Netflix is raising their prices again. Spotify just raised their prices…
Streaming prices are out of hand. What are cheaper alternatives?
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Streaming prices are out of hand. What are cheaper alternatives?
Just steal everything. The powers that be rob you blind every day in a death by a thousand cuts kinda way.
They don't give a fuck about you, don't pay them any courtesies in return.
Yarr!
Harr
🏴☠️
Fiddle dee dee
Do what you want, 'cause a Pirate is Free!
Prepare yourself, matey!
(NSFW)
https://youtu.be/bHVcuA9aMLs
👉 Your local public library. You can borrow movies and books. Return them so someone else can use them too. Not run afoul of the law. Libraries are great!
Your library probably even has digital access to thousands of movies, books, and songs, so you don’t even have to leave the house!
That's definitely true for books. I have an ereader and I often use my library account to add books on loan to the reader over the Internet. I don't think there's video available like that, but they do have physical media like CDs, DVDs, and BluRays.
Kanopy (video only) and Hoopla (multimedia) are two papers widely used in Canada and the US. There are other and international providers, but I don't remember them off the top of my head.
Ofcourse, they don't have the same content as the big streaming companies, licenses and all, but there's plenty to be enjoyed if you're not keeping up with the latest streaming shows anyway. (I watch TV shows on the broadcaster website the day after they air on TV.)
Some do have streaming services. In Germany there is filmfriend.de for movies and the NAXOS Music Library. For big productions and everything else than classical music they still loan physical media, but it's a good start.
Alternatively:
Give your former Netflix and Spotify subscription fees to the Internet Archive.
They are essentially a gigantic, global, public library.
fmhy.net is a constantly updated directory of streaming piracy sites. Make sure you have an ad blocker and enjoy any show from any service instantly with no sign up.
Beat me to it, love fmhy
Piracy.
Your public library.
Consume less media in general.
Buy stuff once (eg: DVDs, drm free music)
Take what you can. Give nothing back!
But all jokes aside, do give back by seeding your torrents. Some stuff is hard to get complete copies because of leechers.
I never stopped. Welcome back, the waters fine.
Spotify specific:
Use the free service to listen to new stuff in order to find groups you like. For the sub cost you can buy an album per month and have it forever. I work in areas that don't have great data connections, so having a local copy keeps the jams going without interruption or ads.
Soma.fm and radio.garden are two streaming music service replacers. I have not used Soma, but Radio Garden is interesting because it gives you a map of every single participating radio station on the planet and lets you just scroll around the entire globe and pick a radio station.
You deserve all the upvotes today, but I can only give you one.
Thank you
I also recommend Qobuz. They're European and have high quality streaming + the option to buy and album and download it.
If you don't mind the less legal way, you can easily use a program like streamrip and download whatever you want from the service.
And if you don't have the money to spend, they have a trial for a month. Just rip whatever you need and have a nice offline collection. And if you need more, you can just make a start trial with a disposable e-mail.
There's also lucida.to if you don't want to be bothered with any of that.
How is this a surprise to anyone? They came to replace cable.
No, you still don't get it.
THEY CAME TO REPLACE CABLE.
At this point I'd think a good number of folks either don't remember or simply never experienced cable/satellite TV.
Hard to compare against something you've never experienced.
a basic cable package in my city costs $100. A high end one costs $200.
Netflix basic is 8 bucks, netflix premium is 25.
For now. And that's Netflix only. Many many users have multiple subs.
Plus the internet connection, which I get it, it's currently a necessity, but at the time of cable TV, it didn't represent an expense.
That's exactly my point. Cable didn't start off costing $100-$200. In the beginning it was a few bucks as an ad-free alternative to antenna TV. Then they raised prices, just a little at a time, over many years, as well as introduced ads. Sound familiar?
I promise you, some day streaming will cost $100-$200, too. And people will pay it, just like your grandparents do today.
I say again: streaming is here to REPLACE cable. You're living in the golden age of low-cost entertainment and you don't even know it.
The sea awaits you.
Streaming is not frugal by definition since you don't own anything.
It's also important to emphasize that artists make more from a Bandcamp purchase than if you had just streamed a few times on Shitify.
