Netflix Prices Went Up Again – I Bought a DVD Player Instead
aywren.com
aywren.com
I am thinking the same thing. Most recent movies are available for under $20 per DVD - and there are tons of deals.
You can get the 4 lego movies for $5 on DVD on Amazon right now. A "Tom Cruise 10-Movie Collection" is $12. You get the idea.
Get the DVD. Make a legal backup. Keep the physical DVD in storage.
You now "own" the movie (or TV show), not a "license".
In my neighborhood you will often see people selling DVD collections where you get 10-20 discs for $10 or less - varies. I'm sure that is the case elsewhere.
NAS + Apple TV with Infuse app installed = Better than Netflix (and others) imho.
(Note: I do recommend the one-time lifetime license for Infuse app = $99.99)
Reference:
- "Backup DVD Copies Legal Says Electronic Frontier Foundation" https://www.eff.org/effector/16/7#I
- "2026 DVD Digital Copyright Laws in US, UK, Japan, Australia..." https://www.winxdvd.com/resource/dvd-copyright-infringement-...
Also iTunes has Movies for $5, but it has DRM, which bit me since I always remembered their mp3s being DRM-free back in the day being a big deal.
There used to be some limitations with Dolby Vision as well, but I think those have mostly been straightened out now.
I have a modest AVR and 7 channel setup and still watch movies on my shield which is still getting android updates
Similarly, It CAN do Atmos for E-AC3 audio, but E-AC3 is meant for streaming, so it's really rare to have that in a file you're playing back locally.
Basically, it just falls back to whatever the next best thing it can support is at the hardware level.
This is one area where Android wins. The Nvidia Shield, despite being ancient, is your best bet for local playback. It's still limited on the supported Dolby Vision profiles, but can just pass the audio through to your receiver without mucking with it. So you get all the bells and whistles.
Other than the shield your only alternatives are weird dedicated devices that are literally built for playing back UHD blu-ray rips (Dune HD, etc).
https://community.firecore.com/t/help-get-more-dolby-atmos-o...
Only Dolby Atmos from WEB-DLs will play, and you need to use a supported player (like Infuse or VidHub).
It’s a tvOS limitation.
Is this actually true? I thought there was inherent illegality to cracking the DRM on DVDs.
Granted, I doubt anyone is going to come after you for making a backup of a legitimate copy, but I think strictly speaking it's still illegal.
I am also not a lawyer.
17 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(1)(A)
Which was the beginning of the end for ownership vs purchasing a license. That thing you paid for isn’t yours.
More importantly however, is the fact that there isn't a meaningful argument that making backups of physical media you own is ethically wrong.
I was just saying that I don’t think it’s actually legal to do so for a DVD since those usually have CSS encryption.
But at least in the US, it is a DMCA violation.
DMCA gets a little weird; Basically unless you're distributing it is a civil penalty (which, I could be wrong but would mean you'd get a Jury trial, even assuming it ever came up) and I doubt you would ever run into legal issues so long as you were only backing up for personal use.
It's where you get into distribution that anyone starts to care, and it's when you do distribution on a large scale that criminal penalties come into play.
However there may be countries where possession of an 'illegal number' or 'DRM Breaking software' is considered legal for personal use.
It's still sort of confusing to me because would that mean then that if you are making a personal backup in the United States, would it technically be allowed if you pointed a video camera at your own TV screen?
DeCSS proved that CSS is not strong at all. A Pentium III could bruteforce it in 18 seconds. It was also impossible to contain the source code because it was so short, you could print it on a T-shirt or write it into a haiku.
Sharing stuff is still illegal, so if you rip a DVD and upload it for others, that's technically breaking the law.
A 1080p screen has 6 times as many pixels as an NTSC DVD.
A 4k screen has 24 times as many pixels as an NTSC DVD.
Or hooked their DVD player to the HDTV with an RCA cable and were disappointed.
On the flipside, if you had a DVD player capable of progressive scan and Component or HDMI-out, it's fine for couch viewing.
