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I don't think people feel good about it. It does seem like people put up with it, though, which is pretty confusing.
I'm honestly surprised with people paying the extra fee for sharing a Netflix account more than anything.
People are doing that? I know more people that dropped netflix than started paying the fee
What alternative exists for people who aren't tech literate enough to torrent their entertainment?
A proletarian revolution, I suppose.
Community jellyfin servers as far as the eye can see.
Wtahcing 10 minute chunks of pixelated messes of incomplete shows on Dailymotion.
Hello, me from 5 years ago.
I felt the same way before I got into torrenting, but upon taking the time to sit down and actually read a tutorial, I found it was all much easier than I initially thought. All I had to do was install qBittorrent, go to the piratebay website (or RARBG, rest in peace), and click the link to the torrent. qBittorrent will then do the rest for you.
I don't know how much effort you've given to figuring this out already, but if it isn't much I'd give it another try if I were you. If you get stuck somewhere just make a post about it here. I'm sure there are many comrades who would gladly walk you through it.
Oh don't worry lol I'm a pirate. Haven't torrented stuff in a while because I literally have not had the time to watch anything. I was asking the question mostly because I think like 95% of the general population would blow up their computers with viruses if they tried to torrent everything.
Computer viruses aren't that big anymore. The bigger things are ransomware and data breaches, but those tend to be targeted at corporations more than people. Not saying computer viruses don't exist, but they're not a big thing as they were 20 years ago.
I guess I understand although that doesn't mean I don't think it's dumb either, I mean, if I'm not wrong (please correct me if I am) it's necessary to have one of the most expensive subscriptions to be able to share, it seems silly to me, that means I strictly need to know someone pays those expensive subscriptions to save a little bit.
We failed the kids. We didn't teach them how to torrent.
I just leave the first time I hear about a price jack-up, frankly, and go right back to sailing the seas whatever I was looking for before that streaming service approached a price point I was willing to pay. These ratfuckers don't get to pull with a parabola ploy; if they got their price point to a place where I'd buy in only to hook me and draw the price up for no good increase in quality of content, I'm ghost.
Barbados and Nassau are real nice this time of year; and I def don't have an issue with buying up more SSDs to store that hypothetical plunder now that storage space per dollar's on the rise.
I canceled Netflix when their model shifted to “focus on original tv shows that we cancel after two seasons. I canceled HBO when they became Max. I guess I get Apple TV for free but I hate their programming so idk. Right now I get Disney and Hulu through my phone plan and pay for a Prime membership because Amazon and COVID basically killed B&M shopping where I live.
I only see my subscriptions decreasing in the future and I plan to focus more on reading and physical media.
My fundamental problem with Netflix isn't that it's $20/mo for streaming TV/movies. Its that Netflix has gone from the single bulk distributor of streaming content to one of at least half a dozen "good(ish)" services that also all want to charge $20/mo. When they had the full Disney/Marvel list plus a bunch of self-published anime plus indie dramas plus a huge back catalog, I was fine with it. But now I'm just going to pirate, because over half of what I use Netflix for is gone.
What's really got me in a lather is streaming sports, which has functionally become all subscription services that are even more expensive than Netflix. Fuck you, YouTube. I'm not paying $60/mo for sports. It's practically cheaper to get tickets to the actual games.
And with sports, at least, its much harder to find live streams that aren't scams or walls of ads or abysmally low grade streams. That's the one thing I can't pirate, so I've fallen off watching entirely.
Which really sucks, when your team is in the playoffs.
Edit: Seriously, fuck this shit.
If you’re looking for nfl specifically, nfl+ premium isn’t too bad. Local, primetime, playoffs and redzone for $15/month. Sunday ticket is a price gouge, but not really any other way to legally watch your team if you live out of market and they aren’t on primetime
Came here to post this, Netflix sucks now and if they have a show worth watching they'll probably cancel it within two seasons, plus the TERF apologism too.
Cannot imagine using TV subscriptions in 2023. It's the easiest thing in the world to pirate and none of what you would be paying is actually going to the people who made it
Live shows are still annoyingly difficult to get.
Everything else is reasonably simple to download. But there is the occasional niche movie or old-ass anime that I have to scrounge for. The 27 episode "Record of Lodoss War: Chronicles of the Heroic Knight" is a hard find, simply because everyone hosts the 13 episode OVAs instead.
Sunk cost analogue where if you pay 10 bucks, you don't notice them so you renegotiating with yourself 5 bucks increase as a new purchase, not the whole price.
I'm more puzzled by people watching shows on repeat who don't torrent them and stick a usb into telly 
Setting up plex is somewhat involved, you need at least nas, big hdd and some juggling around.
There are plex subscriptions (either a plex share or seed box), to avoid that hassle. Bit of a middle ground I suppose.
That's a good point, I guess people don't mind an occasional $1 or $2 increase but if they were told all of a sudden that the price was going to go up a lot they would leave and especially for many people who are already used to a certain service it's very hard to leave.
It's capitalist rent-seeking as usual. Fiduciary responsibility to keep the stock price high requires growth in revenue. For these subscriptions services, that comes in the form of increasing the number of subscribers. In the business press, subscriber numbers are reported above all. When that growth begins to fail due to market saturation and increased competition, the only thing left is to increase prices.
the price increases and crackdown on sharing got me back into piracy.
and it's fan-tastic.
