Hacker News Reader

Comment by ho_schi | Hacker News Reader

Netflix: ”You get two parallel streams with your family. Family means trust and password sharing.“

Customers: “Farewell pirating. We pay a fair flat and it is automatically shared between Netflix and artists. Great!“

Netflix: “We increase the flat permanently. And we have now competitors and doesn’t over anymore all relevant content (e.g. Star Trek Picard, Expanse, Disney). How about ruining it and blocking family members with heuristics, geoblocking, per-device-checks and so on?“.

Customers „I’m done.”

THE END

We accepted and used the fair system. And you tease us with DRM? And HDCP? Increasing rates? And now you block our family members?

I wouldn’t be surprised if artists (filmmakers, musicians…) create a common fair streaming platform. Let us name it “United Artists“ ;)

View on HN

> I wouldn’t be surprised if artists (filmmakers, musicians…) create a common fair streaming platform. Let us name it “United Artists“ ;)

That falls under

> And we have now competitors and doesn’t over anymore all relevant content

The core problem is basically owners of IP all wanting to build walled gardens to distribute them (and get all of the cut), instead of just going "pay us X per view, regardless of who you are" which would allow every platform to potentially have everything at cost of having to actually compete on service, not exclusives.

Verizon, who are well known for being affordable, honest, and "with the times", has announced they're going to bring back "cable" subscriptions - you give verizon a flat rate, and they get you all of the streaming services, presumably for less than you'd pay for them individually.

Yes, the first part is obvious facetiousness.

I wish consumer protection laws applied to cell phone providers. I shopped around a while back, and walked into an AT&T, TMobile, and Verizon store.

They all had big ass signs in the front window saying $25/month per line (with a bunch of fine print that can't be read from outside the store).

Of course, none of them will honor that pricing. Also, none of them actually publish their prices. The best I got was some hand written scrawl from the the customer service person, who had memorized their pricing table.

Of course, after handing the piece of paper to me, he said something like, "so that'll be $85 per line, but in practice your bill will probably be $110. I've seen some people end up with $115/month".

Anyway, that's a long way of saying they can offer to pay me to subscribe to their crappy whatever service, and I'll still refuse.

But you’re getting unlimited data! :)

For what it’s worth I pay $25/mo on Visible, Verizon’s discount carrier, and have been quite happy.

This sounds insane and I'm incredibly happy for the situation we have in the EU.

You see "9,99€ / month" for a mobile plan? That's the full price they will take from you each month, no more. Only exception being the home fiber lines, which start at 24,99€/month but progressively increase every couple months to reach upwards of 30€/month.

>Only exception being the home fiber lines, which start at 24,99€/month but progressively increase every couple months to reach upwards of 30€/month.

I haven't seen that but I have had marketing phones where they insistently tried to upsell me on random shit ("security protection") or to increase bandwidth (I had 300Mbit/s, they wanted to sell me 600Mbit/s)

> Only exception being the home fiber lines, which start at 24,99€/month but progressively increase every couple months to reach upwards of 30€/month.

I (Sweden) haven't seen this before, where has this been used?

I pay 5 euros for 5G plan with unlimited calls and almost unlimited Internet. You can even take 4 plans for 2 euros each at promotion. :)

And 10Gbit FTTH from the same provider is just 12 euros. :)

Which country/provider is that?

Romania / Digi

Consumer Cellular FTW

At this point the only people left directly using the infrastructure companies don't care about money. For each of the infrastructure providers, there are many competitive MVNOs with prices plainly on their websites. You should be able to get a regular plan for ~$40/mo, and even a bare bones paygo for $10/3mo.

Disagree here. T-Mobile’s advertised price is what I pay. Yes it’s with their “autopay” discount. But they’ve not had hidden fees.

> instead of just going "pay us X per view, regardless of who you are"

Yeah and this is actually how the music industry is doing this and it works great. Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer etc all work fine alongside one another.

Sadly, I think you'll find the artists have a much less rosy view of that.

"We'll cut the people creating that art's earnings down to millicent's per stream and even screw them over on that, and we'll share all the profits equitably between the rent seeking middle men" doesn't really count as "works great" for everybody...

