The Last Of Us season 2 being on a different, new subscription service is very much the last straw.
Everyone wants to run a subscription service, until they have everyone on a subscription. Then instead of celebrating that they won capitalism, they go and start with the exclusive extra addons and upgrades. Because unfortunately no company in the history of companies has ever said that’s it, we’re making enough money, let’s relax.
I’m relatively happy with the higher quality older television shows. I don’t really see a need to watch the latest stuff.
So it’s cable all over again
Enshitification
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Avast, me hearties!
There was a time when almost everything was on Netflix. As a consumer, having all my content in one place for $10/mo is awesome, but according to capitalism, it is a problem that needed to be fixed.
Movies were on Netflix, TV shows were on Hulu. It was great.
Once Netflix started on their whole “half of all our offerings are going to be original content” is when it began to go downhill. Literally no one (aside from executives) was sitting around going “man, I can’t wait until Netflix starts making shows and movies!” They were a service. That’s all they ever needed to be.
I think they were forced into it when the other companies decided they could make some of that sweet netflix money, so they stopped licensing to netflix and built their own services. Netflix had no choice but to build their own content.
Idk I know I was pretty excited for Netflix’s early original content because the proposition was like “HBO, but on the internet and you can watch it any time” and they were doing big budget stuff. Things only went south when they didn’t keep up the HBO level quality and ruined their reputation to the point where I see “Netflix original” and immediately think “garbage TV”
The crazy thing is loads of people stopped pirating and paid for a streaming service that was affordable, worked, met thier needs.
Now it’s all splintered with corporations wanting a piece of the pie.
It won’t stop until the system reaches its ultimate form and each movie has its own subscription service.
So, buying physical media again lol
except that you don’t have any sort of long terms rights to it and it costs more.
Back to piracy, it is, then. Yarrr! ☠️
I’m about to cancel everything and buy a good vpn service.
It really did hurt my ressources for pirating though. After not downloading anything for years, finding the right sites and proxies again was hard.
you guys remember this old goldie?
lol limewire
Y’arrr ye old salt!
And it’s never anything in demand either. It’s always some random movie you came across on Wikipedia when you were scrolling through some actor’s filmography, and a minor interest was sparked. These companies create no value and hoard wealth and power. The whole copyright regime is tyrannical.
Or it’s a series of movies, and one of the earlier movies is missing.
Right back to cable packages and pay-per-view or on-demand movie rentals.
Tons of paid video service, most of it not worth watching, pay extra again to watch what you do want to watch. Oh, here’s a couple ads, too.
Arr…
Or even better, “even though you pay for the ad free subscription, this video is only available with ads”.
.arr me matey
TPB has almost everything
At first I was like “Trailer Park Boys is great but it doesn’t have almost everything” but then I got it. It’s been a while since I’ve used torrents
DVDs are dirt cheap, plentiful as fuck, don’t have DRM bullshit to have to deal with, last for decades when stored properly, and still look pretty damn good with deinterlacing. Plus, they don’t run any of the risks associated with piracy. Am I allowed to copy my DVDs onto my hard drive? That may be a legal gray area. But can they see that I copied my DVDs to my hard drive? Of course not. And I’m not making my ISOs and MKVs available to the world for download.
Spend 4 bucks on a used DVD. Give her the ol’
dd if=sr0 of=~/Videos/Movies/Title.iso
And keep the disc for basically forever. Copy it again if something happens to your file. EZPZ. Plus, it’s cool to own a physical thing imo.
One last thing: DVDs come with subtitles. I have a hard time understanding spoken words. I like to read my movies as I watch them. Makes it easier to know what’s going on without cranking the volume to 11. Speaking of which, the menu for the Spinal Tap DVD is excellent.
Plus they have extras which if you really like a movie could be a lot of fun
I miss director’s commentary tracks sometimes.
It would be awesome to have a service that releases those commentaries as podcasts you can sync up with the content. I’ll never forget the BSG director’s cut podcasts by Ronald D. Moore. They’d come out about a week after the show and he’d sip a whiskey and smoke some cigarettes and it felt like we were just chilling together.
even DVDs have ads tho
You can rip just the part that’s the movie. Most DVDs have the ads before the menu, so on the disk it’s a separate file. There are probably better alternatives, but I use a program called MakeMKV that lets you open a disk and only save the videos you’re interested in. IIRC there’s a free version that lets you rip DVDs and a paid version that also does BluRays (assuming you have an optical drive that can read them,of course). I bought it probably about a decade ago and was still able to recently activate a new copy using my old activation code.
If you burn your own they don’t