The TV streaming apps broke their promises, and now they’re jacking up prices

arstechnica.com The TV streaming apps broke their promises, and now they’re jacking up prices

Op-ed: Apps promised to free us from ad-supported subscription bundles. Oops!

cross-posted from: https://yiffit.net/post/1072752

For a moment, it seemed like the streaming apps were the things that could save us from the hegemony of cable TV—a system where you had to pay for a ton of stuff you didn't want to watch so you could see the handful of things you were actually interested in.
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I cancelled all my subscriptions and just pay for a seedbox instead.
Only two subscriptions I have now are Spotify and Game Pass...because they are actually worth it.
- Even Spotify though continues to Jack their prices with no extra benefit. I’ve hoped for lossless audio from them for so long, but instead they just charge more for a bad UI driven by engagement instead of user experience
  
  I don't mind Spotify increasing.
  Inflation is real. And nobody wants to see the service turn into a Little Caesars "$5 Hot N Ready" pizza that erodes in quality, rather than gradually price increase with inflation.
  The advantage we have with music streamers is that nearly ALL the content is on ALL the services. So, if one service goes bananas with pricing, we can jump ship to a cheaper one.
  But TV is siloed into mini monopolies. The only source of capitalism competition they face is use choosing to do without. And frankly, if I'm gonna be forced-fed ads, I choose to do it on YouTube which costs me $0 and not $7.99 a month.
  Netflix is gone. And as someone who leaves The Simpsons running 24/7 on Disney+, I'm frankly getting thiiiiiiiiiis close to dumping their asses, too!
  
  Spotify increased the price of everybody's subscription by £1/$1. They have some 200 million subscribers. That's at a minimum an extra $200m a month. Is that really necessary?
  
  The thing is, I would totally pay more for lossless audio on Spotify, but they didn’t give me that option. They just increased their price without any benefit to their service. And their CarPlay integration is horrid. I can pick a song on tidal and it plays instantly without issue. With Spotify I have to open the app and play it from my phone and even then it only works like half the time. I’ve been a Spotify customer since they first launched in the US but there’s now no reason to keep my subscription
  
  Try switching to apple music. It is cheaper and the quality is way better. UI is also waaaaay better than spotify's. Also, I learned that if you dont have any money on your card connected to google play store apple music will be just fine for extra month. So you can use apple music 2 months for price of one month.
  
  Thanks for the recco! Though I’ve actually been using Tidal for the last few months because they’re one of the few lossless audio services, just annoyed because I was a Spotify customer for years waiting for lossless and instead they bumped prices without improving their services
  
  Spotify users propably got used to it haha
  
  My boss pays for my spotify and my google opinion award pay for my disney+. That's all the subscriptions I have
- What exactly is a seedbox and how much is it?
  
  It's, in layman's terms, server space you rent out and can use for your downloads. torrent clients like transmission are usually built in. I pay £5 a month for 2tb space and enough bandwidth to keep a good ratio.
  So instead of downloading to my pc, I download torrents to the seedbox (at a blazing fast speed) and then download files from there to my pc whenever I feel like it, again at stupid good speeds.
  I have FTP access, so I've just added it as a folder/mounted drive on my windows and Linux mint file explorers. Works great. Also have it on my smart TV as a web address for quick streaming of whatever I downloaded.
  Edit: this also eliminates the risk of downloading Torrents locally.
  
  Is it advisable to have a VPN though to access the seedbox though?
  
  Shouldn't need one if you trust your seedbox provider to not log. And even if you don't trust them you'd need to find a VPN to trust more and they're almost all super sketchy.
  
  That sounds great!
  Which Seedbox Service do you recommend?
  
  Look up real-debrid with Stremio if you wanna skip the download part. It's like renting someone elses seedbox.
  
  I use seedhost.eu, can't really recommend others as this is my first! But it's been great so far, easy to use and access
  I use transdroid on my mobile for torrent management
  
  It's basically a web based software that handles the download of torrents for you and then offers a download link for you to get it on your machine
  
  Wait, aren't seed boxes just VMs that run on the infrastructure of some internet hoster that doesn't give a crap about the users utilizing it for torrenting? But AFAIK on most seed boxes the user needs to configure the VMs themselves to some degree. So it acts as some beefed up proxy server to torrent stuff without you compromising your own ip address + you have access to high bandwidths and some tb of storage to store your downloaded stuff
  
  It depends, you can rent an already set-up server/VM just for torrenting and related purposes, but of course nothing prevents you from setting it up in any VM wherever you rent. Just know that some providers that don't explicitly offer a seedbox for purposes of unknown legality will not appreciate it and may terminate the lease.
  
  Well, more precisely it's a piece of hardware, and it remotely manages torrenting whatever you want, and then you can securely download it wherever you are using the software part
- Nah, in the case of Spotify, I've ady lost all my faith on the music industry and remain on the sea for a while now. I rather take times to listen to the music instead of giving even a quid to those mf.
- Same for me. Had Netflix and Prime.
  Cancelled Prime. Student plan ran out and wanted to spend less (on Amazon and buying random stuff.
  Cancelled Netflix. Didn't use it, convinced my mother to let it go (only after saying how much it costs).
  Renting a seedbox for 15€ per month, Spotify for music and since this month I burried my life long hate for YT premium and now also have that (and wish for a plan without yt music for 3-4€ less).
  Reason why I did YT premium was, because I already watched more YT than Netflix anyway. And it's near daily for about 2-3h. Well worth it (for way too much money).
  
