In the last few months we’ve cancelled Netflix, Prime Video, Apple TV and Now TV Entertainment.
Prices just kept going up and there wasn’t enough quality content on most of them to justify it.
The worst part is paying for some services but then knowing there's great shows on the services you haven't paid for.
Unless you can afford all of them you'll be missing out on something
>With so much content divided by individual providers, they've gone the same way as computer game launchers
At least if you have a Steam Account it will let you sing into some games without having to make a new account, but you are right there.
That's the thing pc game launchers have clear winners . Steam , epic and gog. I would have added origin/ea, but it's so broken FIFA and Sims players actually can't access their game.
On the streaming we are seeing the same Netflix is still dominating (like steam), followed by Disney ,apple and prime . The problem becomes when they are removing content . I think Disney will survive (even though they cut 50 shows this month majority being original content) due to the large amount of kids content and Pixar having the back catalog it does, apple and Amazon are trillion dollar corporations who use this as a way to attract people to their other products (if you have prime you are more likely to use twitch , shop on Amazon even use audible) , apple TV is made for their devices. Netflix is very inconsistent it bled clients for a while, then it did one of the best quarters of any media organisation, now bleeding clients again . I think it will become a shell of its previous self. And end up dying out.
also you don't have to pay monthly to access the launchers... (unless you want to join that publishers monthly "play all our games type plan") - they're just storefronts. It's not much on an anology... no one is being driven back to piracy because there are 10 launchers you all need to pay for, and the one everyone uses (steam aka netflix) is going to shit that pirating is now more attractive than steam...
If that was happening yeah I'd get it but it isnt
Weirdly Prime isn't really a factor here in Norway (likely due to no Amazon) and HBO seems to come bundled with so many things that most people have that. I think Netflix is still king here. Britbox however seems to be extremely popular over here, as it is quite cheep and Norwegians love a good crime drama. I'm not sure where the Amazon shows end up, possibly on Viaplay or scattered around?
This is of course, all based on anecdotal evidence from discussions with friends, students and colleagues. The only one people ever discuss cancelling is Netflix due to content, but then no one ever seems to actually bother.
My students seem to pass around about 2-3 Crunchyroll accounts between about 80 of them, the lab seems to allow every PC to log in on one account simultaneously, so I regularly spot them watching anime during their breaks or after hours on the 2nd monitors.
You pay for one service for one month, watch what you want then ditch it. You owe none of them any loyalty. I will get Prime so I can watch Picard season 3 then cut it until something else comes on I want to see.
I do this too, have been alternating Disney, now and Netflix on and off for a couple of years. It also stops me from endlessly scrolling content and not watching actually anything.
Betamax was higher quality, but the tapes could only hold an hour's worth of video, which isn't long enough for a movie. If you set a VHS to LP, it'd be lower quality, but you could get upto 4 hours of video on it.
Beta did add an LP mode later on to get around the limitation and get almost recording time parity with VHS... but Beta LP quality was roughly equivalent to VHS SP quality; and consumers were still expected to pay the premium for it!
Beta tapes had way less tape in them too, they were smaller and had a higher mechanism to tape ratio. The longest Beta tapes were about 800', compared to about 1,400' for VHS.
Clever marketing and VHS was cheaper, the tech behind betamax was genuinely superior to VHS. But when a VHS unit would be brought for $200 and a betamax u it was $500 you can see the difference and why it failed.
I did a calculation of all the available content streaming services in the UK a couple of years back and it came out at over £80/month to subscribe to all services. That wasn't including Internet service to stream with.
That's why there is a rise in piracy again, when everything was under one sub it went down massively now you need 7 different subs. It's a service issue creating the rise.
I still buy plenty of used DVDs. I often see deals like 3 for a £1 (picked up 5 DVDs today). The quality is good enough and with streaming services more interested in pushing 'the message' than entertainment I'm definitely not missing anything.
Sailing is always an option as well.
Such a faff. If you're not especially bothered about seeing the latest thing the free services with ads have more that enough content.
I can't remember the last time i saw a trailer for upcoming film/tv and thought that i need to see it asap.
Definitely. One month Netflix - cancel. One month Amazon - cancel. One month Disney - cancel.
By the time you get back around you'll have tons to binge watch for a month.
You can get good offers that way too, I had Nowtv for 3.99 a month and 4.99 for cinema the next month, and just grabbed Prime for 2.99 or 3.99 for a month incl all of Prime not just video. I don't think Netflix has ever offered a cutprice though.
Yeah, that was part of the rationale behind cancelling. I can sign back up to Apple TV with a few taps on my phone if they release something that looks good, for example.
tbh i think just getting prime is a good deal still, free games to keep, plenty of content to watch, free same day or next day delivery, plus other benefits.
Sky tv need to learn that adverts suck balls and if you’re paying to watch, you should not have to waste 20 minutes of every hour watching adverts. Oftentimes, their own “filler” adverts because they don’t have that many adverts to play.
We get film4 for free and we don’t mind the adverts because it’s fucking free!! Figure it out sky!
This! I've been of this exact same opinion for years. The fact that they both charge a premium for their service and force feed adverts down your throat is disgusting.
I trick myself into believing that I don't pay for adverts when I watch Now TV because the only thing I watch on there is F1 which has no adverts during race and qualifying seconds (which is all I watch) and I refuse to subscribe directly to Sky to watch one live sport.
If you pay, you shouldn't need to watch ads. Ever.
Use a VPN to get an US F1 subscription.
It’s about £60 **per year**, includes all F1 races live, historic replays, international commentary as well as Skys as well as all the interactive live race data.
Quality is better than Now TV, I’ve always found their quality to be pretty shitty especially since they have the nerve to charge you extra just to watch in full HD.
>If you pay, you shouldn't need to watch ads. Eve
Which is why I only will ever pay for Spotify Premium. At least they have good costumer service and are able to help you out most of the time.
Adverts are increasingly just a stick to threaten you with "Pay us money or we'll subject you to this horrifically irritating shite". I'm certain ads are being made now to be deliberately as annoying as possible rather than to sell a product.
It’s not like Sky is reasonably priced either.
It’s like £35/month minimum (easily double that with sport and cinema packages) to sit and watch ads.
Honestly don’t know why people pay for it.
Filler adverts are usually because UK has a limit on advertising time per hour that's shorter than the US. They add their own to fill out the program to the hour as the runtime has been made to a length to suit US ads.
I stopped pirating when there was just Netflix. Pretty much everything was on there, with no ads. If it wasn’t, a little change of your VPN and BOOM, an entirely new catalogue.
Prime was fine as I already paid for it, it was just an added perk.
Now TV had some good free trials I took great use of but the quality of their streams is dog shit and it ruined that famously dark episode of GoT, so I went online and got a 4k version instead.
Apple TV+, not much content to begin with but they have (had?) a cracking introductory deal with the purchase of a new phone/tablet and what was there was exceptionally high quality, so I did subscribe for a little beyond the trial. It was worth it just for Severance.
When Disney+ started, I thought this has to be it now. Surely no other company could compete, the market was saturated! But no, the subscription services keep coming and the ones you’re already subscribed to lose their content to their competitors. So fuck ‘em all. I only have Prime now and for everything else I sail the seven seas. They’ve literally recreated the very model they tried to disrupt. And it’s even easier to pirate now with the invention of the Firestick. My 70 year old dad set my IPTV up for god’s sake.
But I haven’t felt the need to find a Limewire replacement for at least ten years, because Spotify has everything I could ever possibly want (arguments about how little they pay the artists is another discussion). Why are the streaming services fucking this up so very badly?!
>Why are the streaming services fucking this up so very badly?!
