Everyone wants to run a subscription service, until they have everyone on a subscription. Then instead of celebrating that they won capitalism, they go and start with the exclusive extra addons and upgrades. Because unfortunately no company in the history of companies has ever said that’s it, we’re making enough money, let’s relax.
actually, plenty of companies say exactly that.
The thing is, they’re small privately owned companies. not giant corporations.
I use an Emby/Jellyfin stream. There’s nothing I don’t have.
The Last Of Us season 2 being on a different, new subscription service is very much the last straw.
Or I can keep it for 0.
That’s only if it’s an older movie. The latest Captain America is available to rent for $25, or to buy for $30.
Or you can do what I did, and sail the high seas for it.
Was showing the inlaws the bingie skin i’d been setting up…they explicitly said this subscription shit was becoming unmanageable and they were seriously considering setting sail
I pay for a VPN once a year and then everything is free. Ahoy mateys!
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I’m relatively happy with the higher quality older television shows. I don’t really see a need to watch the latest stuff.
Currently marathoning Alien Nation. Much better than whatever the fuck that last season of Mythic quest was.
Wow I barely remember that show as a kid. I think it actually helped my dad with his bigotry and interracial marriages though.
Still a great watch, really wish they’d released a bluray tho :(
So it’s cable all over again
There was a time when almost everything was on Netflix. As a consumer, having all my content in one place for $10/mo is awesome, but according to capitalism, it is a problem that needed to be fixed.
The part that’s wildest to me is that nowadays with all the ways services are trying extract more value from their users (ads, increasing rates, reducing library size, restricting access to features, etc ) plus the DRM, the media consumption experience of just having the media files is so much better than the experience one can have through most of the streaming services or even DVDs with all of the unstoppable prerolls
Whether you rip your own DVDs (legally murky) or you’re just watching a bunch of public domain silent films, or pirating, it’s really hard to beat just having the .mkv and opening it in your player of choice.
About the only way to compete with that is one decent service with good quality, no ads, an extremely wide collection and minimally invasive DRM
Movies were on Netflix, TV shows were on Hulu. It was great.
Once Netflix started on their whole “half of all our offerings are going to be original content” is when it began to go downhill. Literally no one (aside from executives) was sitting around going “man, I can’t wait until Netflix starts making shows and movies!” They were a service. That’s all they ever needed to be.
I think they were forced into it when the other companies decided they could make some of that sweet netflix money, so they stopped licensing to netflix and built their own services. Netflix had no choice but to build their own content.
Idk I know I was pretty excited for Netflix’s early original content because the proposition was like “HBO, but on the internet and you can watch it any time” and they were doing big budget stuff. Things only went south when they didn’t keep up the HBO level quality and ruined their reputation to the point where I see “Netflix original” and immediately think “garbage TV”
The crazy thing is loads of people stopped pirating and paid for a streaming service that was affordable, worked, met thier needs.
Now it’s all splintered with corporations wanting a piece of the pie.
It won’t stop until the system reaches its ultimate form and each movie has its own subscription service.
So, buying physical media again lol
except that you don’t have any sort of long terms rights to it and it costs more.
And they know when we watch, pause, fast forward…
…and all your IDSo, renting physical media again.
That last remaining blockbuster is playing the long game.
Back to piracy, it is, then. Yarrr! ☠️
I’m about to cancel everything and buy a good vpn service.
It really did hurt my ressources for pirating though. After not downloading anything for years, finding the right sites and proxies again was hard.
Enshitification
Avast, me hearties!
you guys remember this old goldie?
lol limewire
Y’arrr ye old salt!
And it’s never anything in demand either. It’s always some random movie you came across on Wikipedia when you were scrolling through some actor’s filmography, and a minor interest was sparked. These companies create no value and hoard wealth and power. The whole copyright regime is tyrannical.
99% of these problems would be solved if copyright lasted a reasonable amount of time. IMO copyright should last for 50 years from the date of publication or the life of the original creator, whichever is longer. That way the author has control over their work during their own lifetime, and like an author’s husband won’t just be screwed if his wife published a blockbuster book and then dies soon after, but we don’t have Disney milking shit from the 1920s for a hundred years. It’s absurd to me that I have to pay Amazon $4 to watch Citizen Kane, a movie that came out before my grandparents were born, and that’s the only legal way to watch it. Literally nobody who was involved in making that movie is still alive to benefit from it, it’s only people making money from doing literally nothing.
Or it’s a series of movies, and one of the earlier movies is missing.
