Streaming prices are out of hand. What are cheaper alternatives?
Just steal everything. The powers that be rob you blind every day in a death by a thousand cuts kinda way.
They don’t give a fuck about you, don’t pay them any courtesies in return.
Yarr!
Harr
🏴☠️
Fiddle dee dee
Do what you want, 'cause a Pirate is Free!
👉 Your local public library. You can borrow movies and books. Return them so someone else can use them too. Not run afoul of the law. Libraries are great!
Your library probably even has digital access to thousands of movies, books, and songs, so you don’t even have to leave the house!
That’s definitely true for books. I have an ereader and I often use my library account to add books on loan to the reader over the Internet. I don’t think there’s video available like that, but they do have physical media like CDs, DVDs, and BluRays.
Kanopy (video only) and Hoopla (multimedia) are two papers widely used in Canada and the US. There are other and international providers, but I don’t remember them off the top of my head.
Ofcourse, they don’t have the same content as the big streaming companies, licenses and all, but there’s plenty to be enjoyed if you’re not keeping up with the latest streaming shows anyway. (I watch TV shows on the broadcaster website the day after they air on TV.)
Some do have streaming services. In Germany there is filmfriend.de for movies and the NAXOS Music Library. For big productions and everything else than classical music they still loan physical media, but it’s a good start.
Alternatively:
Give your former Netflix and Spotify subscription fees to the Internet Archive.
They are essentially a gigantic, global, public library.
fmhy.net is a constantly updated directory of streaming piracy sites. Make sure you have an ad blocker and enjoy any show from any service instantly with no sign up.
Beat me to it, love fmhy
Piracy.
Your public library.
Consume less media in general.
Buy stuff once (eg: DVDs, drm free music)
Spotify specific:
Use the free service to listen to new stuff in order to find groups you like. For the sub cost you can buy an album per month and have it forever. I work in areas that don’t have great data connections, so having a local copy keeps the jams going without interruption or ads.
Soma.fm and radio.garden are two streaming music service replacers. I have not used Soma, but Radio Garden is interesting because it gives you a map of every single participating radio station on the planet and lets you just scroll around the entire globe and pick a radio station.
You deserve all the upvotes today, but I can only give you one.
Thank you
I also recommend Qobuz. They’re European and have high quality streaming + the option to buy and album and download it.
If you don’t mind the less legal way, you can easily use a program like streamrip and download whatever you want from the service.
And if you don’t have the money to spend, they have a trial for a month. Just rip whatever you need and have a nice offline collection. And if you need more, you can just make a start trial with a disposable e-mail.
There’s also lucida.to if you don’t want to be bothered with any of that.
How is this a surprise to anyone? They came to replace cable.
No, you still don’t get it.
THEY CAME TO REPLACE CABLE.
At this point I’d think a good number of folks either don’t remember or simply never experienced cable/satellite TV.
Hard to compare against something you’ve never experienced.
a basic cable package in my city costs $100. A high end one costs $200.
Netflix basic is 8 bucks, netflix premium is 25.
For now. And that’s Netflix only. Many many users have multiple subs.
Plus the internet connection, which I get it, it’s currently a necessity, but at the time of cable TV, it didn’t represent an expense.
That’s exactly my point. Cable didn’t start off costing $100-$200. In the beginning it was a few bucks as an ad-free alternative to antenna TV. Then they raised prices, just a little at a time, over many years, as well as introduced ads. Sound familiar?
I promise you, some day streaming will cost $100-$200, too. And people will pay it, just like your grandparents do today.
I say again: streaming is here to REPLACE cable. You’re living in the golden age of low-cost entertainment and you don’t even know it.
The sea awaits you.
Streaming is not frugal by definition since you don’t own anything.
- Buy from Bandcamp, own and stream forever for a cheap price
- Torrent movies
- Torrent or Soulseek music
- Listen to podcasts, there are billions of those, it will last forever
- Free music on SomaFM, ByteFM, Radio Paradise, Shoutcast, etc.
- YouTube client like NewPipe if you have Android to listen to music
Buy from Bandcamp, own and stream forever for a cheap price
It’s also important to emphasize that artists make more from a Bandcamp purchase than if you had just streamed a few times on Shitify.
You would need to listen to a song 400+ times on Spotify to earn the artist $1. Or you could throw them a buck on Bandcamp Friday and get to download it forever. Plus the artist gets paid immediately from the Bandcamp purchase instead of quarterly streaming royalties.
Then my favourite artist has earned more from me streaming her music on tidal than if I’d bought her entire discography.
Good!
Care to share the artist name?
Eivør, there’s one person on tidal who listened to her more than me. I can only assume it’s a Faroese coma patient who’s relatives have put her on repeat in the hospital room in the hopes they’ll be brought back stranger things style.
