It's weird. When Netflix came about, I was excited to dump all the bespoke pirating stuff that it replaced. I didn't mind paying for content, in fact, I was glad to.
Fast forward a while, and now Netflix seems to be an undiscoverable mess of old and foreign content while charging twice as much. Each IP owner felt it necessary to make their own way worse clone, and still, after paying more than a hundred a month, there are things just not available on any of them. And now, more than ever, the high seas seem so enticing again.
I'll never really understand how they ruined the opportunity presented, but they really soured people on their value proposition.
netflix didn't really ruin it themselves (at least, not completely) - the owner of the licensed content did, by wanting a bigger cut of the pie. Disney, for example, didn't feel they're paid enough, and so stopped licensing the content out to netflix and instead created a competing service.
I think this is a regulatory issue, because each piece of content is an effective island of monopoly. The state needs to make some changes to how content is licensed to prevent monopoly. An example policy would be to force content production studios from exclusive licensing - only broad and available licensing (so any streaming service can pay a known price and obtain the content).
Something similar exists with cinemas and movie producers (of course not quite the same). Why couldn't the same or similar be for streaming?
> The state needs to make some changes to how content is licensed to prevent monopoly.
Why? Nobody _needs_ Mickey Mouse. If the price for Mickey Mouse is too high, just don't buy it.
Now you could argue that some (much) older works are part of culture, and being exposed to that culture is necessary to function in society. But that then becomes an issue of how long copyright is necessary or reasonable. New works most certainly should be allowed to be monopolized by their creators - even if that means that some potential consumers are priced out of experiencing them.
You don't need to see every Disney movie. In fact, not seeing some of them will raise the bar to make better movies and will cause competition to emerge.
Why? Nobody _needs_ Mickey Mouse. If the price for Mickey Mouse is too high, just don't buy it.
That's not the point. The parent was saying "if you own content and display content, you must license it", not "the price needs to be reasonable".
Typically, there are ways to do this. One way is forcing a company's distribution and streaming to be separate, and this already exists in some other parts of the market.
So if Disney sells Mickey Mouse content $x to its own streaming service for $5, they have to do the same for Netflix. Disney can still set the price. It just has to pay it as well, and that reflects on its own balance sheet. The problems involved in regulating this have already been solved in other markets, it's a solved issue.
Now, you can typically enter volume sales agreements still. So Disney streaming can buy 100k 'streaming options' for $4 if they hit the volume. But that means the same agreement has to be available to, say Netflix.
Of course, the same will be true for any Netflix created content!
Nothing is perfect, but this is the sort of common carry stuff that separates out 'cable companies' from 'TV studios', and there's been loads of legislation about this over the years.
That is because cars require maintenance and parts, so laws were enacted which ensured that a liable party would be located in the end user's jurisdiction.
Streaming services are not critical infrastructure that require an active supply chain.
I don't really care how streaming shakes down, except for how companies dodge paying creators.
But it's been clear for decades the DMCA and fair use laws needs a huge overhaul for the modern internet works. You make a 45 minute documentary, but some 10 second sample of a VEVO pop song can get your content taken down anyway? All fanart is technically under a gray area as well. All that is something that would benefit from reviewing content licensing.
You can happily ignore Disney. You are elevating it to status it does not have to have.
Yes copyright should be shorter. Yes, these companies abuse artists to the maximum they can away with. But there is zero reason to create state monopoly around this.
> You can happily ignore Disney. You are elevating it to status it does not have to have.
I'm not eleveating Disney to anything. It already is at that level. It owns huge swaths of, well, everything spanning back decades.
For example there was a minor viral news that Winnie the Pooh finally entered public domain. Well, Disney owned it exclusively from 1953 to 2021. All of it, from print to video.
Pooh is just the most famous and advertised example. Since Disney owns most of movie and TV production in the States, through that alone they own rights to a huge number of written works. That's before we go into how many audio and visual media they own.
Disney isn't just Mickey Mouse and Marvel. There was an article on HN yesterday on how the author "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" finally got the rights back after 35 years: https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/18/im-not-bad/
Next time you watch a movie you like or even read a book you like there's a very high chance it's owned by Disney (or some other huge license holder).
Or if you can't find that movie or book you like anywhere? Same reason.
> But there is zero reason to create state monopoly around this.
I didn't say anything about this or imply anything of the kind.
Besides, copyright literally exists only due to state exercising its power.
There are hundreds minor viral news about a lot of stuff daily. I am not even trying to keep up with it all.
> Next time you watch a movie you like or even read a book you like there's a very high chance it's owned by Disney (or some other huge license holder).
And in all seriousness, very likely not, because the ones you keep mentioning are not the stuff I would read or my kids would read. My kids do watch some superheroes, I dont because I find that super boring. Like I said, you can happily ignore the Disney.
I agree that they abuse artists to the max, that artists should have more rights and corporations less of them. But, Disney is really not necessary and ignoring it is perfectly workable strategy.
> There are hundreds minor viral news about a lot of stuff daily. I am not even trying to keep up with it all.
Yup. The gist of my text was that it was viral news, and not Disney owning exclusive copyright on a chunk of human culture for 70 years.
> the ones you keep mentioning are not the stuff I would read or my kids would read.
Yes, because all examples should be 100% directly applicable to you, and you alone, and if a few examples don't, then nothing matters.
> My kids do watch some superheroes, I dont
"It's something my kids would never read but look this is exactly what my kids are interested in but it's completely irrelevant because I, me, I, mine".
And yes Disney is not just superheroes. And for better or worse superheroes are a huge part of the American culture, and Disney owns a huge chunk of it (either through direct ownership of Marvel, or through licenses and deals it got when acquiring US TV and film producers).
> But, Disney is really not necessary and ignoring it is perfectly workable strategy.
Yup. "I never" somehow turned into "my kids watch superheroes" but you didn't even catch on to that.
BTW, if you have favorite movies, a lot of them are owned by Disney. If not by Disney, but then by some other huge conglomerate. The books you read are owned by a few huge publishing houses. Most music you listen to is owned by at most 4 companies etc.
We don't need many things. Basically everything in our culture is things we don't need.
And yet the next time you find yourself watching that cozy Christmas movie you fondly remember, chances are its owned by Disney. As is that book you read to your kids. Etc.
Yeah but think of any other piece of media and how people might be forced to start a brand new subscription just to see it.
It's not about Mickey Mouse but it's about you wanting to watch the next season of something and having to make a choice: either submit to the monopoly or skip.
Consumer protection should be there to prevent this kind of abuse of IP.
Imagine if every single individual piece of art was in its own individual subscription-based location in the world ran by a different owner, being the only way to enjoy it. That'd be ridiculous, wouldn't it?
None of this is abuse. It's a leisure activity that you have to pay for, and people have the right to sell their work how they like. It's not exactly access to clean running water.
They only have that right because society has deemed it beneficial for everyone to give them that right. If it is no longer beneficial overall then they should no longer have that right.
If you want to abolish private property in the name of watching things on Netflix then that's your choice, of course.
Unless we see the horror that lack of private property rights has visited on people over the centuries and deem your right to believe things to no longer be beneficial overall.
Actually, most art is housed in either private locations or paid museums. Certainly most well-known art. You pay the owner of e.g. the Louvre to see e.g. the Mona Lisa.
> You pay the owner of e.g. the Louvre to see e.g. the Mona Lisa.
That owner is the French state that heavily subsidises The Louvre. On top of that no one prevents you from taking pictures or videos of Mona Lisa, re-drawing it any way you like, and posting those photos and videos and drawings and what not anywhere.
Additionally, there's nothing preventing museums just exhibiting their collections anywhere, and they do that frequently.
Meanwhile Disney not only has exclusive rights to an insane amount of properties [1], they will sue you for breach of copyright.
So while (most) of the Western world was/is in the chokehold of Disney, other parts of the world had completely different takes on the character: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wlk7O2-rnQs
> That owner is the French state that heavily subsidises The Louvre. On top of that no one prevents you from taking pictures or videos of Mona Lisa, re-drawing it any way you like, and posting those photos and videos and drawings and what not anywhere.
Yes there should be something like a "mechanical license". Content owners would set their own price but it would be the same for everyone and they shouldn't have the power to pick their licensees.
Wouldn’t Disney just set an insanely high license fee in this case though? If they’re just paying it to themselves then they can make it high enough that nobody else can justify paying it.
This problem was also an issue for movies and theaters. The "fix" is to ensure theaters (the distributors) cannot be owned by, nor can they own production studios.
So under this rule, if disney wanted to have their own streaming service and used a high licensing fee to try stop competitors from their content, they'd pay high taxes due to the high licensing fees making huge (fake) profits for the parent company - it'd end in losses, as the streaming service (as a separate company) cannot bill their cost onto the parent company (to offset the profit). It's as if the tax man gets to sit in the middle, and siphon part of that license fee for free. Disney shareholders would never stand for that, and so they won't do it.
The idea of a mechanical license sounds perfect. Sorry to go off a tangent but my mind immediately went to healthcare as I have never heard of a mechanical license before.
can the same idea be applied to healthcare? for example, hospitals and doctors can set their own rates but these rates have to be public and they can't charge one insurance lower rate? If they charge anyone a lower rate, they have to charge the same rate for everyone.
> these rates have to be public and they can't charge one insurance lower rate? If they charge anyone a lower rate, they have to charge the same rate for everyone.
The problem with this is that it takes away only half of the negotiation. Doctors are now obliged to charge $X consistently but insurance is not obliged to pay it. So the negotiation process seems broken, and seems like it would cause a lot of bad faith negotiations from the insurers. “Eh, we’ll pay you minimum wage. Don’t like it? We’ll just wait until someone else finds your actual minimum and then you can pay us that.”
It’s also not clear what happens if Doctor A charges 10% more than Doctor B at the same medical facility. If you see Doctor A, can your insurance decline that even though they would have paid Doctor B’s rate?