Isn't that how the music industry has always worked? The record labels have always screwed artists, except the biggest ones.

But anyway, it's better than getting nothing like it used to be :) Spotify and the like have really managed to stop piracy.

It s unfair to say that I think. First, an artist doesnt only work for money, there is an element of fame and love for the craft that is bigger than in other profession. Then, I mean, nobody forced them to sign a label and if there was a way to make the audience pay more they d have found it by now.

With a label "screwing them", they get more famous, practice the craft more often in front of more people, and get more money out of it.

Because let s be honest, what s the thing you can cut the fastest in your budget ? Movies, music and paintings. It s a difficult profession with a difficult billing. Labels help more than they screw, up to the artists to shop around for one that has good marketing for a cheaper fee.

Isn't that a problem of the respective companies taking too big of a cut, rather than method itself ?

"works great", maybe for consumer

... which is the person our governments should be optimizing for..

Isn't it in the consumer's best interest that the creator is also happy and well compensated as well and that a fair, competitive ecosystem of middle-men (distributors) exists?

Most of the money is going to middlemen tho. That's the problem.

It's quite fun that this is essentially the pre-50s Hollywood vertical integration again. I expect this will eventually end with antitrust legislation and mandatory licencing to third parties.

Same situation with sports broadcasting rights.

Exclusivity does not serve the customer.

I've got two houses across two states where any one us (four) can be at any time. If they start blocking based on IP geo-location, I'll drop them immediately.

They will. That’s basically what their new policy is blocking.

> money for two houses

> no money for separate accounts for family members

That's not what GP said. GP complained about having to pay as if there were multiple households benefiting, when it's actually just one household, albeit a wealthy one. If NFLX said "we're going to start charging rich people more, based on zip code," there would be a revolt.

I would assume it's not their intention to try to "go after" this segment and make them pay more (since it's a small portion of their users, and the revenue opportunity is small), but they've undoubtedly thought about this possibility and the unfairness it creates.

To be fair, this seems like a very convenient redefining of "household". If a household can, quite literally, span two houses (and states!), then what does household actually mean?

Edit: double checked and Netflix today is clear that plans are for a single "household". No idea if that language has changed over time but I vaguely recall them always referring to multiple "devices", not people.

According to a dictionary, "household" means:

> those who dwell under the same roof and compose a family; also: a social unit composed of those living together in the same dwelling [1]

It seems more focused on the family unit rather than where they're located. If a household goes on vacation, are they not still a household when they are at their hotel? Why is it different if they're at a condo, which they own?

Disclosure: not that it matters, but I do not have a second home.

1: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/household

I'm curious how you read that and don't see the words "roof" and "same dwelling"? Because... that seems far more focused on where they are located than not? Only thing it is excluding is multiple family units all living in a shared building are not one household.

Oh, I absolutely see that limitation. But as I mentioned in my example, a "household" does not cease to exist when it leaves that shared roof. The group is defined based on where they live, regardless of whether they are together at any given moment, or if they are under a different roof together (and whether that different roof is part of a hotel, condo, or vacation home).

It totally ceases when you leave the shared roof. Is why me and my siblings shared a household with our parents, but don't share one now that we have moved out.

I can't believe you actually had to explain this to someone on HN

OP referred to an intact family unit that has multiple homes. They are still a household because, unlike your example, the are still intact. It's obvious that once you move out permanently, you're not part of the household anymore. But the original examples, and all of mine, refer to temporary relocations of an intact family unit.

I am sympathetic, but to pretend a household is multiple houses feels forced, to say the least. Would be like claiming you have multiple primary houses. Can make a sense, in very narrow cases. Largely not what anyone thinks that term means. To claim otherwise seems bad faith.

> pretend a household is multiple houses

To me this reads as a category error. Households are made up of people, and houses are made of wood. But if you want to pay more to Netflix when you visit a friend's cabin, or your own, I won't get in your way!

And to me this reads as petulant redefining of terms in the hopes of pulling a gotcha.

To be clear, the portability afforded with streaming services is nice. And I'm all for taking advantage of it. But household has always been the combination of a physical house and a social group in it. To claim otherwise is silly.