That said, there are plenty of DVDs out there (extreme case, single layer DVD with extras on same disc as movie) where the bitrate can show, but that's not a fault of the format.
If your TV is under 50", I don't think you'd notice quite so much.
While the resolution may be higher on streaming, the bitrate is often significantly worse. Beyond that Netflix has done upscaling in the past with middling success.
Nevermind the horrendous AI upscaling they tried last year. https://futurism.com/netflix-ai-upscaling-old-shows-horrific
DVDs are not well-encoded, and the sources are typically poorer, too.
DVDs store MPEG-2 Part 2 (H.262) video streams. It's an extremely old, inefficient codec. (It was published in 1996! Next month, it'll be 30 years old!) It looks best when the encoder is given a bitrate limit north of 20 megabits per second, but DVD-Video has a hardware limit of 10 Mbps, and that includes the audio and subtitle streams. Most video streams on DVDs get 4-5 Mbps. MPEG-2 also isn't a very good codec; no matter how much bandwidth you get it, it's never really considered to be “transparent” (that is, encoding artifacts are always visible).
If you take a Blu-ray copy of a film (FHD or UHD, doesn't really matter), scale it down to SD resolution, and run it through a good HEVC (H.265) encoder, you'll usually find that a DVD-equivalent encoding takes about a third, maybe a quarter of the space. Or, if you go the other way and let the encode take as much space as the MPEG-2 one on the DVD, you'll almost certainly see an obvious difference, particularly in action scenes.
Starting a physical media collection? Fantastic. Good for you (seriously). But get Blu-rays wherever possible. You'll mostly have to forego the thrift shop, fine, but if you're ever actually going to watch the film, you'll vastly prefer it.
I recently purchased the Firefly Blu-ray and it was an interesting case because it's image quality isn't that much better than the DVD (but definitely better) however it's sound quality was astonishingly better than the DVD. I imagine this has a lot to do with the source material, how it was mastered, etc. I still stream, but I like that I have a core collection that will never disappear without warning, or be edited behind my back (which happens all the time, without notice, especially on YouTube and on Amazon Prime).
When using subtitles, another reason is the higher-resolution fonts.
I have been watching a number of french and mexican movies from the 50's and 60's these last few weeks and video resolution was not an issue. Sound quality and mixing on the other hand was more of a problem if I didn't wanted to turn the volume too high, especially the mexican ones (Cantinflas).
I don't know what is it with mexican movies, even movies to this day tend to have a terrible sound mixing. It is annoying because actors tend to speak in a much more natural and pleasant way than their US counterparts and their ugly vocal fry (women) or ridiculous mumbling (men).
Would a bluray look better? Probably. Does streaming look better? Often, but not always; streaming likes to measure quality by resolution, but more pixels doesn't help quality unless it comes with more bitrate and/or improved codecs and/or improved encoders... And sometimes streaming has pretty low bitrate.
The image quality on these is also quite bad, especially with cost cutting resulting in these being compressed further to fit on a single-layer DVD. Often without any indication that it happened, as well. Whether or not you find it acceptable is definitely a matter of personal taste, but it's very much apples & oranges vs. Netflix. Blu-ray by contrast is generally better quality than what you'll get from streaming services.
I sometimes "sing" the tick, even in other versions.
Streaming services are not exactly known for their image and sound quality.
I've bought and watched hundreds of movies and TV shows on disc, but can count the number of times I've used an actual disc player to do so on one hand.
I buy movies only when its one I really want and there's either an iTunes code or a VUDU code.
One note on Kanopy - they use a ticket system (10-15 tickets per library customer). So if you have a couple people in your household, all of your library card numbers contribute tickets to the login. And, if you have two library systems like we do here (KCLS and SPL) you can double dip on all the cards again. No hack required - Kanopy actually has a very nice way of failing over to other cards as your quota is used up.
