Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

streaming hit the wall the moment every corp wanted to make their own service to cut out netflix. the boom in streaming happend - at least in most parts of europe - because basically everything anyone wanted (even some hbo titles) had been on netflix for 10 eurobucks a month and now you have to sub at least three services for almost thrice the price each. and especially disney+ is complete trash if you're not a marvel/star wars stockholm syndrome victim. now asking for even more in times of inflation and recession is a slap into the face of subscribers.

Current streaming has messed up the popularity of legal cord cutting. There's no real difference in cable and streaming anymore.

That’s all very well, but in some regions like Australia, Disney has or has announced the end of DVD and Blu-ray sales, which sucks.

Last i saw, the physical media version of their recent shows came with a box and a code to get it online, not actual discs, so they're effectively getting out of the business of letting you own your media

I thought the general consensus has been a return to good old fashioned pirating?

To be fair, Spotify might suck for artists, but for users it's a good value in my opinion, and the price was $9.99 for like 10 years. I don't begrudge them a small increase. In fact, I wish all the price increases we've seen lately would be so modest.

To be fair my fiber ISP recently got actual competition and lowered my price from 95/mo to 65/mo. So SOMETIMES the system works. When its not rigged.

I am doing my part!

Yup, this + crackdown on password sharing made me cancel all of my 3 subscription plans and move back to pirating.

The reason for pirating for me isn't about getting stuff for free, it is about paying a reasonable total sum for the amount I use these streaming platforms.

There's a premium plan? Here in Australia, we still just have the one monthly plan, which they recently increased by $3 per month.

If they jump onto the "premium" plan bandwagon like the others, and move 4K to that, this will literally be the final streaming service for me to drop. I've already dropped all the others. Only reason I kept this is because the sheer volume of content for my wife and daughter makes the $14 worthwhile - I just don't have enough storage space (yet) to deliver all that via my Plex setup.

It's funny how every year these services get worse and worse and the prices keep going up. Netflix previously encouraging password sharing and then deciding it's not ok. Did the price drop? ofc not. Did they replace it with a better feature? No. At least getting better content? Fuck no. Repeat for literally any of them.

I don't get why the "not surprising" way to react when you are losing subscribers is rising prices so more subscribers gtfo.

Come on, you are FUCKING DISNEY. Get everything up to 50's/60's for free and make some plan to have limited free streaming of this or that movie (call it "disney watching parties" or something like that, make it be available during a same slot of time, put some hashtags and let people give you free publicity) so you can attract customers.

Then offer everything else you got for money and you are set. For life. You are Disney, for fuck's sake.