[jbirer]

My main issue is that they're now slowly testing the waters to see if they can make you watch ads while still paying for the subscription, and at that point, might as well take advantage of Romania's lack of law enforcement and hit the torrent websites.

[platevoltage]

It's amazing how blurred the line is getting between streaming and cable TV.

[squigz]

It already came full circle some years ago when we started seeing new streaming services every year, and those companies pulling their content from other platforms to put on their own. Then you had to start thinking about what servces you need, whether you still want those services, etc. Just like cable!

Absurd.

[platevoltage]

True, although I guess this is sort of understandable. It's the "you're paying us, but here are some ads" that really gets me.

Either way, 5 bucks a month to Emby, a really easy to get membership to a large private torrent site, and a 16TB hard drive solves these problems for me, and will continue to.

[dborzov]

Thanks for the tips! Could you explain how can one get about "getting a membership to a large private torrent site"? Also, why Emby rather than, say, Jellyfin or Plex?

[squigz]

The private trackers tend to be a pain in the butt to remain active enough on to keep your account, as they tend to require a certain amount of upload:download ratio. This can be difficult to achieve since so many members have high-speed seedboxes.

Just use https://1337x.to/ or any other public tracker. You'll be able to find 99% of whatever you want.

[platevoltage]

I was a Plex user, but gave up on it when it started to suck. This was years ago. Emby was the other option at the time and I'm a big fan of it. I've never tried jellyfin. If you want to, email me and I can get you an invite.

[SSLy]

https://wiki.installgentoo.com/wiki/Private_trackers

[jbirer]

Paying 5 bucks to pirate seems to be missing the point of pirating for me IMO.

[sunrunner]

It really doesn't seem like it has to be that complicated, yet somehow we've gone from channels with markedly anti-consumer fixed bundles to a massively fragmented ecosystem where it genuinely seems like the streaming services _don't_ actually want you to subscribe by the amount of the effort that goes into making things hard to watch or doing everything that could make the streaming experience worse (region availability, paid tier ads, lower bitrate stream quality, and so on).

[rootsudo]

Thats what they said about cable too, pay for it so no ads. Then the ads came.

[nickthegreek]

they are done testing the waters. its standard practice for the majority.