And if that's not enough, try Scarecrow Video out of Seattle. They are the masters of physical digital film media right now. It's fun to try to stump them. And they provide mailorder system similar to the old red envelopes of NetFlix.
eBay has DVD collections go up for sale all the time. Fun to buy the "box of movies" for $100 and see what you get.
Another big haul for me is from local thrift stores - usually 50 cents to 2 bucks a disc.
Hoopla is good for this is what I hear as well. I have not tried it yet, I have not taken the time to get my library card since I moved and forgot to renew. There's a new library opening up near me, so waiting on that to open a new card.
Paramount and Lionsgate are the only studios which don't participate IIRC.
Backups are legal (assuming you keep the physical DVD, like youve said, and dont just "make a backup" and then sell the original), but you don't just have carte blanche to the content still (ie, region coding has weird legalities to it, public viewing is still not allowed, because you havent licensed that right.)
That said, I still fully agree with you. I just find the "license" vs "ownership" topic interesting for physical copies. The fact that media companies are so strongly trying to limit your rights just means you need to make sure you keep what rights you do have. I spent 3 years personally backing up my wife's 1400 DVDs, because with that many of them, at some point the discs are bound to go bad.
Reference:
https://language-studio.clas.ufl.edu/copyright-law-and-educa...
Yes, and it turns out I also own the hard drives that it's stored on. The thumb drives. The SSDs. And there is no copyright police in my utility room. But there is a Plex server. The "Netflix sucks and I don't have enough control over my shows" problem was solved years ago. Seriously, you can stream this to any device you own, whether you're at home or in some hotel a continent away. You can stream it for your friends.
>I spent 3 years personally backing up my wife's 1400 DVDs, because with that many of them, at some point the discs are bound to go bad.
I made a list of our DVDs, then gave them away and spend a few weeks downloading those. In many cases, like Star Trek TNG, I ended up getting improved versions... god help me, interlace comb.
So, yes, you can. Is it legal? No. But neither is selling cocaine in a nightclub yet many people fund their entire lifestyle doing just that.
* Usenet
My son has autism and viewed his Netflix homepage as his personal curated collection. But then, of course, Netflix renegotiates licensing deals and entire seasons or shows just go away. And it really crushes him because it's like they were stolen from his personal collection.
So now when I hear him play, the super villain trying to destroy the world is always named Reed Hastings.
That is absolutely hilarious and it totally sounds like a villain's name
Netflix is exceptionally shitty at letting people what is leaving their platform and when, and even letting them know when the shows they saved or were in the middle of watching have been removed. Netflix has been around for ages but we still have to depend on third party websites to tell us what's coming/leaving. Some items will have a "leaving soon" banner on the thumbnail, but that's only good for shows netflix decides to push at you. There's no section or search that will find all that stuff (searching for "leaving soon" will show you some of them)
That way games that are gone remain and I have a Netflix like interface to view all my games past and present
They were.
Suddenly, not prostitution!
It’s easy once you get the hang of makemkv.
So if you have the license, download a legal fair use back via “alternate distribution channels”.
I'm not sure if it's easier using jellyfin etc.
Could someone turn this into a business where they store all those DVD's you bought, on your behalf?
Or even go out and proactively build your library for you. Then let you download the missing ones (or if that flouts distribution laws, roundtrip mail them to you).
Since you're unlikely to need to view all of your titles at once, maybe they could do a loaner program where customers pool their entitlements and "check out" movies to watch.
Wait, have I just reinvented OG Netflix?
Move the storage to the cloud and now you have something like contemporary Netflix.
The difference being instead of going out and negotiating bulk streaming contracts, there's a physical DVD backing every single ownership title.
(For my next trick we'll tokenize them to a cryptocurrency...)
I buy Blu-Rays at charity shops, strip them from the case and once ripped slide them in to a CD wallet with the inner leaflet. A horror show if you were collecting with cases but works for if you desire to own movie to NAS legally.
> Could someone turn this into a business where they store all those DVD's you bought, on your behalf?
Someone did, got sued and the business took the shock and closed down. They used to let you buy old stocked DVD's they owned. When you cancelled your subcription they sent you back the DVD's.
