With the simultaneous rollout of restrictions on account sharing and price increases/addition of advertising, I’m cutting back severely on streaming services.

I allowed my streaming subscriptions to grow without thinking about it. Without trying to remember the constant merging and bundling, I was subscribed to probably a dozen services at one point. They ranged from Netflix and HBO and Hulu to Shudder and Showtime. I had Paramount, Criterion, Disney, Peacock, and others. I’d do the typical thing where I’d search for a movie, find it is exclusive to a platform, and grab the free trial and forget to cancel. I excused it if I found a movie even every couple of months on it. There were still nights where it’d take an hour to find something I wanted to watch. I was probably closing in on $200/month all told, and I don’t have sports subscriptions.

I’m interested in learning what other people are doing regarding the price hikes and service compromises. Are you cancelling? Are you taking advantage of bundles with your internet services? Are you rotating on some interval? Or are you not changing at all?

  • Ark-5@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    1 year ago

    Could you elaborate? I looked up both services and it seems to just be a media front end and a downloading tool. How does that get you the actual files to watch.

    • jeanofthedead@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      Debris services (Real-Debrid, AllDebris) basically cache most popular torrents and give you direct https links to the video streams. Frontends for these services include Stremio, Syncler, etc. I adore both, but Stremio is much more lightweight which works better on my GoogleTV / FireStick. You select what you want to watch (the apps sync with Trakt, fwiw) and it immediately shows you the versions it has available that are cached. I choose 4K Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos whenever it’s available.

      • Ark-5@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        1 year ago

        Thanks so much!! Seems like a cool service. Reminds me of popcorn time, which I don’t think works anymore. Are you still routing all your traffic through a VPN when using that? Seems like a privacy nightmare should any action be taken against those companies.

        • jeanofthedead@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          Naw, I don’t bother with a VPN since I’m not torrenting anything. I just set my router’s DNS to something other than the ISP’s default.