Cue up people shouting about how this is horrible and that they're totally going to cancel, only to be followed by Netflix making even more money next quarter.
I now sign up for 1-2 months a year to catch up on shows I like and just rotate which streaming services I have. Yes, this is anecdotal.
It's hard to find data on how common rotating streaming services is. I would guess not common. I found this from 2021 showing the number of streaming services the average US household has [1]. It's worth noting that this was based on lockdown-era data.
The number if still quite high. I still have 3-4 mainly because my ISP gives me 1 and Amazon Prime bundles it. Were it not for those, I'd probably stick with 2. This is imperfect data because is it the same 4 or are some or all of these rotated? We just don't know.
Most of the data around this is how streaming is cannibalizing satellite and cable. But at this rate Netflix will cost $30+ in 10-15 years. Will it still have growing revenue and the same subscriber numbers? There is price elasticity here.
[1]: https://www.thewrap.com/u-s-households-with-4-streaming-serv...
I cancelled a year or two ago, but not for the price changes alone. I didn't like the new interface much, and I found myself endlessly scrolling through the same things looking for stuff to watch.
I'm not sure if Netflix vastly removed most of its content, or they just made discoverability a nightmare, but it felt often like I 'ran out of stuff to watch.'
It's hard to justify 20 something a month for what is essentially a few 6 episode shows that will last one season, and maybe 4 or 5 passable movies in a year. It seems rather silly to me to pay for that all year.
And with what seems to now be an unavoidable economic storm as in-transit tankers dock and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz starts to be felt, there might be a larger than normal amount of people looking to cut costs in the coming year.
Or maybe not, people seem to have stopped responding to economic pressure by cutting costs in the US! When vacations got super expensive, people still spent, and increased their complaining. We will see what happens in 2026.
Too bad most people are okay with this so it's never gonna change.
Netflix lets you in Safari[1]; Disney+ limits you to 1080p[2]; and Hulu limits you to 720p[3].
[1]: https://help.netflix.com/en/node/55764 ("Mac computer with an Apple processor or Apple T2 Security chip").
[2]: https://help.disneyplus.com/article/disneyplus-video-quality ("Please note 4K streaming is not available on computer browsers").
[3]: https://help.hulu.com/article/hulu-video-quality ("Hulu.com streams in quality up to 720p").
Apparently, Netflix is using steganography/content watermarks in their 4k content itself to trace users who are pirating. This is from a totally unsourced Reddit thread[0] but they do reference a real company which claims to do this watermarking[1]. The claim is that in addition to Netflix requiring 4k content to be available only on platforms with Trusted Execution Environments[2], Netflix also encodes each ~10 second "chunk" of the video stream into at least 2 different versions: an Y and a Z version. Then, they serve each customer a unique series of chunks when that customer streams their content, e.g. YYZYZZZYZYYZYZYYZZYZYYZ. Then when content leaks, Netflix can examine each chunk of the leaked content to extract the ID of the user who streamed the content. Apparently, Netflix can encode a lot more than just the userID, they can also encode stuff like the individual device ID, the TEE key ID, etc.
I know you might be thinking "I could do something to defeat that" and you're probably right (e.g. take streams from multiple users and intercut them so that the bits of the watermark through time are being constantly shuffled), but I'll also bet that there's many layers of steganography we don't know about, and unless you get them all, you'll not escape scot-free.
[0] - https://www.reddit.com/r/Piracy/comments/1rqkyjg/with_a_lot_...
[1] - https://irdeto.com/video-entertainment/irdeto-anti-piracy
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_execution_environment
I'm not 100% sure how it worked, but I guess it could do a similar kind of steganography-style thing to the audio track, where they would embed keys silently and the blu-ray player would check against that.
I'm not sure if anyone actually ever managed to defeat it, I think they just stopped implementing it in streaming boxes.
But the only real world impact is that the device that was used to stream that 4K content gets blacklisted at the hardware level.
To workaround this, piracy groups try to batch 4K rips because they know that the device will be burned soon after they upload the content. They then acquire another device, and the game of whack-a-mole continues.
There are some interesting discussions in this HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46803451
What are they gonna do? Ban your account? You don't need to go through KYC to get a netflix account, so what's preventing you from using a prepaid card to sign up for another account?
I recently started watching a series, and I figured I'd check if it's on any streaming services I have access to. I found it on Prime Video, but when I clicked into it, it needed some other separate subscription to a service I'd never heard of to watch it. And even then, it had like, seasons 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, and 8 of the 9 total seasons. If there was any chance I'd subscribe to watch it before, I definitely wasn't now. I couldn't even figure out where the remaining seasons are available to be watched legally. It's especially hard to find this information in Canada because searching "X where to watch" just gives you results of where things are available in America, which has completely different licensing deals.
So I found a torrent for the complete series and I've been watching it pain-free. Piracy tends to be my default now. It even has the advantage that I can frequently find a Bluray rip rather than a reduced bitrate internet stream. Anything I really like and I want to support the creators, I purchase a physical release, or official merchandise or something.
No it's not. It's just the cheapest. Except for a few outliers like you describe, streaming is an order of magnitude less painful.
The only use we have for streaming apps is finding what we want to watch.
No ads or previews to skip before each episode. Skip button seems to appear at different times.