Most 4k kids movies on eBay were from the bargain bin at Walmart. The DVDs are as cheap as 4k blu rays.
You do not "own" the movie. You still only have the right to view your personal copies. You cannot broadcast it. You cannot charge others to watch it.
Physical still has the downside of needing space. I have space for books, but not much else.
You'll need prowlarr for downloading. And a Bittorrent client that works with it (e.g. Ktorrent doesn't).
Then you'll set up radarr/sonarr, and ensure they can talk to prowlarr.
Setting up Plex is straightforward. But I think you do need to make it visible to radarr/sonarr.
It was definitely a pain, but once I had it set up it's been fine.
Sort of. You tell Plex where your directories are for movies and TV shows. All you have to do with Sonarr/Radarr is have them dump the finished downloads into their respective directories.
https://github.com/aldarisbm/local-k3s-cluster/tree/main/dow...
if you want to have an idea. I used a docker compose approach.
Should be self healing
I have ended up in the past being in a state of “don’t touch anything, it hasn’t broken in 6 months”. Then an update releases and I have to learn everything again. Beats paying 120 a month for whatever streaming services we would need.
I've given up my streaming box because I find passive watching so draining and trying to focus on educational content/ course and exercise.
I was finding myself wallowing away hours per day passively watching endless episodes of the current biggest show.
This wasn't something that I didn't want to learn myself, but I have so little time with children and gardening on top of my super busy work at this point that I didn't have time to simply google everything. I did know enough about it beforehand to provide a general idea of what I want, so YMMV.
And nothing of value was lost.
This is an argument for preservation.
i.e. everything should be available via sailing the seas. If something isn't, and you know where to obtain it, do your part.
Many films and records have been lost because nobody cared to do it.
DVD Inbox and Cafe DVD is $20/mo for 2 discs at a time, with unlimited discs and a 5 day guarantee. 5 days to get your DVD doesn't seem great. They have cheaper plans but limit the number of DVDs you can take out.
Netflix was revolutionary because they shipped very eagerly and they charge $15/mo for 2 DVDs unlimited. And I think their shipping took 2 days. They shipped as soon as you shipped yours back so if you were diligent you could prob have close to a movie every night. Incredible service.
I guess the economics just isn't there.
Also, the turnaround times were really slow. Slow mail perhaps, but at the same time it's kind of in their interests to not turn things around so fast.
In the UK, letters get a lower priority than packages which doesn't help.
The latter sure seems a lot more likely than the former, my man.
If you'd have asked me 20 years to bet on whether streaming or shiny disks would be producing better quality audio/video in 20 years my money would NOT have been on disks but here we are. Ye Olden Plastic Disk's are still kicking streaming's butt even though I have 2.5Gbps fiber now.
Also, display resolution is not scaling like it used to. The move up from 4k to 8k is far more expensive and less worthwhile than the previous jumps.
So, I think your assumptions about the business side of streaming and the way the hardware is scaling are wrong and we will, in fact, not see physical media make a comeback.
There are some niche services like the one that you can only get on Sony TV's that stream at like 50% of UHD bluray's bitrate - and that might be as good as it gets for the foreseeable future unless these services are forced to compete on quality or people decide to care about 8k or something.
Regarding the 5d guarantee -- I suspect that most disks would show up in 2-3 days, but if you're going to guarantee you'll need some buffer (as I think US Mail says first class is 1-5 days). And I think Netflix was just counting on it mostly being shorter (and may have even had distribution centers at some point in its history).
Yeah, it was fast. And yet, for it to work financially, they were still using plain old USPS. The trick (which required the levels of volume they had at the time) was to have a bunch of distribution centers positioned all throughout their service area. For a modern day service trying to do the same with significantly less volume, they won't be able to afford the extra distribution centers.
If you had a very regular viewing behavior you could have your new disks the same day as you shipped your old ones. To the customer, it was magical.
