In the US, you don't even need to pay a licensing fee when you buy a DVD with intent to rent it out to people (this is not the case in the UK), thanks to the "First-sale doctrine" - Bobbs-Merrill v. Straus (1908).
I don't know about in the US, but I live in a fairly small city in Canada and we have DVD rentals. I go to the video store almost every week, and it was on the papers that a second one (which will also rent out VHS!) is opening.
The Library does DVD rentals too, I check it out every couple of months.
It's even better in Toronto, Bay Street Video is an institution.
Eh, I miss video rental stores in the US, but I don't agree that they would solve this problem. I worked for a large chain of them as a teen, and know first-hand that people were spending just as much on rentals as they do with subscription services, especially when you add in game rentals and late fees.
More importantly, it does not solve the problem of ownership. We don't own a rented disc just as much as we don't own a DRM-controlled digital purchase that can only be accessed via the subscription portal it was purchased on.
Hi honestlyranked you might want to reach out to the mods, your comments are dead. I think you are meant to put info in the submitted post text field, not in the comments, I could be wrong!
This is what I am always curious about with these tech valuations. They’re valued at multiple times earnings, often 30+. That implies 30 years to earn back an investment iff earnings are payed out. Yet all are immediately enshittifying or price gauging when they hit monopoly / have market share. Is the bet then that thats just gonna be the status quo? I guess historically it was a good bet.
What is the alternative to subscribing to streaming services? Can you purchase your movies online and be guaranteed to have access to the movies in the future?
No. The whole issue is that the seller needs to maintain an online service to allow you access to the movies. This online service costs money so over time is likely not worth the cost. This plus the online service provider undergoing changes (bankruptcy, acquisition, mergers, etc) or they themselves losing rights to the movies. Seems to me that rental or purchases are still unbeatable. The alternative is streaming but the downside is higher costs over time and worse quality movies.
Libraries! They often have digital access to various services—e.g. Kanopy—but also often have lots of physical media sources! It involves a little more planning and a little less algorithm, and there are shows and movies that won't ever be available—e.g. things from Netflix, Apple—but there's enough out there already.
Subscribe, screengrab what you like, unsubscribe. Repeat. Really easy to do in a virtual machine, so it doesn't conflict with anything else happening on the computer.
You can stream your own stuff, from home, to all of your devices and your friends' devices, for free. And since the movies are on your own hardware, you have them forever. Movies, tv, music, books, comic books, video game roms, basically any sort of media you can even name. And it's been possible for you to do so for the last 15 years, maybe more.
I'm mostly down to one. It's called Daddyflix (Jellyfin, actually) and runs on a Mac Mini in my home office. Costs close to zero, is accessible everywhere and there's no ads or other bullshit.
Yeah same. I have an agent running on it, so whenever one of my kids asks to watch something that their friends have told them about it, provided it's not retarded, I tell the agent to go find it and it shows up on the kids TV. No monthly bullshit (apart from the AI supscription I pay for anyway). Automated piracy. I love it.
Which metric of inflation are you adjusting it to? And which assumptions are built into the goods and services measured, as well as their respective weights, of that index?
I am still happy with my decision to never get entertainment subscription services. I buy CDs (that I rip) and BDs (that I let someone else rip, since that's a science in itself). This guarantees me access forever and I get to sell down the line, if I feel like it.
Streaming services do not offer you what you like forever, they offer you what you didn't know about for the amount of time you need to watch it. So these are two different things
There is so much garbage on streaming platforms, I rather research and pay per song/movie than waste time on trash. And that was before AI slop. Only reason I have subscriptions is family (cheap babysitter)
I have a hard time understanding your opinion. What do you even mean by garbage? There's thousands of legitimate music bands/musicians on these platforms. Naturally you won't care for a majority of it, but an interpret being niche doesn't make them garbage.
FWIW I went through a phase of this (feeling like streaming services were full of low grade stuff) until one day when basically nobody seemed to understand me except Amazon Music, which has an almost eerie recommendation mechanism that I think people don’t talk about much because the rest of the app is so meh.
In one single afternoon Amazon
Music served up loads of niche old favourites I had not thought to search for, introduced me to a couple of artists I would not have known existed otherwise, and probably rescued my failing love of music.
I now play a game with it and pick somewhat diametrically opposed aspects of my music tastes in quick succession— Superorganism, Cardiacs, Gavin Bryars, Nanci Griffith, Vivaldi, Anouskha Shankar, say — and then see what it comes up with. Invariably one of the recommendations will be something I already adore and one will change my life.