Can you find other uses of the term that does this? Even "family" is typically constrained to immediate family. Such that nobody expects family benefits at a job to extend to their cousins. Heck, we don't even expect it to extend to siblings or parents.

You're free to think of this as a redefining of terms, but the first person to make that argument upthread was downvoted to grey. That tends to indicate that I'm not the one redefining a term in a novel way.

But to answer your question, economists refer to "household income" and they don't care if you have a vacation home.

If you look at the origin of this thread, it relates to a single family with multiple homes. If you can't see that a family does not cease to be a family when they purchase a second home, then nothing I can say will convince you. Cheers!

Apologies on missing this the other day. The "first person" to make this argument is just getting the ire of folks that are upset to be losing their streaming benefits.

Household income is an interesting one. You have a primary residence that dictates a ton of information for financial reporting. And as far as households go, you only count in one of the houses, as far as a household. The others are non household units.

My entire point is that a household is not a family. Those are different things.

> And to me this reads as petulant redefining of terms in the hopes of pulling a gotcha

You are the one doing the petulant redefining.

> But household has always been the combination of a physical house and a social group in it. To claim otherwise is silly.

Not true.

Household has a well established meaning that you are trying to redefine. The referent of "household" is a social group and does not include the house itself. The house is merely part of how that social group can be defined.

If your house is destroyed in a fire, you don't stop being a household while it is rebuilt. If you own a vacation home, the household doesn't change based on who might be visiting the vacation home at any given time.

> Even "family" is typically constrained to immediate family. Such that nobody expects family benefits at a job to extend to their cousins. Heck, we don't even expect it to extend to siblings or parents.

You seem to have trouble with meanings. Just because some employment benefits described with the term "family" are contractually limited, doesn't change the meaning of the word "family". In fact, even the term "immediate family" explicitly includes siblings, spouse's siblings, parents, spouse's parents, grandparents, etcetera.

My point was that nobody has ever used household for two houses. Ever. If you can find a place that has been done, I'd be swayed. But I have never ever seen that. The definition posted above has family/social unit and house/dwelling unit. Reading that as one of those being plural is awkward and feels flat out in bad faith to conversation.

Now, I will fully cede that Netflix has redefined their terms and are also at fault in this whole fiasco. They are the ones that tried to build on the back of goodwill by allowing a much more open sharing policy than anything else was ever capable of doing.

> My point was that nobody has ever used household for two houses. Ever. If you can find a place that has been done, I'd be swayed. But I have never ever seen that.

Then maybe you should have spent some time looking before so strongly asserting something that is flat out wrong. Go look at some definitions. There are plenty of legal definitions, in addition to dictionary ones, that clearly contradict your take.

The key element is shared residency and living expenses. The number of homes owned is not relevant.

Point me to some. Seriously, the definition linked here clearly has household as the combination. Where are households defined as multiple houses?

For fun, try https://www.prb.org/resources/what-is-a-household/ which says "A household is defined by the U.S. Census Bureau as all the people who occupy a single housing unit, regardless of their relationship to one another."

Did they get it wrong? https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cps/technical-docume... seems to agree with them.

Or, maybe, you are just trying to gaslight folks and not actually arguing in good faith...

The census is a great example. If a person is at a location, such as vacation home, when the census counts them, the census counts them as at the location that they sleep at the most. You don't stop being a part of a household just because you're spending the weekend at your cabin.

Even if your 10 person household has 11 homes, 1 primary home where everyone sleeps 183 days a year and 10 vacation homes where each sleeps the other 182 days a year, that would still be counted as a 10 person household by the census.

And both those linked definition make clear the basic point that you are still apparently failing to grasp. The referrent of "household" is the people who share their primary residence, not the residence itself.

Ah, I see the distinction you are trying to make. You are talking of the people in the household. But that is easily seen as a distinct thing from the household.

Consider standard household services. They are tied to the household, which has a fixed address. Is why power company won't give you power for your RV at any other location.

Again, I'm sympathetic. And power companies distinguish this with service address. But this is exactly the point. Every other "sharable thing" will be a distinguished thing that is shared. They will often have vague ass terms that tie it to the people of a household. But they will also have carve outs on how that applies to them.