Their shipping was pretty incredible. I'd drop one off early morning pickup at my college campus and have another DVD the next day aternoon in my mailbox sometimes. It was crazy how fast I could turn over discs.
This is about what we paid for Netflix in 2006. Especially after accounting for inflation.
Now we use the library or buy cheap DVDs second-hand at a shop that employs people that would struggle to be hired. We cancelled our Netflix when it became something like 15€ per month. That’s 3 years of library subscription.
Honestly isn't worth the effort to visit my local one, unless I want to join a crochet club or do 'mindfulness' jigsaws.
Then we also have a larger inter-library loan, where I can request things from libraries far, far away (even in another state). It takes much longer, though, and if it is deemed a popular/useful item, my local library may decide to purchase it and give that one to me rather than use ILL.
You may want to check if your local library has something similar.
I wouldn't call that underutilized. :-)
I once heard from a knowledgeable source that most of library lending is bodice rippers. These are available from Amazon/etc. pretty cheaply, which undercuts the value argument. And of course, there's practically no social value of providing the public with free bodice rippers...
I'd be interested to know more about the economics of lending DVDs and Blu-rays. Hopefully libraries get a better deal on these.
Why not?
> Some of the services end up being very expensive, like ebook lending
We need something like a first-sale doctrine for electronic media. Blockchains would be ideal for tracking ownership.
Would a library ever lend porn out? I'm guessing no, because of the lack of social value. To the extent that bodice rippers are like porn, the same rationale would apply.
850,000 people have to share just 2 copies of Thompson's Calculus Made Easy. (I didn't cherry pick this: I looked up at my bookshelf and picked the first book I saw.)
Very little of the money is spent on books. Only 15% of the money is spent on 'collections', and much of that is spent on things other than books.
SF libraries are nice for children (lots of copies of kids' books, lots of desks to do homework when waiting for parents to get back from work).
But I personally don't find them a convenient source for reading material as, if I want a particular book, they usually don't have it.
SFPL's own stats say they see over 10,000 visitors per day and check out over 12 million items annually. Let's say you allocate 50% ($100M) to each of those two missions: serving as a community space vs. lending materials.
That gives you:
- As a community space: $100M ÷ (10,000 visitors × 365 days) = ~$27 per visit. You could hand every person who walks in a $27 gift card to a coffee shop with free Wi-Fi and they'd arguably get a comparable experience for many use cases.
- As a lending library: $100M ÷ 12,000,000 checkouts = ~$8.30 per checkout. You could just buy most paperbacks and many e-books for that price and give them away.
Libraries do more than lend books and provide community spaces. They also run a lot of programs. So just saying "hand everyone a Starbucks gift card and a paperback every month" doesn't cover everything.
There are worse ways for a city to spend money. SF has a spending problem. Both can be true.
Yes, San Francisco does all of those, too.
Showing 0 suggestions.
10 of 10 suggestions left
I played very few games from 2002 to 2017. Didn't want to keep buying new computers, and did not want to bother with consoles (graphics was better on PC than a non-HD TV).
In 2010 I bought a PS3, but only to watch Blu-Ray, Netflix and stream from my PC to TV. Did not play games on it.
Then in 2016/2017, on a whim, I decided to check out a game from the library. I Googled some good games, and picked Telltale's The Living Dead.
Oh wow. One of the best games I've ever played. For the next 2 months I kept checking out games and playing them.
Then for some reason I stopped. I started again in 2022 and haven't looked back. Seriously cut down my TV watching so I can play the games. I don't use the library any more - I just buy the games.
I've found that intentionally going there, checking a movie out, and setting it up at my home has made me more engaged with it than ever before.
It's not a random movie that an algorithm recommended to me; it's the movie I chose. Thus, I give it more of my attention.
And it's free! With no ads! Just how I like it.
Watching movies and other shows without commercials is such a treat!
I haven't tried audiobooks nor ebooks on Hoopla but look forward to it.
It's possible I could've saved money just renting 1 movie at a time, no different from how online rentals are now.