I stumbled into the Chris Thile multiverse this way, for instance.
Movies and TV shows I can maybe see. There hasn't really be a show that I really wanted to watch for the past... two years, except a few that are on public broadcast or only available on DVD.
Music I don't get, you can't even buy a single CD for the price of a streaming music subscription, unless you buy used, in which case you can get as many as 10 CDs per month.
Video streaming and it's licensing model is horribly horribly broken, there's no reason why I should have three to five subscriptions just so HBO and Netflix can produce yet another drawn out true crime show about someone how got lost half way around the world in 1983.
I'm not questioning not having streaming services. I'm questioning it actually being cheaper than buying physical media in the long term for anyone who listens to more than the occasional song or watches the occasional movie.
If the answer is "I pirate stuff", that's fine. But just be honest about it.
It's absolutely cheaper in the long run for me. I spent a fair bit on my CDs (and digital downloads), sure. But I never need to pay another dime in my life. I'm going to guess that I spent somewhere around $1000 on my music collection. But $13/mo for Spotify for 60 years (if we figure one listens to music from 15-75) is $9360. I'm coming out quite far ahead by owning my music.
If you are someone who wants to frequently listen to new music, then sure, Spotify is cheaper than constantly buying new albums. But I at least don't do that; I listen to the same music I listened to as a teenager and I pick up 0-1 new albums per year. So again, no real advantage to using Spotify.
Tbh just recently I found the full extended version box set of LotR on DVD just lying on the street together with ~dozens more decent movies.
I could probably fund my viewing habits entirely out of found stuff.
As for music; my dad ripped his whole CD collection many years ago, many thousands of CDs; more than I could listen to in a lifetime probably.
Plus I buy music on bandcamp to support a few artists I really like.
Paying for streaming services is just fueling the wholesale of our culture or worse the military industrial complex
You know computers have the ability to compress videos, right?
>Do I really need 4k HDR to enjoy Seinfeld?
No, but the difference between 480p and even 1080p is pretty significant and definitely makes the viewing experience just generally more enjoyable. But that's just Seinfeld, where you can basically close your eyes and guess what is being shown 90% of the time with great accuracy. Where this doesn't work is with movies/shows/etc. where the visual component is important. If you go to a LotR watch party and bring a 480p rip and expect people to watch that, then you might need to get your eyes checked.
Some are 576p and at that point the difference to higher resolutions isn't as pronounced, especially if you sit a fair bit away from a TV that isn't 120".
This is going to vary by age range, right? For anyone over the age of ~35, the percentage has to be way, way higher than the full population, regardless of technical capability.
Some of us owned thousands of albums (or movies, or shows) on physical media before the legal streaming party even started.
Personally, I also listen to a lot of ad-free college radio and watch a lot of online videos. Depending on what type of entertainment you enjoy, it's really not hard to pay next to nothing for it without compromising.
LP's, 8-tracks, cassettes, cd's, mp3 players, etc.
You didn't have the whole world at your hands. You had to pick what to listen to, what to buy, what to carry.
Yes, it's nice having the world available, but also, it's nice being able to sometimes think, ponder, make a decision, and explore that decision.
Based on all the responses, people need to learn to make a decision and live with it for a bit.
- Picked a song and it's not the perfect one? meh, okay.
- Also learn to be in the quiet. Oh, the song is not meh, but bad? Turn it off. It's okay.
- learn to read a book
buy 13 songs a month, every month, for a year, and see how big your library is.
Remembering that a song at full price on itunes store is $1~ and a monthly subscription to spotify is $13
There is a compounding effect, so buying my library as it is today will cost me about $300~, but that's because I've accumulated 300 songs over the course of about 12 years. (300/12) is about $25 per year.
So the delta is $131... for convenience of being able to listen to a new song once or twice and never again.
The irony of course being that if I ever stop paying, I have access to nothing at all.
300 songs is not many at all. I have purchased around 20,000 songs in my life. Would it have been cheaper to use Spotify? I suppose so but (a) they don’t have all the music I want and (b) I prefer having the independence to control my media. Also Spotify didn’t exist when I started :)
300 songs might not sound like many, yet that is how many items have been added to my library or to a playlist in 12 years.
So I can't really speak to anything else than that. That's my usage pattern, yours may be different.
I keep yearly playlists (starting 2023) where I add songs I like and each one is only about 30 songs on average, so that somewhat matches the aggregate number over a decade..