This also solves the sports coverage issues. The clubs still make money but it’s the media companies that must compete on quality of service, punditry etc rather than it being an exclusive license to make money
> The state needs to make some changes to how content is licensed to prevent monopoly
That sounds similar to the 1984 Cable Communications Act (where large cable operators were required to lease channels to others, separating content delivery from content creation) but in reverse! requiring content producers to licence content to distributors
Don't forget shortening copyrights would have a major impact on this issue as well! 25 year copyright would make most of these libraries public domain. Then the price would truly reflect what we would all like to be subsidizing: the new stuff.
Does the rights to Friends being traded around for the Nth time really benefit anyone?
I mean.. if Netflix offered Disney more money then they wouldn't have felt it necessary to launch their own service. I think they simply underpayed or overplayed their cards. It's hard to imagine Disney with it's own service is getting the same amount of people viewing its content.
Having the services fractured just ends up with everyone making less money. Both the streaming services and the IP holders
Its possible Disney just completely overestimates how much they can make on their own - but market forces should correct for that eventually. We aren't privy to the accounting that went in to the decisions. They currently are making some amount of money off of their streaming service. If Netflix could offer substantially more than that amount (and more customers this way), then I don't see why they wouldn't shut it down
There's a sort of joke in academia, about the "least publishable unit" for a paper: Since "how many papers produced" is much easier to measure than "impact on a field", one way to try to game the system is to figure out the smallest amount of research that can be called "one paper", and publish just that, to maximize the papers / research effort ratio.
What we're seeing now is the same thing for streaming services. Sure, you'd pay £20 for a subscription to watch 75% of all available content. But it turns out most people would pay £40 for two subscriptions, each of which would show you 35% [EDIT and even people who won't, will still pay one £20 subscription for 35% of the content]; and quite a few people would pay £100 for five subscriptions, each of which will show you 12%. The beancounters are busy experimenting to find the "least bundle-able unit", to maximize extraction.
EDIT: And as someone else has pointed out, this is not something that any Netflix -- or any potential replacement -- can unilaterally do something about. In fact it's a "tragedy of the commons" situation: If MGM and Universal Studios and Paramount and WB all license their content to Netflix (under the £20 umbrella), and Disney doesn't, then Disney gets to keep a massive amount of money for themselves, while the other rights-owners have to divide up the rest. It only takes one or two "defectors" to basically force everyone to do the same thing.
Or you can pay £0 per month for 99% of the content.
I'm a bit like the parent comment. I've always wanted to be able to pay a monthly fee (even a high one, say £50 a month) to have access to a good quality selection of movies and TV shows. The thing is, it's always bugged me that you can get a much better experience by pirating than by paying for legitimate access. That seems the opposite to how things should work.
This pre-dates streaming. DVDs came with FBI warnings and other screens that couldn't be fast-forwarded or skipped. You couldn't buy a DVD in the US and play it in a DVD player in Europe because the "region" didn't match. You couldn't easily transfer it to watch on a device without a DVD player because of the DRM.
All of this means that, even ignoring the fact that it's free, it's just far more straightforward to torrent a movie and watch it wherever you want using whatever app you want.
I think I actually enjoyed Netflix more when they used to send DVDs in the mail. The library of movies felt much more complete, and getting stuff in the mail is fun. And it’s probably a healthier way to watch than binging 3 seasons of some mediocre show in a weekend just to see how it ends.
Yeah, I think younger people don't realize how limiting Netflix's library is today. They used to have absolutely everything. If it was released on DVD, they had it.
Now if I want to watch a movie or TV show, I need to consult an aggregator [0] to figure out where it's streaming.
As a nerd, I was so excited about the early days of streaming, as it felt like the inevitable path for a company like Netflix.
Now though, I'm way past subscription fatigue. I've seen movies I "purchased" on iTunes be silently swapped out for other versions as the licensing changed.
So I recently bought a Blu-ray player for the first time, and I'm assembling a library of plastic discs. This might be the last physical media format for video, so I want to support it and grab some of these titles while they're available.
It was inevitable. Netflix rose thanks to studios and distributors selling them rights to content for peanuts. Streaming wasn’t taken seriously as it wasn’t a main source of revenue. Some years later and it’s a completely different story. Demand for streaming sky-rocketed, digital rights value increased and now every studio wants to create their own walled gardens.
> I'll never really understand how they ruined the opportunity presented, but they really soured people on their value proposition.
I think that they took the opportunity and milked it as much as they could. They are making a lot of money, have a ton of subscriber and are very successful.
They don't care if you are happy about the service as long as enough people pay for it. And it seems to be working.
> Each IP owner felt it necessary to make their own way worse clone, and still, after paying more than a hundred a month, there are things just not available on any of them.
I wonder how hard—technically/legally, not 'politically'—it would be to create a 'neutral' streaming service where all the major studios and IP holders could become a part of as a part of a co-op (?).
After costs are taken care of, the holder of the IP would get the leftover profits proportional to the number of minutes their content was viewed in any given pay period.
At the very beginning Netflix was able to get licences for very cheap, as owners didn't think of it as serious service and it was not impacting their sales on other channels. That isn't going to happen again.
I don't really mean old, I'd even say old movies were "better" in the sense of more variety, also foreign is often not a problem provided it's good (my favorite genre here is comedies like Norsemen or British Ghosts).
What I really dislike is this bland, characterless, boring, inauthentic, unengaging, but neverending stream of pulp that Netflix is producing and promoting. Most people I know just got fed up with it.
Personally I watch maybe one movie a month, and when I do, I make sure my time won't get wasted.
>I'll never really understand how they ruined the opportunity presented,
Money. It's easier to understand it if you realize each studio is trying to maximize its own revenue.
Consider the common advice given to content creators and startups : "You don't want to be a sharecropper on somebody else's platform."
Well, the other studios like Disney, HBO-WarnerBros, Paramount, etc are just taking that same advice by not being beholden to Netflix's platform.
E.g. Instead of Disney just simply licensing all of their catalog to Netflix and then just getting a partial fraction of Netflix's $17.99 subscription revenue, Disney would rather create their own platform and get 100% of their own $19.99 revenue. In addition, the Disney+ subscribers are Disney's customers instead of Netflix's.
Everybody avoiding the "sharecropping" model inevitably leads to fragmentation of content. Everybody pursuing their self-interested revenue maximization leads to not sharecropping on Netflix's platform because Netflix (i.e. the Netflix subscribers) won't pay the equivalent higher prices that Disney thinks they can get on their own.
To create a truly unified video streaming service with everything for one cheap monthly price means multiple studios have to willingly give up revenue. Most customers are not willing to pay Netflix a hypothetical $150+ per month such that all studios like Disney think it's a waste of money to maintain their own exclusive digital streaming service and would be happy with the fractional revenue share from Netflix.
Corporations care primarily about their position relative to other corporations; you and piracy is not concerns for them. Disney, Warner Bross and similar media corporations fears monopoly of Netflix. You cannot harm them thru piracy, Netflix can.
And worse, when you search they KNOW what you want to watch and will show you EVERYTHING they have that is NOT what you want.
Infuriating, I reverted back to the old ways a year back and haven't regretted it.
Same with Spotify, who has a solid catalog that I was happy to pay for. Now I pay double, for podcasts, shows, and now even freaking videos that I have never wanted or asked for and have no choice to not take.
And now they also the audacity to show me ads on PAID PLANS.
They don't deserve our money, customer focus is long gone.
Really? Darn, that is such BS. I was already looking out to be fair, only reason I'm still there is because of my family plan and older parents who will struggle to switch.
That being said, I don't mind additional plans to be fair. Let me pay for what I use, not what you force down my throat. What I mind is the constant enshittification.
greed, as always. It's an interesting Tragedy of the Commons. Though "commons" is a weird word to use for private corporations.
They could have charged $50 a month if everything were truly in one place and always available. Instead they had to cut here and there to dodge residuals. Then cut more here and there to optimize slop over prestige, then cut more here and there to try and save money on licenses, then cut more here and there to try and become the middleman themselves. the cut more here and there to "maximize engagement" and compete with an entirely different business model and medium.
Ultimately the shareholders ruin everything with their short term mentality of companies. They keep rewarding hype over substance and overall health. And of course the consumers suffer in teh end.
And in this case, the enshittification of the whole streaming industry. In the same fashion as USA's "publisher can't own a venue", publisher shouldn't be allowed to own a stream service as well.
First you attract customers by offering (potentially unsustainably) good deals. Then you become the default option. Then you extract money from customers by enshittifying your service. Most famous digital services follow this path.
Being put in contact with foreign contents? Disgusting! /s
More seriously, before Netflix I never knew how high-quality and fun was stuffs from all around the world. I watched great series from South Korea, Turkey, Jordan, Spain,France, Luxembourg, Germany, Scandinavian countries and South America. I also watched quite enjoyable movies from Nigeria. I probably forgot a few places too. Do Netflix has issues? Plenty. Their originals are often blands and cancelled. They taught me to seek mini-series and completed series instead of ongoing series. The wrestling they air is shit. But the availability of foreign contents is the coolest feature they have.
Yeah, same here. Foreign content is good thing about Netflix, the thing I enjoyed the most when I randomly run into it. Sure, novelty will wear off after a while, but at least it is not the same thing over and over and over.
A few months ago we'd had Disney+, Paramount+, Hulu, HBO Max but we've cut back to Netflix and YouTube premium.
Switched to purchasing and renting when there's something we want to watch that isn't available and we're finding it to force us to be more conscious of what we're watching.
We're considering ditching Spotify and music streaming to return to buying albums so our children can start to be more thoughtful listeners. After falling down a rabbit hole of some insider music vlogs, I recognized how much streaming is harming independent music.
They could also consider making manual youtube playlists and setting up a media computer with something like TubeArchivist. Selfhosting youtube is the only actually useful thing in my "homelab".
I'm only mentioning this because for years I've been making music playlists and archiving them. When you come back to them on youtube a few years later a few songs are always gone/ unavailable. Some of my favorite songs don't exist on yt anymore
On the music side, the current trend for vinyl has been a really great thing for my teenage kids. My eldest (who according to Spotify listens to about 130k mins of music a year) has really discovered an appreciation for the arc of an album when he has to spend the time loading up a disc.
Spotify is so cheap that it is worth it for the convenience alone. Not to mention Spotify is legal while piracy is not.