No waiting for the skip button for recaps or intros. Sometimes they decide not to appear. If you jump 10s, sometimes they don't appear. Most pirated shows are appropriately bookmarked.
No waiting for the "next episode" button to appear. Sometimes they decide not to appear. If you jump 10s, sometimes they don't appear.
Some services make it harder than it should be to get to the episode/season list.
Must use their player. Usually means controls and subtitles appear on top of video. Screen dimmed on pause. Wack-a-mole controls.
That's not even counting the "few outliers" that I seem to encounter frustratingly often.
There are "shitty" ways to do piracy (usually the sketchy streaming alternatives). But the media management and playback tooling is genuinely great right now.
I still buy most of my media, but I pick up cheap physical copies of things and put them on a NAS for playback through jellyfin.
It's... MILES better than netflix/amazon/hulu/etc. No ads, no bullshit, no marketing, no "self-promotion that's totally not an ad, wink wink". Just your media.
Playback is per-user, it keeps all your stuff just fine, you can resume later from wherever you left off, I can shuffle series (great for kids shows like Arthur or magic school bus), and it's never offline, down, or unavailable.
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Basically - you're very confused. I have "streaming" it just comes out of my own equipment, playing my own content. All the affordances are there and it has none of the bullshit.
Having to constantly re-authenticate in my own home is annoying as hell.
Now, if I want to pirate, I just go to my browser, search for a movie/TV show, tell it to download, and it ensures it shows up seamlessly in Plex.
The benefits:
- Searching is easier
- One interface (Plex) vs many streaming interfaces, each with its own quirks.
- You don't have to worry that they'll take the show away while you're in the middle of Season 3.
Plex is pretty easy to set up. The arr services, though, were a royal pain. If there's some automation that sets it all up for you on your machine, though, then it would be a game changer.
I'm fairly pro-streaming services. I want the content producers to get paid when I watch. However, Apple TV's royal screwups[1] drove me to the edge and I decided to go through the painful process of figuring out all the *arr services.
If the streaming services don't make it a pain, I won't even think about pirating.
(I'll add that there was one time I pirated a Netflix show - even though I had Netflix - and the audio in the pirated version was much better than if I watched directly with Netflix. Not sure why).
[1] Locked out because I couldn't confirm the CVV of a card that I had reported lost almost a year prior. All the attempts to change the card/account failed. Even with a new account, once you'd enter an updated CC, it would tie it to my old account because it would realize I'm the same person.
I didn't just get locked out of Apple TV. I got locked out of all Apple services until that CC expired. I could not even apply for a job at Apple unless I confirmed the CVV. Thank God I don't use Apple devices!
They're, at worst, equal.
If I have a show/movie I want to watch, I first have to go to an indexing site like JustWatch to figure out which streaming service it's on. If it's not on any, or not on one I'm subbed to, I'm already having to go pirate.
Whereas when pirating, I typically just search my tracker for the show I want to watch, sort the results by most seeders, then download the highest one. I just save the .torrent on the shared network folder on my Raspberry Pi (Which literally just shows up as Z:\torrentfiles), and Transmission starts downloading it. A couple minutes later, it's ready and I sit on my couch and watch it.
I will grant you that the initial setup takes a little more effort. I signed up for a private tracker where torrents are vetted. I had to configure Transmission to auto-download. I had to install Kodi. But...meh? That's it? All that takes less than 10 minutes and only has to be done once.
If you're still using pirate software akin to LimeWire where you have to wade through results like "Pluribus-S01E01.mpg.exe" and deal with results where for some reason people renamed files (Back in the KaZaA days, I downloaded "JackAss.avi" expecting it to be the Jackass movie and it was actually Fight Club. WHY!?), then yeah, pirating is a pain in the ass. But otherwise, nah, it's really easy.
EDIT: As others have mentioned, pirated content is simply easier to consume. I can watch offline and have full control over playback. Never any ads or unskippable content.
But as it is, no. It's more painful for the reasons I highlighted in my comment you replied to. It's an endless slog of hunting down where to find things, managing what you want to be subscribed to, shows and movies disappearing from your watchlist, acquisitions killing off apps and pushing you to new services and apps that are worse than the one before, etc. I don't have to deal with any of that because piracy is a better service.
I don’t understand why with music streaming, every service has all the same songs, but with video streaming, everything is locked to just one service.
If you set it up so it's convenient and usable by everyone in your house, including visitors, just like Netflix, it's not much cheaper. Electricity and occasional hard drive purchases add up. I bet mine averages out to ~$300/yr. I'm not sure whether just buying discs for stuff we actually watch, and the occasional 1-month binge-subscription for a series or something, would work out better, or not, but it's not a slam-dunk sure-win for piracy on the cost front.
> Except for a few outliers like you describe, streaming is an order of magnitude less painful.
Sort of. A good piracy server takes some time and effort to set up, certainly more than subscribing to even ten different streaming services would, and of course is beyond what most people can accomplish with computers, period.
However: 1) "I just plug in my laptop an play the movie" probably is less painful than having a bunch of streaming services, though not quite as friendly for all members of the household, and 2) Once it's set up, in actual use by people who aren't maintaining the system, the well-configured piracy server is less painful than streaming services, for those users.
https://trends.google.fr/trends/explore?date=all&q=Reddit,Ne...
Or are they just trying to chat online about the purchase decision topic at hand?
Better off paying for Disney and downloading the rest.