Unfortunately, yes.
When Netflix clamped down on password sharing I expected a mass exodus back to pirating and more people self hosting like I did.
Instead they complained for 3 days and brought out their wallets.
The difference is, that Netflix (or Spotify, or whatever) does bring value on its own. I am paying money to comfortably and legally stream content, which itself is paid for and licensed by the streaming provider. From the perspective of a lazy end user, it’s worth it, because you do not need to care about downloading, finding releases, opsec and whatnot. I don’t want to protect Netflix, fuck corporations and subscription services, but password sharing was always only tolerated at most. From the same end user perspective, reddit is just an empty platform. The content is brought in free of charge by the community. And now not only they want the same community to pay, but also for an objectively worse experience? I don’t think that you can compare that.
Agree with you, but small nitpick, password sharing was encouraged at some point, at least from the PR side of the business.
I can somewhat understand both perspectives. Although I too sail the high seas, if you don’t have the aptitude to self host, and you only care to binge a show over the weekend, $12 (or whatever it costs now) is a somewhat justifiable expense. I mean, 1 comic book is $4-$6 on average these days. One of those might provide 15 minutes of entertainment and a month of anticipation. $12 is a good value.
Everything I want to watch is readily available for streaming. Why self host unless you want to keep copies?
Because it’s available to stream NOW for $ but it may not be available LATER for $ or not
Well, sure… not everyone has to self host to see what they want to see either, but my reasoning remains the same. The people signing up and paying for Netflix all of a sudden likely lack the aptitude or don’t care enough. I got a sandwich yesterday that was > $12.
Mostly because if you set it up right it’s near entirely automated and you don’t have to worry about media availability on your subscribed service.
Edit: also a lot of the time we (Canada) miss out on a lot of content on streaming services
A big part of it for me was seeing streaming companies removing episodes due to “modern sensibilities”. Multiple censored IASIP episodes, removing the D&D episode of Community. I think this is going to happen more and more and I want all the content. Not just what was approved by some diversity group.
The strange thing, to me atleast, is that you can even just stream shows and movies on websites like bflix with subtitles for every language. I have friends and family that would pay netflix their left leg if they asked them to. And now they’re stuck with a bunch of subscriptions to multiple streaming services because everything is split between multiple platforms.
Is there any risk to streaming movies in bflix? Do you need anything special to use that site (like a VPN)? There is a little knowledge barrier to doing things like this.
Weirdly, I’ve been using my parents’ Netflix credentials still and haven’t been kicked off yet. They live hours away so there’s no mistake there about being in the same household.
Hopefully I’m not tempting fate too much by talking about it on the Internet lol
Plot twist: Your parents can’t access their Netflix anymore but aren’t tech savvy enough to understand why, so they’re back at watching classic broadcast television.
Thinking people are retarded because they don’t pirate or self-host. Most people don’t have the time, room, energy to do it, you must be a genius
Bit of a leap there. I was merely saying consumers gonna consume no matter what the overlords demand in return.
Just earlier today I had to beg my cousin to get a DOS laptop with an i3 and ssd over a windows machine with a celeron + emmc for the same price. The task of installing windows was enough to make him see these options as equal.
I find it a tad arrogant to believe costumers can’t make rational decision that differ from those of the vocal online minority of reddit et al. Whenever a website changes its product (arguably for the worse, most of the time) said minority prophesizes the end, and calls out some kind of revolt, whereas the vast majority of users or costumers customers just makes due with the slightly worsened conditions, simply because they still see the product as worthwhile. Netflix, for all its flaws, still is a decent product for a decent price, as long as you’re into the kind of slop they produce. And there probably is a large portion of costumers customers who weren’t even affected at all by the recent changes.
Posting for it is still easier than learning how to pirate and dodging lawsuits.
I kept paying for a little while, until I had ripped everything off their site I wanted to see, then I cancelled lol.
Yep, I got a program that had to be subscribed to for about $30usd a year that allowed me to rip up to entire seasons of shows in 1080p at a time through a logged in account. I accumulated about 3TB of shows and movies then cancelled My subscription to both Netflix and the program I was using.
Well, why would they ditch for piracy? Netflix was smart about the whole thing: adding an authorized household (not user, entire household) is cheaper than creating a new subscription. The people subscribing to Netflix aren’t fundamentally opposed to paying for streaming, they were opposed to an unfair change in the business model. Netflix countered with a seemingly fair change in the business model that now eliminates the hassles that come with password sharing and could make the marginal increase in cost per household fairly small. It was overall a pretty smart business decision.
There are many many problems with Netflix, including their growth-based business model, the lack of insight into their finances, and the way they’re slowly enshittifying the film industry. They’re a major reason for the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. However, this change wasn’t stupid and people weren’t stupid for going along with it. I don’t see how it would lead to an overall increase in piracy, that’s being driven by the many new streaming services forcing costs on consumers. But consumers won’t blame Netflix for that because, frankly, that’s not Netflix’s fault.
My GF pays for Netflix and other than some annoying messages and text account sharing is still possible, not as cool as before though.
Anyway, as she does not have the premium version, or whatever is called (no 4K) good quality picture films we end up watching them on Stremio lol.
She doesn’t care, but I do.
