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?
I have a toddler who doesnt understand the concept of "We cant watch Gabbys Dollhouse anymore because Daddy is sticking it to the man."
Nope, few more years before I can think about shitcanning any of them.
Yarr Harr?
One day yes but we're only just now learning how to deal with compromises, sometimes "How about Bluey? works sometimes it doesnt.
If you need some help on where to begin, msg me. I can get you up and running in under an hour, so long as you have a working computer with some hard drive space (or a portable HDD).
Edit: that goes for anyone else who needs help setting up as well.
Might take you up on that offer once I give it an honest try :))
What kind of a setup do you usually go with?
Hardware doesn't matter except for raw disk space, since you'd be storing the files yourself.
I use Docker Desktop, Portainer, and docker-compose stacks to run everything. The whole thing will take maybe 1.5 GB RAM and a little bit of CPU. I ran the whole setup from a raspberry pi for a while.
WARNING: This is a rabbit-hole that will eat your wallet alive, and bring you endless joy.
It can be as simple as running a VPN on your computer, and downloading torrents through a torrent app on the same computer. Then you can just watch the videos you download however you like.
If you want a Netflix-like interface for what you've downloaded, run Plex or Jellyfin and point them to your downloads. Get the plex or jellyfin app on your tv, tablet, phone, etc as well. The app will see plex running on your computer and you're good to go.
You can keep getting more advanced depending on what you want. For example you can use apps like Sonarr and Radarr to automatically send movies and shows to your download app as they come out. You can also use things like Bazarr to automatically get subtitles. Tdarr to encode what you download if you want to do something like make sure everything works on your tv and a specific streaming stick (eg: roku).
And on and on.
I use all of that, and have it set up through docker on a server which has access to a giant NAS for storing the files.
Gonna piggyback onto this, my DMS are also open. Ask away if ya need help. Fuck this streaming bullshit, steal everything.
Kid can operate a tv remote to find streaming shows. Yoohooing is a little out of their capability and would need a parent to constantly start shows.
Parent can set up Sonarr, add the shows, kid can watch them via Jellyfin.
We are not rich but the streaming services arent stressing us financially. I am however time poor, the streaming services "just work" and my daughter can navigate them well enough to open the app and pick what she wants.
I know its easy enough to do, but setting it all up and teaching my wife and daughter the new way of doing things… not to mention managing the constant requests for fresh content. Pass.
Okay and when they want a different show….?
Then daddy adds a new series to Sonarr? I admit it introduces some latency.
Okay, now you’re doing it every 5 minutes, and by the time you’re done A, they are already asking for K.
Have you considered maybe that's not a healthy way to consume media in the first place?
Just download Mr Roger's and sesame street and let them watch them over and over. Kids will watch the same thing ten times in a row. I know, I've seen them do it.
Have you considered that’s not healthy watching the same stuff on repeat?
After the second watch the kids would have the show memorized almost verbatim, how is not having them stimulated with new information a good thing…?
And just because a kid does it, doesn’t mean they are enjoying it wouldn’t be happier doing something else.
This scenario is highly undesirable, have you ever considered that not all people, especially kids want to watch content in English? (depends on the age ofc).
Most torrents offer original language with subtitles, if you say, let's search for a kids show that is in Latin Spanish not Spain Spanish this will make the task incredible harder… we are talking about searching private trackers with this, heck even I struggle to find cartoons of my time with natal language, it was fairly impossible to do so, at least before HBO MAX and Pluto TV brought back several classics to life again… you can't beat easiness of streaming media for that scenarios, not even with softwarr.
Most of us dealing with variations of this theme.
I'm in the same damn boat 😅
Do you think your little one could use something like Popcorn time? Those interfaces are as good as netflix, from my experience