TLDR:
Current ad free plans for Disney+ and Hulu are now raising $3 more on October 12. Both becoming $13.99 and $17.99.
Yet another example of how the streaming model is a scam. Disney also wants to ban password sharing like Netflix did. The sooner you can get away from services like this the better. Instead of forking over a fortune for all these streaming sites, it makes way more sense to invest in owning the media you consume.
streaming hit the wall the moment every corp wanted to make their own service to cut out netflix. the boom in streaming happend - at least in most parts of europe - because basically everything anyone wanted (even some hbo titles) had been on netflix for 10 eurobucks a month and now you have to sub at least three services for almost thrice the price each. and especially disney+ is complete trash if you’re not a marvel/star wars stockholm syndrome victim. now asking for even more in times of inflation and recession is a slap into the face of subscribers.
Eurobucks? I think you mean eddies.
You got it, choom
Preem
People forget families have children who wants cartoons. Which makes it even worse because it’s hard to cut off services.
It’s funny how we managed to survive without streaming services. I distinctly remember teaching my kids how to rewind a vcr tape. They watched the same Barney episode about 400 times per day. Guess kids nowadays can’t handle that.
it’s funny how the “when we were kids, whe didn’t even had a tv at home and we were happy”-routine from our grandparents moved up to “we watched the same episode on vhs on repeat!” now millennials are getting older.
I mean at least my parents had rabbit ears… kinda cruel to force a kid to rewatch Barney when PBS has been accessible over the air to 95% of people for like the last few decades.
I didn’t force them to to anything. Not sure how anyone jumped to that conclusion.
I just don’t understand why you would rewatch something 500 times when you get hot barney straight off the press back then… it was even super easy to watch barney later, you just pressed the red button and recorded over the tape.
And if one even bothered to read the manual, you could usually preset recording times on most devices. Although shows also had this weird habit of being offset by ad hoc commercial inserts or unplanned interruptions. So it wasn’t super uncommon on most channels (PBS was actually a bit of an exception, due to lack of ads) to be off a few minutes from schedule.
The 90s were neat.
Yeah lets have our kids watch Barney 400 times.
Even at a young age they have their own freewill. I forced nothing, merely provided them the tools, which was my point. You don’t have to have a subscription to a streaming service to keep a child entertained.
I think some people have not had much interaction with young kids. Sometimes they only want to watch one. single. thing. over and over and over and over again.
Bingo.
Like baby shark
Current streaming has messed up the popularity of legal cord cutting. There’s no real difference in cable and streaming anymore.
That’s all very well, but in some regions like Australia, Disney has or has announced the end of DVD and Blu-ray sales, which sucks.
I canceled all my services and purchased all my content on iTunes. In the long run it’s cheaper especially if you use something like cheap charts to follow sales, and I get all the benefits of streaming model while still owning my media. I’m happy!
Last i saw, the physical media version of their recent shows came with a box and a code to get it online, not actual discs, so they’re effectively getting out of the business of letting you own your media
They started doing that with discs back in mid-2010 along with videogames. Not surprised that it’s just papers now.
I mean it was awfully silly when you had to insert a disc just to have to download part or all of the game anyway.
It was not a big surprise that Disney will follow Netflix as in prohibiting password sharing. It is better for the corp of each viewer has their own account.
I gave up on streaming services and now using Stremio and justchill.
All in one streaming services in the palm of my hand.
I mean, the Netflix password sharing crackdown was a vote put on the users to decide if it’s a good thing to do or not.
And it appears that the results are good, since they are reporting subscriber growth and more revenue. Now every other service will follow because, otherwise, they’d just be wasting untapped profits.
I don’t like this profit maximization companies are trying to do, but one thing is clear: people prefer to pay more for the extra convenience than to stand their ground in their principals.
Even if people like us stand our ground, most won’t even care (I can see it in my personal relationships as well).
Priority for corporation will always be profit maximization. Users are secondary.
Yeah, and in cases where there is a monopoly or quasi-monopoly of a product it becomes really exploitative.
But in this case in particular, I’m gonna have to say it’s the fault of the users.
They chose to pay more for a worst product that had already been declining in quality steadily, when there are tons of other streaming services with good content.
I guess that is the fault of not being aware of alternatives, or brand royalty.
Average Users just want to be comfortable with watch they already have and don’t want to hassle to learn new habits.
Disney simply chose to skip the voting and went straight to forbid password sharing. They are hoping for gaining new customers like Netflix .
And that is why we need a new corporate contract where the betterment of its employees, communities and it’s services/products is a corporations goal not endless growth for the sake of profit.
