With the simultaneous rollout of restrictions on account sharing and price increases/addition of advertising, I’m cutting back severely on streaming services.
I allowed my streaming subscriptions to grow without thinking about it. Without trying to remember the constant merging and bundling, I was subscribed to probably a dozen services at one point. They ranged from Netflix and HBO and Hulu to Shudder and Showtime. I had Paramount, Criterion, Disney, Peacock, and others. I’d do the typical thing where I’d search for a movie, find it is exclusive to a platform, and grab the free trial and forget to cancel. I excused it if I found a movie even every couple of months on it. There were still nights where it’d take an hour to find something I wanted to watch. I was probably closing in on $200/month all told, and I don’t have sports subscriptions.
I’m interested in learning what other people are doing regarding the price hikes and service compromises. Are you cancelling? Are you taking advantage of bundles with your internet services? Are you rotating on some interval? Or are you not changing at all?
Cancelled netflix when they started the restrictions and switched to Disney+, have prime as well but don’t use the movie stuff much, so I won’t upgrade to the add free version. Otherwise Spotify and Xbox gamepass. Spotify is a family shared account that makes it much cheaper and gamepass is such a money saver for me, cause I stopped buying games I couldn’t play (motion sickness) or didn’t like in the end.
Nothing left. It’s not even out of protest or anything, I’m just greedy. Netflix was ok when it was 7$ and had a lot of stuff but not anymore. I just pirate everything, it’s centralised, I can watch it how I want. And when my Internet went down a few weeks ago I could still watch shit since it’s self hosted.
Edit: Forgot I still have Amazon prime for delivery but I don’t really use prime video. Oh and Spotify for discovering new music and creating “together” playlists with friends. This one I would only replace with another platform.
I’ve been using Stremio with Real-Debrid for about 6 months now and I don’t see myself going back. It’s too perfect.
Could you elaborate? I looked up both services and it seems to just be a media front end and a downloading tool. How does that get you the actual files to watch.
Debris services (Real-Debrid, AllDebris) basically cache most popular torrents and give you direct https links to the video streams. Frontends for these services include Stremio, Syncler, etc. I adore both, but Stremio is much more lightweight which works better on my GoogleTV / FireStick. You select what you want to watch (the apps sync with Trakt, fwiw) and it immediately shows you the versions it has available that are cached. I choose 4K Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos whenever it’s available.
Thanks so much!! Seems like a cool service. Reminds me of popcorn time, which I don’t think works anymore. Are you still routing all your traffic through a VPN when using that? Seems like a privacy nightmare should any action be taken against those companies.
I cancelled netflix cause i was barely watching and the only reason i kept it was because we were 3 friends sharing it. We pay for 4 screens so we expect that to keep working which it didn’t. So we cancelled cause we spoke about it and nobody really watched a lot.
In the end unfortunately for Netflix it is worth it, just look at their stock which is going up again, which means more people bought the extra subscription rather than cancelling.
Sad times but if the majority of people don’t go against enshittification they will keep squeezing as much money out of everyone as long as it is profitable
We cancelled Netflix recently. With the quality ever going down there was nothing new left to watch and just rewatching old series out of habit can be replaced with browsing random youtube videos or so. And those end up often having some curiosity or educational value.
