Prices are rising across Netflix, Spotify, and their peers, and more people are quietly returning to the oldest playbook of the internet: piracy. Is the golden age of streaming over?
I’m probably going to be allowing most of my streaming subscriptions to lapse over the next year or two. Gonna stick with Dropout and PBS, but that might be all.
maybe I’ve been living under a rock but I don’t get all this emphasis on hosting. What’s wrong with having a file on your device that you just play when you want to
That is the smallest scale of self hosting. The server and the client are the same device. It is also the most insecure way as you probably don’t have any backups and very limited storage space.
Actually self hosting is the next step when you decide you want 5+ TB of data and have it automatically create backups. Digital storage media degrade pretty quickly and if you just have your movies on a hard drive in your computer, after 5-10 years you might start to lose quality or some files completely.
start to lose quality
Wait… That’s a thing? You can lose video quality off a video file on a HD over time?
Not like the whole video goes from 1080p to 720p or something but single bits of the drive will fails over time. If that bit is part of your video file, one pixel of one frame will be the wrong color/black. If multiple bits close to each other fail you might get a video stutter. If even more fail your video player will not play the video at all (or just stop playing at the place of the errors).
Sooo… where’s the self-hosted material coming from if Bluray’s aren’t being produced any more?
If the high seas dries up, are we up shit creek and have to stream?
Yeah, piracy is the last bastion of privately controlled media files
Doesn’t seem like it’s going away though
Until they enforce government ID verification on every website & ban VPN’s. Mark my words, that’s what they’ll try to push under the guise of “save the children”
The .torrent files would just be distributed over i2p or tor then. It’d be one add-on to the seedbox. Nothing would change for most people already familiar with docker etc.
That won’t be of much good should Tor or I2P get taken down too, and a major Tor exit node operator recently getting arrested doesn’t spell anything good on that end.
They’ll never be able to shutdown either. Nor would it help all of the three letter agencys that use it.
They’re going up again?
I dropped all of those. I just have a couple services now.
CBC Gem (mostly to support CanCon and local media), one streamer, and I migrated to Qobuz for music.
I’m the spring I’ll go to yard sales for dvds/blu rays. They’re like a dollar there, which is reasonable.
A ton of content I liked is now owned by fascists and Larry Ellison, so I don’t even want to buy new media anymore.
Do you know what ORACLE stands for?
No
