Roku does the same. At this point I would be surprised if any box or TV isn't taking 30%.
100% yes.
I’ve been plex for a while but jellyfin looks like I might have a choice of service in future.
Many VPN services are one click to install and $2-5 a month, and the pirate sites are very resilient at this point, so anti-consumer practices could easily drive a resurgence in this form of mass market consumption.
Extrapolate the last 20 years of HDD capacity growth (around 300x), and assume that will continue, every single piece of media will fit on a single drive.
I know those assumptions aren't a given, but it sure feels like we're heading towards a world where you can just have a local copy of everything always.
I know that we techies can bypass it fairly easily, regardless of type... but I do understand the argument that 95%+ of people can't bypass DRM even if they tried their hardest, it's just too complicated for them. Which in a sense makes it effective and purposeful?
Ugh.
To a techie. The amount of people who find torrenting too confusing and overwhelming or are afraid of legal consequences or don't even know it exists is, once again, the vast majority (unless we are talking about Eastern Europe and third-world countries).
Even if you could prove that the US had, say, 10 million people that torrented actively (which is, honestly, a big stretch in my opinion), the pitch to movie studios is that they should abandon DRM because 10 million people can bypass it and 320 million people can't; and 320 million people don't even know the DRM is there or something they should care about. Not a winning sales pitch there.
Like am I taking crazy pills. I got fed up with the madness of all the streaming sticks, and putting in my password with a crappy remote and ended up dropping $300 on an old desktop from a discount computer store. Spent an hour throwing Ubuntu on it, and now bam, works like a charm.
I put the youtube, PBS Kids, and Disney+ (which we later removed) icons on the side so the kids can use it easy.
I can stream Hulu if I had an account, I can watch my Disney+, I can watch youtube, I can watch Netflix if I wanted to. Plus I can play steam games on it, set a fun screensaver. Loads of things.
The best part is I no longer have to try and put in a 12 character password with mixed case, numbers and symbols over a freaking TV remote.
EDIT: Well this blew up more than expected. Many people are pointing out the issues with the quality. I'll be honest I don't care that much about quality, most of the streaming consumption in our house is Wild Kratts, and Bluey anyway.
Beyond that though is that I have to have a slightly worse quality, (meaning orders of magnitude better than the VHS I grew up on) to be able to own my computing device, to be able to have the freedom I want to use it. It's a price I'll happily pay. If they day comes that the streamers decide it's not worth it, then at that day I'll be turning it off and going to the Uncle Ted route of things.
With your Ubuntu install, was it hard to get it to go above 720p? I see people in this thread saying that's the max.
The larger point though is that what you’re describing is not mass market viable. If the streaming services wanted they could shut off HTPC access overnight and they probably wouldn’t even lose a rounding error in terms of users. In a future world where every streaming service has their own stick with its own ads and own DRM I can absolutely imagine them doing that to force everyone over.
Because most streaming services don't support 4k HDR on Linux. And if I'm spending thousands of dollars for my TV to play 4k HDR content, I want to be able to watch it.
I get running a Linux media server, don't get me wrong. But a dedicated windows machine for my TV seems like a waste of time and money when my TV can already do whatever that box would. It buys me very little.
Kind of surprised that Roku hasn't been bought up yet.
Maybe there's a difference between Google TV and an Android TV, but my partner's dad can't buy/rent stuff on Prime Video through his tv, he has to use another device and then can watch it on his tv. He finds it very irksome, to say the least.
My understanding is that this came around by Google insisting on the 30% cut of purchases made in the Prime Video app on the tv, and Amazon told them to pound sand. I could of course be wrong, though.
The equivalent here would be Prime offering a free ad-supported channel and Google requiring them to hand over a percentage of their ad revenue for the channel.