However, I agree that if you enjoy music (or any other art/content) someone produces, it’s only fair (and natural) to support them in a more direct way.
I suppose the qualifier here is "there's no moral point in paying for streaming". If you're fine listening to your favorite artist but paying Taylor Swift for your convineinece, cool.
You'll benefit the artist much more by throwing a real dollar at them and pirating their music.
Finally jumped ship to a Jellyfin based home server and couldn't be happier.
The ui is surprisingly good and polished (especially for the users who don't have to manage the library), video quality is amazing (with bd source files, who would have thought, but even DVD is often better than what modern streaming provides), and I can cache the movies on my phone when needed.
It works in ANY browser under ANY os, doesn't have ads, doesn't track me, and has all the content that I could ever desire (and wouldn't be able to find in any one service. In some cases, IN ANY service).
I can have any combination of a subtitle language and a voiceover.
Overall cost was only 500 for a used m1 air and a 16TB external storage.
I find the free version of plex - once I config out all their own streaming junk - is perfectly good.. (and it runs acceptably on my ancient synology) Are there any compelling reasons for me to look in to jellyfin?
It’s free as in freedom and open source. This isn’t just a thing for people who are preachy but it’s also a sign that it’s less likely to change the terms of the deal, so to speak.
I'm perfectly fine with paying for software, so the price wasn't a leading factor in my choice (and I have contributed to Jellyfin).
It just looks to me that Plex (as a company) isn't really as reliable for self-hosting in the long run. So even though Plex has a better client support (for example, on xbox and playstation), I decided against it in favor of something that only I am in control of.
Initially intended to buy a license for Emby, but it doesn't support hardware transcoding on Apple Silicon yet, so Jellyfin it is then.
If you are happy with Plex, there's no reason to switch, IMO. If something goes wrong, it likely won't take you long to connect an alternative to the same media library
The main reason that finally pushed me to move over was that Plex works local only (no internet connection) for only so long and then you are done for without a beacon/login home I guess. Dumbest "feature" ever but I guess I get why they do it.
We had our power and internet go out for an extended amount of time earlier this year and shortly after I converted us over to Jellyfin vs Plex. Quite easy and painless setup. Mostly just recreated my libraries in Jellyfin and good to go.
Some of us have quite a few DVD/Blurays that we could rip. A lot of good stuff can be found in bargain bins and closing down sales (I got all the 9 series of the X-files for next to nothing). I am personally not bothering to rip them and download them instead, but I am not paying like 5 times for the same movie/tv series that I have already paid for.
A lot of films have been re-released now like on different media formats, with several different "cuts" which normally have maybe a few extra minutes of dialogue.
I have to investigate this further. I bought a bunch of bluray UHD documentaries that I cant watch because my 4K TV is a 'monitor'. Which I only found out was a problem after also having to buy some expensive 4K HDMI cable which was supposed to fix the problem.
Since I couldn't work out how to backup the discs, I now also just buy 2nd hand DVDs for when I need my pacifier box. Anyway, for this old man it turns out that the old movies are the best; no shaky camera and clear audible dialog. Plus some of the modern discs are now also polluted with adverts, horrible.
If we lived in a sensible world, buying the item once should give me rights to every format available. I might even consider digital purchases again if that was the case, especially since we have seen too many of these services fold and take our purchases with them.
We recently did a stock take of all the subscriptions we've ended up with - versus the ones we actually regualrly use - and it was clear we've been wasting money for some time
This year had me reduce my subs to a grand total of Youtube and Discord. And even then Youtube is on shakey ground. Just sucks because Youtube is prety much an uncontested monopoly serving as that middleground between tiktok shorts and high budget TV shows.
I've found we can usually watch what we want on a streaming platform in a month or two then cancel the subscription and move on elsewhere - it also makes us think about what we actually want to watch rather than what's available to watch.
In the past I used to pay for Netflix, Spotify, and even YT Premium.
However, they keep raising prices every year.
In the past Netflix 4K cost like $22 and with family sharing it was about $5 - totally acceptable.
Now they cracked down on family sharing in different households and charge $37. No way.
Spotify: they increased prices again last month to $20 USD for the individual subscription. I bought a 12 month Colombian gift card for $40 USD and activated via VPN. Should this stop working, I will unsubscribe entirely.
YT Premium: it's at $23 per month now. Considering they aren't producing movies themselves, I consider that one the most egregious pricing out of all three. They can absolutely forget it - I am unwilling to pay any more than $10 for it.
YouTube has the best content that you absolutely can't and won't find in commercial productions, and exactly because they aren't producing anything, they're just a platform. I think the sub-$10 premium without music was in the right price range but even at $20+ it proposes much, much more value than your random streaming service.
However, what they're not clear about is how the Premium fees actually land on the YT channels which is an irksome point. Premium views generate more income than unpaid views, that much I know. But I don't know if my subscription fees will benefit only the channels I watch or whether I my subscription is helping the big, popular shows that I never watch.
I don't understand the youtube love i see all over this site. It's constantly something i see that people are okay with.. but i see so many things i dislike within it.
It has a social media style layer on top of it to entice people to keep watching, as well as creators to keep creating horrifyingly misleading titles/thumbnails, it captured a massive user base without utilizing ads and then removed the training wheels and went full steam ahead on ads and added a paid model.
they added shorts which is all the things i mentioned on steroids, and its owned by google.
I'm a strong advocate for turning youtube into just a search bar, with some subscriptions on the side for creators you actually care for. Imo, if something gets through all the noise and finds its way to me, its maybe worth watching, if its their social media style layer suggesting it to me? its a low % chance its worth watching a minute of.
> youtube into just a search bar, with some subscriptions on the side for creators you actually care for
That's exactly the only way to use Youtube: start with the subscriptions page where you see new videos from channels you follow in reverse chronological order, then open up the videos into tabs, go fullscreen and play. The platform indeed is rather horrible and tries to be a video hosting plus a kitchen sink but you don't have to engage with it (even if they try to get you in to that). Sadly, the experience sucks for youtubers as well, accounts shut down for no good reason, copyright harassment, demonetization, videos removed, etc. with nothing much they can do about it. I would pay for Youtube if it was a video hosting service straight and honest, connecting creators and viewers, and not an opinionated platform moderated into nannies.
The problem with Youtube is that it has good content despite everything else so they can force this crap on us. If there ever was a friendlier implementation people would jump to it but network effects give Youtube its power. As long as you can't follow your subscriptions outside Youtube it's hard for competition to come out of nowhere. Much like there's no aggregation of social networks where you could follow people on various services without having to be on every single one even if you like Facebook and your kids like Instagram.
I last watched tv at my parents house in the last millennium. Never had a tv because there was nothing interesting to watch. Then Youtube came and all the niche people filming their stuff on all the niche channels. Stuff that would never ever be in any commercial, mainstream network because they would have to try to appease the largest possible audience. Coincidentally, all the Youtube channels that grow too big and make the channel a "production" rather than a "guy with a camera" unequivocally become bland and boring, averaged, dull, and all the nice rough edges nannified away just like networked stuff from big production companies.
>It's constantly something i see that people are okay with.. but i see so many things i dislike within it.
Yes, welcome to a true blue monopoly.
I can list issues for days, but at the end of the day a lot of beloved creators in pretty much all sectors can make a living off of Youtube and not much elsewhere. Maybe some can jump to Nebula, but not all have content that fit that service. It's those creators I love, not Google.
I'd love nothing more than a proper competitor to rise up, or for courts to finally do their job and slice Youtube out of the Google ecosystem. But I'll be waiting a while for either. I've de-googled in pretty much every other aspect except Gmail and Youtube, and I simply don't see any other way out for now.
As any other subscription, it depends on your habits. I can pretty much subsist on entertainment, educational, political, podcast, and simply fluff content on Youtube without any other streaming service (because damn, what's the last TV show I really was excited to watch? the new King of the Hill Season a year ago?). $15 for that is fine, for now. But I'm eagerly keeping an eye out on another ship to jump to.
I really don’t think you need much more than a Criterion streaming subscription. I’m filling my head with quality and art that makes me feel and think now.
I tried it because I was less and less happy with Google and the various free alternatives never quite hit it. With them, I'd have to go back to Google every now and then to get better results. I thought I'll try Kagi for a month or two and see.
With Kagi, I think I've gone back to Google a couple of times in the early period. Then not once, since last winter. On browsers where I'm not logged onto Kagi I've gone from Google to my primary browser with Kagi multiple times. I can't really tell if Kagi is good or bad, objectively, but in relative terms it's very good. Most importantly, it's quite invisible, doesn't have irritating things to fight with, and the first two pagefuls aren't sponsored ads. It's tool-like and it certainly gives the feel of 2000's Google Search.
I don't know if I'm a fan but I still also have no reason to stop using Kagi. I like the simple concept. And I think paying for search is a good proposition because it turns the odds to my favour: the company can succeed by making me happy instead of using me to make advertisers happy.
I really like it, but for the cost of a cup of coffee you could try it for a month as well. I highly suggest you just do that: commit to spending a month using it, and if you don't like it at the end cancel. Maybe it won't work for the way you use search, maybe it will, the only way to find out is to try.
I used Kagi for a few months, it was the best search experiemce I've seen, but in the end I decided I didn't value that enough. I use Ecosia now, it's fine- worse, but free.
I guess it's down to you how much you value web search. Kagi does have an AI tool as well, but I didn't use this and don't use AI search anyway, so can't comment on how it compares.
It varies from person to person because everyone uses search differently. Someone I know swears by it and loves it. I tried it for three months using only Kagi and it didn’t feel worth it to me, so I went back to Google. Your experience might be different so my suggestion is to try it yourself if you can.
I still don't understand why Google gets such a bad rep. I think it's fine. And about AI "summarizing" web results: while sometimes useful, you absolutely need to check the source. AI can make stuff up, and it can also summarize wrong (when the source does exist).
With google I can't find things I know exist. For example, it doesn't find several of my github repositories with unique names that have been there for years. With old google you could drill down a couple of pages of results, but they're not there now. It also prefers worse sources for materials, for example some blog which poorly explains some API, rather than the original documentation.
My honest review - Kagi is really, really great. Been using it almost a year now.
