Streaming Has Reached Its Sad, Predictable Fate | What should I watch? is now a much easier question than How do I watch it?::<em>What should I watch? </em>is now a much easier question than <em>How do I watch it?</em>
The decline of legal streaming, through the dividing up of content onto multiple expensive streaming platforms, has pushed me away from legal options onto the black/grey market where I can get much more content for much less on a more convenient single platform.
They were never competing with cable but with piracy. Of all media sellers it seems Gabe Newell was unique in understanding that
By all accounts Gabe isn’t also a gargantuan piece of shit, which also sets him apart from the other media sellers.
Somehow my mind read over the isn’t and I had to deeply think on Wtf I missed and couldn’t come up with shit
What did Gabe do differently? I can’t recall any specifics
He noted piracy was an issue of service and ease of availability, not price. Case in point, it’s far easier for me to wait for a Steam sale and have a legal game than it is for me to go through all the effort of waiting for a decent crack, torrenting the game, and then waiting for the crack to the patch because of something that doesn’t run well.
I used to pirate games to “sample” them, and now it’s simply easier to just buy through Steam. If I hate it…oh, well. It only cost $10 through a Steam, GOG, or Humble Bundle sale.
Video streaming used to be somewhat like this when everything was through Netflix. One place to get everything you wanted was far easier than trying to acquire things through piracy.
Now, however, you’ve got to have 6 different streaming services to get what used to require only one, and with the price of hard drives going down every year, it’s actually easier to torrent what I want and just have things in my personal collection that’s never going to just get removed suddenly because NBC Universal decides that they want a piece of the pie as well.
You can ask a refund for any Steam game after a few hours of play. Refund is full, no questions asked. I’ve done it multiple times with games that just didn’t click for me.
Also pirating games needs a lot of space. First for setup files and then as much or even more space to install the game.
Installing games from Steam is much more space efficient.
One of the best things about Steam is not having to store install ISOs so I can reinstall games when I upgrade.
Provides a better service and doesn’t just jack up the price. Steam sales are some of the best discounts around. Embraced Linux and worked to build upon its open foundations to deliver a great handheld which is open . Great customer service in general. Obviously there will always be people pissed off but going by sales and the general vibe I think it largely favors a positive position.
I think steam is a private company so there are no shareholders to crack the whip. They seem to be good to their staff too and give back to the Linux community.
He specifically stated that before, and also in general just focused on making steam accessible. Some people have issues with steam and what it has for annoying DRM, but compared to what EA and Ubisoft did with their platforms, Steam doesn’t shine itself down your throat, doesn’t bloat everything, and has a massive library.
I think this is true for most people on Lemmy. But I do wonder what the average streaming users will do. What about “free” streaming platforms like Channel 4 in the UK? Content is king, and the path of least resistance will always trump.
Two days after the Super Mario movie hit theaters I walked into my barber shop and it was playing in 4K on the TV. HDMI streaming sticks loaded with self updating piracy apps with a simple Netflix-like interface can be found easily by most consumers.
In my household, where we pirate very very rarely if ever (the last time I’m aware of was 2010, though I’m not the software engineer in the relationship), we plan to: a) cycle between apps as needed; and b) frankly, watch less tv. We’re watching a couple of things on Netflix right now but once we’re done, that’s the next to go, much to my kids’ dismay. They’ll get over it.
I’m back to sailing the high seas and dumping my loot into Plex.
Use your local library! Thousands of Blu-ray/DVD titles for free you can check out and rip freely. And then you don’t have to worry about any nasty letters from your ISP.
Thats what a VPN is for.
I honestly didn’t even include a DVD/BluRay drive in my PC build, so can’t really use those. And I tunnel all that traffic through Proton VPN, so ISP isn’t an issue.
Indeed however that would necessitate having an optical drive
They’re pretty cheap, I have one that can read 4K blurays. About $70. I get access to all sorts of hard to find movies, and my library will even order blurays for me if they don’t have it in their catalog (up to 30 per year)
My local library only has DVDs with kids movies, matey.
Yeah, this is much less chaotic. It’s not even about the cost so much as the convince now.
BTW I use the plex discovery search to find stuff across streaming services. This deserves a shoutout here. Could be better but I haven’t found a better solution. Google voice search on my nvidia shield used to be good at this but it’s really degraded lately.
How do you use Plex? Can it work on a fire stick?
Yes. There is a legit plex app on fire stick and roku. It comes with free live TV and on Demand content, but you can also run your own server on your network with your own downloaded content. If you have an IPTV service you can stream that through plex as well.
Note that Jellyfin is a similar app/server that works the same way and is totally free. Plex is also free, but there are additional features behind the pay wall like GPU decoding, PVR service for IPTV, and others.
Plex - in the way users here are describing (important context since Plex’s management has recently shifted heavily to trying to be like Pluto.TV with less emphasis on its original purpose) works as an application that acts like a library for your own media collection.