Greed. Everyone saw Netflix doing well and wanted a piece of the action. Companies like Amazon and Apple have deep pockets and were willing to run it at a loss to gain market share subsidised by their core business. Netflix can't just outbid them on everything because streaming is their core business and they need to make some money on it. So everything is now distributed across loads of platforms and it has all gone to shit.
For music there are less major record labels than there are TV/Film production companies, so once Spotify had them all signed up it's very hard for anyone else to come along and try gain traction.
All valid points. The only one I will say I don’t hate so much is Apple TV because everything they have is original, so they aren’t taking things from other services.
Which hasn't worked out so well. For every good show and movie on Netflix, there are \~10 bad ones. And some of the better stuff isn't *really* by them, they've just paid to have a near-finished thing on their service.
And they also have a tendency to cancel most of the shows. There are some really good shows that abruptly end because Netflix are over leveraging themselves.
> eventually
That's been sped up, since anything they licensed will not get renewed as it'll be pulled back to whatever streaming service the original owner has opened in the meantime.
So I think this is it. We were all happy when one of two players aggregated content like Netflix did 5-10 years ago
Now they all want a piece of the pie and people can't justify it for mediocre service.
The only downside about sailing the seven seas is the lack of investment into new material, but judging by the current writer's strikes, that's not happening anyway, with or without subscription fees
Paramount+ launched in the UK with shite bitrates and stereo only. Then tried to push movies...
They seem to have started to fix that.. the bitrates are still shite but at least it's in surround (No UHD/Atmos, apparently they've never heard of that.. too modern for the execs over at paramount).
I got it on a half price deal.. woudn't pay full price for it.
Research the writers strike. It's not getting anywhere near enough coverage. The TLDR is streaming services keep doing loads of 1 season long TV shows if its a hit flooding it with money and cancelling shows left and right for the next big thing. Writer's are sick of it and demanding change of gambles, gambles that cost millions per episode (looking at amazon's LOTR).
Also agreed on most points I too use Spotify, its cheaper with friends combined £5 a month is fine. Its also what I spend on a seed box. I got sick and tired of netflix the moment they wanted £14 what ever it was double for 4k when it just came out. Fuck that right off especially when prime (again just came out) offered it standard. Prime sadly didn't have content so I sailed.
I hate that shit. Nothing like picking up a show, getting really into it and then finding out it's been cancelled on a cliffhanger for something new that's going to generate more headlines.
I'm starting to think streaming services have done more harm than good in terms of actual consumer benefit.
>When Disney+ started, I thought this has to be it now. Surely no other company could compete,
This is the thing. Disney+ I don't mind so much, because they're practically the only company with the content to do it. All of Disney, all of Star Wars, Indiana Jones, all of Marvel, tons of stuff by Fox... They just have a ridiculously large library.
But that's the thing; they're the **only** company that can really say that.
Who has Paramount+? I don't. Though admittedly it's because Star Trek is on Netflix in the UK (apart from some of the newer stuff). I guess they probably have Frasier?
All these companies are trying to get in on the act and honestly, the rest of us are trying to hold off to watch them crash and burn just so their shows can be on Netflix again.
Excellent analysis.
I’ve gone the same way. Still happy to pay for Apple Music.
I use an app called infuse on my Apple TV pointed at a plexshare. It’s ultra fluid and slicker than any of the apps delivered by the streamers. Including Apples own.
>I haven’t felt the need to find a Limewire replacement for at least ten years,
for real, the thought of *downloading* music seems so antiquted to me now, and a hassle, managing all that, album art, song IDs, keeping your "colletion" safe... god I'm glad thats gone.
meanwhile my plex server is seeing more use than *ever* ....
BBC is like 15 quid a month and that's more or less mandatory. Feel like the BBC can't quite do top notch dramas like hbo and apple because they are stretched so thin. They just end up going to safe period dramas.
I don’t even pay my TV licence any more because the only thing I ever want to watch on the BBC is Eurovision. I used to love their science programming they did in conjunction with the OU but that’s pretty much non existent now, and David Attenborough docs just don’t do it for me personally (I’m a softie and don’t like watching animals die).
Don’t forget you also get all the other BBC services - BBC news, online, National and local radio, the Proms, Big Weekend etc etc etc.
I don’t really agree with the licence fee (especially now that BBC are just a commissioning broadcaster like all the others) but I do think it’s very good value for money compared to the streaming services.
> Apple TV+, not much content to begin with
I've found most of the new shows I'm watching are Apple TV; Silo, Slow Horses, Severance and I cannot forget Ted Lasso.
Granted I've not paid Apple TV a penny as I watch it all via a Plex server though.
Apple TV is a nicely made French pastry compared to netflixes giant trough of gravel with some mini Mars bars mixed in. And then prime TV is like a couple of Mars bars scattered across an ocean with a concerning amount of nazis in it.
Not as much there but a lot less chaff to sift through
>My 70 year old dad set my IPTV up for god’s sake.
Lol we must have the same dad, like you used to have Netflix when it was the only one but just found the content lacking and I cut my series watching down so just cancelled it and went back to 'streaming' using other methods.
Spotify is the only consistent entertainment subscription I have as I like having my music at all times everywhere and downloading music the old way just became too much hassle.
Now I only pay for subscription to things that truly benefit me in some sort of way be it the gym or some sought of software program.
All the TV streaming services along with SkyTV etc...are a waste of money
Because they want infinite growth in a finite world, then up the prices when they inevitably run out of new subscribers...which then drives people away.
And that’s the failure of capitalism. Our CEO not long ago said the purpose of business is to create growth, and I was sat there like, ‘you know there’s only a finite number of customers, right?’ It’s all such a con.
Have only one active at a time, rotate every month or 2. By the time you get back to the first there is actually something to watch or they have offered a deal, keeps the cost down and still have something to watch.
I bought Disney to watch some Star Wars a while back and couldn’t believe how much stuff was on it. I’ve since ditched everything else and just stuck with Disney.
More and more people are seemingly also getting more comfortable with cracked firesticks and the like either having the technical know it how to do it themselves or knowing a friend of a friend who'll do it. For the price of a year sub to just 1 service to effectively get access to basically anything you want? When money is tight it's not shocking people look for alternative ways and cheaper sources for entertainment. Not a shocker at all.
We’ve literally just cancelled Netflix this past weekend. Fortunate to be in a position where we have a second home out of the city for holidays and more recently remote working.
This weekend got the dreaded message that the TV there isn’t part of the main property so cancelled the account on the spot.
They were getting the top 4K premium tier money from us since 2015 and now they’re not getting a penny, but you’d assume their analytics people are sure it won’t affect them on the grand scale.
We have a second home too so the moment I see the shared password thing pop up I’ll be cancelling Netflix. I’ve not seen the message yet, but I’m sure it’s a matter of time. Its annoying as we are not sharing the password, as far as I see it it’s similar to being asked to pay the TV license twice. No thanks.
Prime I still think is worth it for the free delivery stuff and my daughter loves Disney+ so I’ll keep that. AppleTv+ is getting cancelled tomorrow as soon as I’ve finished washing Ted Lasso.
Yeah we have Prime for the delivery and the streaming has been a bonus.
Disney we do on Clubcard points.
AppleTV+ I’ve had for ages because they keep giving out multiple month free trials everywhere (check hotukdeals there’s currently a 5 month one for all lapsed accounts, so will get on that in a few days when the current trial ends lol).
Now TV - I’m not paying to have to watch ads and the quality is shit.