Unfortunately they are pushed by the investors to focus on generating profit for them.
If I would give money to someone to make more money. I would expect more and more not less or a fix amount.
If the corporate contract changes then the expectation of investors would have to change as well. Changing the corporate contract is fundamental to changing nearly everything. What’s even better is that no one can argue it’s “evil socialism/communism” because it just isn’t but it still affects sweeping positive changes.
Whit this the company might risk the chance to loose some of their biggest investors, who are keeping the company alive.
The implementation of such change would take years to slowly modify and chisel as much money-loosing-holes as possible.
Plus there would be board meetings where the company have to come up with a short term plan to Convince every money oriented board member that the new corporate contract will shovel money to the business. It is not easy, trust me.
They can’t afford to loose money first to gain money years later.
It’s just still relatively cheap. I don’t know anyone who has more than 4 streaming services (although I am sure there are some) at once concurrently, that’s still cheaper than the average cable bill ($83).
Still, if you were sharing with 3 friends before, it’s a 4x price spike for you.
I’m about to set sail. Streaming is only convenient and cost effective until it isn’t. They are headed for the isn’t pretty rapidly.
I mean it is better to have them offline at least nothing gets in your way when watching
I love how after Netflix did this, all of the fucking idiots on Reddit were just like “LOL JUST USE ANOTHER STREAMING SERVICE,” as if it wasn’t obvious as shit that all of the rest of these companies would follow suit shortly.
reddit is absolutely full of the dumbest and most gullible idiots on the planet.
That would’ve been true a few months ago, but now it’s even more true because only the dumbest stayed and downloaded the app.
I’d say the Disney+ catalog is quite a bit better than the Netflix catalog.
I mean if you like watching garbage marvel content then I guess?
Well, it does have The Simpsons, Duck Tales, Chip&Dale Rescue Rangers, TaleSpin, DarkWing Duck, Gargoyles, Mighty Ducks… that’s about it.
Indiana Jones, Star Wars, some decent documentaries also. There’s a lot on there and I’d say it’s more rewatchable items than Netflix.
If someone deserves to be pirated into oblivion it’s Disney, for fucking up the copyright after making a fortune of public domain material.
But they don’t have any content I would like to watch :(
Just do it out of principle!
Ok, I will torrent something and let it seed for couple of days.
At this point these services are asking us to pirate. We aren’t getting our money from trees.
Yup, this + crackdown on password sharing made me cancel all of my 3 subscription plans and move back to pirating.
The reason for pirating for me isn’t about getting stuff for free, it is about paying a reasonable total sum for the amount I use these streaming platforms.
This is why I pirate. Disney buys exclusive rights to kdramas that would otherwise be on multiple streaming services just so we have the privilege to overpay for their shitty subscriptions.
Disney can go fuck themselves.
How do I learn how to do this and not get caught?
Piracy community on the dbzero lemmy server is quite helpful. Run by the piracy subreddit former head admin.
If you live in a country that hunt pirates you will probably just need to get a VPN (I’m not from a fancy country but I believe it is cheaper than Disney there) and download stremio.
Sounds like they’re removing 4K from the standard plan and moving it to the new premium plan. Fuck you Disney!
There’s a premium plan? Here in Australia, we still just have the one monthly plan, which they recently increased by $3 per month.
If they jump onto the “premium” plan bandwagon like the others, and move 4K to that, this will literally be the final streaming service for me to drop. I’ve already dropped all the others. Only reason I kept this is because the sheer volume of content for my wife and daughter makes the $14 worthwhile - I just don’t have enough storage space (yet) to deliver all that via my Plex setup.
They’re introducing it in Europe from November 2023, not sure about other regions. The press release here explains what’s in each plan - unfortunately the premium plan is listed here and it sounds just like Netflix.
Sonovabitch. This is why I cancelled the others in the first place - forcing me to pay for additional devices, just to get 4K streaming. That, and Netflix wanted to charge me for password sharing because my stepkids use our account when they’re at their dad’s. Netflix’s answer was they should have a profile at each house. Losers.
Use stremio instead
I’ve seen a few people mention Stremio lately. What’s the tldr; in terms of benefits?
I went through a fair amount of “adjustment”, getting my family to use Plex and Overseerr (replacing Kodi and “ask Dad to get it”), so I’d want to have some compelling reasons to change things on them again.
