I cancelled all my subscriptions and just pay for a seedbox instead.
Only two subscriptions I have now are Spotify and Game Pass...because they are actually worth it.
this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2023
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Even Spotify though continues to Jack their prices with no extra benefit. I’ve hoped for lossless audio from them for so long, but instead they just charge more for a bad UI driven by engagement instead of user experience
I don't mind Spotify increasing.
Inflation is real. And nobody wants to see the service turn into a Little Caesars "$5 Hot N Ready" pizza that erodes in quality, rather than gradually price increase with inflation.
The advantage we have with music streamers is that nearly ALL the content is on ALL the services. So, if one service goes bananas with pricing, we can jump ship to a cheaper one.
But TV is siloed into mini monopolies. The only source of capitalism competition they face is use choosing to do without. And frankly, if I'm gonna be forced-fed ads, I choose to do it on YouTube which costs me $0 and not $7.99 a month.
Netflix is gone. And as someone who leaves The Simpsons running 24/7 on Disney+, I'm frankly getting thiiiiiiiiiis close to dumping their asses, too!
Spotify increased the price of everybody's subscription by £1/$1. They have some 200 million subscribers. That's at a minimum an extra $200m a month. Is that really necessary?
The thing is, I would totally pay more for lossless audio on Spotify, but they didn’t give me that option. They just increased their price without any benefit to their service. And their CarPlay integration is horrid. I can pick a song on tidal and it plays instantly without issue. With Spotify I have to open the app and play it from my phone and even then it only works like half the time. I’ve been a Spotify customer since they first launched in the US but there’s now no reason to keep my subscription
Try switching to apple music. It is cheaper and the quality is way better. UI is also waaaaay better than spotify's. Also, I learned that if you dont have any money on your card connected to google play store apple music will be just fine for extra month. So you can use apple music 2 months for price of one month.
Thanks for the recco! Though I’ve actually been using Tidal for the last few months because they’re one of the few lossless audio services, just annoyed because I was a Spotify customer for years waiting for lossless and instead they bumped prices without improving their services
Spotify users propably got used to it haha
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Nah, in the case of Spotify, I've ady lost all my faith on the music industry and remain on the sea for a while now. I rather take times to listen to the music instead of giving even a quid to those mf.
What exactly is a seedbox and how much is it?
It's, in layman's terms, server space you rent out and can use for your downloads. torrent clients like transmission are usually built in. I pay £5 a month for 2tb space and enough bandwidth to keep a good ratio.
So instead of downloading to my pc, I download torrents to the seedbox (at a blazing fast speed) and then download files from there to my pc whenever I feel like it, again at stupid good speeds.
I have FTP access, so I've just added it as a folder/mounted drive on my windows and Linux mint file explorers. Works great. Also have it on my smart TV as a web address for quick streaming of whatever I downloaded.
Edit: this also eliminates the risk of downloading Torrents locally.
That sounds great!
Which Seedbox Service do you recommend?
Look up real-debrid with Stremio if you wanna skip the download part. It's like renting someone elses seedbox.
I use seedhost.eu, can't really recommend others as this is my first! But it's been great so far, easy to use and access
I use transdroid on my mobile for torrent management
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Same for me. Had Netflix and Prime.
Cancelled Prime. Student plan ran out and wanted to spend less (on Amazon and buying random stuff.
Cancelled Netflix. Didn't use it, convinced my mother to let it go (only after saying how much it costs).
Renting a seedbox for 15€ per month, Spotify for music and since this month I burried my life long hate for YT premium and now also have that (and wish for a plan without yt music for 3-4€ less).
Reason why I did YT premium was, because I already watched more YT than Netflix anyway. And it's near daily for about 2-3h. Well worth it (for way too much money).
For YouTube premium I just did the whole vpn to turkey and pay for a year upfront which was like £12 for the year
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I absolutely loved the idea of Game Pass. I had it for two years. I actually stopped buying Steam games.
I was annoyed of their whole file structure (like it's extremely difficult to move saves from a PC Game Pass game to a Steam/Epic Game). It's using some weird Windows DRM and has constant connection issues with the Microsoft server. But the value was good and I accepted that hiccup.
After the Steam Deck dropped, I quit PC Game Pass.
As a busy parent, Steam Deck is way too convenient and the future of PC gaming is portability. And once the Steam Deck reaches critical mass, if PC Game Pass isn't on there, it'll be the Bing of gaming and play second fiddle.
I have Disney+ for Marvel and Star Wars, $4 Google Play rent or theater watch everything else because I'm not a big TV/Movie guy.
Had Gamepass Ultimate, dropped them when they shut down the family plan, raised the price of Ultimate by $2/mo, cut the value of gold-to-ult conversion pretty significantly, and ditched the monthly games in favor of a perpetual list of games I mostly already own.
