Technology
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We came back to another cycle of big corporations forgetting they have to be more convenient than pirating.
Can't speak for anyone else, but just having an actual no logs VPN for less than the cost of one streaming service while also using qbittorrent with the torrent site search function is so much more convenient than spending probably hundreds at this point for streaming services I might only watch anything on once a blue moon.
Money issues aside, it is absolutely maddening to have to navigate through six or eight different streaming services to find the show you want to watch
I pay for spotify. If I want to listen to a song, it's on spotify. I don't need a different music streaming service for every single record company. As a result, I don't pirate music anymore.
To be fair this is also not good though. It's convenient, sure, but it creates a monopoly that can dictate what they pay to the artists - which is often close to nothing.
Itunes, Amazon music, tidal, YouTube music. It's not a monopoly yet. Hopefully we can get a few more services, but I don't see anything competing with this group.
Internet quality lies in "monopoly". On Internet, the best service has everything and satisfy customers. That's why piracy is such a strong contender. If a service has less than another, it's not worth the other. If it has as much but miss features, it's useless. Price is the final determinator, but if it's too expensive, people can't afford it.
Copyrights make the problem worse, because then any copyrighted content exclusive to a platform makes this platform a monopoly, because it's the only place were you can find this content.
Well that kinda works in general, but the issue is that it's a never-ending cycle of "cool thing appears", "cool thing grows and takes over the market", "cool thing wants to make more money so it becomes less cool", "it becomes so shitty that people look for alternatives and there are none because it created a monopoly", "it becomes actually unbearable and folds because people flock to a new cool thing".
Decentralized stuff kinda helps, but you can still see with e.g. email that there are a handful of giant "instances" and they have a huge control over the space, standards, etc. that others have to follow whether they like them or not. But it's still possibly to at least compete in that space (see for example ProtonMail) and it rarely becomes a true monopoly.
Mail is not community based, which means it works as a decentralised service. Most other services are better centralised.
As long as we put that "exclusive content" crap aside, every one of them can potentially offer every song if they agree with the artist. That's where the video streaming services are different. Disney+ and Netflix had many overlapping shows until the shittification started.
Or even more convenient, the arr suite + Plex/jellyfish + Overseer. A docker compose is easy enough to write and get running in minutes
I would definitely love to set up a server for something like Plex if I had enough content to justify it. To me it seems excessive to have a server for just a very small handful of shows, in my case.