Netflix, Disney+, TVNZ+ etc all happily solved "the piracy" problem because piracy was a mitigation of broadcast TV's anti-consumer distribution business model.

Now these pigs have saturated the market (there are no more non-subscribers to sell to) and bump up their prices without any commensurate lifting service to inflate profit.

All they are doing is pricing people back to piracy.

Time to break out the old Sonarr/Radar stack again.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago (1 children)

They don't even do it in a subtle way either. I would be fine with a yearly 3-5% because hell, inflation and everything goes up over time. But they seem to be doing 20-30% increases every other year and it's ridiculous

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago (1 children)

It's just greed.

Any sustainable business would be finding ways to be more efficient, allowing them to lower retail cost.

Take Amazon Web Services for example the unit price of every service trends down over time because they get more efficient delivering the service.

They add new services for you to buy or lower the cost of existing services to entice higher usage.

But media? Gobble gobble gobble.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

And if they're hosting on one of these cloud platforms that is decreasing in cost, then they're paying less for hosting and increasing their profit margin even without the subscription increases. I never made that connection before... Excellent comment.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago (1 children)

100% this. I always picture Agent Smith from Matrix Revolutions - "MORE!" .

I had a brilliant home server set up about 15 years back with a Usenet subscription, SABnzbd Sickbeard, Couchpotato, Sonaar etc. Might be time to check out the modern versions and put something back together. Sigh.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

I’ve heard that stremio + real debrid is a convenient setup these days, way easier than all the *arrs

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago

Yep. I setup sonarr, radarr, jackett, overseerr, and whatever the autounzipper is last year when netflix nixed password sharing and haven’t looked back. Streaming stuff is as easy as just adding something to my plex watch list. Sometimes it misses it, so I have to manually add it, but it’s not even that hard. It works for my older parents too.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

Thats a very insightful take, couldnt agree more