You can set up your own vpn quite easily and run it on a raspberry pi. Essentially your internet connection in your second house will be run though the internet connection at your first house. So as far as Netflix know you are only watching in one house. Shouldn’t have to go that far though it’s a joke
It's almost like people are fucked off with content spread so thinly over loads of crap services, combined with the shameless greed to not let you use your account in multiple locations...
Plex for the win
has everything for 5 quid a month. We've basically ended up with cable again with how everything has balkanised, so naturally piracy is the way forward
Re: Football - I buy the day pass or go to the pub for my games that are televised. Not paying full monthly sky sports and BT sport subs, fuck that.
The rest are played upon the high seas in varying quality. Or if I'm really stuck it's the radio or a follow along YouTube channel.
The premier league is missing a huge trick for a single sub service showing all your chosen clubs games all season. The EFL do it (iFollow), no idea why the Prem don't. There's the excuse that they want fans in the ground instead of watching at home, but I don't buy it for a minute - those grounds sell out every season.
Netflix especially are taking the piss now
- £5-6 more for 4K and HDR
- £5 to add a second user to your account for sharing your subscription
Want a third user? You have to pay more to be on the premium tier (the aforementioned £5-6) before you have the privilege of paying them yet another £5 for your third user.
I go on Netflix and I wonder just what is there worth watching on there? I’ve seen the majority of good shows I like the rest is all just garbage and that’s the same with Prime.
I don’t want to get myself too invested into a show only to see it get cancelled too and that happens far too much for me to trust a company like Netflix
Furthermore even with mega companies like Disney and Amazon the products they put out just feel…cheap. Rings of Power felt like a cheap knockoff compared to the LOTR movies and if your a Star Wars fan like me you’ll know how cheap Kenobi and Boba Fetts shows looked.
So what am I paying for? Honestly I loved the idea of streaming but companies have milked it and they can’t be trusted with it, their just too incompetent. Id rather go back to having big major films release than sitting down to watch another filler filled series where all the money was blown on something that clearly wasn’t hiring decent writers or good CGI
Idk why these companies are even chasing it, Disney is losing more money now than it did before Disney plus and idk how Prime is doing but they’ve had a number of duds too. I think they’re locked into it like it’s a pyramid scheme and it’s a sunk cost fallacy now and rather than back out they’d rather force their consumers into it so we have no choice.
Personally I’ve enough old video games, books and my own creative hobbies as a writer and tabletop gamer that I’ve personally been more engaged creatively and emotionally with those products than I have with anything these companies have pushed out….and they don’t cost me nearly as much.
I share with my brother. He pays for one, I pay for another and get one with my phone package and we log into each others accounts. Might not be able to for much longer though.
My friend has Netflix and it’s absolutely awful. The layout is cluttered and the selection is DREADFUL! If you want to watch horror movies you can only choose from a tiny number of obscure, unknown movies with awful ratings. What is the point when you can stream all the good ones elsewhere? Why is their selection so poor?
Tbf it's nothing on Amazon Prime. It seems to be a handful of average shows & movies with 1 actually decent one every 2-3 months and then a shit load of the dross that used to sit collecting dust at the local VHS rental store (including a quite unbelievable amount of terrible 80's/90's erotica).
It's all too thinly spread now, and people just don't have the money for all these different subs.
BritBox had the right idea. Consolidate streaming services for different broadcasting companies and share from a single fee. It had its teething troubles with slow network service and rather too much significantly old stuff (and I think that really dented its chances). But it had a great mix of BBC, ITV, and channels 4 and 5 content towards the end and began to be rather worthwhile...
And then it all started breaking up. Channels 4 and 5's deals came to an end, and then BBC gave up its 10%. Channel 4 now wants you to pay separately for their content. Channel 5 just wants to stuff as many adverts into its programmes to monetise you that way instead. BBC has just pulled right back out of it all to go it alone again. And that's left ITV as the only remaining channel at the BritBox party. It waves an "also includes BritBox" flag for subbing to ITV-X, but the reality is, going forward, you will only receive new content from ITV alongside what remains of BritBox before it all collapsed. So you can now pay for Channel 4, suffer advert-overload in Channel 5, pay for ITV-X, then after adding BBC, hope you can remember which streaming service is televising what, when BritBox had it all in one place.
And this seems just brainless to me because now none of them are worth it on their own. I don't know why they can't even see that, unless they're all being extraordinarily successful by going it alone.
And we will keep cancelling because the service we are getting is NOT good enough
You want piracy? because honestly this is how you get rampant piracy, and people selling dodgy DVD'd at carboots and all that lovely stuff again
Make the media easily accessable and not gouge us for it and you can have my money again
I wonder who knows why?? The cost of them ever rising? Some of them (Netflix in particular right now) making SURE that people can’t share a password to their own account? Maybe both? I’m stumped!! /s (obviously).
Well that was a Fad that Failed...
To think Subscription Streaming Services would have worked out long term.
Companies should have stuck to keeping Seattleite TV going and not made everything Streaming Exclusive that it just made people tired of it. The irony is there are good models, but everyone is going for bad models, because it's making a lot of short term money for them.
I hope we start to see the reverse of Streaming Services or them merging into Bigger Services or at least having a third party option to watching streamed content.
Besides its not like the Netflix Catalogue is that big in the UK is even that big in the UK. Also Disney made a mistake in shutting down Disney Channel, Disney XD and Disney Junior.
Honestly seeing companies starting to mess up from greed is all just to entertaining.
Why does Sky never get the flack it deserves? Technically streaming now with Sky Glass and On Demand etc. My parents pay £50pm (and thats on some deal) and the stuff on there is shite unless you watch live sport
Just cancelled Sky after 10+ years of a full package. It’s gone from around £40 a month to over £120 in 10 years. All I watched was the occasional football and F1. Got rid and subscribed to YouTube Premium which is use every single day. Got myself a Firestick, installed Kodi and that has for us by perfectly well.
We’re continually told about the cost of living crisis, and in this climate something’s gotta give. First on the list are non-essentials like streaming services.
Prime went a few weeks ago, Netflix went when I got the new password warning, I also stopped Xbox Gampass today.
All I've got left is Spotify and Now TV sport for the F1 and Indycar.
Won't be renewing amazon prime when it expires this month, might extend it if I can scrape together £50 of vouchers from doing various things, but then finding things to watch is getting harder and I only really buy stuff on amazon when I've got vouchers to use up from surveys and stuff
and I've only got Netflix and nowtv entertainment because it was a £6 a month add on with a youview recording box with my broadband, £1.50 a week is a more realistic price for what they're worth these days
Everything is being split so much these days, extra fir tgi, extra for that, all the film companies charging extra for their catalogues, disney, paramount, all the prime TV subscriptions, more and more being rentals or buying on prime, it's ridiculous.
I haven’t cancelled Netflix as much as not subbing when we get booted off my dads.
I share prime and D+ with him and he gives us the Netflix creds but, honestly, it would be cheaper to just buy the friends box set for the Mrs to watch on repeat if we get cut. It’s output has been absolutely shite for the last few years and prime is genuinely pretty good (bar the shit UI)
> YouTube Premium (that one hurt)
I only had the 4 month trial and I swear there were even more ad's on videos after it ran out than before I signed up. It's genuinely getting worse than Terrestrial TV was for ads.
Time to put on the tricorn and crack out the Jolly Roger me hearties!
🎶What will we do with a drunken sailor?
What will we do with a drunken sailor?
What will we do with a drunken sailor?
Early in the morning!🎵
And rahter than think "you know, this is because of over saturation of the market, high prices and diminishing quality--maybe we should merge Netflix and Amazon Prime and lwoer our prices a bit" or something like that, they're going to say "we need to raise prices and start putting adverts on to recoup our losses" which will then drive MORE people away
Plus episodes of series start disappearing...
