date night (well, the parts excluding coke and depeche mode), but phrased it like it was a bad thing. I would go broke if a blockbuster or family video opened in my area, and I aleady have every movie I could ever need on my NAS.