My new preferred plan is PS+ Premium+PC Gamepass, in part because the game offerings on PS+ are actually pretty good, but also because I realized that I can very sustainably get PC Gamepass from Microsoft Rewards. They have an auto-redeem plan with a low enough point value that, if I were to do nothing except the daily Bing/Edge searches, I'd rack up enough points for the next month in 25 days. That's pretty significant for something I can mostly do sitting on the shitter.
Piracy has steadily been getting more accessible and easy to use (see: Jellyfin, Plex, Sonarr, Radarr, Lidarr etc.). There is basically no reason anymore to pay for any digital context, especially considering the streaming services are screwing over both the users and the creators. I like to support game developers that make really enjoyable games, but I can't and won't tolerate any shitty subscriptions that offer increasingly less content for increasingly exorbitant prices
Streaming services are dead to me rn. I’m paying £10/month to watch what I want when I want by using usenet (including electricity). Instead of paying for Netflix prime hbo Apple TV etc etc for over £10/month EACH.
Nice to see polish people on lemmy :)
Piracy and software was already really easy to use a decade ago ( sick beard / couch potato ) it’s just that the services at the time were good enough that you could watch practically everything on Netflix +1 so it wasn’t really a problem to stomach the cost. now I need 7 different subscriptions to watch shows I’m interested in which is a ball ache
I’ve already made the decision to sail the high seas in 2017 and selfhost my media.
Best decision I’ve ever made.
Sonarr + radarr + jellyfin
I never stopped, but I doubled down a good 10 years ago when Netflix first announced they were gonna put an end to people getting around geolocking. I'm Canadian. I'd pay (at the time) for US Netflix 100%. Canadian Netflix wasn't worth the cost of the pot to piss in.
Spun up a Plex server, set up Sonarr, Jackett/Prowlarr, Radarr, Tautulli, and now I am Netflix for 20 people lmao.
Edit: And I'd have it no other way.
That’s the way!
I feel your pain as I had Canadian Netflix around 2015. I was bummed when I knew that the new seasons of Suits (iirc) wouldn’t be available in Canadian Netflix for a couple of months.
I had to watch it in putlockers while I was paying for a freaking streaming service.
Such a mess lol. I take pride in knowing that every movie, tv show, comedy special, album, game (up until the ps era cause i'm not made of hard drive money), comic book, novel, piece of software, basically anything I ever enjoyed over the course of my life (as well as a couple terabytes of random data hoarder shit) are sitting 2 feet away from my fingers at all times.
Does your ISP still provide Usenet access or do you subscribe to a Usenet provider?
Paying $9 a month for Usenet makes me wonder if I shouldn’t just keep paying for Hulu
I don’t think my ISP provides it.
Id suggest you to setup sonarr and radarr behind a vpn as it’s a set and forget setup.
Fully automated.
@deleted
Oh? You don’t have to setup a usenet provider to Sonaar work?
I’m out of the loop then. You have any recommendations for modern setup tutorials?
Most (if not all?) of the *arrs can use torrents. edit: as for guides, i would just check out yams.media.
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Trusting promises of corporations is like believing that a wild cobra won't bite you. It's definitely possible, highly unlikely they will keep the promise.
Of course Netflix was going to increase prices and reduce their offering. What did anyone think would happen? They’d just decide that a stable profit was good enough?
24 years of continuous piracy. All I pay for is a seedbox. Paying these scummy corporations nothing each month feels great!
May I ask what are the benefits of a seedbox?
So with a seedbox its basically an offsite swrver that you tell to download the files you want, rhen you download them direct from the seedbix. Because theyre dedicated servers you get better download and upload speeds for preserving your ratio, you don't have to use local storage to seed things, and it can be safer if your seed box is in another country because your isp doesn't see any torrent traffic.
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
Discovery's David Zaslav have also indicated that their services were initially priced "too low" in an effort to draw a huge and unendingly expanding subscriber base.
In the early-to-mid 2010s, a subscription to Netflix and Hulu and your friend’s borrowed HBO password could get you access to the vast majority of all the TV that was worth watching.
Netflix had a huge archive of older shows plus a slowly growing library of its buzzy releases like Orange Is the New Black, Jessica Jones, and Stranger Things.
Not content to let Netflix have what looked like a lucrative new market all to itself the companies that made and distributed TV decided one by one as the decade wore on that it was time to create their own apps and generate their own subscription revenue.
Tech companies also decided to jump in, with Amazon Prime Video pushing into expensive scripted dramas and Apple TV+ becoming relevant by dint of throwing untold gobs of money at all kinds of projects.
Netflix announced its first subscriber loss in a decade in early 2022, cratering its stock; despite some recovery, it's still only worth about two-thirds what it was at its peak in late 2021.
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