I don’t do ads. Seeing them after years of not has a profoundly negative effect on my brain. A slight fog akin to waking up after using Benadryl as a sleep aide, and a hazing of attention capacity.
I’m not going to pay for that impact on
my thinking. It certainly won’t improve the world to have more of it.
This is why I keep insisting that Kodi (and other open source "media center" solutions) really only work for people dedicatedly ripping their own large collection of physical content, or for pirates.
I would kill for an all in one, "single pane of glass" way to browse and watch even just only my legally obtained media library (personally ripped discs amd multiple streaming services). But at absolute best I still have content from different sources all squirelled away in their own separate menus, and if I use something like Kodi for the rips I'm stuck at 720p for streaming (assuming the unofficial plugin for Netflix decides to work that day).
And not even proprietary closed source stuff gets it right. With a chromecast dongle (or whatever they've relabeled it now) at best I can search for a specific piece of content from the main menu, and then it's a crapshoot if say, the Amazon Prime content found by the search is included with my sub or a separate cost. It's a crapshoot if the "link" will just open the associated app or actually take me to the fucking content in the associated app.
I don't get why these streaming services think people care about the brand at all. The less I have to think about the service itself, the more likely I am to ignore how infrequently I use it. The more I have to deal with friction getting to the content, the more I have time to think about if the subscription is even worth the cost.
I remember when streaming was super new and the service was AMAZING. As time passed; everything got much more expensive, movies and series were removed and now, even ads are displayed to you even though you pay for their service. The reason for the streaming service was BECAUAE of them having no ads. Now all streaming services has gone to shit :/ giving you 720p upscaled but saying its 1080 HD or 4k. Just lies.. Too expensive to pay for 4 or 5 different streaming services to get the movie you want to watch because one service doesn't have what you want to look at.
Wasn't $7.99 the price for standard at some point? I mean, it was easy to predict but they really did just add the option with ads to make it as expensive as the version without ads and then make every other option way more expensive
I honestly don't mind the pre-movie ads too much. Usually there's not that many, it quickly moves on to other movie trailers (which I don't mind knowing about) and then you just get the full movie without any ads whatsoever. You can always just arrive 10 minutes later and skip most of the ads anyway.
Netflix ads can kiss my ass though. Jellyfin to the rescue!
Sadly I still pay for a service I don't use because I have members of my house who are relucant to embrace the change.
I, on the other hand, am more than happy with my Jellyfin and assorted apps to provide my content from whichever source I choose, now if only I could cadjole the others into embracing the freedom of the high seas.
I was in a similar situation, I just told them I'm cancelling the account when they added the extra charge for extra users, and they're free to make their own account if they want.
There was a bit of complaining, but it turns out no one missed Netflix enough to come back.
I get them using sonarr and usenet as well as an indexer that lists those releases in german.
Sometimes sonarr is smart enough and sometimes I have to grep em manually using prowlarr. But with smart filtering, it is done pretty fast.
For English releases, it works flawlessly.
The only thing missing are youtube series, but those can still be grabbed from YouTube directly (let’s see for how long still), hope more release groups would upload YouTube series to the usenet, hate it that YouTube has no series/episode sorting.
At this point your guess is as good as mine. I e also set up Jellyseer for discovery and ability for users to request stuff but still a reluctance to move.
Netflix is "sold" along other services. Here many internet companies bundle netflix in their plans.
They don't need to be attractive to the consumer. They just need to do a deal behind curtains with other companies and force Netflix on people by other ways. Numbers go up.
I shared my parents' account, but rather than locking me and my sister out of Netflix when they started bringing in restrictions against account sharing, Netflix just…deleted our account entirely. Maybe something to do with my parents being in a different country from me and my sister.
So anyway we haven't had Netflix for like 2 years now thanks to that. Thankfully we've got a really nice…alternative streaming site with all the stuff that Netflix has, and any other stuff available from around the web, with the niceties of being streaming based rather than requiring downloading ahead of time, and keeping your watch progress etc.
Boycotted over those cunts platforming that cunt chapelle and never looked back. No Netflix, no Disney, no Twitter, no Facebook, no Instagram, no TikTok, no Reddit, no Amazon, no Apple.
My parents are finally getting rid of it. The one thing I've noticed, though, is that not having a subscription service means I'm very unlikely to get off my butt and watch tv/movies. Which isn't a bad thing, I guess I just value other entertainment more?
I've wanted to watch the boy and the heron for a while. Maybe I'll get to it eventually, lol.
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