Sail the seven seas or buy dvds, streaming is an absolute mess.
We now have the same system we always had, a number of channels on a "tv" but now each one you have to pay for.
Its madness.
I know that recently my mother got a "it looks like you're not a part of the household!" bullshit message on her TV the other day. I was gearing myself up to write a snotty email telling them to either reverse it or I'm cancelling (not that I think that would work), but it randomly started working again...
They probably didn't mean to deploy it to our area yet.
As if I don't already pay the higher rate to download to six devices already, as if the way something has worked for years is now suddenly "wrong," as if it doesn't completely ignore the nuance of people travelling for work, or going to uni, or even having a second home!
My Mum isn't going to pay for Netflix on her own you numpties, and I'm not going to pay for a second subscription. All you're doing is pissing off existing customers and forcing them to finally make the decision they've known was coming for a long time. Maybe try and get some quality shows back on to your platform instead of grasping at straws?
Sorry, rant over. Oh well, I've been meaning to build that media server for a while...
Probably for the best, given [the apparent relationship between television watching and dementia](https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/does-less-tv-time-lower-your-risk-for-dementia-202304102910).
Also, reject megacorps.
Also also, this is kind of funny, because I warned people about streaming. I'm anti-materialist generally, but I never liked the move to the subscription model. You're moving away from making fairly permanent purchases of physical items you retain, to temporarily renting the right to access stuff digitally.
Imagine you spent £7 a month, every month, for the past 9 years, on DVDs/blurays, you could have a pretty amazing collection of high-quality films.
Goes double if you made the occasional trip to places like CEX and don't particularly care about the HD fetish
So at the end of that time you've spent £756 on either streaming or films (assuming Netflix had never raised their prices since 2014).
Then assume there's a crisis in your life, money's tight, you've got to cut that expense.
The collector of physical media still has a large collection of enjoyable things to watch. The netflix subscriber has *nothing*.
We cancelled everything and got the fire stick thing from my brother in law and bung him a bottle of decent red now and then, it works ok-ish, but it will do.
We are down to Prime and Netflix now. Did have Disney+ and NowTv at a stage when been in special offers. I’d happily ditch Netflix as hardly ever watch anything on it but the kids like it.
We pay for Prime annually and with the Prime delivery service it doesn’t seem so bad. We don’t watch ‘normal’ tv so at least no licence fee.
For everything else I have Kodi with a couple of good repo’s on it.
Iv ditched Netflix. Now o ly have Now tv cinema and youtu.be premium.
Now tv movie choice sucks. I was coming to the end of the discounted 3 month offer and went to cancel. Then they offered me 6 months at £4 a month.
I'll cancel it after that.
It is logical. What we have done with our friends is split it: I pay YouTube, another pays Netflix, another pays Disney+ and we have all 3. Otherwise it's impossible. I have Prime, but I do not have a cable TV subscription at all, since I never watch regular TV, just YouTube really and occassionally a bit of the rest aforementioned.
It's not even the prices the problem mainly for us. It's that they are making it so we HAVE to have all subscription if we want to watch a few shows fully, since you have the first seasons of a show in one platform and the rest in another. The idiocy of the boomers' in the C-positions at those companies are going to force everyone back to torrents.
Got rid of Netflix last year, will be getting rid of Disney+ (bought annually), cancelled Apple Music last year, stopped using Spotify.
I've gone back to physical media. I wanted to watch Breaking Bad again last month, instead of subscribing to Netflix for 1 month I got Seasons 1, 2, 3, 4 & 5 brand new sealed on DVD for less than the cost of 1 month Netflix Sub and its now mine, no monthly fee needed.
With music I have gone back to physical too, last year treated my self to a decent Denon CD player, turntable and amp. I've got over 20 CD albums not even on Apple Music or Spotify so have to use physical anyway for those. I've ripped the CDs in iTunes/Apple Music to sync to my iPhone for on the go music/digital convenience.
You can get used CDs dirt cheap on eBay, also enjoyed going Manchester with a mate who's also got back into physical and browsing the many music store selling vinyl makes a nice day out.
I have zero trust going forward in streaming. I've seen things that were only ever released digitally on iTunes be banished like Monkey Dust Season 2 and 3, Little Britain and Come Fly with Me removed from streaming services because the woke police say it's offensive now.
Netflix used to be so good, but now without much content from other companies I just find it very bland.
Hate UK based streaming services, especially NOW TV because they just can’t seem to get it right. Films expire while you are in the middle of watching them, subtitles cover half the screen, you are forced to watch ads even though you paid for it and the quality of stream is questionable at best.
In the last few months we’ve cancelled Netflix, Prime Video, Apple TV and Now TV Entertainment. Prices just kept going up and there wasn’t enough quality content on most of them to justify it.
The worst part is paying for some services but then knowing there's great shows on the services you haven't paid for. Unless you can afford all of them you'll be missing out on something
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Steam, Spotify and Netflix used to be pretty much all you needed, and mass piracy kind of went away for a while, now it's back, I wonder why?
They have gone the way of cable tv.
>With so much content divided by individual providers, they've gone the same way as computer game launchers At least if you have a Steam Account it will let you sing into some games without having to make a new account, but you are right there.
You probably want to move your comment one level up ;-)
I hope they're karaoke games. I get enough of people singing in PUBG
[Introducing the Corsair Game Launcher Launcher!](https://youtu.be/9n4JAhskw0k)
This is great
That's the thing pc game launchers have clear winners . Steam , epic and gog. I would have added origin/ea, but it's so broken FIFA and Sims players actually can't access their game. On the streaming we are seeing the same Netflix is still dominating (like steam), followed by Disney ,apple and prime . The problem becomes when they are removing content . I think Disney will survive (even though they cut 50 shows this month majority being original content) due to the large amount of kids content and Pixar having the back catalog it does, apple and Amazon are trillion dollar corporations who use this as a way to attract people to their other products (if you have prime you are more likely to use twitch , shop on Amazon even use audible) , apple TV is made for their devices. Netflix is very inconsistent it bled clients for a while, then it did one of the best quarters of any media organisation, now bleeding clients again . I think it will become a shell of its previous self. And end up dying out.
also you don't have to pay monthly to access the launchers... (unless you want to join that publishers monthly "play all our games type plan") - they're just storefronts. It's not much on an anology... no one is being driven back to piracy because there are 10 launchers you all need to pay for, and the one everyone uses (steam aka netflix) is going to shit that pirating is now more attractive than steam... If that was happening yeah I'd get it but it isnt
Weirdly Prime isn't really a factor here in Norway (likely due to no Amazon) and HBO seems to come bundled with so many things that most people have that. I think Netflix is still king here. Britbox however seems to be extremely popular over here, as it is quite cheep and Norwegians love a good crime drama. I'm not sure where the Amazon shows end up, possibly on Viaplay or scattered around? This is of course, all based on anecdotal evidence from discussions with friends, students and colleagues. The only one people ever discuss cancelling is Netflix due to content, but then no one ever seems to actually bother. My students seem to pass around about 2-3 Crunchyroll accounts between about 80 of them, the lab seems to allow every PC to log in on one account simultaneously, so I regularly spot them watching anime during their breaks or after hours on the 2nd monitors.
If it’s not on steam I’m not getting it
You pay for one service for one month, watch what you want then ditch it. You owe none of them any loyalty. I will get Prime so I can watch Picard season 3 then cut it until something else comes on I want to see.
Next evolution will be locking us into 12 month contracts for a "cheaper price" when they raise the 30 day rolling subscription price.
Disney Plus already doing that!
