Cool story.

Have you build your own server? Or did you buy a NAS?

I don’t think it’s really the fault of the economic system of capitalism exactly. There’s nothing about “private ownership of the means of production” that requires infinite growth. For that I blame Wall Street in particular.

Yeah, screw this. Haven't been subscribed to Disney+ for a year now and I certainly won't return. If you have children, I guess you're fucked though.

I'm using a 2019 Dell SFF (Small Form Factor) desktop. It idles around 20 watts with max power of 80 watts, which is important. My old desktop idled at 100 watts.

This machine has no trouble doing everything I need for a media server. It's running VMware ESXi, with multiple VM's. One VM is for the Jellyfin server, one is the file server, one is a video conversion/DVD ripper/CD ripper, etc.

While ripping DVD's and converting videos, that box still has no problem serving multiple video streams for Jellyfin.

It really takes so little to stream, especially if you work toward limiting transcoding. Still, even when transcoding I don't run into performance bottlenecks.

My only streaming service

I am told that back in ancient times people survived somehow with very few viewing options. They listened to radio, read books, magazines and newspapers and such for entertainment and information. Sometimes they talked to each other in person or on a phone. Sounds a little crazy but I might give some of these a try. Personal media streaming is an interesting bypass I would like to explore as well.

It is not streaming and doesn’t address the advertising part of the conversation but if you are lucky enough to be able to set up a good antenna appropriately placed, over the air (OTA) may be an option for some for some television. Location is a constraining factor.

I don’t object to paying a fair price for a service but I do object to “let’s take you for as much as we can possibly get”.

So, stupid question, I have anywhere from 2-4 little kids running around the house at any time, and a partner that is recovering from a very serious illness. Can I change my whole game to the high seas with all of that going on? Like, I usually can't stay seated for more than 5 minutes at a time. How difficult and how long does the switch over usually take?

The headline doesn’t invite room for nuance, and there’s a higher concentration of pirates here.

And— again, not to excuse it— most streaming services already do these types of promos, even Apple TV (meant to be the prestige one).

I don’t think they’ll slide into putting them in the middle of shows, but I do think they’ll charge more for ad-free than they’d have ever made from the user on ad-supported, and they’ll make the ads so annoying on ad tiers to pull users into ad-free tiers.

Prime is the worst one afaic: ads in the middle, ads on both ends, and ads on the pause screen, and clicking Enter shops for whatever the ad is about about. Not to mention the ads in the program itself (Prime boxes, Amazon trucks, etc.).

I was at my parent’s house and they watch that 9-1-1 Ryan Murphy show; oh my fucking god, I thought the Subway sandwich ad in the Hawaii-5-O was embarrassing: this program plugged three things in less than a minute.

You're gonna be force fed this shit everywhere all the time until you fuckin' buy something and then it's on to the next one

That is the way

“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell”

Scumbags

Remember that if you sign up for Disney+, you waive the right to sue them if they kill you at one of their restaurants.

I bought a shell of a supermicro super storer, put ATX components in it, and outfitted it with 8x 10 TB drives in ZFS RAID Z2.

I have to 50 TB of storage and I can scale to 200 TB relatively easily. Streaming services are gone in my household.

Ah the classic enshifitied double dip. "Yes, you're paying us.. but we want more money, and these guys will give us lots to advertise to you, So fuck you and behave"

Created by a Disney mod as a locked post. They would certainly have an incentive to be less than honest about ads coming to premium tiers.

You could also get players that ignored the can't skip flag.

They immediately dropped the arbitration argument once the bad publicity started, but it wasn't truly tested in court so they could try again on a less public case.

Plus, they made ad free a separate payment so they could force people that pay yearly for prime to start paying extra right away.

What in the fuckety fuckfuck?

The constant rising tide of "oh, we're adding ads to your current tier, but here's a new ad-free upgrade option!" was bad enough. But "Actually no, you can't even pay for ad-free streaming if you want to. Gfys." is sooo fucked. What are they even thinking, from a business perspective, do they really believe they have their user base so locked in that they can get away with this? (Don't answer that; the sad truth is, they probably do believe so, and they're probably right...).

Also, that on-screen prompt better include an option for an immediate downgrade and/or pro-rated refund (it probably doesn't).

Out of curiosity, why are VMs, streaming or transcoding needed? I've always just accessed and played the movie files directly from the media center PC via some form of ssh or nfs. Even works from my phone on the go with a Wireguard VPN. Have I been missing out on something?

Stremio is so good too

Some on here seem to be way overcomplicating things. Just stick the movie files on any old box with a large drive (even a Raspberry Pi could work with external USB drives) and then access them via some form of file share: ssh (sftp, sshfs), nfs, cifs, etc. And then play the file with a standard media player, VLC, mpv... most media players are smart enough not to try to load the entire file at once and so streaming is automatic.

Fuck all these streaming service. I want Stremio, with the ability to pay a little directly to the creators of the things I watch. We need to break this system and replace it by something fair for the artists and creators, not to a fucking corporation that will give them pennies. People are willing to pay an amount for the media they consume, we just need to redirect the money to right people.until then stremio all the way.

Those are fun and dated now. The streaming services won't leave anything after the profit is gone.

Yeah, I guess I'll see how that goes for a bit, though if Disney does what YouTube tries to do and succeeds, I'll cancel my sub. Oh and this is one fewer reason to care about my PS5, which acted like a Disney+ box for a while but doesn't have decent ad blocking.

Cancel it, you'll be okay.

Damn... that post has some serious 'Ministry of Truth' vibes. Wild.

It's what we did with cable.

Fair enough

who knew that streaming services aren't the most sustainable business model... it would be real funny when Netflix roll back to disc rental.

In the UK we have had Sky Television for decades. Its a paid for subscription service, but ALL of its channels have adverts and has done since its inception. I don't understand why people are so surpised that ads are now appearing in paid for subscription based TV apps, it was a matter of time. It sucks, but you know, there are ways around it...

If I were a Disney+ subscriber, I would issue a chargeback every bill, stating that I am not getting the service I agreed to, until they dropped me as a customer.

Also, 🏴‍☠️

Its because these people were paying for the ad free tier that explicitly stated no ads.

Ads have been a thing since forever in radio and cable, but when you are paying explicitly for the ad fee service and a company decides to show you ads anyways without dropping you to cheaper ad tier its understandable to be pissed.

I think it was after the Jimmy Kimmel nonsense we decided not to resubscribe and just never went back. I’m about done with all of them at this point

Is this them weaseling ads into all of their content or is it more because of offering sports or something?

(Full disclaimer I assume they are being anti consumer by default -- but I also know they all the platforms are trying to stream sports. My wife has four different platforms for soccer, and still can't see every game she wants)

Ok good point. I've never bothered to look deep enough into the terms and conditions (who does?), but there are obviously clauses that say they can do this at any time.

Only 3.49€ a month too !

😁

(My VPN cost)

That's how they do it, add 10% ads every year and normal people just figures it's the new normal.

The secret recipe: add 10% a year and people start normalize it!

-"Well, some ads are okay like buy a car I mean I don't care, I mean it's way worse having your balls electroshocked every 10 minutes!!"

How can you sue someone from beyond the grave anyways?

My jellyfin server doesn't have ads

I was only staying there for Furious. That's probably it for me.

Wait didn’t Prime and Netflix do this already? After Hulu and YouTube went nuts with ads?

Disney sucks but seems like this is one of the last to ad ads.

And you just know the normies will keep paying