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.
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)
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
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
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.
There’s enough good “old” media that I don’t think any of us will exhaust the entire supply in a single lifetime.
The return of the pirate
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.
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.
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
I grow weary of all the attempted comparisons between streaming and cable. Even if it cost the same (streaming is still cheaper), you don’t have to call a tech to fix the dvr, which will wipe all your recordings… or pay per tv you own, rather than the number you are actually using. Of and you can watch it when you aren’t even home. Streaming is sooo many 1000’s % better than cable in soo many ways. Is it enshitifing, he’ll yeah. But still way better.
Plus you’re not locked into contracts and bundles. See a show you like on Netflix - subscribe, binge, cancel.
I rotate through all the services like this.
Plus you’re not locked into contracts and bundles.
Yet…
I can absolutely see that as the next step once people get comfortable rotating.
I’ve been getting back into reading, buying up used books for pennies. It’s been good for my head.
Streaming is getting worse, but it’s still way better than cable. Everything is on demand without having to fuss with a dvr, you can subscribe only to the services you want or rotate through them one at a time, and there are no contracts so you can cancel whenever you want.
Things could obviously be better, but we are nowhere close to how bad cable was/is.
Soon the pirates will be dominating the digital sea again.
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 got back into torrenting media and using plex because of all this nonsense. I’m not watching ads on a paid service and I’m not subscribing to 6 services at a time just because every company wants their own Network+ service. I’m also not going to pay more because you decided to add ads to an existing “tier”.
Then I learned through lemmy about real-debrid and stremio/torrentio and decided to try that. Now I’ve got the equivalent to these services for much less cost and the only difference is before I press play on an episode or movie, I just choose the cached torrent. No ads, don’t even need the space on a hard drive, good quality, and almost everything is immediately available.
I think we need to remind companies why streaming started…time to sail the seven seas yet again, fellas!
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.
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
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.
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.
They’ll cancel them anyway.
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.
Time to hoist the jolly roger high.
Fortunately, Lando has experience with such things.
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.
You still can pay to remove ads sometimes, and you also get to pick what you’re watching instead of waiting for whenever it’s on TV. You also can cancel any time. Things are getting worse, but they’re still immensely better than cable.