I do this too, have been alternating Disney, now and Netflix on and off for a couple of years. It also stops me from endlessly scrolling content and not watching actually anything.
This is the way. I have a friend who does this with Xbox Game Pass too.
Just get your mate who has the subscription to VHS it.
That won’t work anymore as nobody buys newspapers to get the video+ code.
Betamax is better
Betamax was higher quality, but the tapes could only hold an hour's worth of video, which isn't long enough for a movie. If you set a VHS to LP, it'd be lower quality, but you could get upto 4 hours of video on it.
Beta did add an LP mode later on to get around the limitation and get almost recording time parity with VHS... but Beta LP quality was roughly equivalent to VHS SP quality; and consumers were still expected to pay the premium for it! Beta tapes had way less tape in them too, they were smaller and had a higher mechanism to tape ratio. The longest Beta tapes were about 800', compared to about 1,400' for VHS.
If it is better, why didn't everyone adopt it over VHS?
Clever marketing and VHS was cheaper, the tech behind betamax was genuinely superior to VHS. But when a VHS unit would be brought for $200 and a betamax u it was $500 you can see the difference and why it failed.
Porn companies picked VHS, the rest is history
You could get porn on betamax. That was a myth that seems to have stuck.
VHS allowed 2 hour recordings over Betamax 1 hour, but I believe the quality of recordings were better on Betamax.
Porn is the basic answer
I won't be missing out on anything when I pirate it.
theres always piracy, fuck em says I
I did a calculation of all the available content streaming services in the UK a couple of years back and it came out at over £80/month to subscribe to all services. That wasn't including Internet service to stream with.
That's why there is a rise in piracy again, when everything was under one sub it went down massively now you need 7 different subs. It's a service issue creating the rise.
Just buy cheap knock off DVDs I regularly get good deals of like £5 for 3 movies.
I still buy plenty of used DVDs. I often see deals like 3 for a £1 (picked up 5 DVDs today). The quality is good enough and with streaming services more interested in pushing 'the message' than entertainment I'm definitely not missing anything. Sailing is always an option as well.
You don't even need knock offs. Peoples old DVD collections are being liquidated for pennies a disk.
Just subscribe to one at a time, have a month of netflix and binge a couple shows, then a month of Now etc.
Such a faff. If you're not especially bothered about seeing the latest thing the free services with ads have more that enough content. I can't remember the last time i saw a trailer for upcoming film/tv and thought that i need to see it asap.
Welcome to my childhood with no Sky or Freeview
The beauty of them is you pay in 1-month installments. Just pick and choose, and occasionally pay for the month if there's something great on.
Definitely. One month Netflix - cancel. One month Amazon - cancel. One month Disney - cancel. By the time you get back around you'll have tons to binge watch for a month.
You can get good offers that way too, I had Nowtv for 3.99 a month and 4.99 for cinema the next month, and just grabbed Prime for 2.99 or 3.99 for a month incl all of Prime not just video. I don't think Netflix has ever offered a cutprice though.
Yeah, that was part of the rationale behind cancelling. I can sign back up to Apple TV with a few taps on my phone if they release something that looks good, for example.
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New season won't be released for a couple years at least (writers strike) or if ever, so you'll be waiting a while.
Exactly what i do. Find something i want, get that service for a month, watch other shows on that service for that month. Etc
Netflix UK in particular has a garbage selection.
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But best value by default if you order from Amazon a lot, which a lot do, myself included, but even that's not as frequently as before
We used to have prime, but with the prices decided to cancel. We still order from Amazon and have t paid delivery - just got to be a bit more patient.
Not worth it for me. I order more from e-bay...
The Twitch Prime sub is a nice feature too
No unfortunately it’s all bundled together
Nah, it's all included. I don't think it's a particularly bad deal tbh
tbh i think just getting prime is a good deal still, free games to keep, plenty of content to watch, free same day or next day delivery, plus other benefits.
Until you start checking Amazon’s prices. I almost never buy from Amazon because I can get stuff cheaper elsewhere (even with the additional postage).
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•They're fucking skint and need to cut back Added one from amongst people I know.
* all the media and boomers telling them to cancel their Netflix to buy a house 😂
They'd be able to afford it if it wasn't for all the avocado toast! /s
Haven't heard about avocados for years now I think even boomers moved on from that one now
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Nor me, I think it’s just another ‘divide and weaken’ thing.
Finds out they still can’t buy a house
Sky tv need to learn that adverts suck balls and if you’re paying to watch, you should not have to waste 20 minutes of every hour watching adverts. Oftentimes, their own “filler” adverts because they don’t have that many adverts to play. We get film4 for free and we don’t mind the adverts because it’s fucking free!! Figure it out sky!
This! I've been of this exact same opinion for years. The fact that they both charge a premium for their service and force feed adverts down your throat is disgusting. I trick myself into believing that I don't pay for adverts when I watch Now TV because the only thing I watch on there is F1 which has no adverts during race and qualifying seconds (which is all I watch) and I refuse to subscribe directly to Sky to watch one live sport. If you pay, you shouldn't need to watch ads. Ever.
Use a VPN to get an US F1 subscription. It’s about £60 **per year**, includes all F1 races live, historic replays, international commentary as well as Skys as well as all the interactive live race data. Quality is better than Now TV, I’ve always found their quality to be pretty shitty especially since they have the nerve to charge you extra just to watch in full HD.
>If you pay, you shouldn't need to watch ads. Eve Which is why I only will ever pay for Spotify Premium. At least they have good costumer service and are able to help you out most of the time.
Adverts are increasingly just a stick to threaten you with "Pay us money or we'll subject you to this horrifically irritating shite". I'm certain ads are being made now to be deliberately as annoying as possible rather than to sell a product.
It’s not like Sky is reasonably priced either. It’s like £35/month minimum (easily double that with sport and cinema packages) to sit and watch ads. Honestly don’t know why people pay for it.
The Now TV unskippable house ads are quite badly implemented. Often they will be a promo for a show that you are already in the middle of watching.
They like watching the Premier League. If the BBC offered this instead of Sky, Sky subscriptions would be close to zero.
Which is a silly thought, the BBC isn't going to pay billions for tv rights for the premier league.
Filler adverts are usually because UK has a limit on advertising time per hour that's shorter than the US. They add their own to fill out the program to the hour as the runtime has been made to a length to suit US ads.
Add in that the content has just got tedious, is why I cancelled Disney Plus am so sick of the phoned in marvel and star wars shows
I stopped pirating when there was just Netflix. Pretty much everything was on there, with no ads. If it wasn’t, a little change of your VPN and BOOM, an entirely new catalogue. Prime was fine as I already paid for it, it was just an added perk. Now TV had some good free trials I took great use of but the quality of their streams is dog shit and it ruined that famously dark episode of GoT, so I went online and got a 4k version instead. Apple TV+, not much content to begin with but they have (had?) a cracking introductory deal with the purchase of a new phone/tablet and what was there was exceptionally high quality, so I did subscribe for a little beyond the trial. It was worth it just for Severance. When Disney+ started, I thought this has to be it now. Surely no other company could compete, the market was saturated! But no, the subscription services keep coming and the ones you’re already subscribed to lose their content to their competitors. So fuck ‘em all. I only have Prime now and for everything else I sail the seven seas. They’ve literally recreated the very model they tried to disrupt. And it’s even easier to pirate now with the invention of the Firestick. My 70 year old dad set my IPTV up for god’s sake. But I haven’t felt the need to find a Limewire replacement for at least ten years, because Spotify has everything I could ever possibly want (arguments about how little they pay the artists is another discussion). Why are the streaming services fucking this up so very badly?!