I think disc rentals over mail and Redbox machines still has some relevance even today. You never have to worry if a movie's taken off the streaming catalog, then having to research what other streamer has it, then contemplating if you want to go through signing-up just for 1 movie. You found the movie, you requested it, and it's getting mailed to you in hardcopy. It won't suddenly disappear in transit due to rights-holder issues.
OP here might be misremembering DVDs, here: the physical media skipped or froze intermittently and the players themselves were finicky; we ended up replacing it about three times in just as many years. Streaming services are overpriced, but they do _work_ consistently.
It's a glorified blurry player, and it works fine as such.
In my teens my friends and I watched probably hundreds of DVDs, and they almost never had a problem. Skips & freezes were almost only ever a factor for highly scratched copies, more typical of those from Blockbuster than anything we picked up in the $5 bargain bins.
I don't think I've ever encountered a "finicky" player, either. I don't even know what that'd mean.
I've never had a really bad player though... I have seen players that had issues with burned disks, but not mfg (unless scratched rentals).
Meanwhile, my streaming box randomly loses network connectivity, despite having a wired connection, and I have to restart it, before I can stream anything.
With digital distribution, the license to watch it will eventually terminate, and it cannot be transferred, so without a resale market it is much more expensive.
The best part is that I can go to my local flea market, and buy Blu-Ray discs for a tiny fraction of the retail price. Multiple vendors sell them for well under $1 each. Last weekend, I bought the Avengers 3D bundle and Pacific Rim, for 50¢ each.
Blu-Ray players, in a modern small form factor, are often under $10 at thrift stores, although they rarely come with a remote, but usually do have CEC, so the remote isn't always needed.
PS: Thanks for the reminder about the price increase, just cancelled my netflix.
Even if costs were lower, I still think we should not have so many, since it spoils our kids. I don't want them to see TV as "we have access to everything all the time". I want them to see that there are tradeoffs, and understand that we could have hundreds of dollars more if we had Netflix for half the year and Disney+ for half the year, for example.
There's also something to be said for restarting a sub and being excited to watch content that you had been waiting to see.
I remember when there were 3 networks. I remember when those networks stopped broadcasting content around midnight by playing the national anthem and then playing bars or just going off the air. I used to think the concept of UHF is kind of lost, but then realized it's kind of just what YouTube has become-weird, random, wacky content produced by just about anybody that can hit record on a camera.
Phoenix, AZ had a local variety kids morning show, "Wallace and Ladmo" that anyone from the area born before 1985 or so probably remembers.
By the time the Saturday morning cartoons were gone, there were 24/7 channels for cartoons and kid's entertainment.
Even then, 90% of the time was watching local/broadcast networks via cable.
that was pretty much the point of cable being invented. the other networks just jumped on the bandwagon in a "if you build it" situation
So we paused on ALL paid streaming services.
The "effort" it takes to a watch a movie on Kanopy, and the fact a movie is only two hours, gives us a lot of value. It's not a money thing, it's a "what am I spending my time on" thing.
But for TV series in particular, watching on disc is quite clunky after a decade+ of streaming services, and DVR boxes prior to that. I'll buy them in principle, but ultimately they end up ripped and viewed via Jellyfin.
They ended up ripped and played on kodi
That said... could maybe setup a mitm service that does this for even $5/yr to manage various services... where that service takes care of updating their signon/cancel scripts. Maybe even a semi-trusted mechanical turk as necessary.
Instead of having handfuls of locally-owned television stations you could pick up by antenna or a cheap cable subscription offered by your local cable TV provider, we have apps on apps on apps all owned by Disney, Netflix, Apple TV, Amazon and Comcast, with local stations being owned by huge conglomerates that are effectively franchisees.
At least it's truly a la carte, which was something cable and satellite providers could never correctly implement.
Actually, I wrote that and realized a few seconds later that that's not actually true.
