Streaming services have become the worst of all worlds.

As an EU citizen, even tho I pay for Netflix and Prime, I cannot access most of the content there as even tho it exists on the service because it's not available in my country.

Amazon prime has 2 good shows and just a bunch of D-tier movies or some 35+ year old ones. It's mostly worthless.

Netflix region locks a whole lot of content or removes it after some time. I can't watch some great movies and TV shows because "oh we don't have rights for this region".

Meanwhile, piracy provides a user experience that not just lets me access all of their content - one I'm already paying for - anywhere, but also lets me access movies and shows that would otherwise not be found anywhere else, including regional movies and short movies.

Of course with piracy you can have all the content available everywhere forever.

How do you expect a law-abiding company to match that with content they don't own? Unless we abolish copyright.

Zero options to get the content you want at a fair price. Plus, OpenAI and Anthropic have paved the way for everyone: any content you can find online is fair game! I don't download any content. But, hey, if my agent does? I mean OpenAI and Anthropic can't control their agents. How could I possibly be expected to?

I wouldn't be surprised if they end up basically exactly like cable, where the only people who hang around end up being the older generations in the decade to come.

Well that sort of happened for the music industry. I think people thought the video industry would follow a similar path where a few providers offer very large catalogs and then pay the media owners per play.

Instead these media owners got greedy and every media producing company decided it also needed to be a streaming company. But further, they licensed the media out exclusively to single streaming companies.

I'm also certain nobody expected that bought digital media would simply evaporate due to licensing.

Don't get me wrong, if the music industry could get away with the same move they would. But there's simply a lot more music and the ecosystem is too well established.

In slovenia, one of the media houses demanded from telcos (iptv providers) to disable skipping ads when timehshifting shows (for the first 3 days), so even if you're watching a show that was on yesterday, you can skip forwards/backwards all over the show, but you can't skip over the ads (currently you can skip forwards over the ads only "a lot" (like 10 minutes), then slowly skip backwards until you reach the end of the ads, but it's a pain).

So yeah... cameras tracking your eyes (that you're not turning away or going to pee during ads) are next, and then the "drink the verification cam".

( https://siol-net.translate.goog/novice/slovenija/nova-pravil... )

Someone I know buys cheap "IPTV" service by the year. Access is paid for by buying potted plants or something else that looks random on some web store and is delivered in the form of a .m3u playlist that hides behind a username/password pair.

The usual way they use it is with slimey-feeling closed-source sideloaded apps on mass-market streaming devices from such unknown companies as Amazon and Google, or directly on a smart TV itself. Wherein: Despite the dingy back-alley ambience of the subscription and installation processes, the UI is snappy and responsive in use.

And the slimey software is also avoidable. Since it's all based around a playlist that is hiding behind basic http auth, it also works with open-source projects like Dispatcharr, which in turn can emulate an HDHomeRun network-connected OTA TV tuner. This combination can then present new possibilities, like live streaming TV for Plex users.

(It'd all be very interesting to me if I had any motivation to sit down and absorb live television like a slug, but I didn't do much of that even when I worked for a cable company and got the uber-premium package for free as a perk.)

The same old 6th-gen i7 desktop rig that I do everything else with also does this job quite well. It's not beefy by any modern measure, and I'd have built it and kept it going (and powered on) even if I never had any intention of running these background processes on it.

The only added hardware expense is one external hard drive (redundancy? hah, no -- not for this). This cost a couple of hundred bucks a several years ago, which is the equivalent of surprisingly few trips to Taco Bell.

One certainly can spend a quite lot on nice kit to accomplish any goal, but that's not an indication of any necessity to do so.

If a film of acceptable quality averages around 2GB (yay h.265), then a 10TB hard drive can hold 5,000 average films.

You shouldnt be spinning up cloud resources to host your media stack. You should be buying used hardware off cycle and cobbling it together. All of which costs time to operationalize it, ie tweaking gpu drivers on linux to get that old hardware working.

It only really makes sense if youre a real enthusiast, or amortize it across your family, friends, etc. But then youre breaking a bunch more laws and as a working professional that just isnt worth the liability for the value provided.

The real answer I think is simply to consume less content.

Once you set it up with Sonarr and Radarr and Plex/Jellyfin you will never go back to HBO, Netflix, blah blah blah blah.

FWIW, I didn't want to spend hours or days on the setup, but Claude set the whole *arr stack for me in an hour on an older NUC, under Proxmox.