There are 2 required parts to it :
- A “server” or “host” which acts as your library.
- A client - like an NVIDIA Shield, your phone, PlayStation, Roku, or eve your Fire Stick.
Without your own server with content stored on it, or at least a friend’s server credentials you can connect to, you are limited to the “Pluto.TV” type ad-driven media collection.
So the answer is “yes it works on a fire stick,” but you will need #1 also for it to be the single source library for your content and not just another ad-riddled garbage service.
Yes you can get plex on firestick
I see an irony in the fact that I can’t read this damn article without paying for yet another media / news subscription service. Stop linking to pay walls Lemmites!
Piracy
/thread
The streaming services have managed to completely forget their business model of being marginally more convenient than piracy.
As for me, though, I’ll start ripping my DVDs. I’ll sail the high seas when I have to, but I’d may as well get hard copies of my favourite films and TV shows.
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Depends on the quality of the rip. As far as streaming goes, yes the Blu-ray will always look and sound better due to the huge bitrate difference. Netflix says “oh it’s 4k!” Okay great, but resolution has little to do with quality. It’s all how much information is available per second (bitrate).
'They could not live with their own failure. Where did that bring you? Back to me." – Piracy
Yo ho fiddle de dee
Being a pirate is alright with me
YOU ARE A PIRATE
Arrrr!
YARG!
I blame Disney in particular. People are just so short-sighted.
Disney felt like a tipping point for me (and Netflix’s new role as a production company). It was only when that came about that people like Paramount started offering their own services (idk how true that is but it’s certainly how it felt).
I still pay for Disney+ right now, but a big part of the appeal of streaming for me was having lots of stuff in one place. Now it’s just cable/satellite all over again.
I never left the high seas because I knew the sociopaths running these corps would screw everything eventually. It was obvious with the way they treated music streaming…
Even though I completely stopped pirating music a decade ago, since I could listen to everything I wanted to on Spotify, when I paid for Netflix I’d still torrent the content I liked. Now that content is no longer on Netflix, but they are still on my hard drives, and I can watch them wherever I want.
If consumers stopped paying for streaming services en mass, they’d be forced to change their business model, but they’ll keep making money by screwing both consumers and their workers because consumers are people, and people are idiots.
The irony is this article requires a subscription to view it…
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“Oh you should definitely check out Mr. Inbetween”
“Is it on Netflix?”
“idk it’s on my plex”
I love Plex!
Too bad they’re cracking down on sharing. :(
The amount of media we have instant access to has reached a level that I find intimidating rather than inviting. Consuming media is becoming more of a chore than a pleasure. Dividing the available media into more services is a plus for me, if I am honest.
I have access to a streaming service, and if they don’t have anything I’m interested in, I just walk away and read a book, play a game, put on some music, go outside, or do my chores.
The days when I thought there were things I “should” watch/read/play/listen to are long gone. Not being driven by what is “the thing to do” makes life so much better.
Not having much choice also makes life easier. There were times when I spent more time clicking around in the flood of what I could consume than I did choosing and enjoying. Now, if I can’t decide in less than 5 minutes, I take it as a sign that I should do something else.
Seriously. There’s way too much content and no way most of it is worth my time. If it is, people will still be talking about it in a couple decades, and then I’ll think about it.
too much content and no way most of it is worth my time.
That’s why I cut the cord many years ago.
Most months I only have 1 streaming subscription, and for a couple of months each year I don’t have any.
As the old song said “I’ve got 57 channels and there’s nothing on”
There are an absurd amount of perfectly good books and /or audio books out there. TV or movie as the only way to pass the time indoors may stop being the case. If it does I’m ready.
Just sails the seven fucking seas
It is so much more convienient. I had Disney+, Amazon and Netflix a year ago and it was too much to bother to open the apps and search if they have what i wanted to watch, only to find out it was on HBO or whatever.
I’ll pay for a few streaming services that can keep something I want to watch in stock year around. For the ones that can’t, their shows go onto a seedbox with plex and sonarr.
This is the way. I pay for Sling TV because there are some shows (Drag Race, SNL, Sunday Fox cartoons) that I prefer to watch while they’re still in the zeitgeist, YouTube Premium, and Hulu. That covers pretty much all of my watching habits and I don’t feel left out of anything.
For anything else, there’s piracy™️
I mostly just channel surf on Pluto or Roku for free lol
That quality is terrible though.
Well, how? I go to my mighty little website and they give it to me for free…
I have just about the opposite problem, as someone who has been known to pirate in the past. I find there is so much content out there that it’s harder for me to decide what to watch over where to go to find it.
That’s literally one of my hobbies, building my collection of media. Plex lifetime pass ftw
The bigger the collection the harder the choice of what to watch lol
It’s always been, what should i watch. There just used to be the caveat of how.