  For YouTube premium I just did the whole vpn to turkey and pay for a year upfront which was like £12 for the year
  
  How about you use Revanced?
  
  Cause I use an Apple TV and an iPhone?
  
  Your fault for buying into the anti-consumer Apple ecosystem
  
  Sure and with that trade off I have a rock solid experience with no issues at all.
  Sometimes you get tired of android and the jank and want shit that just works so you can get on with your day and just focus on other things.
  
  Apple is a huge mess tbh, you have NOT done tech support for Apple stuff, it's a pain. Android, otoh, is a breeze. I've always found Apple stuff jankier.
  
  I haven't needed to tech support on any of my Apple stuff in the entire time I've owned them, I have at home both a Linux server and a Mac mini running as a headless server. Guess how many times I've had to fix the Mac mini 0.
  My iPhone I've had 0 issues with and my M2 Air which I use for work has had 0 issues.
  I don't really see a situation where the sorting out a mac would be troublesome it's pretty much all simple as hell.
  Oh and fun fact, I have done tech support for apple stuff on a daily basis as part of my job as a store manager of a retail tech store and I'm constantly thrown problems from Android/iOS Devcies as well as MacOS, Linux & Windows Devices and guess which ones give me the most problems.
  
  Sorting out a Mac is troublesome. Errors that give you no information, lack of easy access to advanced utilities, and of course, it bring all in the name of "It Just Works! (TM)". I found myself cursing at a Mac, but never had on literally any other operating system ever. Even TempleOS is easier to troubleshoot.
  Errors on every major OS:
  
  Windows: The application could not start because of missing dll X (0xb). Reinstalling the program may fix this problem. Linux: Could not find libfluidsynth.so.1. Reason: No such file or directory! macOS: Could not connect to this network. Android: App not installed. There's also another "There was a problem parsing the package" which either means it's corrupted or your phone is from the Stone Age. iOS: Literally reboots your iPhoney every 3 minutes because the fucking microphone is broken.
  Now let's see what those errors tell me.
  
  Windows: A DLL is missing. Either it got corrupted or the user fucked up. Linux: App is linking against a super old library. Update the app or compile it to use a newer library. macOS: LITERALLY NOTHING. Super vague, but at least the Android one below only appears when you are sideloading (you should know what you're doing) Android: While the error itself is vague, it usually means "no space left" or "bad signature". Again, if you see this error, you should know what you're doing. iOS: I couldn't tell unless I knew the mic was broken.
  Guess how many times my Dad had trouble with Bluetooth on macOS. More than I can count, to the point of needing to steal my mic from me.
  
  lack of easy access to advanced utilities
  Me and you have very different experiences to this, at work I've found MacOS the easiest of the three to sort out.
  I'll give you a recent windows example, A PC comes in for repair with a b450 MSI board no audio on the Front panel or the rear I/O. Naturally we install all the drivers off the MSI web page except windows won't even detect the sound card. Throw on a Linux USB live environment instantly detected.
  Naturally we're like no worries let's use the inbuilt Windows tool to reset the PC with a cloud download, nope that doesn't fix it. Required a complete reinstall from a USB. This was windows 10 22h2 iirc.
  At work I see Windows/Mac/Linux daily and Windows, gives me the most trouble on a daily basis. With Mac/Linux most things you can fix from the terminal pretty quickly, or with Mac just use the inbuilt reset tool no matter how much a customer fucks up their machine.
- I absolutely loved the idea of Game Pass. I had it for two years. I actually stopped buying Steam games.
  I was annoyed of their whole file structure (like it's extremely difficult to move saves from a PC Game Pass game to a Steam/Epic Game). It's using some weird Windows DRM and has constant connection issues with the Microsoft server. But the value was good and I accepted that hiccup.
  After the Steam Deck dropped, I quit PC Game Pass.
  As a busy parent, Steam Deck is way too convenient and the future of PC gaming is portability. And once the Steam Deck reaches critical mass, if PC Game Pass isn't on there, it'll be the Bing of gaming and play second fiddle.
- I have Disney+ for Marvel and Star Wars, $4 Google Play rent or theater watch everything else because I'm not a big TV/Movie guy.
  Had Gamepass Ultimate, dropped them when they shut down the family plan, raised the price of Ultimate by $2/mo, cut the value of gold-to-ult conversion pretty significantly, and ditched the monthly games in favor of a perpetual list of games I mostly already own.
  My new preferred plan is PS+ Premium+PC Gamepass, in part because the game offerings on PS+ are actually pretty good, but also because I realized that I can very sustainably get PC Gamepass from Microsoft Rewards. They have an auto-redeem plan with a low enough point value that, if I were to do nothing except the daily Bing/Edge searches, I'd rack up enough points for the next month in 25 days. That's pretty significant for something I can mostly do sitting on the shitter.

77 comments