Shit like this is why I don’t feel bad at all for pirating.
They raise their rates by 65% so they can continue to pay Hollywood actors to make crappy forgettable movies for the service
Don’t forget the 5 BILLION dollars they just gave to WWE, a company that regularly goes to Saudi Arabia. A country so backwards in human rights that they don’t allow women to work. So WWE’s answer to this was to create a tornament just for the women. Called “The Great Moolah Classic”. Only problem with that is, it happened just as the MeToo movement was happening. Now in case you’re unaware, womens pro wrestling from the 1950s through the 1980s was dominated by “The Great Moolah”.
Btw, I’M not saying she was great. Far from it. Thats just her stage name.
But if you were a woman, and you wanted to get into womens wrestling between 1950-1985 you NEEDED to go through The Great Moolah. Here’s the problem though.
You had to live in a camp, where she controlled every aspect of your life from training through retirement. What she did with this control was appalling. She forced them to prostitute themselfs out to not only the male wrestlers, but also the rest of the general public in the area.
These women then had to give 100% of the money to Moolah, or else they’d be beaten.
And that’s the tornament they tried to give as the consolation prize for women not being allowed to wrestle in Saudi Arabia. Oh, and when they were forced to change the name, almost IMMEDIATELY, they changed it to The Mae Young Classic. Mae Young was Moolah’s best friend, and one of the people who would help beat the other women. That’s still what it’s called today. When they first introduced the trophy for it, the trophy was intentionally made to look like a vagina. "Here’s your make believe trophy for winning a make believe tornament, as a consolation prize for very real restrictions on making very real money, and we shaped it like your genitals. Snickers, who sponsered the tornament balked when they saw their logo would be on that trophy, and they were forced to redesign it to something more generic. The tornament continues to this day.
And that’s what Netflix just paid 5 BILLION dollars for. Either 3 or 5 years. I forget which.
Holy shit, do you have some more info or refs for this, this sounds unbelievably fucked up.
From the book The Chronicles of Mad Maxine and from Dark Side of the Ring S01E06.
Care to share what site you use to pirate? I haven’t been in that loop for a while, but all these pricing increases for all these streaming services is driving me back.
remember when the adfree plan for netflix was 8.99?
Yup, and that’s when I stopped buying DVDs and pirating. But with standard without ads being ~$15 with less selection, guess what I’ve gone back to doing?
They’re passing off the price of inflation to the people
Hahahaha
Netflix has no way to continue growing aside from increasing prices. That is a bad sign. They will just keep squeezing people. Your best bet is to stop subscribing.
Yea tbh it’s business model is gonna be obsolete.
The bottom line is especially in a trash economy where the rich are bleeding everyone, no one is gonna wanna pay for digital luxuries.
I only shell out for hardware and food.
Streaming is going to end up exactly like cable, it feels inevitable. Adverts, package bundle deals, contracts will be the final thing where they lock you in for a “discount”.
Damn near every tech company and major utility provider has no way of growing aside from squeezing.
No matter where you turn you will be getting squeezed, and it’ll just get worse every year that regulations don’t catch up.
And if the U.S. has it’s way, institutional regulation will be a thing of the past as a new wave of unchecked corporate oligarchy begins. And since the U.S’s biggest export is crazy, it’ll just spread…
Making the future more grim.
My biggest beef is that the ad plans also limit your downloads. I use that feature a ton.
So now I just pirate everything.
We pay for an ad-free tier and our downloads “expired” when we were in the middle of nowhere. They still existed on our device and on the service, we just couldn’t play them.
That got my wife annoyed enough that I think I can convince her to just buy DVDs again. $15/month is 1-2 DVDs/month, and that’s about what we watch anyway. We won’t get Netflix originals, but that’s fine with me. If we ever need any of those, we can just binge for a month.
Good thing I already like digitizing my media for Plex
I joined the Plex server plan, it’s better and works everywhere and I don’t get price increases or ads
Jellyfin + Wireguard VPN server says hello
All the shows that I like I’ve been buying DVD or Blu-rays for, and then I rip them and put them on my Plex server. Just so I can watch some anytime, and not potentially damage the discs.
I don’t have to worry about geofencing, Don’t have to worry about a price change ever, Don’t have to deal with commercials, Don’t have to think if the shows that I like are going to disappear and maybe show up on a different provider, and generally higher quality audio and video.
Would it just be easier to use something like iTunes for movies/shows?
I’d say no. Because it’s online and attached to your account it can be lost. If for some reason you lose access to your Apple account you lose everything you’ve bought. And a lot of these online services don’t want you to share or transfer your account. So like if you pass away, most of these online services don’t allow you to transfer the account to a living relative (per of the TOS) (granted I doubt there’s much I could do to actually stop you if you just leave them out of it and just give the account to somebody).
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Not sure if it’d work on Netflix but my wife were pleasantly surprised to A&E and History apps on our apple tv suddenly forgetting how to do ads after I set up adguard home with a few extra filter lists…I did have to ok a few things the list blocked. But the apps work and seem to be adless, at least for now.
You could just ditch all those apps and get Stremio with a Real-Debrid subscription. You can stream any content from any provider for ~$3/mo (including Netflix, A&E, History, Disney+, HBO Max, Prime Video, etc.) Ad*-free, of course.
Basically R-D works by downloading torrents to a dedicated server, so you can stream them instantly using a Netflix-like interface on your TV/tablet/PC/phone (via Stremio). And since they’re direct downloads, you don’t have to wait for seeds, nor do you need a VPN. It’s like having a seedbox except anyone can add any torrent to it (and not just videos, but literally any torrent can be downloaded instantly).
Sorry if this reads like an ad, but I really want more people to know about this. There’s a better way than paying for a bunch of streaming services, or waiting hours for people to seed. Or signing up for a private tracker and having to constantly worry about keeping your seeding ratio up.
For anyone who is unclear, this is a pirated content service, for better or worse.
And paying for it with a card with your name on it might be a bad idea…
EDIT: VPN or Usenet might be better and there are also pretty good tools.
You can always pay with Monero, which is completely anonymous if used correctly.
But I’m almost scared to mention this, given how much Lemmy hates crypto.
Yeah I regrettably* bought a year’s subscription to Peacock and was also pleasantly surprised that my PiHole just blocked all the ads.
*This was when they were offering a year for 20 USD. They had advertised world cup streaming but neglected to mention that all the commentary was in Spanish with no English option. I ended up just streaming a Swiss TV channel because it was at least in a language I can understand.
Is it that the decade of 0% interest rates and angel funding for startups lulled us into unrealistically thinking we could get unlimited everything for 9.99 per month, or is it that companies are suddenly starting to rip off people?
As an end consumer it’s impossible to gauge what is a proper price for entertainment.
Netflix has been profitable since 2003. This is greed.