If you want to watch The Office, some footbaseketball thing, Shrinking and Real Housewives of $CITY, you've got to get Peacock, Hulu, Apple TV, and the "All-Access" packages from MLB, NBA, and/or NFL, with all of them being independent monthly subscriptions ON TOP of your Internet plan that add up to being way more than your old cable or satellite subscription + premium channels. All of those apps come with tons of filler and studio titles that you probably won't watch, just like the "thousands" of channels stuffed into the cable plan you got just to get access to the big networks, sports and HBO.
This outcome was obvious the minute Netflix got out of DVDs and into streaming. And it's so much worse IMO.
It was somewhat better when the streaming studios were dumping entire seasons of content, but they've been walking that back now too.
Two months ago I just stopped watching streaming services all together. The friction of enshitification reached such a boiling point that I lost all joy in watching anything. I cancelled those services I personally paid for and stopped watching those that I don't. My life improved in clear ways. I began reading for pleasure again. Each night at 10pm I sit down in my reading chair, get comfy and read 2 chapters of: one book for enjoyment and one book for learning. It didn't hurt that the first book I read was Atomic Habits! I noticed that my sleep schedule and quality of sleep improved. I've also been more dedicated to my passion projects as well. You don't really realize how invasive these things are until you remove them from your life. I had already given up all social media except Reddit a couple of years ago. Even now I stay away from hot bed subreddits (typically news oriented ones) to preserve my mental health. From 2010-2018 I actually did a test to give up a smart phone in favor of a flip phone, but that became untenable.
So thank you to all the enshitified streaming services for helping me restore balance in my life.
Absolutely enshittification. I canceled my prime membership that day.
I have a Shield TV connected through my AVR and it works pretty well for content directly from my nas/cifs/smb via Kodi.
I think I finally cancelled it at $14-15 but I go back for 1-2 months a year to catch up on stuff I want. I basically cycle streaming services.
I've searched for data on how often people do this. I'm 99% sure it's a small minority but I bet it's growing. There is an inertia with subscriptions of every type. People are lazy to cancel things they don't use. It's the entire basis for the gym model.
So somebody is doing the math in the background of working out how much they can raise prices and lose people to subscription cycling vs lazily not cancelling and it still favors raising prices. I suspect at some point that'll change and, when it does, it'll be too late to do anything abou tit.
My suspicion is that this kind of analysis will be a textbook example of a company making short-term optimizations all the way into extinction.
The only research I've found is on comparing to move to cable to streaming and how many streaming services people have. I haven't found anything about streaming churn. If anyone knows of any, please let me know.
I've just started doing this late last year. I'm down to one active service at a time. I heard of it from someone else, so that's at least +2 to your tally
The biggest problem I have with physical media is that increasingly shows aren't being sold at all. Sometimes it's older or genuinely obscure stuff, but sometimes even recent and popular stuff doesn't get released. I suspect that often it's intentionally done to drive subscriptions to streaming services.
There are still a lot of shows that can't be legally obtained anymore. Sym-Bionic Titan (2010) is one I've pretty much given up hope on. There are also a bunch of Disney shows like Star vs. the Forces of Evil, Amphibia, and Owl House that never got a physical release.
Prices on physical media are going down which is nice since a lot of companies played bullshit games like releasing "volumes" or "collections" instead of full seasons and you still have to do some research to know which discs have bad transfers, terrible "remasters", and which should be fullscreen vs widescreen. I recently got a really good deal on Star Trek: TOS, only to later realize that they'd replaced all the special effects and shots of the Enterprise with CGI.
The Netflix adaptation of "100 Years of Solitude" (part two due out this august) was one of the most astounding bits of visual story telling I've seen in a long time. Entirely the opposite of "disposable background TV".
$400 is about 10-11 movies for 2 people. So one a month is pretty much even-stevens with that.
If you live (or watch) alone, the math changes a bit, perhaps.
Now, when compared to blu-ray... That's different. Very, very different.
I would take crisp 480p over a gooey, artifact-softened 1080p for most content.