The search results are much more relevant, there are no ads or hallucinated BS AI summaries at the top, and you're not giving Google your data (and money) to further enshittify the world.
There are features I haven't tried yet so can't speak to them, but that's my very general take on the default kagi experience.
The perception of Kagi at HN is extremely positive, but in my personal experience the search quality reminds me more of Bing than Google, with Kagi sometimes surfacing puzzling results first. Also, I wasn't thrilled about giving them access to all my search data. As flawed as Google may be, I still believe they have better privacy standards than Kagi.
Same, I tried it only because its spoken highly here and I dropped it after paying for a year. I was not able to find what I wanted at least 25% of the time, not worth it to pay.
I use Kagi at home and Google at work, and IME Kagi results are much better compared to Google. It's easy enough to jump to Google by adding !g, but I never find myself actually using that... I do however end up doing the reverse, where I'll not find the result I'm looking for on my work computer and then quickly repeat the search on Kagi on my phone. I used to use DuckDuckGo on my personal devices before, and while it was mostly fine, I did have to jump to Google more frequently. In the end sometimes the results were better on DDG and sometimes on Google. I haven't really found any situation where Google results were better than Kagi (I do tend to prefer Google Images results, but I only very rarely use image search, maybe once a month).
There was also an instance recently where I was helping out a coworker get set up with something. I had done it earlier in the day, so I told him something like "type in $SEARCH_TERM, then go to the first page and copy the commands from there". He put it into Google, couldn't find the right result, tried a few variations, still couldn't find it. I pulled Kagi up on my phone, searched the same term, and slacked him the page while he was still looking around on Google.
Hi @nmil - Thanks for the awesome shout out! It's great to see that you've been enjoying the server. You mentioned reddit in your text. If you're active on reddit, and if you haven't done so already, maybe stop by the unofficial r/hetzner subreddit. There are a lot of long-time users there. --Katie
You guys should invest in comms/PR and mostly in reliability. Fly your 9s. AWS/GCP/Azure outages are getting more frequent and it seems like they don't even care.
I like the AI-disclaimer :). This might become a thing for blog and news articles: (c) all words written by <editor> on <date> without AI. And then there will be a robots.txt directive that allows collection of this self-declared human material for AI training. And a google search option: "ai:no" :)
The only time I had a Netflix subscription was in 1999, for a couple of years, when they were mailing DVDs. Can't remember how much it costed. Never got any streaming subscriptions.
I get annoyed with the Netflix button on my TV remote. It wastes a minute when press it by mistake.
I only have a single service at any given time and keep rotating them over the year. Even bad services have one or two interesting series you can watch and then dump the service after a month. It's a lot cheaper than cable still...
Mubi can be a slightly cheaper alternative. They now provide one movie-theater ticket per week in some countries, which is a good deal if you enjoy watching films on a slightly bigger screen with slightly louder speakers.
It's funny, I have never thought of it this way, but, reflecting, I realise the way I do think about it is very similar. Whenever I have to justify a subscription on JetBrains or hosting or what have you, I always just ask myself: will this bring me joy? Specifically will it bring me as much joy as e.g. a Netflix subscription? Very easy to justify then.
To be fair, I used to smoke cigs, and drink heavily, which are both very expensive habits. I've since quit those (they weren't bringing me joy) but the benchmark is the same.
I get why the general non-tech crowd pays for Netflix but why people who hang out on here do it is beyond me. Most shows/movies on Netflix are garbage, there are plenty of free services that you can stream anything you want from. Why the hell would I pay for Netflix or any other paid service?
I wonder if it would be in the governments interest to heavily subsidize streaming services. Considering virtually everything seems to be getting hopelessly more expensive and no real progress on economic inequality seems likely outside a slim AI path - dollar for dollar free or cheap entertainment provides a lot of utility and can help keep the poor masses complacent.
$30 a month makes a hell of a lot more of a dent in entertainment affordability than it does in healthcare. No clue on how accurate these estimates are but it seems like the combined budget of most shows and movies in a given year is somewhere around the 40-50 Billion range which in the context of all the other shit in the federal budget is kind of nothing.
Last thing I want is more billionaire handouts, with all due respect. As much as the rising costs suck, it is still better than the cable lock-in contracts and bundling deals. Netflix didn't lead to the cost of living crisis we arrived in today.
I used languagereactor.com for learning spanish for a while (a browser extensions that supplements netflix for language learning). It allows a second subtitle track, shows word translations on hover over the subtitle, and bookmark words to your vocab database with a single click. I exported the vocab after a few days into Anki to learn them. It is a bit finicky to setup and learn the tool, but overall good motivator to keep learning.
After about 6 months I became proficient enough to drop the extension and just watch now in plain spanish audio and - depending on the content - spanish subtitles.
Hebrew is a very niche language, so it won't fix the core problem that there is no hebrew-native content.
Forgive the basic questions, but you were using Spanish original videos, with first-order Spanish subtitles already available, then adding second (English?) subtitles via language reactor?
I ask because I went down this path a little to help my German learning, but struggled to find the right combination of videos at the right level with the right subtitles available. (I was trying to use free apps/services though).
You can have any subtitle track be "blurry" in language reactor and only show it on keypress or mouse hover. Depending on your learning level, listening comprehension etc. you might not need a first or second subtitle, or configure the subtitle to be "blurry" by default.
Having 2 subtitles is only helpful in the beginning, where you do not understand entire sentences or sentence constructs sometimes, but you want to understand that entire sentence to continue to follow the storyline (and continue to be engaged). Very quickly I switched to having only the spanish subtitle and lookup individual words.
IIRC, Languagereactor also enables all the subtitles (netflix somehow filters the list of available subtitles based on the country you are in). But I should add that I am actually living in spain, so all the content has spanish subtitles available (and english, which I used as a reference instead of german).
I watch in foreign language without subtitles or with foreign language subtitles. I use language reactor so the translation is right there, on mouse hover. It also allows you to quickly rewind the scene, so you can watch and hear same dialog multiple times. That helps a lot too.
Also, I happily watch dubbings. Dubbings are easier to understand then original shows. Imo, it is fully ok to watch Nordic show in Spanish. Or an American show I have already seen, but this time in Spanish.
Switched to this and never been so satisfied. Hard to get old and not streamed shows though. And stremio has plugins that support some streaming sites as well.
The issues with subscriptions to streaming services are manifold (if you ignore the gargantuan waste of time that mindless TV-watching is):
- the UI is deliberately crap
- the library is deliberately incomplete
- accessing content is deliberately complicated
I had an experience recently where my phone provider bundles 20+ OTT services in a single plan within a single app that runs on your TV/phone/browser. The kicker: you can add stuff to a watch list, but the watch list is never exposed anywhere. While they want you to pay for stuff, they do not want you to be choosy about it.
YT has, to my mind, the best user interface of all the services I have tried.
It's weird. When Netflix came about, I was excited to dump all the bespoke pirating stuff that it replaced. I didn't mind paying for content, in fact, I was glad to.
Fast forward a while, and now Netflix seems to be an undiscoverable mess of old and foreign content while charging twice as much. Each IP owner felt it necessary to make their own way worse clone, and still, after paying more than a hundred a month, there are things just not available on any of them. And now, more than ever, the high seas seem so enticing again.
I'll never really understand how they ruined the opportunity presented, but they really soured people on their value proposition.
> how they ruined the opportunity presented
netflix didn't really ruin it themselves (at least, not completely) - the owner of the licensed content did, by wanting a bigger cut of the pie. Disney, for example, didn't feel they're paid enough, and so stopped licensing the content out to netflix and instead created a competing service.
I think this is a regulatory issue, because each piece of content is an effective island of monopoly. The state needs to make some changes to how content is licensed to prevent monopoly. An example policy would be to force content production studios from exclusive licensing - only broad and available licensing (so any streaming service can pay a known price and obtain the content).
Something similar exists with cinemas and movie producers (of course not quite the same). Why couldn't the same or similar be for streaming?
Now you could argue that some (much) older works are part of culture, and being exposed to that culture is necessary to function in society. But that then becomes an issue of how long copyright is necessary or reasonable. New works most certainly should be allowed to be monopolized by their creators - even if that means that some potential consumers are priced out of experiencing them.
You don't need to see every Disney movie. In fact, not seeing some of them will raise the bar to make better movies and will cause competition to emerge.
Why? Nobody _needs_ Mickey Mouse. If the price for Mickey Mouse is too high, just don't buy it.
That's not the point. The parent was saying "if you own content and display content, you must license it", not "the price needs to be reasonable".
Typically, there are ways to do this. One way is forcing a company's distribution and streaming to be separate, and this already exists in some other parts of the market.
So if Disney sells Mickey Mouse content $x to its own streaming service for $5, they have to do the same for Netflix. Disney can still set the price. It just has to pay it as well, and that reflects on its own balance sheet. The problems involved in regulating this have already been solved in other markets, it's a solved issue.
Now, you can typically enter volume sales agreements still. So Disney streaming can buy 100k 'streaming options' for $4 if they hit the volume. But that means the same agreement has to be available to, say Netflix.
Of course, the same will be true for any Netflix created content!
Nothing is perfect, but this is the sort of common carry stuff that separates out 'cable companies' from 'TV studios', and there's been loads of legislation about this over the years.
> That's not the point. The parent was saying "if you own content and display content, you must license it", not "the price needs to be reasonable".
Or perhaps creation and display/distribution cannot be done by the same entity / conglomerate.
> So if I as an artist paint a painting, I could not sell it in my small personal gallery by the beach? That is ridiculous.
It is so ridiculous that it is how movies were made and distributed in the US for decades:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pic....
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studio_system#The_end_of_the_s...
FWIW, I think this is what led to the car dealership world we live in.
That is because cars require maintenance and parts, so laws were enacted which ensured that a liable party would be located in the end user's jurisdiction.
Streaming services are not critical infrastructure that require an active supply chain.
You got this the wrong way around: If no one needs Mickey Mouse then why should we so severely restrict everyone's speech to encourage its creation.
I agree completely. I address that in the mention of culture.
>Why?
I don't really care how streaming shakes down, except for how companies dodge paying creators.