Turns out I know of her from seeing a short of her (or a fan?) belting the intro to Enn in a parking garage. Never knew the artist name til now, but I never forgot that melody. Thanks for reintroducing me!
Soulseek is love, Soulseek is life.
Self-hosting and/or use Kanopy if your local library offers it
How have I never heard about Kanopy? This looks so cool!
🏴☠️
This. This has always been the better alternative and this always will be the better alternative!
Fmhy net
If buying isn’t owning piracy isn’t stealing
For streaming, Debrid and Stremio!
Your local public library!
Buying physical media.
I’ve had a shit town of issues lately with Stremio + Torrentio to the point where if I can watch one full episode of a show without a major interruption, it’s a mialracle
I use AIOStream instead of Torrentio as a plugin personally. Though when it comes to downtime it’s usually the debrid service that is down. I only experienced that once with Premiumize in the last year I’ve been using them.
I’ll check it out.
I will build a Jellyfin server soon to get rid of stremio altogether
There’s also that free streaming site if you have a library card here in the US
🏴☠️
Piracy
🏴☠️
yo ho, all hands, hoist the colors high
heave ho, thieves and beggars, never shall we die
I’d say piracy … but it’s definitely no cheaper the way I do it (at least not short term).
But if you have some spare storage and don’t need a huge amount of content, that’s a good option.
What are you spending the money on? Physical sever devices? Electricity?
NTA but I spend about $30/month on various self-hosting-specific services: Usenet subscription, VPN, Plex Pass, a few little recurring donations to OSSes that I use, etc.
It’s not really self-hosting unless you own the hardware. But I support your sentiment!
I do own the hardware. 5x8tb (down from 6) drives of media on my desktop (Phanteks Enthoo Pro is the best case ever made)
Yeah, personal hardware. Replaced my 2 bay (2x 6 TB) NAS that had 5 USB drives attached with more powerful 12 bay NAS and 9x 20TB drives. Luckily before the insane price hikes due to the AI hype. Still, I invest like $7000 over all at least. That’s a lot of years of netflix/spotify :D
I don’t even bother with the electricity, it just is what it is.
Jeeeeeesus. I’ve got 20TB and that feels like a lot 😅
8 of the drives are on a raid 6 and one is a hot spare and converted to 1000 based terrabyte, I’m maxing out at 109.1 TB, but max volume size is 108 TB.
But I’ve interacted with people that had 1.2 PB … there is always a bigger fish ^^
Meanwhile, I’m over here about to attach a 2tb drive to my Nextcloud server and I thought that was a lot…
It’s a lot cheaper if you don’t need to keep it. I acquire, watch, and delete.
I spend about $10/mo., and that’s a lot.
Absolutely. But I do want to keep it, the fact that streaming services can just remove shows from their service is one if the reasons I dislike them.
Also a lot family members and friends use that to rewatch old shows or keep up with newer ones at different times, so not an option for me.
This is where I’m at after about a decade of being a self-described “data hoarder” and experiencing a drive failure a couple months ago and losing about 8tb of media that I realized I didn’t care at all about.
Now I have a custom script that runs on the 1st of every month that A) detects if movies and full TV series have been marked as “watched” more than 7 days ago and/or B) if movies and full TV series have never been started and unmatched after more than a year and deletes titles that meet either requirement, while outputting a ledger on my desktop showing what titles have been deleted, the date, and for what reason. I ran a dry run of the script and saw that I was about to save 12tb of storage and realized how unimportant 99% of the stuff marked was to me. Really important stuff (my David Lynch titles, for example), are manually marked for exclusion.
Anyway, but of a blog post but I’ve realized this is the way for me. My Plex library is now less cluttered and full of only new things. My other users on the account can still request anything they want and my Usenet+*arr+fiber optic server can have almost anything ready for them in 10 minutes or less
7000/19.99(netflix ad free)+12.99(spotify ad free) is 17 years, and thats excluding any other providers you may have had such as crunchyroll or a content specific provider. Honestly if you leave your unused HDD’s off the array/NAS you likely have years of drive life as well
Hard drives. That shit’s gotten expensive lately. But keeping your own media is worth it. Also, paying for the annual VPN subscription.
It’s definitely the hard drives. A 1tb SSD is about $150, and can definitely get you far, but it’s never far enough
I use a 1 TB and a 2 TB ssd for temporary storage, sorting and transcoding. But for permanent storage, HDDs are the way to go if you want a lot.
How long would it take to watch 1 TB of video? A lifetime?
A single bluray movie will run around 50GB and full TV shows can easily be 100s of GBs.
Haha. That depends on a few factors. If you’re going to the highest fidelity possible, you could fill 1tb up with about 20 UHD movies at ~50gb each.