I will be curious to see what happens to families living in RVs.

Apologies for missing this. I'm not clear what you mean. They already have the worst services of any "household" you can imagine. Such that I don't see it changing much?

>If NFLX said "we're going to start charging rich people more, based on zip code," there would be a revolt.

Not in the poor houses, and the rich ones would pay anyway because they're rich and price inelastic.

So I doubt there'd be a revolt.

I would hypothesize a revolt for two reasons. First, it would violate people's general sense of fairness that a product is being sold at different prices to different customers. Wealthy people (who are perhaps above-average in terms of retention) would leave to go to other services that they perceive to be fairer.

Second, it would be difficult to avoid overinclusive/underinclusive issues. For example, someone who lives in a studio apartment in a zip code with many large expensive homes would feel they are being clumped with people who are not like them. Is it hypothetically possible to avoid these outcomes? Sure, but it would take a ton of work, and would likely outweigh the benefit of differential pricing.

You think The people will demand to pay more to subsidize the rich. I love your optimism and altruism

> If NFLX said "we're going to start charging rich people more, based on zip code," there would be a revolt.

Revolt? Price discrimination is illegal.

Tell that to the California power companies:

https://californiaglobe.com/articles/income-based-electric-r...

Your comment adds nothing useful to the discussion, as GP never said it was a matter of cost. I am in the same boat and it’s about convenience and/or the loss of what we currently have. Netflix both raised prices and reduced what you get.

Yeah, it's not a matter of angry feelings, it's just a cost-benefit analysis

I'm guessing they aren't actually going to put this into action in the USA, but we'll see how it goes

I'd personally be fine with paying for 5 different streaming video services, but my wife is too frugal and makes me cancel one when I start another.. presumably a lot of people are in the same boat, and would look at this as a good opportunity to try out Disney+, HBO Max, etc

Just curious, what makes you think they won't do it here? I think they're 100% greedy enough to do it here.

And at that point, I'll cancel. I've already kind of accustomed my parents to it by reminding them that it takes them half an hour to find anything that they even want to watch on Netflix.

I just think they'll play around with it in smaller regions to see the effect and run a cost-benefit analysis before they risk angering their primary money maker

I disagree, if cracking down on friends and different households sharing passwords means I get it cheaper than I’m ok with that.

Their implementation allows people to use their tablet / phone / setup box/ streaming device in multiple locations. Since the technology isn’t available to cater for people living and paying for multiple house holds the options are everyone pays extra or the very very few people that can afford it or an anomaly pay extra

To be frank for the case of someone living 6 months here 6 months there They can sign-up and cancel cause it’s a month by month subscription

You get it cheaper? How? We even have inflation caused by greed and greed only.

Inflation is caused by the Covid fiscal policies and the money the government gave out to keep those financially impacted afloat but was also abused by many people

A Netflix account is supposed to be one per family, it was never supposed to be tied to an individual person. Who in their right mind would assume that a package that allowed four simultaneous streams would be for a single person watching four shows at once?

No, it’s clearly supposed to be that one account covers multiple people. GP is fine to complain whether they have enough money for two houses at once.

What about kids who have divorced parents and stay at a different house on the weekend? Do they need to get two separate accounts because “their parents can afford two houses?”

>A Netflix account is supposed to be one per family, it was never supposed to be tied to an individual person. Who in their right mind would assume that a package that allowed four simultaneous streams would be for a single person watching four shows at once?

Like cable, internet connection, or Costco membership - it's per household not per family.

The addition of "household" is a new addition they made, likely coupled with this change in direction about password sharing. The word household does not appear in archived versions of their page discussing streaming plans.

2017 (https://archive.is/KFZtP) "No matter which plan you choose, you can install the Netflix app on as many devices as you want, and enjoy as many TV shows and movies as you want, anytime, anywhere." In 2017, not only were they not talking about households, they were explicitly bragging about how you can watch on any device in multiple locations, which conflicts with the concept of a household they are pushing now.

