Netflix kills Basic plan, making its cheapest ad-free tier $15.49
If you already have the $9.99 Basic plan, you can keep it.
I've been putting off having a local copy of the series and movies I watch because I still can access them quickly and cheaply enough in some streaming service, I think it's time to plan ramping up my selfhosted setup.
pirateshipnoises
YO HO AHOY AND AVAST BEING A PIRATE IS REALLY BADASS RAISE THE BLACK FLAG AT THE END OF THE MAST YOU ARE A PIRATE
You’ll find me in the Drunken Slug tavern.
First rule of the sea:
Never place your rear end on a pirate's face.
The next step is for the ad-tier to go to $7.99, $8.99, $9.99
The strategy was always to make the ad-free options more valuable by comparison.
In no more than 36 months, the ad-tier will cost the $9.99 it was intended to replace, making Netflix having successfully added ads to the base tier, for no discount.
Maybe they noticed that most people don’t want the most expensive Plan if they are not allowed to share anymore
Anakin and Padme image macro
That extra money will go to the writers and actors right?
SSDs are very cheap these days
HDDs are even cheaper and you really don't need an SSD for movies. You can get a 4tb HDD for less than 50 bucks and that will hold more than enough movies/shows for the majority of people.
An alternative to self-hosting and piracy, if there's something you really want to watch, just buy a month, then immediately cancel the subscription to whatever service has that show, after all the episodes has aired. I usually spend between $30-$50 in total on streaming services in a year this way, and as a principle, I call it "buying a month" as opposed to "subscribing." Right now I'm waiting for Secret Wars to finish on Disney+. Will probably watch the last few MCU movies and some other stuff during the same month so that's probably up to 10 shows/movies for $whatever-a-month-goes-for these days. Might do a month of Netflix later in the autumn, as I have a few things I want to watch there now that didn't quite justify buying on their own. And no, I very rarely rewatch anything, so I don't really worry about loosing access to them in the future.
All I can say is Netflix at 12.99 was a tough sell. That was the rate hike that made me drop them. 15.49 forget it.
When Netflix was the ticket and my sub was 8.99 some years ago, I didn't pirate anything because I didn't need to. I'd have to pay a hundred a month due to the fracturing and inflation of streaming services now, and I still wouldn't get everything. I didn't wanna pirate, but the industry backed me into a corner.
I love Netflix. I'd happily pay them $20 per month for a single account. The problem is their content. It's not original anymore. Shows with real story and depth have been replaced with reality tv and typical Hollywood formula. Sad seeing the slow decline of the platform that started out so great.
Literally all you need is a networked raspberry pi with a content hard drive, and Kodi installed anywhere. Don’t look back.
Can you elaborate for on this for simpletons like me? I've looked at raspberry Pi's before but have no idea what I'm looking at or for because of the options.
If you don’t know anything about this stuff and don’t want to get into setting up linux software, you’re better off just getting a simple self-enclosed NAS drive like a WD MyCloud (just an example, I don’t know all the options out there now) that you connect to your LAN and then connect to it with Kodi or another player. With that you just login to it from a web browser to create your content folders, then map it as a drive in windows explorer and copy data to it over the network like any other drive. Then Kodi etc can be provided the network address for that drive and content folder. (And have a separate USB drive to make a content backup in case the NAS dies one day.)
Otherwise I use a raspberry pi 4, as it’s fast enough to be an emulator box with retroarch (etc), and a torrent seedbox for acquiring content with deluge installed (behind a VPN), and a pi-hole for blocking ads network-wide, and has 4 usb ports for content drives. For just hosting media you’d only have to make changes to the config for it to automount the usb drives every startup, and then the pi just acts like a NAS with several drives. The software for vpn, torrents and emulators (all included or free via git) can be a bit complicated to setup but once you have it correct, you can make a backup image of the microSD card that the os is on if you have to restore it later. I personally didn’t know what I was doing on linux when I first set it all up years ago, but got everything working properly just copy and pasting from guides on stackexchange etc.
Again, if all that makes your head hurt, just use a self-contained NAS drive for content.
edit: should probably add that I personally haven’t installed a vpn on the pi for torrenting, as I have a router with vpn built-in, and set the firewall rules so the pi can only access the internet through that (because it’s faster.) There’s a few ways to handle it.
I have an Odroid C4 with Jellyfin, but some content just won't play. Does Kodi work better?
