https://gizmodo.com/netflix-no-longer-offering-basic-subscription-in-canada-1850576048
Netflix announced its ending the Basic plan for Canadian subscribers, and new or rejoining members can no longer access the $9.99 tier.
Just more enshittification. Glad I cancelled last month, you don't get to tell me who is or who isn't in my household.
They're cashing out and running the brand into the ground. Sure they may technically gain some new subscribers by cracking down on password sharing but their shows will be receiving millions less views because of this and everything else they're doing. It's all typical short-sighted please the share holders bullshit.
Roughly $200 a year. You can buy a very large external hard drive for that price...which would be a much better investment.
I have a very high end plex server. I think all in between VPN, Usenet, hardware costs I pay roughly $60/mo. But that gets me all the content I want, organized exactly how I want it, and nothing disappears on me. No need for 3-4 subscriptions, multiple apps, etc. And that service works for my entire family and I can easily make offline copies for trips.
Now all this does require pretty significant time investment. It's less now, but there were multiple very long research sessions and troubleshooting that I had to go through. I would absolutely pay for a service that was marginally close in ease of use just to not have to be my own IT, but it doesn't exist.
I pay for streaming music. It just works and I (usually) don't feel like maintaining my own music library is worth it. I pay for all my games, because Steam just works. I pay for all my ebooks because they just work. Streaming video by comparison is hot garbage. Just a complete morass of exclusive content, shitty apps, poor user experience and stupid policy decisions.
100% agree.
Steam works. Spotify works. These things are worth paying for because they make my life easier. When Netflix was the only game in town and had content from everywhere it was a fantastic service. Then every studio decided that they wanted all that money for themselves and started their own service. Since that time it is nothing but fragmentation, degraded service and confusion. Streaming Video seems to be in a race to oblivion.
Spotify buy out popular podcasters and force them to use their platform and this results in publicly available Podcasts going behind a centralised platform. This over time will cause the death of Podcasters.
Netflix is my go-to for streaming services. Mainly because there's a dedicated "Netflix" button on my Shield remote that I keep hitting on accident.
Whoa--there's an app for that! https://www.androidpolice.com/2019/10/30/shield-tv-remote-remap-netflix/ Thanks!
there was a redditor that was insisting that it was Nvidia paying Netflix millions and millions of dollars for the privilege of having a dedicated netflix button on the remote, and not the opposite, Netflix paying Nvidia millions of dollars to have a sponsored button the remote
I do the same thing all the time. Need to figure out how to remap the button to load TiviMate instead.
As a side note, I really wish Nvidia would release a new Shield. I just ordered a new one yesterday because honestly, it's still the best streaming box.
Just throwing it out there that large hard drives are inexpensive and there's free software out there like jellyfin to let you play your own media on devices. Data acquisition is up to you of course but that's not particularly difficult either. So just become your own streaming service!
I just doubt 10Mbps up is enough to actually stream content. And how do you deal with the Double NAT problem? I tried just reading over samba via zerotier, but it couldn't handle 1080p, but that could be slow relays for zerotier connections.
10Mbps up is nowhere near enough, unless you stream very low quality (think 720p or highly compressed 1080p). High-quality 4K can get close to 100Mbps.
Ahh, yes, this is why home streaming is a no go - not good enough upload. And I don't care where I get my media, I don't want to deal with the hassle of cloud hosting and whatever legal papers I'd need for that, given that ripping a DVD is still illegial.
I presume ad-free will eventually take over with the same price, after the other 2 plans increase.
It's likely with the household changes we will see an end to the old plans that were based on screens and we will have 2-tiers, ads & no-ads.
Netflix will only get more expensive from here and the ad plan was always meant to make the 'Premium' plan look better.
I just dropped ours down to 2screens, for now..I still think we may well cancel fully. But, we'll see.
Guess I'll just... Stop paying for shit ever again. Already set up a nice Jellyfin server with 16,000+ movies in anticipation of this garbage move so I'm good for the next 43 years assuming one movie a day, every day.
On an unrelated note, how much data storage does it take to host 16,000+ videos? I'm curious
Mostly some custom scripts for scraping yts.mx, cross-referencing imdb for e.g. top 50/100 box office for each year (https://www.imdb.com/search/title/?year=${YEAR}&title_type=feature&) and automatically uploading to and downloading from my seedbox. Tried radarr but it wasn't really my thing. They're all basically garbage 1080p encodes but for their size they're passable enough for me, and my goal was a large library for discoverability not a small one for quality, so it worked out perfectly for that. Also been checking r/opensignups (RIP reddit) for good trackers when they have open registration for the occasional specific stuff that I want in better quality.
The more anti-consumer shit they pull, the more of my friends I get to join my Plex server, for marginal cost since more users barely means any more used electricity.
I'm currently testing the Netflix "Killed Off" subscription plan. 0.00 a year and ad free!
I'm not surprised. Now that Netflix can no longer rely on cable and broadcast to produce its content for pennies on the dollar, Netflix is going to have a hard time paying for its catalog.
Netflix just fucking sucks now. It has killed me off it's service. We have been subscribed since 2012 and I'll occasionally search something I don't have on my home media server and the search will autocomplete what I'm typing, but not actually show the content I want. It will display some other related garbage. I can't imagine paying monthly and suffering through ads for this experience.
Heh. I (US) cancelled this morning and they tried to offer me basic as an alternative to cancellation.
Crave (in Canada) did this a couple of years ago. Their premium package included shows from HBO and others. I guess not enough people were going for it so they got rid of the basic package & bumped everyone up when their auto-renewal happened. So the price switched from $99 per year to $199. I got rid of it for awhile then finally gave in.
If any company knows how to fast track their way into bankruptcy, it would be Netflix. Kudo's for them to try and improve their previous track record!
How does this comment end up under every post about Netflix? Take a look at their financials. They're doing fine. Great, even. Their decisions may be unpopular with a tiny but vocal minority, but let's deal in facts here.
Yeah, I don't like it but after they came down on password sharing their subscription numbers rose, not fell. This will likely be another move that's anti-consumer but pro-investor.
Yep their evidence shows the password sharing crackdown got them more subs overall and I'm sure they have checked this will work too. People forget the purpose is to make them money not provide entertainment to the masses.
Yeah, I'm not a fan of the form of capitalism that's about selling what they want us to buy instead of what we want to buy, but it seems to be working for pretty much every company out there.
I guess we missed our window of opportunity with Netflix. We moved to the middle of nowhere with no internet or cell service 12 years ago. We've had Starlink for nearly 2 years and are just starting to run out of stuff available for free on our Roku. It's been a couple of decades since I played with, um, other options, but I somehow doubt it's become more difficult. :)