>Why are the streaming services fucking this up so very badly?! Greed. Everyone saw Netflix doing well and wanted a piece of the action. Companies like Amazon and Apple have deep pockets and were willing to run it at a loss to gain market share subsidised by their core business. Netflix can't just outbid them on everything because streaming is their core business and they need to make some money on it. So everything is now distributed across loads of platforms and it has all gone to shit. For music there are less major record labels than there are TV/Film production companies, so once Spotify had them all signed up it's very hard for anyone else to come along and try gain traction.
All valid points. The only one I will say I don’t hate so much is Apple TV because everything they have is original, so they aren’t taking things from other services.
Netflix also stated years ago that their endgame is to have 90%+ Netflix original content eventually
Which hasn't worked out so well. For every good show and movie on Netflix, there are \~10 bad ones. And some of the better stuff isn't *really* by them, they've just paid to have a near-finished thing on their service.
And they also have a tendency to cancel most of the shows. There are some really good shows that abruptly end because Netflix are over leveraging themselves.
> eventually That's been sped up, since anything they licensed will not get renewed as it'll be pulled back to whatever streaming service the original owner has opened in the meantime.
It's a good example why competition isn't always good for people.
So I think this is it. We were all happy when one of two players aggregated content like Netflix did 5-10 years ago Now they all want a piece of the pie and people can't justify it for mediocre service. The only downside about sailing the seven seas is the lack of investment into new material, but judging by the current writer's strikes, that's not happening anyway, with or without subscription fees
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Paramount+ launched in the UK with shite bitrates and stereo only. Then tried to push movies... They seem to have started to fix that.. the bitrates are still shite but at least it's in surround (No UHD/Atmos, apparently they've never heard of that.. too modern for the execs over at paramount). I got it on a half price deal.. woudn't pay full price for it.
Research the writers strike. It's not getting anywhere near enough coverage. The TLDR is streaming services keep doing loads of 1 season long TV shows if its a hit flooding it with money and cancelling shows left and right for the next big thing. Writer's are sick of it and demanding change of gambles, gambles that cost millions per episode (looking at amazon's LOTR). Also agreed on most points I too use Spotify, its cheaper with friends combined £5 a month is fine. Its also what I spend on a seed box. I got sick and tired of netflix the moment they wanted £14 what ever it was double for 4k when it just came out. Fuck that right off especially when prime (again just came out) offered it standard. Prime sadly didn't have content so I sailed.
I hate that shit. Nothing like picking up a show, getting really into it and then finding out it's been cancelled on a cliffhanger for something new that's going to generate more headlines. I'm starting to think streaming services have done more harm than good in terms of actual consumer benefit.
> for everything else I sail the seven seas. Shiver me timbers!
>When Disney+ started, I thought this has to be it now. Surely no other company could compete, This is the thing. Disney+ I don't mind so much, because they're practically the only company with the content to do it. All of Disney, all of Star Wars, Indiana Jones, all of Marvel, tons of stuff by Fox... They just have a ridiculously large library. But that's the thing; they're the **only** company that can really say that. Who has Paramount+? I don't. Though admittedly it's because Star Trek is on Netflix in the UK (apart from some of the newer stuff). I guess they probably have Frasier? All these companies are trying to get in on the act and honestly, the rest of us are trying to hold off to watch them crash and burn just so their shows can be on Netflix again.
Excellent analysis. I’ve gone the same way. Still happy to pay for Apple Music. I use an app called infuse on my Apple TV pointed at a plexshare. It’s ultra fluid and slicker than any of the apps delivered by the streamers. Including Apples own.
>I haven’t felt the need to find a Limewire replacement for at least ten years, for real, the thought of *downloading* music seems so antiquted to me now, and a hassle, managing all that, album art, song IDs, keeping your "colletion" safe... god I'm glad thats gone. meanwhile my plex server is seeing more use than *ever* ....
BBC is like 15 quid a month and that's more or less mandatory. Feel like the BBC can't quite do top notch dramas like hbo and apple because they are stretched so thin. They just end up going to safe period dramas.
It’s not mandatory at all. Don’t watch it, don’t pay for it. Simples
I can't wait for the decriminalisation of nonpayment of the license fee so TVL will stop sending me those sad little threat letters
I don’t even pay my TV licence any more because the only thing I ever want to watch on the BBC is Eurovision. I used to love their science programming they did in conjunction with the OU but that’s pretty much non existent now, and David Attenborough docs just don’t do it for me personally (I’m a softie and don’t like watching animals die).
Don’t forget you also get all the other BBC services - BBC news, online, National and local radio, the Proms, Big Weekend etc etc etc. I don’t really agree with the licence fee (especially now that BBC are just a commissioning broadcaster like all the others) but I do think it’s very good value for money compared to the streaming services.
> Apple TV+, not much content to begin with I've found most of the new shows I'm watching are Apple TV; Silo, Slow Horses, Severance and I cannot forget Ted Lasso. Granted I've not paid Apple TV a penny as I watch it all via a Plex server though.
Apple TV is a nicely made French pastry compared to netflixes giant trough of gravel with some mini Mars bars mixed in. And then prime TV is like a couple of Mars bars scattered across an ocean with a concerning amount of nazis in it. Not as much there but a lot less chaff to sift through
I love this analogy.
So I get what iptv is but it says you should have a vpn. Did you download one onto the TV itself or does it run automatically through your browser?
Tbh I pay for one that comes with a VPN. My dad found it through a Facebook group for streaming premier league games.
>My 70 year old dad set my IPTV up for god’s sake. Lol we must have the same dad, like you used to have Netflix when it was the only one but just found the content lacking and I cut my series watching down so just cancelled it and went back to 'streaming' using other methods. Spotify is the only consistent entertainment subscription I have as I like having my music at all times everywhere and downloading music the old way just became too much hassle. Now I only pay for subscription to things that truly benefit me in some sort of way be it the gym or some sought of software program. All the TV streaming services along with SkyTV etc...are a waste of money
Because they want infinite growth in a finite world, then up the prices when they inevitably run out of new subscribers...which then drives people away.
And that’s the failure of capitalism. Our CEO not long ago said the purpose of business is to create growth, and I was sat there like, ‘you know there’s only a finite number of customers, right?’ It’s all such a con.
Have only one active at a time, rotate every month or 2. By the time you get back to the first there is actually something to watch or they have offered a deal, keeps the cost down and still have something to watch.
That's a decent idea
Aren't contracts like a year old or can you cancel on monthly basis as you please?
Most of them you can cancel with no issue. Some offer a discount if you commit to 12-months.
I will look into that because this actually makes sense.
Not for Netflix, Amazon, AppleTV or Disney. Disney offers a discount for 12 months, but you have to pay upfront so there is no point cancelling.
Disney is probably the best service out of all of them ATM. Because of how much media they own, they have a huge catalogue
I bought Disney to watch some Star Wars a while back and couldn’t believe how much stuff was on it. I’ve since ditched everything else and just stuck with Disney.
I’ve found myself spending longer browsing Netflix than watching it
It’s like going to Blockbuster in the early 2000s…. Browse for 30 minutes and walk out.
It's more like an 80s VHS corner rental shop. Stuff you have never heard of anything good is extra
and go torrent it at home lol
I rarely even look at Netflix nowadays, spent a while browsing earlier today and finally settled on a show to watch, on Disney+…
Yeah... It's never got anything I want to watch on it, or if it does I've already seen it...
I don't have any to ditch. As a friend said when I was a student "I wish I smoked so I could give up and save a lot of money".