I haven’t had anything that kodi wouldn’t play, but I also don’t have a ton of different file types. For music and movies it hasn’t failed me yet. You just need to be able to give it a network address to the content folder on a NAS or pi, and it usually scans everything for me. Kodi connects to it from a Fire Tablet, FireTV Stick and the pc app.
And where does the content come from?
Yeah I see you harping about having to download your own material, but that is the reality of self hosting, acquiring content. And the joy of not having an algorithm recommending things. It’s not for everyone. If someone’s not capable of such things, that’s fine, then this convo isn’t for them and they should just keep using netflix.
They're just driving us to self hosted content quicker. Honestly if you can afford a NAS like a Synology or an Asustor, setting up Plex is so easy.
Some edits to this comment:
You vastly over estimate the willingness of people to learn how a computer works.
Well, I mean on those vendor NASes it's pretty much just chuck in a hard drive or two, follow prompts for setup, install the Plex app from said vendor's app marketplace, make a login, and add your content to the specific TV, Music, or Movie folders...Admittedly this doesn't get you setup with running Plex outside the network, but as a basic setup it's fairly easy.
I'm also confident someone would mess those instructions up, but if you even understand what self hosting is I'm fairy confident someone could follow the above instructions to add their content. Obtaining content is a different story, but if you already have your content it is easy.
Even though many people suggest that, I don't believe you can compare any off-the-shelf streaming service with a self-hosted Plex.
You have to find and download content to your Plex. You don't get recommendations. You don't get a built-in interface on your smart TV. You have to deal with network configuration, VPN, private trackers, seeding ratios etc.
How on earth is that comparable to pressing the Netflix button on your TV and selecting a recommended show? Even my boomer parents managed to do this on their own.
I think we gotta work on building community if we want to see people really move away from streaming services. One person with a NAS in a small apartment building could help a lot of their neighbors out with entertainment. It would be more work for the person hosting, but if the folks who benefit help their friend out too it might end up being less work overall.
I'd give someone access, teach them how to use the software, and download some of their favorite shows if they let me borrow their truck when I needed, shared dinner sometimes, or helped me clean house. I think a lot of folks would benefit from that kind of thing, but it would require us making friends with our neighbors. Which, on reflection, is actually really really hard. I imagine it would be kinda awkward to start the conversations around this, but you'd get around the step of everyone getting their own NAS at least!
If you take the time to RATE everything you watch in Jellyfin the recommendations start getting pretty good.
I have a built-in interface on my smart TV for Jellyfin, and I had one for Plex.
I didn't have to deal with any network config, just login once.
Your concerns over obtaining the content are valid, but concerns around the user experience are not.
Plex gives recommendations and has apps for smarts TVs.
Agreed that obtaining the content can be difficult but the user experience is top notch. It even skips credits and jumps to next episodes for tv shows now too.
For obtaining content, Nefarious is my go to solution. It’s nearly as seamless once you get past initial setup (which is not simple)
You still need to get content generated.
Yep you do and some may argue that, depending on how you obtain that content, it's even easier than the setup of the NAS and Plex itself.
Enshittification 101. Usenet is cheaper, torrent indexers can be free. Remember, "Information wants to be free", also remember the 5th of November...
This is exactly the sort of stuff we predicted way back then; this is why I've never touched this stuff.
We wanted to axe one of our two streaming services next month. This makes the choice pretty easy. The netflix catalogue sucks balls anyway
Oh well, there's not much worth watching on netflix anyways. I hardly ever use the free account that came with my cell phone plan.
Getting to the point where they aren't worth the money, it is one increase away from being a dead loss of a service
Plexshares are soon going to be the only thing people will need as less money and value without bs politics and taking customers for granted and as fools....
If you use a "public" Plex share (one that you find online and pay a monthly fee for), Plex will eventually find you and suspend your account.
A safer approach with Plex is to get a cheap server (assuming you can direct play on most client systems), get an unlimited Dropbox team account for storage, use rclone to mount Dropbox on the server, and auto-download via Usenet using Radarr, Sonarr and Lidarr. Split the cost across a bunch of friends.
Or just use Weyd or Syncler plus a Real Debrid account. Real Debrid caches torrents so they're instantly available to stream at full speed over an encrypted (TLS) connection.
real debrid might be a good option
@dan @cyberpiggy is Plex really that much better than say Jellyfin?
F
Well, there is also this news https://variety.com/2023/tv/news/netflix-subscribers-up-q2-earnings-1235673960/ showing that apparently many people just pay up to keep their access.