I guess I stick to the things I like and find things I like in DJ sets or on the Gym radio- I'm not investigating new music through subscription services.
I have 15 years worth of songs, account is less than 10 years old. Arguably I would be okay dropping some of those songs if I wanted to buy the songs. The biggest difference for me though is the issue of discoverability. It is very easy for me to find and save new songs on Spotify, it would be much harder for me to find the songs I like if I had to pay for them, especially since a lot of the songs I like are not just songs from popular artists but are often just one of two random songs from random artists. Is there a good middle ground here? I keep a copy of my song list in case I want to ditch Spotify but this is the main hurdle for me.
> buy 13 songs a month, every month, for a year, and see how big your library is.
Sure.
And when I had Spotify I added about that to my liked songs every month.
> There is a compounding effect
That doesn't sound compounding, it sounds like a linear increase of 13 per month.
> for convenience of being able to listen to a new song once or twice and never again.
Yes, that is the advantage of Spotify and other steaming services.
I can listen to dozens of new songs a day, picking out my favorites while being exposed to new music allowing me to find more that I like.
And if I don't like it, meh, didn't cost me anything.
A library of 300 songs is tiny.
I guess you don't listen to much music?
Back before I lived in the city 300 songs would have lasted a week, I'd statistically hear a repeat on the drive home on the first day.
In my last.fm account it says I have listened 122.000 different tracks, I would have gone mad listening for the 300 same songs for 12 years, it would be like torture for me.
I may be in the minority, but I don’t tend to listen to that many different things, even with a streaming music service.
With streaming TV/video ones, honestly, the selection fucking suck for the most part and the free ones seem to have more movies I actually enjoy. If I weren’t getting them for significantly reduced cost through other deals, I would probably cut the ones I have.
I’m not disagreeing that it could be more expensive to buy movies and CDs and certainly less convenient, but to say it’s worth paying these ever-increasing rates is a bit nuts for me when compared to the alternative.
Not everybody listens to music all of the time. I almost never listen to music. I watch few movies and mostly, I rewatch old ones that I like. Paying that amount of money for any subscription to a content faucet (while Youtube is still free, if you absolutely must watch video) sounds crazy to me.
Buying breaking bad on DVD is <3 months of netflix subscription (no ads).
So if you watch <2 seasons per month on average, you already come out ahead, and this is assuming only a single subscription.
People tend to wastly overpay for subscriptions because they end up underutilized and are typically never cancelled quickly enough because people are lazy.
I mean obviously there are people that consume a lot more movie entertainment than the average, but I'm personally getting nowhere close to 70 seasons per year.
Bingewatching occasionally might not be enough to economically justify your subscriptions.
It should be easy to calculate this for your own needs based on your playlists. The advantage of buying is that you build up your own catalog of artists that you listen to regularly which means you don’t have to keep paying for them. So, at first, buying the albums would be more expensive but after a few years it would become much less expensive. The exception would be if you are always looking for the latest tracks by a large number of artists but I don’t think that’s most people.
Older popular music can be purchased second hand or as a various artists album which also saves money.
Our society overconsumes by insane degrees. TBH the world would probably be a better place if most people limited their consumption to what they could reasonably acquire on disk.
As you age, you have less need to grow your collection. You'll also forget about stuff from decades ago and can watch everything again without remembering much of anything.
Similarly, as you age you'll have less time spending on entertainment.
The initial investment might be higher, but it will eventually be cheaper. And you'll curate more instead of mindlessly watching whatever crap there is.
Don't just look at the next decade. Look at the entire rest of your life and keep in mind that inflation made a thirty cent school meal go up to five dollar over the course of someone's life. Your money will continue to lose value, so you'll have to pay more and more for streaming. And you can never stop without losing access to everything and being left with nothing.
It's not way cheaper long-term at all, I mean unless you really watch/listen to a tiny amount of content, you can rip the same way with Netflix, Hulu and so-on as well so I don't see how that makes it more durable?
What you are doing is practically the same equivalent as downloading torrents, how do you have "more guarantees" than just downloading?
PS: I'm saying this because what you are doing is already illegal so there is virtually no difference.
It's definitely cheaper long term for me. I don't watch/listen to a tiny amount of content, but the cost of buying the stuff once and never paying a dime after comes out far ahead of the cost of a subscription every month for life.
I'm not even buying. If governments think my data is worthless and e.g. don't kill the businessmodel behind data brokers, then why should I respect their copyright laws?
