Only speaking for myself, but these streaming services would need to increase costs A LOT to make me invest valuable time replacing them.
It's a big world out there, whatever "here" means.
That last sentence makes me wonder, do you enjoy ads?
I went to a Super Bowl party a while back and the half time show glitched continuously. Random weird glitches for the rest of the time. => note to self: don't pay for this.
Someone like Nathan Fielder would have the balls for this.
At some point the customer base is going to shrink, especially when the AI slop hits the market, right?
We are back to cable pricing, but shows and movies are all over the place and now we need multiple apps to track us.
It's absurd that piracy is the _best_ user experience. 1 app, 1 place for your content, no licensing deals to worry about, no outrage pulling old episodes, local streaming, the list goes on.
You literally cannot pay (legally) for a better experience, and that makes me sad.
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.
People expecting that the content companies were going to just accept lower revenue forever and not eventually get back to cable pricing were fooling themselves
In fact, the content companies are planning on making more money than they did under cable because since they're selling direct to the consumer, there's no DirecTV/Comcast/Charter middleman taking a slice anymore
Of course they'll sell through those intermediaries and take a cut but it will be much less than the cable companies were getting before, and will just go into the marketing cost bucket
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.
There have been times where I will pay to "own" instead of rent a tv show I really like, and then a year later that streaming service loses the rights to it, and so do I.
In a way I feel today's environment is less conducive to pirating than it used to be. So many fewer people have any kind of "always on" computer these days, they're using phones and tablets instead. Not to mention locked down App Stores, etc.
Cable companies purposefully enacted legislation more than a decade ago to prevent innovation until they could provide these streaming platforms for their oligarchs. Cable companies then sell to them and now are board members of the new platform.
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... )
I can't remember the last time that talk about a show in my inner circle made me check it. Season 1 severance maybe? It feels forever ago, it used to be an almost weekly thing.
Any good starting point for a fisherman not interested in stashing fish but just capturing and releasing?
It's not only the price hikes and the atomization/fragmentation of content, what made me cut the wire was that I couldn't get high quality in my computer unless I used X browser for Y service.
These streaming services learned nothing from cable are just pushing people back to pirating
As a user, probably the best thing to do is get a library card and read books published prior to 1980 or thereabouts. Much of the movies/shows produced these days is not that good anyways, and anything that is good gets canceled after a season or two
Capitalism requires users to vote with their wallets. And advertising still isn't enough of a deterrent to most users to vote differently. Books and grass don't have ads.
There is constant pressure towards enshittification.
Why the hell can't we have streaming businesses that reach some equilibrium threshold for how much content they want to produce, the quality of said content, and then focus on optimizing production and tech to both reduce prices and increase profits over time accompanied with scaling subscriber growth.
You know what to do. Just don’t watch shit :)
I'm at the foot of of a hill that's between me and where broadcast antennas are 40-50 miles away. I had no TV when I moved in until Comcast eventually put in cable. The seller had even tried putting an antenna up in the attic which did no good. So I would need to subscribe to a live TV streaming service which isn't worth it for me as I don't really watch sports much.
But I'm glad you're so confident of your knowledge of my situation.
I swear, the people who compare these streaming services to cable are all too young to remember that the average cable experience was flicking through channels until something remotely reasonable was on (and it was likely an episode or movie you've already seen many times before), you'd hop in part way through the content (so hopefully it was something you've seen before so you knew what was going on), you wouldn't be able to pause anything obviously, and about a third of your viewing time was forced ads. And all of this could be costing you over a hundred bucks a month in 2000s money in a locked-in contract lmao
I get way more video than I have time to watch and I do monitor things so if I'm really not using a service I can always drop it. I care very little about having access to EVERYTHING which I never had before streaming anyway. If I really miss anything, it's DVD by mail.
If you're saying that people will just watch other variants of video slop posted on youtube or other free sites instead of paying for some sort of curated entertainment service, history indicates otherwise.
Not what everyone wants to hear, but I think there’s more headroom for price increases than the HN crowd likes to admit. Compared to how much people spent on cable or satellite TV, these prices feel like peanuts.
Brand awareness is more likely. No one knows wtf a "Hulu" is outside the US, and even parts of the US too (it was never the biggest player).
Parents see "Disney" and sub for a free** babysitter.
**With all these price hikes this dynamic may have shifted.
Hulu is not long for this world anyway, as Disney has been trying to merge them for years, if you believe investor calls. They'll probably be just one streaming service within the year.
