Netflix is planning to raise prices again

I eventually got annoyed that my 4 subscriptions costing $80/month only having 2-4 of the shows I wanted to watch every month, with the other 1-3 not being available to legally purchase in my country or on yet another service with an even lower hit rate.

Since Plex worked so good for these other shows, even better than my subs (e.g. crunchyroll) I decided to do away with them completely. I kept some like crunchyroll for a bit as a sort of "donation" while I used Plex for the exact same shows available on crunchyroll for the better experience.

Once I found out how little of my "donation" went to the creators of those shows I cancelled that subscription and try to make up for it by buying manga/official merch instead.

I basically stopped piracy entirely because it was pointless at that point. It was reasonably priced and easy. The only time I pirated things was when I wanted something niche that wasn’t available on platforms. Like an art house film with weird distribution rights or an mtv cartoon from the early 2000s with the original soundtrack that still can’t be released that way because the song clearances aren’t happening

But now it’s like $60+ a month for Netflix/hulu/disney+/peacock. A lot of the time they don’t have what I want, that’s on paramount plus, appletv, max, crunchy roll, etc and I’m not spending another $20+ a month to add yet another. They almost all have intrusive advertisements that get longer and longer. The ads are somehow worse than cable because they can’t seem to sell the ad space. I only seem to get the same 4-5 ads over and over which is torture. The apps are all ugly with awful ui/ux and the library organization is completely arbitrary. There is rarely an ability to filter or sort the library and they are always loaded with filler content to pad the numbers.

So a decade or so later I’m strongly considering a media server. It was plex last time but I think jellyfin now. Better ui/ux than streaming apps, better video quality, better library sorting, no ads, and all I need is relatively cheap hardware and a Usenet subscription. This wasn’t worth the bother when the alternative was $20/mo for Netflix/hulu.

Consider music piracy too. I can’t ever see myself pirating music again even though I grew up in the Napster era where downloading mp3s was entirely normalized and the thing to do. But the idea of downloading albums, ensuring I get the correct quality, they have correct album art/id3 tags, etc for the amount of music I listen to is a goddamn chore. I would much rather just pay Apple Music. They don’t have these issues. They don’t have fragmented libraries. They don’t force ads even though I already pay them. They don’t hide half the library behind “curated content”. Its not 100% perfect by any means. Sometimes I get censored songs, sometimes I can’t find remixes, alt takes, or live versions I want, etc. but 99% of the time it does what I want and it’s just easier than managing my own library. Unless they fuck this up I will never pirate music again. Tv/movie companies don’t seem to get this.

Sonarr and Radarr just work. They can take lists for top shows and movies, or from people whose taste you like.

Sonarr and Radarr look for the show, look for options like language and resolution, then grab and optionally notify me of success.

I try to pass off my rampant piracy as ok by subscribing to a few services, but the reality is that streaming doesn’t come close to the usability and quality I get from pirating. If streaming was free, I wouldn’t go back at this time.