But it's been clear for decades the DMCA and fair use laws needs a huge overhaul for the modern internet works. You make a 45 minute documentary, but some 10 second sample of a VEVO pop song can get your content taken down anyway? All fanart is technically under a gray area as well. All that is something that would benefit from reviewing content licensing.
> Why? Nobody _needs_ Mickey Mouse. If the price for Mickey Mouse is too high, just don't buy it.
As if Disney only owned original content like Mickey Mouse. Or as if Disney didn't own huge swaths of culture.
You can happily ignore Disney. You are elevating it to status it does not have to have.
Yes copyright should be shorter. Yes, these companies abuse artists to the maximum they can away with. But there is zero reason to create state monopoly around this.
> You can happily ignore Disney. You are elevating it to status it does not have to have.
I'm not eleveating Disney to anything. It already is at that level. It owns huge swaths of, well, everything spanning back decades.
For example there was a minor viral news that Winnie the Pooh finally entered public domain. Well, Disney owned it exclusively from 1953 to 2021. All of it, from print to video.
Pooh is just the most famous and advertised example. Since Disney owns most of movie and TV production in the States, through that alone they own rights to a huge number of written works. That's before we go into how many audio and visual media they own.
Disney isn't just Mickey Mouse and Marvel. There was an article on HN yesterday on how the author "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" finally got the rights back after 35 years: https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/18/im-not-bad/
Next time you watch a movie you like or even read a book you like there's a very high chance it's owned by Disney (or some other huge license holder).
Or if you can't find that movie or book you like anywhere? Same reason.
> But there is zero reason to create state monopoly around this.
I didn't say anything about this or imply anything of the kind.
Besides, copyright literally exists only due to state exercising its power.
There are hundreds minor viral news about a lot of stuff daily. I am not even trying to keep up with it all.
> Next time you watch a movie you like or even read a book you like there's a very high chance it's owned by Disney (or some other huge license holder).
And in all seriousness, very likely not, because the ones you keep mentioning are not the stuff I would read or my kids would read. My kids do watch some superheroes, I dont because I find that super boring. Like I said, you can happily ignore the Disney.
I agree that they abuse artists to the max, that artists should have more rights and corporations less of them. But, Disney is really not necessary and ignoring it is perfectly workable strategy.
> There are hundreds minor viral news about a lot of stuff daily. I am not even trying to keep up with it all.
Yup. The gist of my text was that it was viral news, and not Disney owning exclusive copyright on a chunk of human culture for 70 years.
> the ones you keep mentioning are not the stuff I would read or my kids would read.
Yes, because all examples should be 100% directly applicable to you, and you alone, and if a few examples don't, then nothing matters.
> My kids do watch some superheroes, I dont
"It's something my kids would never read but look this is exactly what my kids are interested in but it's completely irrelevant because I, me, I, mine".
And yes Disney is not just superheroes. And for better or worse superheroes are a huge part of the American culture, and Disney owns a huge chunk of it (either through direct ownership of Marvel, or through licenses and deals it got when acquiring US TV and film producers).
> But, Disney is really not necessary and ignoring it is perfectly workable strategy.
Yup. "I never" somehow turned into "my kids watch superheroes" but you didn't even catch on to that.
BTW, if you have favorite movies, a lot of them are owned by Disney. If not by Disney, but then by some other huge conglomerate. The books you read are owned by a few huge publishing houses. Most music you listen to is owned by at most 4 companies etc.
Disney is just a very convenient example.
Hot take, we don't _need_ Marvel or Star Wars either.
We don't need many things. Basically everything in our culture is things we don't need.
And yet the next time you find yourself watching that cozy Christmas movie you fondly remember, chances are its owned by Disney. As is that book you read to your kids. Etc.
Yeah but think of any other piece of media and how people might be forced to start a brand new subscription just to see it.
It's not about Mickey Mouse but it's about you wanting to watch the next season of something and having to make a choice: either submit to the monopoly or skip.
Consumer protection should be there to prevent this kind of abuse of IP.
Imagine if every single individual piece of art was in its own individual subscription-based location in the world ran by a different owner, being the only way to enjoy it. That'd be ridiculous, wouldn't it?
None of this is abuse. It's a leisure activity that you have to pay for, and people have the right to sell their work how they like. It's not exactly access to clean running water.
They only have that right because society has deemed it beneficial for everyone to give them that right. If it is no longer beneficial overall then they should no longer have that right.
If you want to abolish private property in the name of watching things on Netflix then that's your choice, of course.
Unless we see the horror that lack of private property rights has visited on people over the centuries and deem your right to believe things to no longer be beneficial overall.
Private property does not depend on copyright so your are arguing a strawman.
Actually, most art is housed in either private locations or paid museums. Certainly most well-known art. You pay the owner of e.g. the Louvre to see e.g. the Mona Lisa.
> You pay the owner of e.g. the Louvre to see e.g. the Mona Lisa.
That owner is the French state that heavily subsidises The Louvre. On top of that no one prevents you from taking pictures or videos of Mona Lisa, re-drawing it any way you like, and posting those photos and videos and drawings and what not anywhere.
Additionally, there's nothing preventing museums just exhibiting their collections anywhere, and they do that frequently.
Meanwhile Disney not only has exclusive rights to an insane amount of properties [1], they will sue you for breach of copyright.
[1] My favorite example is Winnie the Pooh. Disney had exclusive rights to the character and stories for 70 years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winnie-the-Pooh#Disney_exclusi...
So while (most) of the Western world was/is in the chokehold of Disney, other parts of the world had completely different takes on the character: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wlk7O2-rnQs
> That owner is the French state that heavily subsidises The Louvre. On top of that no one prevents you from taking pictures or videos of Mona Lisa, re-drawing it any way you like, and posting those photos and videos and drawings and what not anywhere.
The Eiffel Tower copyright on the other hand:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiffel_Tower#Illumination_copy...
* https://www.travelandleisure.com/photography/illegal-to-take...
* https://www.headout.com/blog/eiffel-tower-copyright/
* https://www.rd.com/article/eiffel-tower-illegal-photos/
Omg. Now this is well and truly bullshit :)
There is tonnes of private art in the world you are simply not able to see at all.
Many of these TV shows also come to DVD/Blu-Ray eventually.
Your system simply makes society worse for the benefit of a handful of companies. So, why? To make society better.
Yes there should be something like a "mechanical license". Content owners would set their own price but it would be the same for everyone and they shouldn't have the power to pick their licensees.
Wouldn’t Disney just set an insanely high license fee in this case though? If they’re just paying it to themselves then they can make it high enough that nobody else can justify paying it.
This problem was also an issue for movies and theaters. The "fix" is to ensure theaters (the distributors) cannot be owned by, nor can they own production studios.
So under this rule, if disney wanted to have their own streaming service and used a high licensing fee to try stop competitors from their content, they'd pay high taxes due to the high licensing fees making huge (fake) profits for the parent company - it'd end in losses, as the streaming service (as a separate company) cannot bill their cost onto the parent company (to offset the profit). It's as if the tax man gets to sit in the middle, and siphon part of that license fee for free. Disney shareholders would never stand for that, and so they won't do it.
Could borrow the concept of FRAND (Fair, Reasonable And Non Discrimatory IIRC) from tech companies licensing patents?
I don't know much about it and I do not think it is perfect, but from what I remember from discussions here it prevents certain forms of abuse.
I don’t think such an obvious scheme could escape the view of the monopoly laws could it?
I don't think you can have a monopoly on stuff you own. That's like saying I have a monopoly on my own house.
Ha. Guess you’ve not much grasp on how competition law works huh
I'm glad one of us explained our perspective, at least.
The idea of a mechanical license sounds perfect. Sorry to go off a tangent but my mind immediately went to healthcare as I have never heard of a mechanical license before.
can the same idea be applied to healthcare? for example, hospitals and doctors can set their own rates but these rates have to be public and they can't charge one insurance lower rate? If they charge anyone a lower rate, they have to charge the same rate for everyone.
> these rates have to be public and they can't charge one insurance lower rate? If they charge anyone a lower rate, they have to charge the same rate for everyone.
The problem with this is that it takes away only half of the negotiation. Doctors are now obliged to charge $X consistently but insurance is not obliged to pay it. So the negotiation process seems broken, and seems like it would cause a lot of bad faith negotiations from the insurers. “Eh, we’ll pay you minimum wage. Don’t like it? We’ll just wait until someone else finds your actual minimum and then you can pay us that.”
It’s also not clear what happens if Doctor A charges 10% more than Doctor B at the same medical facility. If you see Doctor A, can your insurance decline that even though they would have paid Doctor B’s rate?
Of course the current process is broken too.
Or just enforce United States v. Paramount Pictures.
This also solves the sports coverage issues. The clubs still make money but it’s the media companies that must compete on quality of service, punditry etc rather than it being an exclusive license to make money
> The state needs to make some changes to how content is licensed to prevent monopoly
That sounds similar to the 1984 Cable Communications Act (where large cable operators were required to lease channels to others, separating content delivery from content creation) but in reverse! requiring content producers to licence content to distributors
Don't forget shortening copyrights would have a major impact on this issue as well! 25 year copyright would make most of these libraries public domain. Then the price would truly reflect what we would all like to be subsidizing: the new stuff.
Does the rights to Friends being traded around for the Nth time really benefit anyone?
It also exist for e.g. radio. It's called compulsory licensing and people have been doing it for decades.
I mean.. if Netflix offered Disney more money then they wouldn't have felt it necessary to launch their own service. I think they simply underpayed or overplayed their cards. It's hard to imagine Disney with it's own service is getting the same amount of people viewing its content.
Having the services fractured just ends up with everyone making less money. Both the streaming services and the IP holders
Its possible Disney just completely overestimates how much they can make on their own - but market forces should correct for that eventually. We aren't privy to the accounting that went in to the decisions. They currently are making some amount of money off of their streaming service. If Netflix could offer substantially more than that amount (and more customers this way), then I don't see why they wouldn't shut it down
> if Netflix offered Disney more money then they wouldn't have felt it necessary to launch their own service
Oh. "Just" offer them more money. Where would that money come from, exactly?