I buy movies on Bluray and physical games for the physical annd collecting aspect, but it’s also a gatekeeper to my consumption habits.
I only buy things that I’m really motivated to watch and play, and it makes it much more fulfilling as a result. Netflix turns watching a movie into something that just feels as hollow as doomscrolling Facebook.
They're $20-50 for complete series on dvd on Amazon right now. That's 14-35 new shows to get every year for the same price. I believe it's cheaper. This is why so many companies push subscriptions. If DVDs made them more money than they'd be pushing you to buy them.
I bought some complete series in DVD in the past but, even putting aside the inconvenience of having to manage discs in the player, there's the quality issue.
I got my 1080p copies on the high seas and that's just a whole different experience.
> Are you really buying and watching DVDs in 2026?
> I got my 1080p copies on the high seas and that's just a whole different experience.
There's _a lot_ of stuff that has only ever been available in SD (or equivalent). Some of it was shot on film that could maybe be remastered, but that costs money. Some of the older/less popular stuff wouldn't be profitable if it was remastered (assuming remastering is even possible).
> even putting aside the inconvenience of having to manage discs in the player
No I'm not, but I'm slowly being convinced to. I've started listening to the radio, tape, and records. I don't really consider that inconvenience. Radio is actually more convenient than streaming, it's made me listen to more music.
This strategy could at least amass a huge horde of older media (which I think still constitutes the bulk of GOOD media), if combined with thrift stores, for very cheap. Probably you could profit during the buying & selling of the media.
They all have piles of audiobooks, audio cds, dvds, a blu-rays for $1-$2 each. Sometimes big boxes at yard sales for a few bucks.
I get Netflix HD free for 2 through Tmobile,
Hulu for free from Spotify, for probably about 7 years.
Peacock for free from Xfinity.
HBO Max for $3 for 12 months when Amazon had prime sale last year.
I get prime since I have Amazon prime.
you can stream for free/cheap if you lookout for deals.
Buying CDs would be so much more expensive than my Spotify subscription with the variety of music I listen to.
Another helpful element of the streaming services is no incremental cost to try out a new movie or series. I can start a new show and drop it 15 minutes in if I decide I don’t like it.
Try before you buy is what piracy is for. I would prefer if there was another venue to try before paying, but the industry hasn't figured this out in the past hundred years, so piracy it is.
Streaming could be an acceptable compromise if it was $10 a year for everything in existence, but the catalogues are splintered across multiple services and even when you combine them all there are plenty of things not available.
Try bandcamp (no really it's actually been improving over the years). Also there's still youtube for trying popular ones. Should cover "trying" almost all music legally afaik.
There are a bunch of albums I found on Youtube that I ended up buying, yes. It's only a very small percentage of my collection, though and not generally how I discover new music.
> I can start a new show and drop it 15 minutes in if I decide I don’t like it
IMO, that can also be a problem. When I was young and buying CDs, occasionally you would buy one you didn't like at first. But since you had spent money on it, you'd listen to it. And I discovered some good music that way.
Same thing with movies and tv shows. Sometimes it takes a bit to get going, or I 'm in the wrong mindset for it, but repeated viewing or just sticking with it gets me through that.
My CD collection is around 30 years old. Spotify is currently $13/month. $13 times 30 years is $4680. A lot of people could cover most of what they listen to with that much budgeted to buying CDs... and I'd remind people that the relevant price isn't list price but what you actually pay. Fetching a Michael Jackson album out of a bargain bin for $1 is that album for a $1, whatever someone else somewhere else somewhen else might have paid. I also buy my own movies, and there's a lot of "$5 for the entire Lethal Weapon series collection" sorts of purchases in there.
You're probably objecting to the fact that you don't have 30 years, which is correct, but is also the point of the "long term" part of the comment. Someone who listens to stuff that is on the streaming services and is literally constantly switching between artists and who doesn't mind if some stuff disappears from the services sometimes and so on and so on is perfect for the streaming services, yes. However, the more of those clauses aren't true, the less obviously advantageous the streaming services are, and I don't think most people are sitting down every week and sampling a dozen brand new artists. A lot of people could, with just a bit of care to buy things frugally and used, build a CD collection with $14/month faster than they will want new music.
It can help to jump start a bit and not compare this to building a new collection from scratch. It also helps that such a jump started collection can start by buying the cheap stuff that fills out collections quickly.