It's certainly blurrier than Netflix, but dark scenes, grain and textures are usually much more detailed on a DVD nonetheless.
Though they don't say 4k/UHD blu-ray which would be a big miss if not. UHD blu-ray is superior to any other format in terms of quality. Perhaps excepting a few very niches streaming services that are tied to expensive hardware.
Not sure if that's common to BluRay players or not.
Got my Bluray player, I buy a movie once in a while when I consider it a "classic" that I really want to have, otherwise local library has a lot of options. And worst case scenario, the high seas.
Same principles with music and games. I still get/burn CDs.
We have a 4K Blu-Ray that gets used every once in a while and the 4K Dune and few other titles looks absolutely stupendous. Local 4k streamed from Plex is pertty close. but nothing supposedly 4k streamed from Youtube or Netflix really compares, the blacks show artifacts and stuttering, even through gigabit fiber. can't beat local playback!
The amount of energy in your brain it takes to do this basic thing versus the amount of energy in a datacenter somewhere, and the slide into cognitive atrophy that must result...
There are things I'll happily use LLMs to accomplish, but offloading day-to-day executive function will never, ever be on that list. And every day I understand and sympathize with the ethos of the Butlerian Jihad more and more.
When you're holding a hammer all the world looks to be nails or something.
EDIT: Also, there's no way in hell I'd let any of the AIs near something with my credit card info saved in their current state.
Certainly there's some convenience advantages for discovering new music, but it turns out I don't really do that often.
When they want to watch something on another service, they add it to a shared spreadsheet.
It works really well! They get to watch everything on all services, and it's all high quality media that they want to watch.
First I tried playing DVDs straight from PC which is connected to TV. That was horrible quality and UX.
Then I bought a good quality DVD player with hardware upscaling. It provided better image quality and slightly better UX. But you still had to deal with the menus and buch of other slow loading stuff that comes with DVDs... Gave up on it.
Is the author aware that Netflix's original subscription business was sending DVDs to customers and customers returning the DVDs to Netflix all via postal mail. "DVD-by-mail rental service"
There was no "streaaming"
YouTube premium also has a number of free movies, the type of stuff you used to see on cable TV. Not the big hits
You can buy old TV shows on dvd box for cheap. There are enough good shows from the past to keep you occupied for the rest of your life.
Netflix is really not deserving 9 USD/mo and even less with ads.
Unfortunately, it is so omnipresent throughout the application these days that it really does make it obvious how little good content they have - or are willing to let you know they have.
I left when shows I enjoyed were a revolving door, and the UI felt hostile (constantly trying to shove terrible quality original content on me).
So long, Hollywood.
Unlike hard disks, they're practically immune to shock (e.g. being dropped). Unlike SSDs and unlike hard disks, they're immune to ESD. And even if you somehow manage to damage one, it's just one, not your whole collection.
I just turned a refurbished Dell Optiplex into a home server.
It is an excellent vessel for sailing the high seas and streaming the loot.
For those unawares at the humor attempt:
https://www.ign.com/articles/redbox-officially-shutting-down
if you buy any smart tv, you can just install streamio and pirate any movie/tv show you like
I dont really see a reason why someone still pays for netflix.
Physical media is the only way to fly. Looks great on a bookshelf, works when the series of tubes is broken, and as a bonus the studios don't sneak into your house and steal them from you.
The price of discs these days, particularly second-hand DVDs, is so great. The low demand is a real windfall for us physical media collectors. Not long ago I managed to score the first 15 seasons of south park on DVD for $100. I quickly did some math in my head, and at ~4 discs per season, that works out to about...uh...carry the one...yep, it's fuck-all per disc.
The competition in the space is going to zero and that is why NF and Disney are raising prices.
Even the Fiona Apples of the world had duds on their albums. Most albums had a few choice tracks and then filler. This is why so many people were happy for the $0.99 per track of the tracks you wanted instead of the $19.99 for the full album with songs you will forever hit skip.
But yes Plex is quite enshittified now. Would definitely start with Jellyfin or something else these days.