> Its possible Disney just completely overestimates how much they can make on their own
You underestimate how much content Disney owns, and how much of it is basically free for them ar this time
There's a sort of joke in academia, about the "least publishable unit" for a paper: Since "how many papers produced" is much easier to measure than "impact on a field", one way to try to game the system is to figure out the smallest amount of research that can be called "one paper", and publish just that, to maximize the papers / research effort ratio.
What we're seeing now is the same thing for streaming services. Sure, you'd pay £20 for a subscription to watch 75% of all available content. But it turns out most people would pay £40 for two subscriptions, each of which would show you 35% [EDIT and even people who won't, will still pay one £20 subscription for 35% of the content]; and quite a few people would pay £100 for five subscriptions, each of which will show you 12%. The beancounters are busy experimenting to find the "least bundle-able unit", to maximize extraction.
EDIT: And as someone else has pointed out, this is not something that any Netflix -- or any potential replacement -- can unilaterally do something about. In fact it's a "tragedy of the commons" situation: If MGM and Universal Studios and Paramount and WB all license their content to Netflix (under the £20 umbrella), and Disney doesn't, then Disney gets to keep a massive amount of money for themselves, while the other rights-owners have to divide up the rest. It only takes one or two "defectors" to basically force everyone to do the same thing.
Or you can pay £0 per month for 99% of the content.
I'm a bit like the parent comment. I've always wanted to be able to pay a monthly fee (even a high one, say £50 a month) to have access to a good quality selection of movies and TV shows. The thing is, it's always bugged me that you can get a much better experience by pirating than by paying for legitimate access. That seems the opposite to how things should work.
This pre-dates streaming. DVDs came with FBI warnings and other screens that couldn't be fast-forwarded or skipped. You couldn't buy a DVD in the US and play it in a DVD player in Europe because the "region" didn't match. You couldn't easily transfer it to watch on a device without a DVD player because of the DRM.
All of this means that, even ignoring the fact that it's free, it's just far more straightforward to torrent a movie and watch it wherever you want using whatever app you want.
I think I actually enjoyed Netflix more when they used to send DVDs in the mail. The library of movies felt much more complete, and getting stuff in the mail is fun. And it’s probably a healthier way to watch than binging 3 seasons of some mediocre show in a weekend just to see how it ends.
Yeah, I think younger people don't realize how limiting Netflix's library is today. They used to have absolutely everything. If it was released on DVD, they had it.
Now if I want to watch a movie or TV show, I need to consult an aggregator [0] to figure out where it's streaming.
As a nerd, I was so excited about the early days of streaming, as it felt like the inevitable path for a company like Netflix.
Now though, I'm way past subscription fatigue. I've seen movies I "purchased" on iTunes be silently swapped out for other versions as the licensing changed.
So I recently bought a Blu-ray player for the first time, and I'm assembling a library of plastic discs. This might be the last physical media format for video, so I want to support it and grab some of these titles while they're available.
[0]: https://www.justwatch.com
The only way to make money from business is by bundling or unbundling.
Netflix made money by bundling, now others are making money by unbundling.
We'll get another netflix era in the next decade or so
It was inevitable. Netflix rose thanks to studios and distributors selling them rights to content for peanuts. Streaming wasn’t taken seriously as it wasn’t a main source of revenue. Some years later and it’s a completely different story. Demand for streaming sky-rocketed, digital rights value increased and now every studio wants to create their own walled gardens.
> I'll never really understand how they ruined the opportunity presented, but they really soured people on their value proposition.
I think that they took the opportunity and milked it as much as they could. They are making a lot of money, have a ton of subscriber and are very successful.
They don't care if you are happy about the service as long as enough people pay for it. And it seems to be working.
> Each IP owner felt it necessary to make their own way worse clone, and still, after paying more than a hundred a month, there are things just not available on any of them.
I wonder how hard—technically/legally, not 'politically'—it would be to create a 'neutral' streaming service where all the major studios and IP holders could become a part of as a part of a co-op (?).
After costs are taken care of, the holder of the IP would get the leftover profits proportional to the number of minutes their content was viewed in any given pay period.
At the very beginning Netflix was able to get licences for very cheap, as owners didn't think of it as serious service and it was not impacting their sales on other channels. That isn't going to happen again.
> old and foreign content
I don't really mean old, I'd even say old movies were "better" in the sense of more variety, also foreign is often not a problem provided it's good (my favorite genre here is comedies like Norsemen or British Ghosts).
What I really dislike is this bland, characterless, boring, inauthentic, unengaging, but neverending stream of pulp that Netflix is producing and promoting. Most people I know just got fed up with it.
Personally I watch maybe one movie a month, and when I do, I make sure my time won't get wasted.
>I'll never really understand how they ruined the opportunity presented,
Money. It's easier to understand it if you realize each studio is trying to maximize its own revenue.
Consider the common advice given to content creators and startups : "You don't want to be a sharecropper on somebody else's platform."
Well, the other studios like Disney, HBO-WarnerBros, Paramount, etc are just taking that same advice by not being beholden to Netflix's platform.
E.g. Instead of Disney just simply licensing all of their catalog to Netflix and then just getting a partial fraction of Netflix's $17.99 subscription revenue, Disney would rather create their own platform and get 100% of their own $19.99 revenue. In addition, the Disney+ subscribers are Disney's customers instead of Netflix's.
Everybody avoiding the "sharecropping" model inevitably leads to fragmentation of content. Everybody pursuing their self-interested revenue maximization leads to not sharecropping on Netflix's platform because Netflix (i.e. the Netflix subscribers) won't pay the equivalent higher prices that Disney thinks they can get on their own.
To create a truly unified video streaming service with everything for one cheap monthly price means multiple studios have to willingly give up revenue. Most customers are not willing to pay Netflix a hypothetical $150+ per month such that all studios like Disney think it's a waste of money to maintain their own exclusive digital streaming service and would be happy with the fractional revenue share from Netflix.
Corporations care primarily about their position relative to other corporations; you and piracy is not concerns for them. Disney, Warner Bross and similar media corporations fears monopoly of Netflix. You cannot harm them thru piracy, Netflix can.
>you and piracy is not concerns for them.
Sure it does. It's just that piracy is still pretty low right now compared to 20 years ago. Most people are boiling in the pot still.
It'll work or a while, until the frog evaporates. Then it'll all fall apart quickly.
And worse, when you search they KNOW what you want to watch and will show you EVERYTHING they have that is NOT what you want. Infuriating, I reverted back to the old ways a year back and haven't regretted it.
Same with Spotify, who has a solid catalog that I was happy to pay for. Now I pay double, for podcasts, shows, and now even freaking videos that I have never wanted or asked for and have no choice to not take.
And now they also the audacity to show me ads on PAID PLANS.
They don't deserve our money, customer focus is long gone.
I am thinking of cancelling my Spotify Premium subscription because they introduce extra paid channels on top on paid Premium subscription.
Really? Darn, that is such BS. I was already looking out to be fair, only reason I'm still there is because of my family plan and older parents who will struggle to switch.
That being said, I don't mind additional plans to be fair. Let me pay for what I use, not what you force down my throat. What I mind is the constant enshittification.
greed, as always. It's an interesting Tragedy of the Commons. Though "commons" is a weird word to use for private corporations.
They could have charged $50 a month if everything were truly in one place and always available. Instead they had to cut here and there to dodge residuals. Then cut more here and there to optimize slop over prestige, then cut more here and there to try and save money on licenses, then cut more here and there to try and become the middleman themselves. the cut more here and there to "maximize engagement" and compete with an entirely different business model and medium.
Ultimately the shareholders ruin everything with their short term mentality of companies. They keep rewarding hype over substance and overall health. And of course the consumers suffer in teh end.
> I'll never really understand how they ruined the opportunity presented
Greed, “growth”, “shareholder value” —> enshittification?
And in this case, the enshittification of the whole streaming industry. In the same fashion as USA's "publisher can't own a venue", publisher shouldn't be allowed to own a stream service as well.
First you attract customers by offering (potentially unsustainably) good deals. Then you become the default option. Then you extract money from customers by enshittifying your service. Most famous digital services follow this path.
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Being put in contact with foreign contents? Disgusting! /s
More seriously, before Netflix I never knew how high-quality and fun was stuffs from all around the world. I watched great series from South Korea, Turkey, Jordan, Spain,France, Luxembourg, Germany, Scandinavian countries and South America. I also watched quite enjoyable movies from Nigeria. I probably forgot a few places too. Do Netflix has issues? Plenty. Their originals are often blands and cancelled. They taught me to seek mini-series and completed series instead of ongoing series. The wrestling they air is shit. But the availability of foreign contents is the coolest feature they have.
Yeah, same here. Foreign content is good thing about Netflix, the thing I enjoyed the most when I randomly run into it. Sure, novelty will wear off after a while, but at least it is not the same thing over and over and over.
> before Netflix I never knew how high-quality and fun was stuffs from all around the world.
The only reason Netflix brought them in is because the big copyright holders (Disney etc.) pulled most of their content from Netflix.
There were a few years when Netflix was a desert.
So, silver lining to every cloud I guess :)
A few months ago we'd had Disney+, Paramount+, Hulu, HBO Max but we've cut back to Netflix and YouTube premium.
Switched to purchasing and renting when there's something we want to watch that isn't available and we're finding it to force us to be more conscious of what we're watching.
We're considering ditching Spotify and music streaming to return to buying albums so our children can start to be more thoughtful listeners. After falling down a rabbit hole of some insider music vlogs, I recognized how much streaming is harming independent music.
We're going back full circle. From renting/buying DVDs, Bluray to Online streaming to renting content again.
YouTube music is really good. I prefer it more than Spotify and if you already pay for YouTube it's free for you.
They could also consider making manual youtube playlists and setting up a media computer with something like TubeArchivist. Selfhosting youtube is the only actually useful thing in my "homelab".
I'm only mentioning this because for years I've been making music playlists and archiving them. When you come back to them on youtube a few years later a few songs are always gone/ unavailable. Some of my favorite songs don't exist on yt anymore
Interesting! In which ways is it better than spotify?
