Post memes here.
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Laittakaa meemejä tänne.
One thing I want to debate about this is I remember how expensive cable used to be. It was like 120 bucks. Maybe you got like a $70 package or $80 package where you had barely any channels. I ain't spending that much on streaming services!! I don't know if I'm an outlier but I got Three and that's about it. I pay around 40 bucks a month.
Yea these memes are dumb and I feel made by children who never paid for cable.
But the direction is certainly heading towards the realm of cable prices...
Total: $79.44 per month
So maybe when you account for inflation it is still only half of what cable costs,.perhaps. but those are the cheaper plans. For HDR support for Netflix it's like $25, and it's the reason I cancelled Netflix.
I don't think the meme is dumb, just ahead of it's time, but it's calling out what is certainly happening.
Most streaming services now include ads in the paid subscription.
Inch the ad ratio and prices up another 40% and we are getting pretty close to cable experience/cost. And that's only a few years away when we look at how much costs have raised over the last 10 yrs.
If each service raises price $1/month every year and you have 6 services, then in 5 yrs you're paying $30 more per month, prob around $100+.
And the six you listed are the big ones, but there's plenty of others that have exclusive content. There's also Criterion if you like classics/arthouse, Crunchyroll if you like anime. Paramount, AMC, Showtime, Peacock, etc etc, etc.
Exactly. I was trying to be conservative by choosing only 6 and sticking to the cheaper plans.
But it is entirely conceivable today that, if someone has literally all the subscriptions, they could be paying more than cable costs.
Another factor I ignored for brevity is, at least when I was a kid, the price of cable was often bundled with Internet and telephone services. I can't speak to how accurate the numbers would be, but I'm pretty sure my dad was paying $100+ for cable and everything else, meaning the cable likely wasn't the entire cost of the bill. But I digress....
Streaming has gotten out of hand, and anyone who disagrees with me today will eventually agree within a decade.
Don't forget you can usually bundle cable with Internet. Right now if I had all of those services plus my Internet it'd be $200/mo.
Or watched cable ADs apparently, cable TV ads were like...5 minutes or maybe even longer. Just commercial after commercial, so long that it was viable to use them to go-to the bathroom when you didn't have DVR lmao
You know how some shows are 23 minutes long and some are 42? The reason for those odd times is because the shows had half an hour or an hour timeslots and the rest of it would be ads, so in an hour show you would get nearly 20 minutes of ads
What's worse is with long running shows like mythbusters you can see the shows runtime slowly being chipped away in favor of more ads, the 2003 season's episodes had runtimes of 50 minutes, by 2016 it was down to 42
Exactly. Cable had contracts for X months, and everything was packaged so you couldn't just get one channel you liked.
Now streaming is splitting off into a bunch of services. That's not great but on the other hand I'm not on a contract. I can stop and start whenever i want. I spend anywhere from $12-25 a month. All i ever wanted was for cable services to be unbundled. If I'm wanting to be subscribed to every service all of the time then yeah that's going to get expensive. But if i just want to watch 1-2 shows at a time then I'm still much better off streaming than i would've been with cable 10+ years ago.
Edit: and when i cut the cord in 2010 my cable bill was $120/mo for basic cable + 1 package iirc.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
They'll cancel them anyway.
Well thats why i wait untill they are done. Too many canceled shows burned me.
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/c/piracy
or
!piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
for your convenience~
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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.
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
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.
🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️😎
I pay 5€ for a VPN just to be extra safe, still way cheaper than all the other stuff
When you realize your streaming services cost more than cable did
Someone never actually paid for cable, huh? Maybe if you had a basic plan with no channels and you're now paying for all of the premiums, but that's not really a valid comparison.
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.
Could it be because the executives that used to be in cable are now in streaming?
Oh, better far to live and die
Under the brave black flag I fly,
Than play a sanctimonious part,
With a pirate head and a pirate heart
Away to the cheating world go you,
Where pirates all are well to do,
But I'll be true to the song I sing,
And live and die a Pirate King!
For I am a Pirate King!
And it is, it is a glorious thing
To be a Pirate King
I am a Pirate King!
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.
The return of the pirate
I get roughly zero commercials on Netflix. That probably varies somewhat depending on how you access it - I use a super old Chromecast bc my super old TV's app doesn't work anymore.
On the other hand, most shows I used to watch on it are gone now, leaving me either to watch the Shitflix content that's left, or just 1-2-3-it elsewhere.
LOL, no. Basic cable was like $70 without any premium movie channels.
🎶 Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate’s life for me. We pillage, we plunder, we rifle and loot. Drink up me ‘earties, yo ho. We kidnap and ravage and don’t give a hoot. Drink up me ‘earties, yo ho. 🎶
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.
Do what you want 'cause a pirate is free, yarr harr fiddle dee dee!
Sorry, what are we talking about?
I think we need to remind companies why streaming started...time to sail the seven seas yet again, fellas!
I've been getting back into reading, buying up used books for pennies. It's been good for my head.
At least with streaming services, you don't have to call every year to get a better price.
The price just reliably increases every year. Simple and straightforward.
Ad-free Disney Plus yearly subscription on day one, Nov 2021: $75.
Ad-free Disney Plus yearly subscription after two years, Nov 2023: $168.
3-year duration VPN subscription 2023: $75