On the plus side, the "cosmic jukebox" seems to have mostly worked out for music streaming and most stuff is available from most services, which is a huge point in favor of the music streaming services. In my opinion for movies and TV shows that can be legally acquired (putting aside piracy for the moment) the analysis tips much more heavily in the direction of just building your own collection. I don't even know what it would cost you to buy a month's worth of access to, let's say, 80% of my movie & TV collection (since I have stuff that is just plain not available on streaming at all). They're so fragmented it's insane. And with my rate of consumption of TV, oh, call it $50/month just for a nice round number, that's way more than I'm spending on building out the collection anyhow. Maybe if Hollywood would hire more writers who have taken and passed Writing 101 my consumption rate would increase, but that's not the current situation.
> and I'd remind people that the relevant price isn't list price but what you actually pay. Fetching a Michael Jackson album out of a bargain bin for $1 is that album for a $1,
If going to physical stores, sifting through bargain bins, accepting whatever nobody else wanted, spending the time to physically rip the CD, and hoping that second hand bargain disc wasn’t scratched is your idea of a good time then that’s great for you.
I will pay $4680 over 30 years of my life to not have to deal with that and to be able to listen to anything I want whenever I want without having to manage a library or streaming setup.
That honestly sounds like a bargain when I consider the time saved over 30 years!
Once your collection is built, thirty years down the line, you'll add less than five CDs per year. With streaming however, you'll end up paying a whole lot more than $5000 for the next 30 years, thanks to inflation. If you started this journey at 20 years old, you'll only be 80 after 60 years of streaming, but you might get to live until 110 and get to pay for yet another 30 years, which you may not be able to afford at that point in your life anymore.
There's also an interesting side effect of owning limited media that streaming advocates overlook.
When you own 3 albums, you'll listen to them more often. You will put more effort into memorizing them. You'll listen to the tracks that were not designed to be radio hits by a committee but were instead the songs the band came up with on their own.
You get way more out of your investment when you invest mentally and emotionally into the full spectrum of their music.
This guy is talking about finding 20 new bands a month. He's not getting anything out of it other than a mild dopamine hit, and he thinks he's somehow cool for that?
It's like being a connoisseur of children's cereal and never having home cooked steak and eggs for breakfast. It's like bragging about your weight loss journey because you started smoking crack.
Is that a good thing? One of the benefits to streaming for me is precisely that I don't want to get stuck being an old guy who just listens to music from when I was a teenager/young adult. 20 new bands per month is certainly excessive, but with the radio long-dead, how do you discover new music without some kind of streaming service?
Music stores still exist. Many of them have setups that let you listen to clips from new albums as well. You can also buy secondhand albums at thrift stores and pawn shops, or trade with others.
Friends might mention a band they enjoy, or you might hear a snippet on a video and look into it. Movie soundtracks occasionally have great music from well-established bands I've never heard of.
And you can go to live shows and check out local artists, buy their merch if they're any good.
Streaming is not the only way. Never has been, and never will be.
As far as your first question, is that a good thing, it's entirely subjective. But listening to a full album when you only "like" one song on it will expose you to new music, and might broaden your horizons or help you develop taste.
You have to actually look not just get spoon fed by the algorithm. Community is how you find music. Subreddits, forums, record stores. You find reviewers with similar tastes and see what they like. You search “bands like X” on the Internet. You keep up with artists you like and watch for new albums. It’s more active than just letting the algorithm feed you stuff but it works. Also radio still exists and public radio especially is still great for discovery.
Or if you’re ripping your CDs and listening via apps you can just scrobble and get algo recommendations still while owning your music and without a monthly fee.
"You'll listen to the tracks that were not designed to be radio hits by a committee but were instead the songs the band came up with on their own."
And amplifying that, we see more and more "built for streaming" music, which is not the sort of music I want to listen to. I have phrased that carefully; it is a personal opinion and I won't criticize anyone who discovers that actually, yes, generic AI rock that is pumped out by the hour is something they find some use for. I could see someone who wouldn't want to "listen" to that with intentionality finding it useful to code to or as background noise in their life or something. But it's not what I want, and unless the streaming services do something about it it is what is going to dominate their platforms over time.
I don't go in for super deep relationships with the musicians, reading about their histories and stuff, but I do enjoy the way that the music I like most on first listen often pales quickly and the tracks that I initially didn't like very well become my favorites.
to add some context from "the other side": last year, i listened to 2930 distinct albums of which 50% were albums I had not listened to before. Even on a 30 year timeframe and a good discount factor for album repetition I don't think I can fit into the budget you propose without making significant concessions in my discovery process.
