It added 30 million users since May.
I feel old for remembering a time when they advertised their service on wii some time after they stopped doing trade in DVDs, which my family was a part of. Back when I’d have the wii set up in my bedroom just to watch my favorite cartoons or the (to me) once new and mysterious Doctor Who (before eventually dropping due to lack of interest). Back when they were pretty much the only streaming service and had just about everything. Back before everything became siloed away into 500 different services that all add up to the price of healthy organs on the black market.
Now you’d be lucky to see me on their platform regardless of whether or not my family has the ad free plan or not (no idea if we do, nor do I care). Let alone any of the other services.
Even ignoring the pricing of these streaming services, having a Jellyfin server these days is basically mandatory for simple convenience sake. You can have everything in a single place on Jellyfin instead of having to deal with multiple services.
If your paid product is worse than free alternative you already failed as a business.
My partner was subscribed to Crave for ages. A little while back she was in the middle of a rewatch of Sons of Anarchy when the app started to act up and wouldn’t work, so I grabbed a copy and put it on Jellyfin.
She was floored by how much immediately better the video quality was and cancelled Crave the next day. Shocked at how much worse the experience was with the paid service compared to free.
I currently don’t have a spare device or whatever is needed to set up a server, but definitely agree with your point. Best I can do right now is having my shows/movies stored on a 1TB drive that’s almost full and a 2TB drive I have yet to touch, which just works for me.