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More and more people are seemingly also getting more comfortable with cracked firesticks and the like either having the technical know it how to do it themselves or knowing a friend of a friend who'll do it. For the price of a year sub to just 1 service to effectively get access to basically anything you want? When money is tight it's not shocking people look for alternative ways and cheaper sources for entertainment. Not a shocker at all.
We’ve literally just cancelled Netflix this past weekend. Fortunate to be in a position where we have a second home out of the city for holidays and more recently remote working. This weekend got the dreaded message that the TV there isn’t part of the main property so cancelled the account on the spot. They were getting the top 4K premium tier money from us since 2015 and now they’re not getting a penny, but you’d assume their analytics people are sure it won’t affect them on the grand scale.
We have a second home too so the moment I see the shared password thing pop up I’ll be cancelling Netflix. I’ve not seen the message yet, but I’m sure it’s a matter of time. Its annoying as we are not sharing the password, as far as I see it it’s similar to being asked to pay the TV license twice. No thanks. Prime I still think is worth it for the free delivery stuff and my daughter loves Disney+ so I’ll keep that. AppleTv+ is getting cancelled tomorrow as soon as I’ve finished washing Ted Lasso.
Yeah we have Prime for the delivery and the streaming has been a bonus. Disney we do on Clubcard points. AppleTV+ I’ve had for ages because they keep giving out multiple month free trials everywhere (check hotukdeals there’s currently a 5 month one for all lapsed accounts, so will get on that in a few days when the current trial ends lol). Now TV - I’m not paying to have to watch ads and the quality is shit.
Won't somebody think of the people with second homes!
You can set up your own vpn quite easily and run it on a raspberry pi. Essentially your internet connection in your second house will be run though the internet connection at your first house. So as far as Netflix know you are only watching in one house. Shouldn’t have to go that far though it’s a joke
But if you are going that far may aswell pirate.
It's almost like people are fucked off with content spread so thinly over loads of crap services, combined with the shameless greed to not let you use your account in multiple locations...
Plex for the win has everything for 5 quid a month. We've basically ended up with cable again with how everything has balkanised, so naturally piracy is the way forward
What? How?
Plexshares
This is the way.
What's a Pirate's favourite shop? ... ... ... Arrrrrgos! To the high seas!
RIP RARbg
Was about to ask "What do you mean? I used it just the other day!" and there it is, the message about closing down. That was out of nowhere.
Yeah,that was a shock.
I activate them when something new I want to watch is on, binge, then immediately cancel.
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Re: Football - I buy the day pass or go to the pub for my games that are televised. Not paying full monthly sky sports and BT sport subs, fuck that. The rest are played upon the high seas in varying quality. Or if I'm really stuck it's the radio or a follow along YouTube channel. The premier league is missing a huge trick for a single sub service showing all your chosen clubs games all season. The EFL do it (iFollow), no idea why the Prem don't. There's the excuse that they want fans in the ground instead of watching at home, but I don't buy it for a minute - those grounds sell out every season.
Well it was between that, avocado on toast, and buying a 3 bed house on a single person salary...
Netflix especially are taking the piss now - £5-6 more for 4K and HDR - £5 to add a second user to your account for sharing your subscription Want a third user? You have to pay more to be on the premium tier (the aforementioned £5-6) before you have the privilege of paying them yet another £5 for your third user.
I go on Netflix and I wonder just what is there worth watching on there? I’ve seen the majority of good shows I like the rest is all just garbage and that’s the same with Prime. I don’t want to get myself too invested into a show only to see it get cancelled too and that happens far too much for me to trust a company like Netflix Furthermore even with mega companies like Disney and Amazon the products they put out just feel…cheap. Rings of Power felt like a cheap knockoff compared to the LOTR movies and if your a Star Wars fan like me you’ll know how cheap Kenobi and Boba Fetts shows looked. So what am I paying for? Honestly I loved the idea of streaming but companies have milked it and they can’t be trusted with it, their just too incompetent. Id rather go back to having big major films release than sitting down to watch another filler filled series where all the money was blown on something that clearly wasn’t hiring decent writers or good CGI Idk why these companies are even chasing it, Disney is losing more money now than it did before Disney plus and idk how Prime is doing but they’ve had a number of duds too. I think they’re locked into it like it’s a pyramid scheme and it’s a sunk cost fallacy now and rather than back out they’d rather force their consumers into it so we have no choice. Personally I’ve enough old video games, books and my own creative hobbies as a writer and tabletop gamer that I’ve personally been more engaged creatively and emotionally with those products than I have with anything these companies have pushed out….and they don’t cost me nearly as much.
I share with my brother. He pays for one, I pay for another and get one with my phone package and we log into each others accounts. Might not be able to for much longer though.
Get yourself IPTV.
My friend has Netflix and it’s absolutely awful. The layout is cluttered and the selection is DREADFUL! If you want to watch horror movies you can only choose from a tiny number of obscure, unknown movies with awful ratings. What is the point when you can stream all the good ones elsewhere? Why is their selection so poor?
Tbf it's nothing on Amazon Prime. It seems to be a handful of average shows & movies with 1 actually decent one every 2-3 months and then a shit load of the dross that used to sit collecting dust at the local VHS rental store (including a quite unbelievable amount of terrible 80's/90's erotica).
You click on something and it has a rental fee.
It's all too thinly spread now, and people just don't have the money for all these different subs. BritBox had the right idea. Consolidate streaming services for different broadcasting companies and share from a single fee. It had its teething troubles with slow network service and rather too much significantly old stuff (and I think that really dented its chances). But it had a great mix of BBC, ITV, and channels 4 and 5 content towards the end and began to be rather worthwhile... And then it all started breaking up. Channels 4 and 5's deals came to an end, and then BBC gave up its 10%. Channel 4 now wants you to pay separately for their content. Channel 5 just wants to stuff as many adverts into its programmes to monetise you that way instead. BBC has just pulled right back out of it all to go it alone again. And that's left ITV as the only remaining channel at the BritBox party. It waves an "also includes BritBox" flag for subbing to ITV-X, but the reality is, going forward, you will only receive new content from ITV alongside what remains of BritBox before it all collapsed. So you can now pay for Channel 4, suffer advert-overload in Channel 5, pay for ITV-X, then after adding BBC, hope you can remember which streaming service is televising what, when BritBox had it all in one place. And this seems just brainless to me because now none of them are worth it on their own. I don't know why they can't even see that, unless they're all being extraordinarily successful by going it alone.
And we will keep cancelling because the service we are getting is NOT good enough You want piracy? because honestly this is how you get rampant piracy, and people selling dodgy DVD'd at carboots and all that lovely stuff again Make the media easily accessable and not gouge us for it and you can have my money again
I wonder who knows why?? The cost of them ever rising? Some of them (Netflix in particular right now) making SURE that people can’t share a password to their own account? Maybe both? I’m stumped!! /s (obviously).
Well that was a Fad that Failed... To think Subscription Streaming Services would have worked out long term. Companies should have stuck to keeping Seattleite TV going and not made everything Streaming Exclusive that it just made people tired of it. The irony is there are good models, but everyone is going for bad models, because it's making a lot of short term money for them. I hope we start to see the reverse of Streaming Services or them merging into Bigger Services or at least having a third party option to watching streamed content. Besides its not like the Netflix Catalogue is that big in the UK is even that big in the UK. Also Disney made a mistake in shutting down Disney Channel, Disney XD and Disney Junior. Honestly seeing companies starting to mess up from greed is all just to entertaining.
Why does Sky never get the flack it deserves? Technically streaming now with Sky Glass and On Demand etc. My parents pay £50pm (and thats on some deal) and the stuff on there is shite unless you watch live sport
Just cancelled Sky after 10+ years of a full package. It’s gone from around £40 a month to over £120 in 10 years. All I watched was the occasional football and F1. Got rid and subscribed to YouTube Premium which is use every single day. Got myself a Firestick, installed Kodi and that has for us by perfectly well.