You would need to listen to a song 400+ times on Spotify to earn the artist $1. Or you could throw them a buck on Bandcamp Friday and get to download it forever. Plus the artist gets paid immediately from the Bandcamp purchase instead of quarterly streaming royalties.
Then my favourite artist has earned more from me streaming her music on tidal than if I'd bought her entire discography.
Good!
Care to share the artist name?
Eivør, there's one person on tidal who listened to her more than me. I can only assume it's a Faroese coma patient who's relatives have put her on repeat in the hospital room in the hopes they'll be brought back stranger things style.
Turns out I know of her from seeing a short of her (or a fan?) belting the intro to Enn in a parking garage. Never knew the artist name til now, but I never forgot that melody. Thanks for reintroducing me!
Soulseek is love, Soulseek is life.
Self-hosting and/or use Kanopy if your local library offers it
How have I never heard about Kanopy? This looks so cool!
🏴☠️
This. This has always been the better alternative and this always will be the better alternative!
Fmhy net
If buying isn't owning piracy isn't stealing
For streaming, Debrid and Stremio!
Your local public library!
Buying physical media.
I've had a shit town of issues lately with Stremio + Torrentio to the point where if I can watch one full episode of a show without a major interruption, it's a mialracle
I use AIOStream instead of Torrentio as a plugin personally. Though when it comes to downtime it's usually the debrid service that is down. I only experienced that once with Premiumize in the last year I've been using them.
I'll check it out.
I will build a Jellyfin server soon to get rid of stremio altogether
There's also that free streaming site if you have a library card here in the US
🏴☠️
Piracy
🏴☠️
yo ho, all hands, hoist the colors high
heave ho, thieves and beggars, never shall we die
I'd say piracy ... but it's definitely not cheaper the way I do it (at least not short term).
But if you have some spare storage and don't need a huge amount of content, that's a good option.
What are you spending the money on? Physical sever devices? Electricity?
Yeah, personal hardware. Replaced my 2 bay (2x 6 TB) NAS that had 5 USB drives attached with more powerful 12 bay NAS and 9x 20TB drives. Luckily before the insane price hikes due to the AI hype. Still, I invest like $7000 over all at least. That's a lot of years of netflix/spotify :D
I don't even bother with the electricity, it just is what it is.
Jeeeeeesus. I've got 20TB and that feels like a lot 😅
8 of the drives are on a raid 6 and one is a hot spare and converted to 1000 based terrabyte, I'm maxing out at 109.1 TB, but max volume size is 108 TB.
But I've interacted with people that had 1.2 PB ... there is always a bigger fish ^^
Meanwhile, I'm over here about to attach a 2tb drive to my Nextcloud server and I thought that was a lot...
It's a lot cheaper if you don't need to keep it. I acquire, watch, and delete.
I spend about $10/mo., and that's a lot.
Absolutely. But I do want to keep it, the fact that streaming services can just remove shows from their service is one if the reasons I dislike them.
Also a lot family members and friends use that to rewatch old shows or keep up with newer ones at different times, so not an option for me.
This is where I'm at after about a decade of being a self-described "data hoarder" and experiencing a drive failure a couple months ago and losing about 8tb of media that I realized I didn't care at all about.
Now I have a custom script that runs on the 1st of every month that A) detects if movies and full TV series have been marked as "watched" more than 7 days ago and/or B) if movies and full TV series have never been started and unmatched after more than a year and deletes titles that meet either requirement, while outputting a ledger on my desktop showing what titles have been deleted, the date, and for what reason. I ran a dry run of the script and saw that I was about to save 12tb of storage and realized how unimportant 99% of the stuff marked was to me. Really important stuff (my David Lynch titles, for example), are manually marked for exclusion.
Anyway, but of a blog post but I've realized this is the way for me. My Plex library is now less cluttered and full of only new things. My other users on the account can still request anything they want and my Usenet+*arr+fiber optic server can have almost anything ready for them in 10 minutes or less
7000/19.99(netflix ad free)+12.99(spotify ad free) is 17 years, and thats excluding any other providers you may have had such as crunchyroll or a content specific provider. Honestly if you leave your unused HDD's off the array/NAS you likely have years of drive life as well
NTA but I spend about $30/month on various self-hosting-specific services: Usenet subscription, VPN, Plex Pass, a few little recurring donations to OSSes that I use, etc.