I actually started using Stremio today because of what this guy said. I never heard of it. It’s definitely easy to use, but requires some setting up with plugins. Without the right plugin (torrentio) you won’t be able to stream anything without being told to use a subscription service. It took me about 5 minutes to figure out how to get the plugin. I just watched Evil Dead: Rise and I had plenty of options for streaming it. Considering how I canceled my Netflix subscription a little while ago it’s nice to have a reliable replacement. I mean, it’s even better than Netflix. Lots of new movies and shows to watch. I hope this thing lasts a long time because it’s just what I was looking for.
Nice dude you can install the plugin “cyberflix” so you get streaming catalogs that you can scroll through in discovery.
stremio has gotten a lot worse quality wise since rarbg went down. it doesnt seem to scrape torrentgalaxy correctly and i have no idea how to fix it
I don’t remember seeing Overseerr mentioned before although I do remember someone describing a request system like that for Plex a while back.
It’s interesting… I have never really tried to get my family using anything like that but I have had the lifetime Plex Pass for years now.
I think it’s about time for me to finally start expanding my local media collection again so maybe I’ll give adding it to the mix a shot.
Honestly, it’s been a game changer for my family and I. To go with Overseerr, I setup multiple Radarr and Sonarr instances, to cover 4K and anime. That way, anything they request in regular 1080p is auto-approved and downloaded, whereas 4K content requires I approve it first, mainly so I can manage free storage effectively.
Once I’ve managed to save up enough to deploy a much bigger storage solution, I’ll just let 4K be auto-approved too.
Makes sense to me… Might still be worth looking into Plex Debrid though to stream anything not worth keeping.
That’s an excellent point - there’s no reason for a one or other approach. There’s plenty of content we only watch the once, then I delete later on when doing a cleanup.
Yaaar! There be no price increases on the seven seas, me hearties. Hoist the sails, raise the flag, no quarter given 🏴☠️
I’m so close to deciding to sail the high seas again.
I’ve been a lifetime Plex pass subscriber for years now… Just need to get a VPN again, get back on Usenet or real-debrid, and maybe setup Sonarr and Radarr.
I’ll almost certainly save money and have access to more content than I currently do.
Get Windscribe for $3 a month and setup gluetun and you’re golden
I’ve not heard of gluetun before but I’ve been a free level windscribe subscriber for several years now and have considered maybe using them when I switch to paid… I think there may be better options though really.
I guess I need to read up more in what the hell gluetun actually even is or if it would benefit me at all…
I’ve got over 25 years in I.T. and, while I’ve worked on and with teams where some folks dealt with docker containers, I personally never have as of yet.
My yearly cost for Usenet is cheaper than one month of Netflix. Granted I already have 60TB of NAS set-up, which wasn’t cheap, but it has more than paid for itself.
Docker and the *arr programs have made setting it all up an absolute breeze too for anyone looking to get started.
i love my magic hard drive
Every day i become more 🏴☠️
Profits are down. Cough up, plebs!
Disney is the one I’ll shed in a heartbeat. Nothing ever seems to get added. People shit on Netflix, but at least I can go their for comfort food like Jaws or The Truman Show.
I remember when you only had to pay once to add a video to your collection…
The worst thing is I’ve got most of these from the DVD era, but I’m just too lazy to get up and put them in.
My secret hope, unrelated to streaming services, is that people start releasing some sort of analogue tape format like VHS or Betamax, or even one of those, paired with a high quality digital download for movies.
I envision it working similar to the vinyl resurgence. A digital download for modern devices and streaming, paired with a fundamentally different form of media for a different experience.
Of course I know that it won’t happen. I just like analogue tech.
Arrrrr!
I think it’s time to cancel my subscription and instead use the net. Usenet.
Does the Usenet still exist? I haven’t used it since around 2006.
It does and it’s alive and well for piracy (alt.binaries.*). As for text discussion well. It’s mostly spam and Nazis. But it’s great for sucking down content!
There has to be something similar to Rule 34 that deals with this. Rule 35: Given a long enough span of time, every form of online interaction will be infiltrated by Nazis. Like a corollary to Godwin’s law.
Haha, well said
Is it worth paying a newsgroup subscription for, or is the torrent network adequate? I haven’t sailed the seas in years, but I’ve been thinking about hoisting my jib since Netflix stopped account sharing, Paramount pulled all the Trek shows, and things are generally getting more fragmented and expensive.
I have a newsgroup subscription, but a lot of the posts are obfuscated (confused titles that don’t make sense) so you can’t read the post headers like you can in (say) lemmy or reddit (spit! ) . So I also subscribe to a nzb provider (makes sense of the obfuscated) .