2021 (https://archive.is/OzbRU) "The plan you choose will determine the number of devices that you can watch Netflix on at the same time. With all of our plans, you can download the Netflix app on all your favorite devices and watch unlimited movies and TV shows."

But now in 2023 (https://help.netflix.com/en/node/24926) "As a Netflix member, you are charged monthly on the date you signed up. A Netflix account is for people who live together in a single household. Learn more about sharing Netflix."

Can you pay for multiple households under a shared account so it combines your watch history?

It always used to be that you paid for the number of streams, and Netflix encouraged it https://twitter.com/netflix/status/840276073040371712

So I cannot use it on my IPad on on the train?

Why bothering with mobile apps then? They should make a desktop decoder box like the old times…

The latter is me. I'll be watching this closely, for my son.

Hulu Live TV is even better regarding location. I have it and had Google Fiber and AT&T fiber at the same address. If I watched live on one it would report on the other than the home location changed and it only gives you so many of those for free before they prevent you from viewing the content (Live TV) you pay them for. So it's only IP and no taking into consideration geo-location at all.

I don’t have a static ip-address. I am curious to see how they will deal with that.

I'd imagine they stick some kind of device fingerprint and only start bothering user if there is too many of new devices that never share same network.

Or maybe ping lan for other netflix app. Or remember the MAC address of router or something.

> Or maybe ping lan for other netflix app. Or remember the MAC address of router or something.

Things that an app or website shouldn't even be able to do without clear permissions.

https://amiunique.org/ is fun thing to look at.

Thankfully getting MAC of router or other similar network stuff would be hard from browser.

Perhaps you have to designate a primary device, and then any of the secondary devices that access from the same IP can migrate for X weeks/months before having to be on the same IP as the primary?

That is going to be quite the schlep with his second houses tv every couple of weeks. I would cancel too

I assume he wouldn't care if TVs in other homes stay logged in when he's not there. As long as they work when he visits, wouldn't that be enough? It could be annoying if another family member goes there for a week and it won't log in because the primary device isn't present.

I guess I misunderstood then. So you mean you activate the network with your primary phone and then it stays active for some time. That would actually work for me.

You sure? That hasn't been an issue for me, although I don't know if my parents (in another country) are actually using the account.

The catalog will be different in each country, but that's expected. It's also quite annoying when you get addicted to a show and fly to the other country where it isn't available...

Which is totally stupid because IP geo-location do not exist and everything is based on isp headquarter's address. IP addresses do not have physical location and ISP now have global presence.

According to many websites I come from another country in eastern europe. Which is not true.

If you are maintaining a website and rely on IP geo location, which should really be called "IP crappy geo guess", you are doing it wrong, especially if you set the default language based on this.

> IP geo-location do not exist and everything is based on isp headquarter's address

There are definitely edge cases (specifically for mobile data), but on average, IP geolocation is much more accurate than "the ISP‘s headquarters".

I live nowhere near my ISPs corporate or even regional office(s), yet my IP location is accurate within a few hundred meters.

Has geolocation gotten a little bit worse in recent years? I understand IP blocks may change phisical location, and don't know if it's IPv4 scarcity or whatever, but apps that use IP location services seem to be mislocating me (like in cities 300km away)

I haven't seen it gotten any better (or worse). It still puts me regularly in other far away cities, in the south of the country, or just in the country. Never in my town. I will never trust GeoIP to figure out anything other than the country.

Even for this it isn't reliable. Depending on the service I can be in different countries. Which is a clear no if you are trying to decide which content you can offer to your customer.

> Netflix: “We increase the flat permanently. And we have now competitors and doesn’t over anymore all relevant content (e.g. Star Trek Picard, Expanse, Disney). How about ruining it and blocking family members with heuristics, geoblocking, per-device-checks and so on?“.

Don't forget cancelling shows constantly. I'm not getting invested in anything Netflix unless I know it has an ending already.

Yes, so annoying. Some shows just makes you interested, invested in the story, you learn the characters' names... Then the season ends, you look up when the next season comes out... And you see that the show has been canceled... Happened too many times, last one that really frustrated me was GLOW.

I wonder if it has a vicious circle, spiral component to it, like how Google keeps killing their products because people don't adapt them, because Google keeps killing their products.