It's not really self-hosting unless you own the hardware. But I support your sentiment!
I do own the hardware. 5x8tb (down from 6) drives of media on my desktop (Phanteks Enthoo Pro is the best case ever made)
Hard drives. That shit's gotten expensive lately. But keeping your own media is worth it. Also, paying for the annual VPN subscription.
It's definitely the hard drives. A 1tb SSD is about $150, and can definitely get you far, but it's never far enough
I use a 1 TB and a 2 TB ssd for temporary storage, sorting and transcoding. But for permanent storage, HDDs are the way to go if you want a lot.
How long would it take to watch 1 TB of video? A lifetime?
A single bluray movie will run around 50GB and full TV shows can easily be 100s of GBs.
Haha. That depends on a few factors. If you're going to the highest fidelity possible, you could fill 1tb up with about 20 UHD movies at ~50gb each.
Download it. If caught just say you are training AGI (Actual Genuine Intelligence) of your own.
I've been downloading for decades. I've never had a single incident, ever.
We're in a Robin Hood Economy. The rich know it, and have been in it for years. Steal everything, it's the American way.
Qbittorrent and a VPN, I've been using Proton VPN and it's been good.
Save up for a 2 bay NAS and a couple hard drives once you cancel your subs, if you want to keep any content that is.
Plex is still a solid choice, but there's probably other self host media options now.
Jellyfin is generally what people are using now instead of Plex, including myself.
I want to like my jellyfin server but it has a bad habit of using 100% of my CPU while idling, and I still haven't figured out a fix yet
How are you personally doing remote streaming? I know some have used Tailscale/headscale, haven't looked into it much since I've been using Plex for over 10 years now...but want to slowly migrate off of it.
personally i don't do remote streaming. Can't really think of a circumstance where i'm not home but also not busy and have time to watch a movie
Cancel and setup a nas.
Truenas, openmediavault, unraid, yunohost. There are many option out there.
Many would gladly help you if needed. :)
Jellyfin on an old computer that you happen to have lying around is free.
You can get videos to watch by going to your library and checking them out and using MakeMKV to rip them to digital format and saving them to the Jellyfin server.
Alternatively, many thrift stores and pawn shops sell DVDs usually for a buck or two.
I know this isn't the point, but has Spotify ever been good, as in a well designed UI? I feel like every time I've used it, there's been some bizarre design choice.
Jump aboard, matey! The seas are always open and full of joyous plunder.
Theoretically speaking...if someone wanted to search for torrents, where would one visit? Afaik, piratebay is long gone.
Piratebay has hundreds of working proxies
Thanks
Thanks
Torrents-csv.com is pretty nice too.
Bold of you to assume that they can sink our beloved ship!
My VPN is as cheap as ever.
Before I streamed music I'd just download it from YouTube at the low cost of free.
I see a ton of people talking about setting up a nas and running Plex or Jellyfin, and i do prefer to store my own media but I've gotten so many more people to switch over since suggesting stremio.
People can take their current firestick or android tv, delete Netflix and Hulu and get stremio set up in 10 minutes. Pay $3/m for torbox and you get a pretty seamless streaming service.
🏴☠️ good ol' piracy will never let you down. 🏴☠️
For I am a Pi-irate Kiiiiiing!
Hurrah, hurrah, for the Pirate Kiiiiiing!
And it is, it is, a glorious thi-ing
To be a Pirate King!
Here I was giving them training wheels, and you said, "Nah, here's how you take a hairpin turn with a stick shift." 😅
Good sir, Tim Curry would greet you as a member of Flint's own crew.
dont use imperialist american services
you can watch movies for free https://fmhy.net/video
🏴☠️🦜
Why subscribe? Subs like this perpetuate a worse future. Go cold turkey for two years and re-evaluate then.
It's not that these use a lot of gasoline explicitly, but their shareholders need to to drive too.
Maybe the shareholders should get a job. Or cancel their streaming subscriptions.
The last time Spotify put up their prices, I told myself that I would cancel if they did it once more. If they do they would rise beyond the maximum budget I allocated to them, so to speak.