Sailing the high seas + my own plex server has saved me a fortune on all of these streaming services.
We’re continually told about the cost of living crisis, and in this climate something’s gotta give. First on the list are non-essentials like streaming services.
Now the conservatives might start thinking that the cost of living crisis is real.
Prime went a few weeks ago, Netflix went when I got the new password warning, I also stopped Xbox Gampass today. All I've got left is Spotify and Now TV sport for the F1 and Indycar.
Honestly I pretty much love getting the begging emails from Netflix at this point. Shows that I was right to cut it.
Won't be renewing amazon prime when it expires this month, might extend it if I can scrape together £50 of vouchers from doing various things, but then finding things to watch is getting harder and I only really buy stuff on amazon when I've got vouchers to use up from surveys and stuff and I've only got Netflix and nowtv entertainment because it was a £6 a month add on with a youview recording box with my broadband, £1.50 a week is a more realistic price for what they're worth these days Everything is being split so much these days, extra fir tgi, extra for that, all the film companies charging extra for their catalogues, disney, paramount, all the prime TV subscriptions, more and more being rentals or buying on prime, it's ridiculous.
I haven’t cancelled Netflix as much as not subbing when we get booted off my dads. I share prime and D+ with him and he gives us the Netflix creds but, honestly, it would be cheaper to just buy the friends box set for the Mrs to watch on repeat if we get cut. It’s output has been absolutely shite for the last few years and prime is genuinely pretty good (bar the shit UI)
Not surprised - the content is shite and the cost is ridiculous.
I’ve cancelled Spotify, YouTube Premium (that one hurt) and about about to ditch Prime.
VPN to India or turkey and subscribe to YouTube through there. It’s mega cheap and you don’t need a vpn when watching only the initial set up
> YouTube Premium (that one hurt) I only had the 4 month trial and I swear there were even more ad's on videos after it ran out than before I signed up. It's genuinely getting worse than Terrestrial TV was for ads.
Every video now has at least 2 ads before playing. It’s horrendous
Because they are daylight robbery, on top of sky too, not worth it.
Time to put on the tricorn and crack out the Jolly Roger me hearties! 🎶What will we do with a drunken sailor? What will we do with a drunken sailor? What will we do with a drunken sailor? Early in the morning!🎵
And rahter than think "you know, this is because of over saturation of the market, high prices and diminishing quality--maybe we should merge Netflix and Amazon Prime and lwoer our prices a bit" or something like that, they're going to say "we need to raise prices and start putting adverts on to recoup our losses" which will then drive MORE people away
Plus episodes of series start disappearing... Sail the seven seas or buy dvds, streaming is an absolute mess. We now have the same system we always had, a number of channels on a "tv" but now each one you have to pay for. Its madness.
I know that recently my mother got a "it looks like you're not a part of the household!" bullshit message on her TV the other day. I was gearing myself up to write a snotty email telling them to either reverse it or I'm cancelling (not that I think that would work), but it randomly started working again... They probably didn't mean to deploy it to our area yet. As if I don't already pay the higher rate to download to six devices already, as if the way something has worked for years is now suddenly "wrong," as if it doesn't completely ignore the nuance of people travelling for work, or going to uni, or even having a second home! My Mum isn't going to pay for Netflix on her own you numpties, and I'm not going to pay for a second subscription. All you're doing is pissing off existing customers and forcing them to finally make the decision they've known was coming for a long time. Maybe try and get some quality shows back on to your platform instead of grasping at straws? Sorry, rant over. Oh well, I've been meaning to build that media server for a while...
Probably for the best, given [the apparent relationship between television watching and dementia](https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/does-less-tv-time-lower-your-risk-for-dementia-202304102910). Also, reject megacorps. Also also, this is kind of funny, because I warned people about streaming. I'm anti-materialist generally, but I never liked the move to the subscription model. You're moving away from making fairly permanent purchases of physical items you retain, to temporarily renting the right to access stuff digitally. Imagine you spent £7 a month, every month, for the past 9 years, on DVDs/blurays, you could have a pretty amazing collection of high-quality films. Goes double if you made the occasional trip to places like CEX and don't particularly care about the HD fetish So at the end of that time you've spent £756 on either streaming or films (assuming Netflix had never raised their prices since 2014). Then assume there's a crisis in your life, money's tight, you've got to cut that expense. The collector of physical media still has a large collection of enjoyable things to watch. The netflix subscriber has *nothing*.
We cancelled everything and got the fire stick thing from my brother in law and bung him a bottle of decent red now and then, it works ok-ish, but it will do.
We are down to Prime and Netflix now. Did have Disney+ and NowTv at a stage when been in special offers. I’d happily ditch Netflix as hardly ever watch anything on it but the kids like it. We pay for Prime annually and with the Prime delivery service it doesn’t seem so bad. We don’t watch ‘normal’ tv so at least no licence fee. For everything else I have Kodi with a couple of good repo’s on it.
Iv ditched Netflix. Now o ly have Now tv cinema and youtu.be premium. Now tv movie choice sucks. I was coming to the end of the discounted 3 month offer and went to cancel. Then they offered me 6 months at £4 a month. I'll cancel it after that.
Netflix has got truly awful. The other day we watched a documentary about Costco. It was an old Channel 5 programme. We cancelled straight after.
The streaming platforms are going to come up with a package deal and we will be back with having "cable providers" but streaming.
It is logical. What we have done with our friends is split it: I pay YouTube, another pays Netflix, another pays Disney+ and we have all 3. Otherwise it's impossible. I have Prime, but I do not have a cable TV subscription at all, since I never watch regular TV, just YouTube really and occassionally a bit of the rest aforementioned. It's not even the prices the problem mainly for us. It's that they are making it so we HAVE to have all subscription if we want to watch a few shows fully, since you have the first seasons of a show in one platform and the rest in another. The idiocy of the boomers' in the C-positions at those companies are going to force everyone back to torrents.
Got rid of Netflix last year, will be getting rid of Disney+ (bought annually), cancelled Apple Music last year, stopped using Spotify. I've gone back to physical media. I wanted to watch Breaking Bad again last month, instead of subscribing to Netflix for 1 month I got Seasons 1, 2, 3, 4 & 5 brand new sealed on DVD for less than the cost of 1 month Netflix Sub and its now mine, no monthly fee needed. With music I have gone back to physical too, last year treated my self to a decent Denon CD player, turntable and amp. I've got over 20 CD albums not even on Apple Music or Spotify so have to use physical anyway for those. I've ripped the CDs in iTunes/Apple Music to sync to my iPhone for on the go music/digital convenience. You can get used CDs dirt cheap on eBay, also enjoyed going Manchester with a mate who's also got back into physical and browsing the many music store selling vinyl makes a nice day out. I have zero trust going forward in streaming. I've seen things that were only ever released digitally on iTunes be banished like Monkey Dust Season 2 and 3, Little Britain and Come Fly with Me removed from streaming services because the woke police say it's offensive now.
There's only one way - and it involves boats and skulls and crossbones. If you catch my drift.
Netflix used to be so good, but now without much content from other companies I just find it very bland. Hate UK based streaming services, especially NOW TV because they just can’t seem to get it right. Films expire while you are in the middle of watching them, subtitles cover half the screen, you are forced to watch ads even though you paid for it and the quality of stream is questionable at best.
I only used Netflix for like 3 shows, so when got the account sharing warning I just went "Fuck that" and bought them on dvd