It's easier to pirate stuff.
Funny that the proliferation of streaming services has just decreased the duration of my subscription to any one of them.
I used House of the Dragon as an example, I watched it on HBO max but I also downloaded it and shared it online. One of my favorite shows (Future Man) is now on D+ but I am not going to delete it from my collection.
It all comes to: "I don't trust others with the data I care for"
Apparently to make them available on other ad supported networks: https://www.polygon.com/platform/amp/23513277/westworld-hbo-...
Despite being strongly motivated to find and watch things that are inexplicably unavailable to me (especially new foreign cinema) I usually just wait, and then sign up for a trial of whatever service has it a year or more after I read the review.
Only if you want rare and older stuff (and even then, only sometimes). Anything mainstream, a public tracker is more than enough.
I have a significant legitimate media library (>1TB), I have the Plex/Kodi infrastructure to stream it to my TV, but going one step further and mixing in piracy is a step I'm not willing to take.
As I said in another post, I like to pay when given the option and I don’t have to jump through tons of hoops.
I dont know now that we signed the TPP11 how things are going to change.
you can then just set the seedbox as a source in kodi, I can even add torrents while sitting on my couch on my phone with the mobile interface
I have shared accounts to a variety of streaming services that I pay for but I largely prefer using kodi as it's a much more pleasant experience
It's (almost) as easy as looking something up on youtube.
Why would "normal" people muck about with torrent software? I think it's mostly the groups doing (and monetizing) the re-uploads that bother with torrents
Throw all that on top of not being forced to watch the same ad for Rings of Power the thousandth time in a row, a much broader library of content, a better library of subtitles, and no performance issues.
I'm happy to pay for things that deliver usable experiences. Concretely, I'd gladly pay $200/month for a good streaming service that avoids the pitfalls mentioned. But I'm not going to pay money to subject myself to abusive practices and terrible experiences.
The whole point is to enjoy the service; if you feel stressed because you feel forced to binge everything to get your "value", well, cancel that service too. It is apparently not bringing you that value. That will help you get over it pretty quickly.
I’ve turned very sour to these monthly renewals and accounts I can’t keep track of anymore.
Similarly, if I'm on the fence about some service, this is the tie breaker for me; the risk of forgetting to cancel it. Even though I do scan my bank account around once a month, I do naturally pay more attention to the bigger transactions and can easily skim past a $8.99 for a few months before noticing I accidentally left something on.
(Fortunately, where I am, it's just an annoyance. Affording individual subscriptions to all the things I may conceivably at some point want to use would be a noticeable kick in the pants, what with the proliferation of them, but accidentally leaving on one service is just an annoyance.)
If I somehow still need it after the first month, I usually get a email reminder or a message about payment processing failure and I can fix that with a non-disposable card.
It's different on the apple store, where Apple forced providers to agree that a subscription could be unilaterally cancelled via the store. Ideally we would pass a law so that credit cancellation also cancels a contract as long as the minimum period is over. Not holding my breath though.
What companies do this in practice. I think I’ve “ghosted” 300 companies and never had a single even send a threatening letter, much less do anything. Usually I get an email of “error processing your card, please fix or we turn off.”
I can’t imagine it is ever economical to pursue in courts over an $11.99/month contract.
The exception is gyms that do seem to go to ends of the earth to collect.
I had a colleague who used to get monthly calls from a cable co. He was divorced from his wife, who had set up the cable contract, so they wouldn't let him cancel it but were still convinced that he was liable for the money because it was supplying his house.
A meta streaming service that dispatches you towars the service that has the show you want to watch. Of course it needs to work in colaboration with the actual streaming services and diatribute revenue proportional to services' use. It would create much more real-time competition.
I generally want my lists of books/films/music playlists whatever that I've seen, reviewed or marked as "to watch" to be managed seperately from any one particular vendor, and owned by me.
There seems to be some movement towards this with e.g. smart TVs that will search all your apps for shows, and sites that will tell you where a specific film or show is available, but I've not seen anything either super geeky, or super easy to use.
The former lets you put in a list of shows / movies you want it to download, and it'll check against public and private trackers periodically until it finds what you're after. The media you want doesn't even have to be released - an IMDB or TVDB link is enough.
The latter makes it easy to stream anywhere, download ahead of flights, and tracks watched status. Plex especially is fantastically easy for family to use.
Setup is "easy" in that it's an afternoon or less for the kind of people browsing HN, and using it is actually easy for anyone else you care to share the service with. Combined, it checks all your requirements of pulling in reviews from you and others, watched status tracking, and owned by you.