With the simultaneous rollout of restrictions on account sharing and price increases/addition of advertising, I’m cutting back severely on streaming services.
I allowed my streaming subscriptions to grow without thinking about it. Without trying to remember the constant merging and bundling, I was subscribed to probably a dozen services at one point. They ranged from Netflix and HBO and Hulu to Shudder and Showtime. I had Paramount, Criterion, Disney, Peacock, and others. I’d do the typical thing where I’d search for a movie, find it is exclusive to a platform, and grab the free trial and forget to cancel. I excused it if I found a movie even every couple of months on it. There were still nights where it’d take an hour to find something I wanted to watch. I was probably closing in on $200/month all told, and I don’t have sports subscriptions.
I’m interested in learning what other people are doing regarding the price hikes and service compromises. Are you cancelling? Are you taking advantage of bundles with your internet services? Are you rotating on some interval? Or are you not changing at all?
Might take you up on that offer once I give it an honest try :))
What kind of a setup do you usually go with?
Hardware doesn’t matter except for raw disk space, since you’d be storing the files yourself.
I use Docker Desktop, Portainer, and docker-compose stacks to run everything. The whole thing will take maybe 1.5 GB RAM and a little bit of CPU. I ran the whole setup from a raspberry pi for a while.
It can be as simple as running a VPN on your computer, and downloading torrents through a torrent app on the same computer. Then you can just watch the videos you download however you like.
If you want a Netflix-like interface for what you’ve downloaded, run Plex or Jellyfin and point them to your downloads. Get the plex or jellyfin app on your tv, tablet, phone, etc as well. The app will see plex running on your computer and you’re good to go.
You can keep getting more advanced depending on what you want. For example you can use apps like Sonarr and Radarr to automatically send movies and shows to your download app as they come out. You can also use things like Bazarr to automatically get subtitles. Tdarr to encode what you download if you want to do something like make sure everything works on your tv and a specific streaming stick (eg: roku).
And on and on.
I use all of that, and have it set up through docker on a server which has access to a giant NAS for storing the files.