I used to pay for 4 services. now I'm down to 2. the less convenient and cheap they make it, the more I cut.
eventually I'll probably get rid of everything and get one of the cheapo bundles, like PBS Masterpiece Theater, and be a high culture benefactor who pirates all slop.
amazon prime has gotten 75% more expensive since I first paid for it as a teenager 
You being a teenager when Amazon existed is an infinitely bigger moment for me
Prime has been around since 2005. They could be 37.
Remembering how gilded age monopolies had their prices absurdly low to corner the market only to jack them up as much as possible once they had no competition afterwards
Anyway I just hope that cable plans don’t get completely phased out anytime soon
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oh shit, goin to the liquor store, you want anything?
There was an interesting development on this front with Disney, who’s also jacking up prices. They had a package dispute with Spectrum, one of the largest cable providers in America. Basically, Disney wants to protect their walled garden of Disney+ so they were asking a ridiculous cut from Spectrum, who didn’t want to pay up that match.
The compromise they came to was that Spectrum customers would only get the basic Holy Rodent Empire channels (Disney Channel, ESPN, maybe a couple others), but Spectrum customers then get access to a discounted rate on a Disney+ subscription. The specifics aren’t out yet, but it looks like it will apply to the ad tier of Disney+.
Which says to me, the trajectory is for these services to become a sort of adjunct to cable, a replacement for on demand. Wouldn’t surprise me if the log-ins and interfaces start getting bundled into the cable boxes or router/modem boxes. Of course, it also wouldn’t surprise me if the net cost ends up being greater for consumers.
Soon, if this isn't the case already, the cost of a subscription service plus an internet connection will be as high as a cable package was twenty years ago. At that point they will calculate that they can't increase the price any further - and they will increase the commercials instead.
They're still going to increase the price, come on.
I only ever watch things on live.hexbear.net, lovingly referred to as hextube.
What is this? Please eli5
It is a chat room where people can queue and watch videos together. We watch pirated movies every weekend, the announcements are in /c/movies
Cool! Imma join y'all sooner or later.
I'm so goddamn sick of everything in this world being a fucking subscription. I want to buy software once and be done with it. Anything these neolib sickos can apply a monthly fee to, they will.
I've started building a 100+Tb media server project and been pirating things in 4k. Also, just discovered repack games. Haven't been enjoying starfield tbh, so I'm pretty happy I didn't buy it.
Yeah same, the pendulum is really swinging back right now... youtube got so goddamned annoying about adverts (boiled the frog too fast trying to push the ridiculously priced subscription) that I just stopped watching for like two months, then finally set up OSMC/Kodi on a raspberry pi and followed a guide to make an API key to watch completely ad-free. I finally started paying for a VPN after avoiding it for a decade because it feels like it is time to spool up the ol torrent program for the forseeable future
Sorry who feels good about this exactly?
Oops, I didn't mean to generalize, although I admit I did it by mistake.
I don't mean that most users of subscription services see that now they are going to pay more for the same service and celebrate, but that many times they either don't know (or don't care, maybe they can afford it) or they don't do anything, I mean, I know that as users we can't do anything but how is it possible that most people agree with that? I guess the extra value does not exceed having to migrate services, recommendations, learn something new, etc.
You'll understand it when you realise that capitalism doesn't just encourage pursuing profit, it encourages pursuing growth.
The "profit" being pursued under capitalism is not the profit of the company itself but instead the profit of the capital-owners with a stake in the company. These people make their profit not from the company being in the black but by the company GROWING. Thus meaning it increases its overall value on the capital markets.
Companies eventually reach a saturation point at which their growth in terms of customers hits a peak, they have acquired all of the customers and aren't likely to acquire more. When this growth avenue closes they must turn to others to continue "growing" the value of the business for the investor class. This is achieved through measures like cost cutting, reducing staff, and installing incredibly bullshit monetisation schemes that either succeed or kill entire businesses in their attempt to continue their growth.
It has nothing to do with "expensive market to maintain". They aren't doing it because they need more money. They do it because they need more growth.
This is also the reason every game you play and liked once upon a time is progressively going more and more to shit.
I originally got netflix for my family, then i started to use it too. Now i cant share it with them and its more expensive. I am working on setting up a home media server and thinking of doing that in a shareable way, but not sure if i have the tech skills to do it or what bandwith would be like. But every month i pay the high fee i feel like a total sucker.
There is a really dedicated online community that maintains a whole stack of open source software which facilitates sharing and DIY streaming of media. Unfortunately it isnt very accessible. The barrier to entry in terms of time and learning is quite high. So even though it is "free" (gratis and libre) it is not easily available.
How to get content without breaking the bank and without needing to become more tech literate:
Joking because it takes a lot of work/learning/research to do the ethical part of ethical non-monogamy. Learning to sail the seas would be easier.
I have 0 memberships with monthly fees (unless you count utilities or rent, I guess), and just pirate all my media because the prices are extortionate. I do agree that I find it strange that people spend money on TV or whatever at all when piracy is so simple.
I dont know that theu feel good about it per se, I think these prices are set carefully at the upper limits of people's begrudging indifference
People consume slop and become too lazy to explore alternatives. The only subscription I have is to a gym and some orgs as monthly donations. I cannot imagine being the rube who's paying $50 a month for 6 different streaming services.