On the music side, the current trend for vinyl has been a really great thing for my teenage kids. My eldest (who according to Spotify listens to about 130k mins of music a year) has really discovered an appreciation for the arc of an album when he has to spend the time loading up a disc.
For underground artists, spotify is piracy with extra steps, often literally only paying in exposure.
Thanks to special backroom deals with the three majors, Spotify only really pays to a small majority in the Top N.
It doesn't matter if you only listen to one artist the whole month, your money is still going to Taylor Swift.
There is no point in paying for streaming. Just pirate it and give your money to your favourite artists by buying merchandise or vinyl.
> There is no point in paying for streaming
Spotify is so cheap that it is worth it for the convenience alone. Not to mention Spotify is legal while piracy is not.
However, I agree that if you enjoy music (or any other art/content) someone produces, it’s only fair (and natural) to support them in a more direct way.
I suppose the qualifier here is "there's no moral point in paying for streaming". If you're fine listening to your favorite artist but paying Taylor Swift for your convineinece, cool.
You'll benefit the artist much more by throwing a real dollar at them and pirating their music.
Finally jumped ship to a Jellyfin based home server and couldn't be happier.
The ui is surprisingly good and polished (especially for the users who don't have to manage the library), video quality is amazing (with bd source files, who would have thought, but even DVD is often better than what modern streaming provides), and I can cache the movies on my phone when needed.
It works in ANY browser under ANY os, doesn't have ads, doesn't track me, and has all the content that I could ever desire (and wouldn't be able to find in any one service. In some cases, IN ANY service).
I can have any combination of a subtitle language and a voiceover.
Overall cost was only 500 for a used m1 air and a 16TB external storage.
I find the free version of plex - once I config out all their own streaming junk - is perfectly good.. (and it runs acceptably on my ancient synology) Are there any compelling reasons for me to look in to jellyfin?
It’s free as in freedom and open source. This isn’t just a thing for people who are preachy but it’s also a sign that it’s less likely to change the terms of the deal, so to speak.
I'm perfectly fine with paying for software, so the price wasn't a leading factor in my choice (and I have contributed to Jellyfin).
It just looks to me that Plex (as a company) isn't really as reliable for self-hosting in the long run. So even though Plex has a better client support (for example, on xbox and playstation), I decided against it in favor of something that only I am in control of.
Initially intended to buy a license for Emby, but it doesn't support hardware transcoding on Apple Silicon yet, so Jellyfin it is then.
If you are happy with Plex, there's no reason to switch, IMO. If something goes wrong, it likely won't take you long to connect an alternative to the same media library
The main reason that finally pushed me to move over was that Plex works local only (no internet connection) for only so long and then you are done for without a beacon/login home I guess. Dumbest "feature" ever but I guess I get why they do it.
We had our power and internet go out for an extended amount of time earlier this year and shortly after I converted us over to Jellyfin vs Plex. Quite easy and painless setup. Mostly just recreated my libraries in Jellyfin and good to go.
I ditched all the services years ago and use a similar setup. Works well enough for me.
Jellyfin is how you're serving it. Where is the content coming from?
They said Bluray and DVD.
Some of us have quite a few DVD/Blurays that we could rip. A lot of good stuff can be found in bargain bins and closing down sales (I got all the 9 series of the X-files for next to nothing). I am personally not bothering to rip them and download them instead, but I am not paying like 5 times for the same movie/tv series that I have already paid for.
A lot of films have been re-released now like on different media formats, with several different "cuts" which normally have maybe a few extra minutes of dialogue.
I have to investigate this further. I bought a bunch of bluray UHD documentaries that I cant watch because my 4K TV is a 'monitor'. Which I only found out was a problem after also having to buy some expensive 4K HDMI cable which was supposed to fix the problem.
Since I couldn't work out how to backup the discs, I now also just buy 2nd hand DVDs for when I need my pacifier box. Anyway, for this old man it turns out that the old movies are the best; no shaky camera and clear audible dialog. Plus some of the modern discs are now also polluted with adverts, horrible.
If we lived in a sensible world, buying the item once should give me rights to every format available. I might even consider digital purchases again if that was the case, especially since we have seen too many of these services fold and take our purchases with them.
I enjoyed the subtle messaging: drop your Netflix for 20 bux. pick up a seed box for 4 bux.
Hetzner will kick you to the curb if you torrent from it so don’t think that was an intentional message
We recently did a stock take of all the subscriptions we've ended up with - versus the ones we actually regualrly use - and it was clear we've been wasting money for some time
This year had me reduce my subs to a grand total of Youtube and Discord. And even then Youtube is on shakey ground. Just sucks because Youtube is prety much an uncontested monopoly serving as that middleground between tiktok shorts and high budget TV shows.
I've found we can usually watch what we want on a streaming platform in a month or two then cancel the subscription and move on elsewhere - it also makes us think about what we actually want to watch rather than what's available to watch.
In the past I used to pay for Netflix, Spotify, and even YT Premium.
However, they keep raising prices every year.
In the past Netflix 4K cost like $22 and with family sharing it was about $5 - totally acceptable.
Now they cracked down on family sharing in different households and charge $37. No way.
Spotify: they increased prices again last month to $20 USD for the individual subscription. I bought a 12 month Colombian gift card for $40 USD and activated via VPN. Should this stop working, I will unsubscribe entirely.
YT Premium: it's at $23 per month now. Considering they aren't producing movies themselves, I consider that one the most egregious pricing out of all three. They can absolutely forget it - I am unwilling to pay any more than $10 for it.
YouTube has the best content that you absolutely can't and won't find in commercial productions, and exactly because they aren't producing anything, they're just a platform. I think the sub-$10 premium without music was in the right price range but even at $20+ it proposes much, much more value than your random streaming service.
However, what they're not clear about is how the Premium fees actually land on the YT channels which is an irksome point. Premium views generate more income than unpaid views, that much I know. But I don't know if my subscription fees will benefit only the channels I watch or whether I my subscription is helping the big, popular shows that I never watch.
I don't understand the youtube love i see all over this site. It's constantly something i see that people are okay with.. but i see so many things i dislike within it.
It has a social media style layer on top of it to entice people to keep watching, as well as creators to keep creating horrifyingly misleading titles/thumbnails, it captured a massive user base without utilizing ads and then removed the training wheels and went full steam ahead on ads and added a paid model.
they added shorts which is all the things i mentioned on steroids, and its owned by google.
I'm a strong advocate for turning youtube into just a search bar, with some subscriptions on the side for creators you actually care for. Imo, if something gets through all the noise and finds its way to me, its maybe worth watching, if its their social media style layer suggesting it to me? its a low % chance its worth watching a minute of.
> youtube into just a search bar, with some subscriptions on the side for creators you actually care for
That's exactly the only way to use Youtube: start with the subscriptions page where you see new videos from channels you follow in reverse chronological order, then open up the videos into tabs, go fullscreen and play. The platform indeed is rather horrible and tries to be a video hosting plus a kitchen sink but you don't have to engage with it (even if they try to get you in to that). Sadly, the experience sucks for youtubers as well, accounts shut down for no good reason, copyright harassment, demonetization, videos removed, etc. with nothing much they can do about it. I would pay for Youtube if it was a video hosting service straight and honest, connecting creators and viewers, and not an opinionated platform moderated into nannies.
The problem with Youtube is that it has good content despite everything else so they can force this crap on us. If there ever was a friendlier implementation people would jump to it but network effects give Youtube its power. As long as you can't follow your subscriptions outside Youtube it's hard for competition to come out of nowhere. Much like there's no aggregation of social networks where you could follow people on various services without having to be on every single one even if you like Facebook and your kids like Instagram.
I last watched tv at my parents house in the last millennium. Never had a tv because there was nothing interesting to watch. Then Youtube came and all the niche people filming their stuff on all the niche channels. Stuff that would never ever be in any commercial, mainstream network because they would have to try to appease the largest possible audience. Coincidentally, all the Youtube channels that grow too big and make the channel a "production" rather than a "guy with a camera" unequivocally become bland and boring, averaged, dull, and all the nice rough edges nannified away just like networked stuff from big production companies.
>It's constantly something i see that people are okay with.. but i see so many things i dislike within it.
Yes, welcome to a true blue monopoly.
I can list issues for days, but at the end of the day a lot of beloved creators in pretty much all sectors can make a living off of Youtube and not much elsewhere. Maybe some can jump to Nebula, but not all have content that fit that service. It's those creators I love, not Google.
I'd love nothing more than a proper competitor to rise up, or for courts to finally do their job and slice Youtube out of the Google ecosystem. But I'll be waiting a while for either. I've de-googled in pretty much every other aspect except Gmail and Youtube, and I simply don't see any other way out for now.
45% of your subscription benefits Google as far as I know.
I'm not willing to pay $20 a month for watching like an hour or two of mediocre homemade content Google did not even produce.
As any other subscription, it depends on your habits. I can pretty much subsist on entertainment, educational, political, podcast, and simply fluff content on Youtube without any other streaming service (because damn, what's the last TV show I really was excited to watch? the new King of the Hill Season a year ago?). $15 for that is fine, for now. But I'm eagerly keeping an eye out on another ship to jump to.
I unsubscribed from Spotify six months ago and didn't look back. Navidrome works extremely well.
almost 4 years for me now, feels good to not feel like im having my music held hostage unless i pay them every month for the rest of my life.
I really don’t think you need much more than a Criterion streaming subscription. I’m filling my head with quality and art that makes me feel and think now.
Can anyone give me an honest review of Kagi? When AI can summarize the web results and search for me, I have stopped using Google.
I tried it because I was less and less happy with Google and the various free alternatives never quite hit it. With them, I'd have to go back to Google every now and then to get better results. I thought I'll try Kagi for a month or two and see.
With Kagi, I think I've gone back to Google a couple of times in the early period. Then not once, since last winter. On browsers where I'm not logged onto Kagi I've gone from Google to my primary browser with Kagi multiple times. I can't really tell if Kagi is good or bad, objectively, but in relative terms it's very good. Most importantly, it's quite invisible, doesn't have irritating things to fight with, and the first two pagefuls aren't sponsored ads. It's tool-like and it certainly gives the feel of 2000's Google Search.