Some percentage of users don't trust Netflix anymore and don't start watching a series until they know it has an ending. A new show launches, it doesn't perform too well, so Netflix cancels it after the second season. Now, the people who enjoyed the show will be more sceptical of new shows, and now a larger percentage of users will "boycott" new shows.

> A new show launches, it doesn't perform too well, so Netflix cancels it after the second season. Now, the people who enjoyed the show will be more sceptical of new shows, and now a larger percentage of users will "boycott" new shows.

This isn’t new, rarely is a cable tv show signed initially for more than 1-2 seasons and then if it does well it’s renewed. Netflix is literally following industry standard here so if you’re going to call them out call everybody out.

If that's the case Netflix definition of success is very different from anyone else, cause no one cancels as much as Netflix does.

Netflix produces as much content as the rest of the streaming companies combined. It figures they would have more cancellations.

Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1299847/spending-on-orig...

Spoiler: the link is from 2022 and only covers Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV+, and Hulu. The OG networks (G Paramount) and Disney were not mentioned.

I think it was the report that went around that Netflix won't renew most shows for a third season because that's when the writers and talent get uppity and ask to gasp be paid well for their work.

> pay a fair

I often read a sentiment close to this around the topic of copyright. But what is "fair" seems to be more often than not "we want to pay as little as possible" with no relation to any tangible values, cost or anything.

I remember during my time at university, a popular point was a culture flat rate of 10€/month to cover everything: Games, videos, books, music, you name it.

Of course the media companies would claim fairness for themselves as well. Everybody is for fairness, they just mean vastly different things.

We will achieve fairness once legislation adjust to Intellectual Property abuses, if not in the laws, at least in its interpretation the abuses are pretty clear to me.

IP Protection is for the ownership of the art. Whether an intermediary between the audience and the author exists or not.

Somehow, by extension, we ended up with exclusivity contracts and protection of the distribution. Lobbies made the law against consumers who don't play by the distributor rules, and worse, even against authors of tools made for use against distributors abuses (DRM)

OK, who's to say what is fair, but it's certainly not individual consumers who have the upper hand: actually they do, unsubscribe and going pirating full on, everybody loses.

Netflix: "Consuming media sucks. Let's try something different, affordable."

Customers: "Oh, great ! Looks too good to be true but so cool !"

A few years later

Netflix: "Well, reality caught with us, we must tighten the bolts or sink in"

Customers: "But... but... you are now forcing me to pirate again !"

TBH, I know of a lot of people sharing beyond their family...

I believe thats what "family means trust and password sharing" meant.

Everybody knew this was not "legal-base family", it was advantageous for everyone to pay lip service to "family" while meaning "anyone you trust".

I know a lot of people on "family" cell phone plans beyond their family. Doesn't seem to bother Verizon.

I pay for a Netflix plan that allows 4 people to stream at any one time. Why does it matter whether those people are biologically related or located geographically?

Because it's a discount for a family, which wouldn't pay for four separate accounts, but are used to share a lot. Families might share a smartphone, but friends and acquaintances wouldn't.

According to a TF article in 2012 - https://torrentfreak.com/top-bittorrent-countries-in-the-wor... - Spain was one of the top 10 countries of torrent downloaders. Is there any statistics of torrent users (by country) for 2023? It will be interesting to see if those million outraged spanish Netflix users have now turned to torrenting Netflix shows.

Are torrents even the primary methods of piracy now? That's an actual question: I get the impression that a lot of piracy has switched to grey market file hosting and streaming sites, but I don't have the perspective to say if that's accurate.

My impression is that the tech-savvy people still use torrents, but nowadays they share these torrents with their less savvy group using things like Plex (and Plex alternatives).

That's what I've witnessed with my Portuguese and Spanish friends anyway. Extended groups who depend on one or more sources of "private Netflix (ie: Plex)".

Even more savvy people use full automation with Usenet and torrents as backups.

What does "full automation" mean in the context of media acquisition?

There is a full suite of software that helps with torrenting. They are the ARR software, it’s kind of a lose collection of open-source software. Radarr, sonarr, homarr, there are many others. Together, they make finding and organizing torrents very easy as long as you can set them up, typically with Docker.