I do think interesting dynamics come into play when the customer base ages though. You saw this happen with kids and cartoons, kids do not even watch normal tv shows anymore. It's all youtube or streamers.
what moves if any has disney done to capture the youth group there
They'll continue to make anti-consumer choices in order to attempt to drive growth. Jellyfin has done nothing but improve.
(is this the level of discourse we're going for here?)
I've got a record player coming tomorrow. My song streaming service of choice keeps jacking up prices and now feeds me AI slop; it's time for a change.
I suspect kids growing up right now will experience a renaissance of physical media from fed-up parents.
And remember same will happen with healthcare, education, products like cars or phones...
BTW here's the Disney 1937-2008 megatorrent, including lots of movies they "hold in the vault" (aka wont republish)
https: SLASH SLASH thepiratebay DOT org SLASH description.php?id=5657801
They don't care about pushing SOME people to piracy as long as line goes up.
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/11/is-your-android-tv-strea...
I can see how they could tell themselves it's not the same. This is a device that just shows a library of content that they can watch. There's no needing to know that P2P, warez, torrents, seeding, etc even exist let alone know what they are or how they work. They couldn't sell these devices if it was illegal, right?
https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/cyber/alerts/2025/home-inter...
https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/cyber/alerts/2025/home-inter...
Search up IPTV on any social media and you'll start getting loads of ads for these services, for like $25 a month for a trillion channels, a catalog of VOD content, etc. You can use a simple client like Chillio on Apple TV as the client and have a safe stack.
I subscribed to one. And just to be clear, I subscribe to and pay $ for every streaming service available in Canada, and a maxed out cable plan. My cable company (Cogeco) serves up some pixelized dogshit low bitrate/obsolete codec feed for both NFL football and F1 racing. Via some dodgy IPTV provider (there are a million names and resellers but they're all ostensibly the front for the same service) I get amazingly crisp, excellent visuals, better accessibility, etc. It's crazy. Technically and usably an infinitely better option, at a fraction of the price.
"Oh but you might fund organized crime!" -- yeah, when most media empires are oligarchs pushing their politics and kleptocracy on people, I have more faith in those organized criminals than I do garbage like the Ellison family.
I have a friend who calculated up their hardware costs (before ram/ssd/hdd-ageddon) and paying for all the streaming services costs came in lower over the span of something like 10+ years. That said, they have the best UI/UX experience I've seen and don't see ads so I'd still count it as a win.
Oh sure, you can use an old laptop (or seedbox-type thing), an external drive, and get pretty far but if you want to replicate streaming services for all the shows you care about, it's not cheap.
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.
* The Free Software Media System | Jellyfin // https://jellyfin.org/
(Couple with Plex/Jellyfin).
Once you set it up with Sonarr and Radarr and Plex/Jellyfin you will never go back to HBO, Netflix, blah blah blah blah.
I have access to a well-seeded 20+ year old private tracker but usually use the above method to stream content for free these days.
The disrespect that streaming companies show their customers is insane. I'm sure most of the customer don't even know what they are missing, the hoops they have to jump through, the mental load to switch between all those terrible, hostile UIs, etc...
The service? The Hardware? The App on the hardware? (Great job naming Apple...)
I agree that the Apple TV is the best experience one can have. It can be further enhanced by using a single app (Plex/Plezy/Jellyfin/Infuse/etc). Jumping between streaming services and their hostile, horrible UIs is such a pain. The Apple TV app was meant to improve that situation but without buy-in from all the streaming providers (which they will never get) it's always going to be playing second fiddle to the high seas.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48835392
(Jellyfin + Soundcloud + Bandcamp + sonarr/radarr/lidarr in this context; if you have Plex, that is also an option; you can also stick web content into this system with yt-dlp)
Instead the content is silo'd in a bunch of massive companies that don't care about UI/UX and exist only to force more ads down our throats.
This isn't about being law abiding or not for the sake of it, it's about the best experience _at any price_ is unobtainable without breaking a law.
And yes, I'm in favor of abolishing copyright and/or significantly limiting/curtailing it. Some short exclusivity window (<5 years, ideally <1 year) and then anyone can redistribute it paying small royalties for another <5-10 years, then it's public.
1. How much content are we talking about?
2. How many people use your server?
Yes, QuickSync is amazing but hard drives alone (for a larger collection) are incredibly expensive (today). Even before prices shot up I know people that sunk $8K+ into hard drives alone.