Streaming TV is about to get expensive – here's why | Hacker News Reader

Streaming TV is about to get expensive – here's why

theguardian.com

37 pointshhs34 comments

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.

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.

Disruption from below is more likely to be a big factor, I'd say. Why even bother with expensive streaming TV when cheaper stuff like YouTube/Vimeo (and perhaps PeerTube/DTube in the future) is just as popular?

Don't forget Twitch.

There was a study showing its happening already. It really is all about convenience at fair price.

Also piracy is really the only thing that keeps the media corps in check, when it comes to pricing.

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.

That's some really nice setup! I'm gonna try it out soon as well. I have a question, I have a VPN as well but I don't wanna be connected to a VPN all the time, I only want my torrent manager go through a VPN while any other app is not. Is this achievable? Are you on a VPN constantly?

Thanks! I can't recommend it enough. As for the VPN part yeah you'll definitely want a VPN if you use torrents for the download source.

For my setup I have Radarr/Sonarr set to prefer Usenet and only resort to the torrent if it can't find a release after 24 hours. Just because Usenet eliminates the problem of having a single seeder uploading at 1kb/s and things like that. I would highly recommend grabbing a Usenet subscription if you're setting this system up. In SabNZBD you can setup which provider you prefer and then it goes down the list. My #1 is Newshosting.com, then Eweka.nl (they follow a different DMCA process so chance of a completed download is higher if a chunk is missing from Newshosting. SAB will use all sources to find missing pieces of the file automatically), then a 50GB block at Tweaknews, and finally a free trial block account at Usenet.farm. I am rambling at this point, if you want more info on this part feel free to ask.

As for your actual question - I have everything in Docker containers running on OpenMediaVault on a server in my house. I use the 'docker-transmission-openvpn' container as a self contained unit, it handles setting up the VPN connection for that container only so that the whole server isn't behind a VPN. For a provider I've had great luck with PIA for the last couple years, they don't care about torrenting. For Usenet downloads no VPN is needed.

I hand rolled this setup with a bunch of pre-made docker containers and configuring them myself. Someone else I know has a similar setup based on 'Cloudbox' (on Github) and that seems to be working well for him too.

You just up opened up a new world to me. I didn't even know what Usenet was and thought torrents were the only possible choice. I'm gonna try it out this weekend!! Thank you again!

My guess is if he’s using usenet, then he’s not bothering with VPN. Torrenting means you’re exposing your IP to anyone subscribed to that torrent. Usenet only exposes your IP to your provider, same way your IP is exposed to your VPN provider. Basically your exposure risk is the same with and without VPN, since all a rights holder needs is the logs from the usenet provider, and the VPN doesn’t obfuscate anything about this generally. VPN might provide some mitm data packet sniffing protection, and also some protections if you use anonomous pay for usenet, but otherwise probably not worth the effort. And if you were to go through the effort, then a dedicated machine with always on VPN is probably the safest way to go, since browsing the internet leaks an amazing amount of info about you.

> 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.

Nobody says they have the right though? They just say they are not having it and getting it elsewhere even if it’s against the rules.

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.

Guaranteed. The combination of torrents and DLNA is easy to do on android and is (in my experience) much better than all but Netflix's built-in streaming

Speaking of piracy, I´ve heard amazing things about IPTV.

I ended up torrenting a movie the other day because I couldn’t find it on any major streaming service. Cost wasn’t an issue, I literally paid for a month’s worth of both Netflix and Now TV just to log in and search for the movie there, without success. Ended up torrenting it - the whole process was a lot faster than even trying to get it legally.

The industry is broken. Even when you want to pay money they can’t be bothered to match the user experience of piracy.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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

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

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe

That sounds like a lot of work for something you can already do by just watching on free streaming sites or torrents. It’s as illegal as recording and storing the content after your subscription probably.

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.

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.

I doubt it would. With the increase in subscription services, I've started for the first time in my life buying digital tv shows from iTunes rather than the alternative of subscribing to 5 different streaming services to eternally rent 5 different shows (most of which I'd only want to watch occasionally or when a new season releases). I'm pretty sure I could have a several box sets of different shows for the monthly fees I had spent watching reruns of The Office. Streaming has turned spending $70 for a cable TV package to Spending $15 per month per "channel". Hardly a different or better world.

$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...

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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?

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.

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