In terms of money it’s not too much - like £20/year.
The nzb provider searches the usenet then your newsgroup host downloads what you want.
I’m probably not very clear, and this has been a learning curve for me, but if I can help I will, just ask. But it is good fun - especially when it works!
Don’t services like Easy News and Giga News provide one simple solution in the form of server access, searchable content, and a news client that organizes and downloads everything? That’s how I used it in the past, but those services are $10-$20 per month. Do you mind sharing what you use?
There’re better provider deals on r/usenet. They usually overcharge if you don’t use discounts.
One subscription provider is good and then few non-expiring block accounts on a different backbone helps donwloading content that migjt’ve been DMCA’d on your main provider. A block with many GB’s lasts a long tims since (almost) all parts of a movie are on the main subscription provider.
And then you need an indexer that usually costs around 15$ per year. Those are like torrent tracker. E.g. DrunkenSlug has currently open registrations.
But to get started a subscription provider and an indexer should be enough.
With sabnzbd (download client), Radarr, Sonarr and Prowlarr and Thrash Guides everything can be automated if you want.
Thanks for the information!
I’m using nzbgeek to find stuff. Then put the links it returns into eweka - a usenet provider. I’m new to this, so I’m just dipping my toe in to make sure it works. Currently it does but I’m sure there are better deals if you look around.
I think it is worth it. Usenet has a lot of advantages, like not needing seeders. If the content’s there, you suck it down at the full speed of your connection. That said, sometimes things get DMCA’d so you have to try to download several of them, until you find one that works. Generally smaller servers are less likely to get DMCA’d. I personally use XSNews.nl having switched from NewsHosting and notice a better availability of files (eg less DMCAs). But that minor hiccup aside, it’s much faster and easier than torrenting once you get set up.
My setup is Usenapp for macOS plus XSNews as a host and a paid NZBPlanet membership for search - which you can plug right into a lot of clients, Usenapp included. So basically it’s a magical search engine and download manager that can one-click pirate just about anything at the full speed of my fiber connection. Glorious!
For the serious pirates there’s a thing called Radarr too, I haven’t dabbed in it but I understand there’s a way to set up your Synology NAS or whatever to auto-pirate new episodes of shows and stuff.
Outstanding! Thanks for all the information.
I wanted to rely on torrents but I need german and english audio for my family/friends, which usually aren’t available as torrents - at least on the trackers I can access.
Usenet and direct download sites (via real-debrid) have most content in my native language and the former is the only one that can be automated with *arr.
You can get subtitles for just about any movie in a bunch of different languages at OpenSubs. It’s not audio, but it could help if there’s something that you can’t find in the right language.
unfortunately germany is heavily “dub centric” and a lot of people here never engaged in english more than needed in school
convincing family/friends to watch a movie/series with subtitles is sometimes challenging
Yeah, there are still some decent indexers around like Drunkenslug.
Saw this coming when D+ started in 2019. Disappointed and not surprised.
They’re losing subscribers and money so I guess it’s not surprising. I’m down to zero streaming services after cutting back this year. The last couple subscriptions I’ve gotten I immediately cancelled and binge watched for the month my subscription lasted. There was no need to extend the subscription after that. Most services you can exhaust the content in a month or two of heavy use.
I don’t get why the “not surprising” way to react when you are losing subscribers is rising prices so more subscribers gtfo.
Come on, you are FUCKING DISNEY. Get everything up to 50’s/60’s for free and make some plan to have limited free streaming of this or that movie (call it “disney watching parties” or something like that, make it be available during a same slot of time, put some hashtags and let people give you free publicity) so you can attract customers.
Then offer everything else you got for money and you are set. For life. You are Disney, for fuck’s sake.
Disney doesn’t really have any enticing new content anymore nowadays. They mostly ruined Marvel and Star Wars and their remakes are generally not worth watching because the originals are better. In some cases they even alter the original story so much that it’s barely even the same story anymore. The only worthwhile stuff on there is the Pixar movies and even they are struggling a bit recently with Elemental being a flop.
I’m currently sharing a Disney+ sub with my family and I’m going to try to get them to agree to cancel our subscription. I wanted to do the same with Netflix but I sadly couldn’t get them to agree to it but with the lack of content on D+ I might be able to convince them this time.
Making changes isn’t surprising since the current pricing is losing money.
Big number must go up! Even if attempts to make it go up only work on the short term and then later destroy your business! Makes lots of sense doesn’t it?!
Capitalism is so broken
I’d say it’s working as intended. Let them drive themselves into the ground.