The arrs are sweet. Plex serves media. Prowlarr maintains a list of torrent sites to use. Radarr for movies, sonarr for tv, and lidarr for music monitor things and auto download, move, rename, etc., and are tied into prowlarr for where to get them. Some examples, every new Minions movie or every new episode of The Witcher or every new album from IVE you can have auto download once available and get moved to the correct Plex library folder with the correct filename, and you can set up metadata requirements like size, bitrate, etc. for those the downloads. Overseerr has a slick ui for discovering media and requesting downloads; you can have it set up to use plex accounts where you or other users logged in with their plex account can request something, and it reaches out to the correct arr for that to do its thing according to the *arr settings for that media.

What's everything is set up, imagine a Netflix where you can also request something not available and get that added in the time it takes to download in the exact resolution, language, subs, etc., that you want with no more than a search and a click.

Don't forget readarr for books and audiobooks. For serving media I personally prefer jellyfin with its overseer equivalent, jellyseer.

Thanks, I'll have to check out jellyfin and jellyseer

Yeah what's killing it though is the static prices of hard drives.

5 years ago I bought some 14TB drives for 229 euro. They are now still more expensive than that. This is really a bummer. Too many people move to cloud so the market for consumer HDDs is shit.

You can Frankenstein a few services together: https://jasondale.me/posts/roll-your-own-streaming-service/

I don't believe torrents are the primary source. It's not hard to find illegal streaming websites nowadays and they are probably more convenient, but still a good source for malwares I guess.

Stremio with torrent addons is extremely common.

this is the answer, Stremio is the easy-to-use solution that I setup for my parents and forgot about. the comments above with their complicated usenet setups reminds me of the famous hackers news comment when dropbox was released.

I use a plex share now. Soon as Netflix announced the password lockdown I quit their service and signed up to a plex share where I get 10 times the content, more simultaneous streams and all the way up to 4K resolution. Oh and the cost is slightly less then the cost of Netflix.

I stumbled on a paid sub that i am able to access via IPTV / OTT.

Most of my network that is from LATAM seems to be on it. EU seems to be lagging, but iberians are jumping on it slowly. I have no idea what USA peeps are doing.

Buying it involved whatsapping with someone far away and sending pic of the wire sent page. It was cheap and fast, tho highly unorthodox

Service works well. Main issue is that most of the content is in spanish. Only about 2k movies are native english, but i suspect a big chunk of movies may have 2nd audio channel for eng. Most series seem to have that 2nd channel. Content is brand new and works. Also seems like there are a million live channels.

I dont trust web based streams anymore. Too many poppups and games being played with ads. It was only a matter of time until i got kissed by with drive-by malware.

I guess it depends on the market. In India, all streaming and file hosting sites with pirated tv / movies materials are immediately blocked now. As are nearly all torrent sites. But sharing torrent magnet links are still easier and cheaper than trying to bypass the ISP blocks. And once someone downloads something, it gets shared around a lot.

> I wouldn’t be surprised if artists (filmmakers, musicians…) create a common fair streaming platform.

I think they tried that with Nebula already, to some? success.

If you have a look at Amazon prime these days, it reminds me of a YouTube clone, where you have to pay for every video you want to watch.

Only nice thing is, that the channel subscriptions are easily cancelable. Spending 3-9 bucks on a channel for a month is essentially the price for one movie, so it is ok for me to a certain extent.

didnt they always require shitty DRM?

no thanks, they can keep their shit

Users need to accept that Netflix was never going to be profitable that way. We had a taste of that amount of content at that price, but it simply can't be economically done.

Consumers do not exist so that companies can be profitable, and are not required to accept anything of the sort.

What a vampiric, corporate lickspittle point of view.

Also it has been profitable for years

As the copyright holders (not creators, mind you) realized the vast worth of their IP, licensing costs started to put the pressure on Netflix.

I'm sure that's true, but then we've found the actual problem! And it's not viewers sharing their accounts with their families.

If more users have accounts then licensing costs are less of a burden to Netflix.

Yes, but the real problem are rising licensing costs, not account sharing.

