Americans are getting increasingly impulsive about hitting the cancellation button
How dare they? Certainly subscriptions must be five years min and impose double fee in case of cancellation
The increase was due to higher prices, not additional services. Nearly half the people surveyed said they would cancel their favorite streaming service if monthly prices went up another $5, the study said.
If your business model is to trick people into signing up for an indefinite monthly payment and forget about it while you keep raising the price to extract more out of your suckers, it’s no surprise that people are cancelling your service. Considering how fragmented these profiteers are with the service they provide, people are voting with their wallet that they are paying these services to wstch specific shows or kind of shows.
I finally just got my jellyfin server running and pirate shows and movies again even ones I have a sub for. Because I don’t have to click past a bunch of bullshit before the show starts.
Yeah it’s the age old problem of “I’d love to pay for this, but the experience would be objectively worse”.
Like even if you’re capitalism-pilled and are determined to pay for your media, your best option is still having to subscribe to 10-20 streaming services and that comes with the aggravation of having to google search every time you want to watch a new show, to find out which service it’s on. Pirates who pay nothing for their media get everyone all in one place.
I mean you could use something like Stremio which aggregates all the streaming sites. The thing is it also aggregates privacy sites too…
What hardware are you using on the player side? My server works fine to my tablet and phone but my pi4 has terrible playback to the tv.
If it’s not direct playing, it could be that transcoding is too much for the Pi4.
Yeah it’s the transcoding that’s very bad direct play is still chopy above 720.
What’s your network connection? And also, is your TV actually direct playing? Because if your file formats/codecs are incompatible, it might not anyways
Direct play is scp the file to the pi and play from the class 10 sd card. LAN is gigabit.
My guess would be the SD card being the problem. SD cards aren’t that fast, even in best case scenarios and a raspi isn’t exactly a best case scenario. And besides, you’re probably sharing it with the OS. Try a USB HDD or at the very least a fast USB 3.0 stick.
(Also, Class 10 doesn’t say anything about read speed, only write speed that isn’t terribly fast either with 10MB/s. A UHS rating would give more indication about read speeds)
Nvidia Shield Pro and AppleTV 4K are the best.
Only if you care about DRM services. For just running Kodi, you can just buy or use any decent PC.
I liked my shield because it’s plug and play, tiny, silent, hardware support for most codecs, with a simple interface. Used are also on eBay under £50, which is tough to beat as an option.
Yeah probably worth picking up a used shield. Thanks.
Or even the Shield TV Tube. People shit on it but mine runs like a dream. 4k remuxes and everything. As long as I use it only as a client it works fantastic.
I have kodi on my steamdeck, and that seems to work fine as well. You can plug it into a TV as well.
I don’t own a 4K TV, so I cannot speak on the performace, but it should be more than a RPI4.
While this is hardly a surprise after the streaming market became a clusterfuck of proportions hardly imaginable, that will lead to more enshitification. Over the course of the coming years, those services will incerasingly try to “re-gain” subscribers in this weird roulette of subscriptions, so they will all count on exclusives, fracturing the market even more.
The only people untouched by this will be the pirates, as always. You hit “go” in your sonarr-application and some time later, the thing you wanted to watch just appears in your library.
Exactly. None of this landlubber Tom foolery affects me and me hearties.
The industry made this decision, not the consumer. It’s a shoddily run company that blames the inefficacy of their unsustainable business model on their customers.
the new york times is just now discovering this? trial jumping and service jumping have been a thing since netflix was the only game in town. before, even, as it was not uncommon for one to jump between directv and dish for tv, or telco and cable for home internets for the ‘new’ customer promos (which is why those companies like the 2 year contract with promo rates only good for the first year now).
no wonder more and more people are resorting to piracy now. streaming became cable all over again.
Worse - subscribe, watch, forget/procrastinate, subscribe, watch.
I will subscribe and then unsubscribe right after. You can still watch for the month and then don’t have to worry about canceling before the month is up.
And even better, some companies that offer subscriptions will send you a discount deal if you activate the trial sub and go a few days without upgrading.
To be specific, got half off my annual grocery delivery this way. I’ve also read that it works for some TV subs.
Another fun tip: Some companies have their chatbots programmed to offer additional deals for items already onsale, so next time you’re going to make a big purchase, be it a mattress, computer, or whatever, just open the chatbot and say: “Hello, I’m interested in x item. Are there any additional deals or sales going on?”
i only do the prepaid cards. i won’t ever give a bank account or card number to a streamer… means no ‘trials’, but also a bit more security and privacy. no definitive identification ‘on file’ for them to match with other databases, and no personal/payment info to get stolen in a ‘security breach’
Not a bad way to go at all.
i’ve been on your step 3 for over a year now. don’t miss it. been watching ‘archived’ stuff mainly the last several years–and almost exclusively, now. i do ‘turn on’ a free service occasionally. don’t even know what the ‘new’ shows are, don’t care.
This is why streamers have mainly switched to a distributed release schedule. They need to keep people on longer to a service.
Now that cable isn’t subsidizing streaming content, I expect the content to get cheaper to chase the vanishing pot of money.
the flaw in their plan is that many people dgaf if they watch something the moment it’s released. they’ll just ‘catch up’ next time they sub to a service for a month.
Probably, but it will affect the kinds of shows offered on streaming. A lot of streaming services thought that premium content would get subscriptions, but now that has been proven false. I expect the industry is going to see a massive shrink in the new economic climate.
Hmm, would you use a streaming service if it were pay-as-you-go? Rather than subscribe/unsubscribe all the time, only get charged when you actually watch something? Basically PPV Netflix. But also assume that the per-view charge would have to be higher than the monthly subscription fee.
You mean amazon rentals? Not my thing but a lot of people use it.
Yeah, that basically is what I had in mind. I’ve used it a few times, but something about paying a one-time rental fee when I’m already paying monthly streaming subscriptions feels… egregious? or wasteful? I’m not really sure.
But if I think about it, paying specifically to see something that I want to watch when I want to watch it makes more sense than paying a constant fee for a service that I don’t even use every month.
Or just host, download, stream to your own devices?
