
Streaming TV is about to get expensive – here's why - hhs
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/jun/27/streaming-tv-is-about-to-get-very-expensive-heres-why
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CommanderData
Who could of guessed a resurgence in piracy after Netflix and Spotify.

Convinced until now piracy will continue to fall with legitimate easy to use
services, and it has done. Take either convenience or low price away and
you'll see people returning to easier options.

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lordleft
I feel like this will fuel a spike in piracy. I used to think piracy was
motivated by entirely by cost, but I can envision folks resorting to torrents
to avoid a morass of confusing services.

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somehnguy
Already happening for me and a bunch of people I know. I was happy paying for
1 service a month (Netflix) and having everything there. Then the studios
started pulling their content for their own streaming services. I'm not
signing up for a handful of subpar streaming services just because the studios
got greedy. Netflix worked and worked really well.

So I got a Usenet subscription and a couple 6TB hard drives. Setup
Plex/Radarr/Sonarr/SabNZBD and grabbed all the seasons of the shows I like to
watch. For future episodes it is all completely automated. I just select shows
I want to watch and the system finds them as soon as they're available every
week, downloads, imports into Plex, and sends me a Slack notification. Some
tech challenged family members have even come to me requesting a duplicate
setup, a clear sign that this fragmented nonsense is not good.

~~~
wilsonnb3
> I'm not signing up for a handful of subpar streaming services just because
> the studios got greedy

I can see why people feel this way, but there is a third option. Just don't
watch their shows.

I don't understand why people feel like they have a right to consume whatever
media they want.

~~~
somehnguy
I know I don't have a 'right' to consume any media. But I (along with many
others) want to and will do so whether legal or not. Take that as you will.

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Fjolsvith
My wife and I have turned on Plex. Burn our DVD's to it and watch anywhere.

Conceivably, one could rent, check DVD's out from a library, or borrow them
from a friend and add the programs to Plex.

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compsciphd
forget DVDs, many libraries now carry blurays. With that said, unless you
enjoy it as a hobby, the time it takes to do it (+the storage cost and
electrical costs if you are transcoding it for storage) is hard to justify
relative to even having multiple accounts.

i.e. if one spends only 10 hours a month ripping things, is paying $20-$30 a
month for multiple services (or even $50-$100) worthwhile? of course it is for
people who don't value their time (or view this as time well spent as it's
their hobby), but for the majority of people, it shouldn't be how they use
their time.

~~~
Fjolsvith
My wife loves watching Walker Texas Ranger. I ripped the complete series to
Plex and now she can watch it anywhere, even at work.

You cannot stream that TV show from any service except Plex.

~~~
compsciphd
I'd agree that there are plenty of one off cases (And I rip for fun as well, I
put hobby there for a reason), I'm just not a believer that for the vast
majority of people its a useful use of one's time. (heck, its probably not the
most useful use of my own time...)

And as an aside, I also like Walker Texas Ranger and not many libraries have
it (or in non damaged condition ;) took me a while to complete it)

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RawChicken
People will find a way.. I see in the future one can subscribe to one of these
streaming services for just one month, and then use recording software 24/7 to
record all the shows and movies they want to watch in the future. Repeat with
another service and slowly build your own database.

~~~
ptah
Something that can also happen is forming clubs where members share their
subscriptions with others

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lonelappd
John Wheeler once proposed the Single HBO-Password Universe theory.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-
electron_universe](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe)

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saltminer
I only have Netflix because my parents have it. I've used it just a few times
this year, as most of the shows I used to watch on it have been gone for
awhile. Over the air TV is more than enough for me at this point, and I can
use a USB tuner so I don't even need to be in the living room to watch it.

The only result of this fragmentation will be increased piracy, just like it
was before the golden age of Netflix. The article claims "The golden age of
streaming is over", but I believe it ended years ago.

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scrumper
We use iTunes TV purchases as a la carte dining for specific seasons of stuff
we actually want to watch (or the odd episode of something to try it out).
Chernobyl just showed up on it, for example, so we'll grab that at some point.
We pay massively less for an indescribably better viewing experience under
this system than we did under cable.

Hopefully that possibility won't go away.

~~~
bryanlarsen
$35 for a season of a single show seems incredibly expensive compared to
$10/month for a bunch of shows. But once you realize how many shows you
actually watch, that $35 a month starts seeming pretty cheap...

~~~
scrumper
Exactly. In practice we spend maybe $150 a year. We have Amazon Prime video as
a side effect and our cell company pays for Netflix for us. Without those two
we’d maybe spend double, but we’re still so much better off this way - not
least because we really only watch the stuff we actually want to pay for.

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burlesona
This has always seemed inevitable to me. TV studios are producing content at
massive expense, and they’re only doing so because they expect massive
profits. $100/mo cable bills do the trick, but there isn’t enough massive
profit it everyone “just” having a Netflix subscription.

The market is going to test ways to continue to charge $100/mo or more (total
household expense), and will only keep producing this “golden age of TV” if
they find they can keep raking in big bucks for it.

If we did end up stabilizing on “most people just buy Netflix,” over the long
haul, I would expect to see studios quit producing blockbuster TV, and for
content quality to look more like it did in the 80s/90s.

~~~
dragonwriter
> If we did end up stabilizing on “most people just buy Netflix,” over the
> long haul, I would expect to see studios quit producing blockbuster TV, and
> for content quality to look more like it did in the 80s/90s.

You mean the period just _before_ the drive to replace most scripted TV
content with “reality” content as a cost cutting measure? That period is
probably the peak of non-premium TV content quality.

Netflix is basically, a single premium channels with a slightly bigger catalog
of third-party older content, and priced as such. If everyone subscribed just
to one such service and not a huge package of non-premium channels, I'd expect
_quantity_ of (non-premium) content to drop, but peak quality of (premium)
content to stay the same and average quality of all content to go _up_.

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thorwasdfasdf
the way I deal with that as a user is to unsubscribe from netflix for 2 months
and subscribe to the other service, then unusbscribe from that one too and go
back to the other, just keep rotating once a month.

Or just unsubscribe from everything and go back to reading books. My
antilibrary is pretty big now and there's plenty of books at the library to
keep me busy for 100s of years to come.

And then, there's all those classics that are in the public domain now,
completely free.

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m463
I wonder if there will be a "good old games" service that lets you download
movies and shows drm-and-spying-free and play on any device?

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beezle
I am almost at the point of dropping YouTubeTV. When it started it was a fair
price ($35), had a lot of sports, a little news and a handful of channels that
at least I never, or rarely would watch. Now that the price is up to $50 and
the additional content is just your typical cable tv filler, it is one price
increase away from being axed.