That has always been a burden. If customers want something then the person selling it sets the price.

That's just a description for Netflix predatory tactics. Their narrative is "against account sharing" (which was historically allowed by them) but the problem is actually "rising licensing costs", so their actual enemy is not users but content owners.

The narrative is important. It's important to reframe this as Netflix going against the less powerful side.

Also, I celebrate this has already cost them 1 million users in Spain alone. I hope this backfires on Netflix globally.

Lickspittle??? :)

I would even object to calling people “consumers”, only because the conversation involves a (potential) service. It’s like calling us “bipeds” when we talk about us on a shoe-making context.

Well, when the shoe fits...

*shoes.

It goes both ways, does it not? Companies and their respective goods or service can't survive without being profitable.

Amazon survived just fine without being profitable for something like two decades.

I feel like we would all have been better off if Amazon had not been allowed to do this.

I absolutely agree.

Investors are willing to put a premium on growth, even if it means the company is unprofitable (for certain definitions of unprofitable — you have to be convincing that you could be profitable, if only you stopped spending so much on growth). If you're unprofitable and losing users you're in trouble.

Generally a enterprise that is not profitable is using more resources than the value it creates and as a result the economy is better off if it goes under.

This isn't just "things only deserve to exist if it makes someone money" this is "our system systemically discourages wasteful use of resources".

Actors and such need to be paid. Their labor is a scare resource so if they are doing something that's not worth more than their time, they should generally be doing something else. If we all behaved otherwise society would slowly die as wealth got consumed to zero instead of increased with time.

an*

We're talking about video here, nobody owes anyone anything. It's not anything remotely close to a basic necessity.

No, you don't owe me anything.

But if I stop buying your stuff maybe you will lower your prices and maybe stop investing in expensive stupid fantasy shows that everyone hates.

I mean, I don't owe it to you to buy your crap either. It's a two way street.

> It's a two way street

Yup, this is my point.

Netflix has been profitable for years…

Devil's advocate: Is their growth high enough? In our current system, you always have to be growing enough, not just profitable.

Maybe true, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a stupid system

It is certainly a stupid system.

That’s the big brain thinking that leads to the enshitification of products.

It’s also quite frankly impossible to grow forever. Market saturation is a thing, as is the number of atoms you can convert to paper clips.

I agree with you, yet here we are, investors expecting more and more meteoric returns QoQ, YoY.

That's just "shareholder value". Combine it with everyone who owns stock expecting it to go up all the time, and you get that mentality. Stocks were once a vote of confidence in a company and their long term vision, and now it's just hyper-analyzed gambling with as short a return time as possible.

Nearly everything that's wrong with the current economy and welfare of your average man in the US can be traced in some way to the stock market. Now we have the additional burden of lumping nearly everyone's retirement accounts into that same system. What could possibly go wrong, again?

I read an article probably 20 years ago, about the things that take down profitable companies, and one phrase that stuck with me was "the relentless pursuit of more".

Milton Friedman really did a number on people. Has any of his ideas stood the test of time? Everything I’ve seen has led to rampant inequality, and rot in both the corporate and government sectors. Even in the most recent economic crises, zero countries embraced his ideas, and those that tried austerity had a worse outcome.

>Nearly everything that's wrong with the current economy and welfare of your average man in the US can be traced in some way to the stock market

Just the basic fact that an economy that is good for workers, where they are more in demand and make more money, is bad for their retirement because the stock market goes down, is really all you need to know to understand why the stock market is a plague.

Users in Spain seem to have accepted that they didn't mind if they had one less streaming service to choose from. They are voting with their wallets.

Media companies need to accept that the huge margins of profit are not sustainable. Accept that users will not pay exorbitant amounts of money for content and price your IP fairly.

They were perfectly profitable till greed didn't breed more walled gardens

Then it's back to piracy and the entire industry becomes unprofitable. Nothing of value will be lost.

Netflix got greedy and decided to make all their own content in-house, but they did a poor job of picking shows, and not making too many at once. They burned tons of money on mediocre-to-bad shows, all in the name of not paying licensing to another company, the result being a higher cost for less desirable content.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com