🏴☠️
![email protected]
Check the megathread
Wait until they implement Surge Pricing. If it's a busy time, it costs more, if it's a popular song, it costs more. If it's both, go watch TV, you can't afford music.
Bandcamp is still the GOAT and Tidal as actually lower their price last year.
It's harder to deliver movies over the internet when there is a WAR going on.
Yarrrrr.
Get an Android device go on the Play store download a torrent search engine and then look for something you want to download it will prompt you to download another app that will then download that torrent and then you watch it
Or look for download forums. There used to be one called Bolt that was incredible. They had EVERYTHING.
There are still a few out there.
for streaming movies/shows just find something on fmhy or if you want to set up your own server download the stuff off like 1337x and put it on jellyfin.
For music you can do the same with soulseek/nicotine+ and navidrome on a server. OR sign up with Qobuz. I use Qobuz and I like it. artists get paid more on there than spotify and since I don't care about podcasts it's not an issue.
With regards to Spotify, assuming you are able to build a reasonable library by other means, I've been massively impressed by Navidrome.
Run it through a free Tailscale tailnet, and you can access it wherever you like (as long as the accessing device is in your tailnet). Run it through a reverse proxy on a VPS and you don't even need your accessing device to be in the tailnet.
So I now have Symfonium on my phone, and Feishin on my desktops, all accessing the same library.
The only part of that that has to cost any money (aside from buying music, that is), is the £5 I paid for Symfonium.
Check out Bloomee
We use deezer and basic netflix since a month and I don't know how but we never had a single ad (using firefox with ublock on linux mint)
Edit: works as well with tv websites.
And public library is the best
I have to admit my biggest grievance with Netflix at the moment is their anti-sharing technology. It bad enough that they no longer consider my kids at college as my family but when I use “Hide my Location”, then neither am I
I’m a tidal user because I’m an artist myself and the artists pay 2nd highest per stream out of all streaming platforms on the market. Tidal costs me 10.99 a month.
But, best to amass a personal locally accessible collection of your media
I'm on Android and using ArchiveTunes to stream free music. No more Spotify.
Not streaming and finding a different way to enjoy your time. Honestly, at this point, I'm getting less interested in things I enjoyed as a younger person and more wanting to do models and tabletop things I can now afford to buy.
I have a friend who recently retired and is building all the Lego sets he could never afford to buy!
I think that's a great comment to make under a post that asks about hobby ideas. Some people work 12 hours a day and just want to watch a show or movie when they're too exhausted to do anything more active.
The quality of popular media has declined, but I still like watching DS9 when I'm tired, for example. I have other hobbies, but they take energy and have a different sense of enjoyment than a piece of media I have fun with.
It's always appropriate to talk about getting into hobbies. Not all are strenuous or high energy. Even just reading about your hobby is good as well. Most of us have time and energy to get online and talk on platforms like this. Why not discuss it with others as well? I'm offering something that isn't piracy, not that I think anything is wrong with it, but because people don't consider alternatives to what they do on the norm.
How do you know that?
People still pay for this shit?
Jesus dude, buy an android TV and use Cloudstream or Stremio and the cost will just be the device itself. If you have decent internet but your ISP blocks that kind of streaming traffic, use DNS over HTTPS
For videos, how about just …. Not?
People used to be glued to the tv, the “idiot box”, consuming whatever media offered by a few dominant companies and on their schedule. Despite “free” (with ads) broadcasting we all opted for expensive (with ads) cable and let them drastically raise prices. We had a brief renaissance with streaming, lead by Netflix, but they’re becoming “the new ComCast”. Ever increasing prices, shittier service, hostile to customers.
Video is no longer the only option to decompress after work and they keep making it worse. It’s time to just say no
Genuinely pisses me off to read comments like this. People are asking for a solution to a problem and instead they get this self-righteous "oh why don't you just do something entirely different" shit. I swear it's 100x worse on Lemmy than on Reddit too.
I know it isn't coming from a place of ill intent but still.
Ok, my solution is to just not. I’ve cut way back on my consumption of tvs and movies. They’re just not worth it anymore and I have many other choices for mindless entertainment
it reads to me like their solution is to cancel it. What other solutions could there be?
OP asked about alternative streaming platforms
it's 1 dollar.
Raising the
temperatureprice, little by little...