I don't know if I'm a fan but I still also have no reason to stop using Kagi. I like the simple concept. And I think paying for search is a good proposition because it turns the odds to my favour: the company can succeed by making me happy instead of using me to make advertisers happy.
I really like it, but for the cost of a cup of coffee you could try it for a month as well. I highly suggest you just do that: commit to spending a month using it, and if you don't like it at the end cancel. Maybe it won't work for the way you use search, maybe it will, the only way to find out is to try.
I used Kagi for a few months, it was the best search experiemce I've seen, but in the end I decided I didn't value that enough. I use Ecosia now, it's fine- worse, but free.
I guess it's down to you how much you value web search. Kagi does have an AI tool as well, but I didn't use this and don't use AI search anyway, so can't comment on how it compares.
It varies from person to person because everyone uses search differently. Someone I know swears by it and loves it. I tried it for three months using only Kagi and it didn’t feel worth it to me, so I went back to Google. Your experience might be different so my suggestion is to try it yourself if you can.
I still don't understand why Google gets such a bad rep. I think it's fine. And about AI "summarizing" web results: while sometimes useful, you absolutely need to check the source. AI can make stuff up, and it can also summarize wrong (when the source does exist).
With google I can't find things I know exist. For example, it doesn't find several of my github repositories with unique names that have been there for years. With old google you could drill down a couple of pages of results, but they're not there now. It also prefers worse sources for materials, for example some blog which poorly explains some API, rather than the original documentation.
My honest review - Kagi is really, really great. Been using it almost a year now.
The search results are much more relevant, there are no ads or hallucinated BS AI summaries at the top, and you're not giving Google your data (and money) to further enshittify the world.
There are features I haven't tried yet so can't speak to them, but that's my very general take on the default kagi experience.
The perception of Kagi at HN is extremely positive, but in my personal experience the search quality reminds me more of Bing than Google, with Kagi sometimes surfacing puzzling results first. Also, I wasn't thrilled about giving them access to all my search data. As flawed as Google may be, I still believe they have better privacy standards than Kagi.
I personally think their privacy policy is very transparent, and they seem to take it seriously.
https://kagi.com/privacy
obviously neither of us have peeked under the hood at google and kati’s source code, so hard to tell for certain at face value.
Same, I tried it only because its spoken highly here and I dropped it after paying for a year. I was not able to find what I wanted at least 25% of the time, not worth it to pay.
I use Kagi at home and Google at work, and IME Kagi results are much better compared to Google. It's easy enough to jump to Google by adding !g, but I never find myself actually using that... I do however end up doing the reverse, where I'll not find the result I'm looking for on my work computer and then quickly repeat the search on Kagi on my phone. I used to use DuckDuckGo on my personal devices before, and while it was mostly fine, I did have to jump to Google more frequently. In the end sometimes the results were better on DDG and sometimes on Google. I haven't really found any situation where Google results were better than Kagi (I do tend to prefer Google Images results, but I only very rarely use image search, maybe once a month).
There was also an instance recently where I was helping out a coworker get set up with something. I had done it earlier in the day, so I told him something like "type in $SEARCH_TERM, then go to the first page and copy the commands from there". He put it into Google, couldn't find the right result, tried a few variations, still couldn't find it. I pulled Kagi up on my phone, searched the same term, and slacked him the page while he was still looking around on Google.
Hi @nmil - Thanks for the awesome shout out! It's great to see that you've been enjoying the server. You mentioned reddit in your text. If you're active on reddit, and if you haven't done so already, maybe stop by the unofficial r/hetzner subreddit. There are a lot of long-time users there. --Katie
You guys should invest in comms/PR and mostly in reliability. Fly your 9s. AWS/GCP/Azure outages are getting more frequent and it seems like they don't even care.
I like the AI-disclaimer :). This might become a thing for blog and news articles: (c) all words written by <editor> on <date> without AI. And then there will be a robots.txt directive that allows collection of this self-declared human material for AI training. And a google search option: "ai:no" :)
The only time I had a Netflix subscription was in 1999, for a couple of years, when they were mailing DVDs. Can't remember how much it costed. Never got any streaming subscriptions.
I get annoyed with the Netflix button on my TV remote. It wastes a minute when press it by mistake.
It would take you all of five minutes to modify your remote so it can never be pressed again.
Without destroying the button? and consistently on every type of remote out there that has a netflix button? How?
Why would you care about destroying the button if you never need it?
But placing a piece of tape or something else non-conductive between the rubber cap and contacts should do the trick fairly non-destructively.
>Why would you care about destroying the button if you never need it?
I'm more worried about breaking the rest of the remote in the process.
I was able to take the little rubber piece out of the remote. just left 4 little openings.
I only have a single service at any given time and keep rotating them over the year. Even bad services have one or two interesting series you can watch and then dump the service after a month. It's a lot cheaper than cable still...
Mubi can be a slightly cheaper alternative. They now provide one movie-theater ticket per week in some countries, which is a good deal if you enjoy watching films on a slightly bigger screen with slightly louder speakers.
There's one called Filmin, also focused on independent and art cinema.
Good value for your money rather than rewarding enshittification, spyware, and slop.
It's funny, I have never thought of it this way, but, reflecting, I realise the way I do think about it is very similar. Whenever I have to justify a subscription on JetBrains or hosting or what have you, I always just ask myself: will this bring me joy? Specifically will it bring me as much joy as e.g. a Netflix subscription? Very easy to justify then.
To be fair, I used to smoke cigs, and drink heavily, which are both very expensive habits. I've since quit those (they weren't bringing me joy) but the benchmark is the same.
I get why the general non-tech crowd pays for Netflix but why people who hang out on here do it is beyond me. Most shows/movies on Netflix are garbage, there are plenty of free services that you can stream anything you want from. Why the hell would I pay for Netflix or any other paid service?
Convinience and budget. If you're making 300k a year, then he $300/yr for Netflix premium is barely a budget item.
Also, family. I can understand not wanting to be the IT for all your non-tech family media needs.
"just get the thing that will get you excited to get your hands on the keyboard"
love that
I wonder if it would be in the governments interest to heavily subsidize streaming services. Considering virtually everything seems to be getting hopelessly more expensive and no real progress on economic inequality seems likely outside a slim AI path - dollar for dollar free or cheap entertainment provides a lot of utility and can help keep the poor masses complacent.
$30 a month makes a hell of a lot more of a dent in entertainment affordability than it does in healthcare. No clue on how accurate these estimates are but it seems like the combined budget of most shows and movies in a given year is somewhere around the 40-50 Billion range which in the context of all the other shit in the federal budget is kind of nothing.
Do you think the entertainment value you get if you are required to pay 30$ would be better than what you can get right now for 30$?
Last thing I want is more billionaire handouts, with all due respect. As much as the rising costs suck, it is still better than the cable lock-in contracts and bundling deals. Netflix didn't lead to the cost of living crisis we arrived in today.
Netflix is my primary foreign language learning platform. I am not dropping it.
Other than watching shows in a foreign language and reading subtitles, is there any specific way you use it to learn a foreign language?
I am learning Hebrew but I find that many Hebrew Netflix shows do not offer English subtitles. It's really frustrating.
I used languagereactor.com for learning spanish for a while (a browser extensions that supplements netflix for language learning). It allows a second subtitle track, shows word translations on hover over the subtitle, and bookmark words to your vocab database with a single click. I exported the vocab after a few days into Anki to learn them. It is a bit finicky to setup and learn the tool, but overall good motivator to keep learning.
After about 6 months I became proficient enough to drop the extension and just watch now in plain spanish audio and - depending on the content - spanish subtitles.
Hebrew is a very niche language, so it won't fix the core problem that there is no hebrew-native content.
Forgive the basic questions, but you were using Spanish original videos, with first-order Spanish subtitles already available, then adding second (English?) subtitles via language reactor?
I ask because I went down this path a little to help my German learning, but struggled to find the right combination of videos at the right level with the right subtitles available. (I was trying to use free apps/services though).
You can have any subtitle track be "blurry" in language reactor and only show it on keypress or mouse hover. Depending on your learning level, listening comprehension etc. you might not need a first or second subtitle, or configure the subtitle to be "blurry" by default.
Having 2 subtitles is only helpful in the beginning, where you do not understand entire sentences or sentence constructs sometimes, but you want to understand that entire sentence to continue to follow the storyline (and continue to be engaged). Very quickly I switched to having only the spanish subtitle and lookup individual words.
IIRC, Languagereactor also enables all the subtitles (netflix somehow filters the list of available subtitles based on the country you are in). But I should add that I am actually living in spain, so all the content has spanish subtitles available (and english, which I used as a reference instead of german).
I watch in foreign language without subtitles or with foreign language subtitles. I use language reactor so the translation is right there, on mouse hover. It also allows you to quickly rewind the scene, so you can watch and hear same dialog multiple times. That helps a lot too.
Also, I happily watch dubbings. Dubbings are easier to understand then original shows. Imo, it is fully ok to watch Nordic show in Spanish. Or an American show I have already seen, but this time in Spanish.
Stremio is free. Real Debrid costs about $3 per month, though.
Switched to this and never been so satisfied. Hard to get old and not streamed shows though. And stremio has plugins that support some streaming sites as well.
RD started honouring DMCA around a year ago and I jumped ship to Premiumize. have RD since reverted their stance?
Does Premiumize have a fuse mount driver and something like the debrid manager page?
not sure, never used it
Or Qobuz, which they say pays creators more than the alternatives
The issues with subscriptions to streaming services are manifold (if you ignore the gargantuan waste of time that mindless TV-watching is):
- the UI is deliberately crap
- the library is deliberately incomplete
- accessing content is deliberately complicated
I had an experience recently where my phone provider bundles 20+ OTT services in a single plan within a single app that runs on your TV/phone/browser. The kicker: you can add stuff to a watch list, but the watch list is never exposed anywhere. While they want you to pay for stuff, they do not want you to be choosy about it.
YT has, to my mind, the best user interface of all the services I have tried.
Jellyfin is quite good.
or an iPad instead of a yearly subscription
Totally missing the amount of bananas one could buy every month. Oh wait, it was apples and oranges, not bananas.
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I read your comment as Simpson's Comic Book Guy.