I don't think that logic really holds but its pushed by spotify. People used to listen to a lot of varied music -- and theres a lot of ways to do that still without paying for spotify.
Anyways Spotify is just a platform/gatekeeper for record labels to push their products and theres no way that spotify prices ever become static. They will need to continue to push more products through the model to continue to grow and pay for company especially as all the other players have wizened up.
FWIW if you lapse in payment they kill all your downloaded content immediately. Super annoying service. I get why but like 10 days after probably about 10 years of subscription seems like a real jerk move. Even content that wasn't theirs and was mine -- they wiped it. You own nothing.
I don’t think you’re in the majority? 20 new bands a week is… I’ve met music lovers with hi-fi setups that maybe try 3 new albums a week! That’s really quite a lot.
If I enjoy an album, I’ll listen to it some 15-20 times before picking favourite songs or simply moving on. What you’re describing sounds more like consuming albums, not enjoying them. My 2 cents :)
> 20 new bands a week is… I’ve met music lovers with hi-fi setups that maybe try 3 new albums a week! That’s really quite a lot.
If you’re thinking albums and hi-fi setups, it would be a lot!
A valuable part of streaming services is the recommendation engine. Spotify generates a new playlist called Discover Weekly that has songs and bands loosely related to what I’ve been listening to. I turn it on while I do yardwork. If I like something I pause and add it to a playlist.
It also has options to continue playing related music when your playlist runs out. You can also enable a mode that mixes suggestions in between songs in your playlist to mix it up.
I’ve discovered a lot of new music this way. It’s probably great for small bands who have good music but lack a marketing budget to get it out there.
I just always cancel my subscription directly after subscribing. So only pay for a month basically. A new show is out that you want to watch, subscribe, cancel directly, watch it. And just repeat when the next season is out. I never understood why people maintain their subscription across multiple services
Because it's a pain to mess around subscribing/cancelling over and over. Time is far more valuable than money and the older I get the more the disparity grows.
If so, the writer is grossly overestimating my techie skilz. WAY longer than 30 seconds for each action. More like 5 minutes. Consider that I had to ask for help to decode "30s."
You could be presenting the most carefully-researched information in the world, but with such an obviously vibecoded site I'm not going to attempt to read it.
You could be presenting the most carefully-researched text in the world, but with such obviously machine made paper I'm not going to attempt to read it.
FrontPage didn't generate your content for you! So there was no reason to assume a FrontPage page might be meaningless just from how it looked. For AI-generated sites, though, if the page looks like slop, is it worth bothering to figure out if it actually is slop? It's not like they're uncorrelated variables. Sure, occasionally it won't be. But I'm drowning here. I must simply assume that if someone is serious about conveying a message, they won't package it in this form.
The TV license is insane to me, as a non-brit moving to the uk.
I am happy to pay a reasonable price for something I use.
But the threats I get about a GBP 1,000 is very un-british.
I don't know who runs the TV licensing scheme but they need to be sacked.
Thankfully if you can look past this gamesmanship then it is possible to call them and decline to participate in this nonsense.
The "licensing" has a point because it does make the BBC more impartial since the current government cannot adjust their funding down or up depending on their programming.
However, the same aim could be achieved by just setting a formula in law. 1 pound per british citizen, or 0.0001% of the average income per citizen last year. Numbers pulled out of ass as i have no idea what an UK tv license costs. As long as they make the formula extremely hard to change, it will work.
"TV licensing" exists in a lot of countries and it funds the public service broadcaster. It is essentially a tax, it just happens to be collected by a third party (in this case, Crapita) rather than other tax collecting mechanisms.
Some countries (like Finland or Switzerland) require you to pay it even if you don't own a TV. It's really just a tax.
The reasoning for it not being a tax is that the public service broadcaster should have political independence from the government. Most people don't want their country to have a "government mouthpiece" state broadcaster, and it is much easier for the government to tell the broadcaster what to do and say by fucking with its funding if it's directly funded from the treasury.
Other countries do the same thing with a different trick, such as inserting it into your electricity bill.
The UK is a powerhouse in media production, part of that is due to the BBC funding all sorts of productions, both the visible (actors, etc.) and the invisble (camera operators, set designers, costumers, writers, directors...).
It has also been clear for centuries that private media, historically just the newspapers, but now TV channels, film studios, etc., have been disastrous, as their private owners either focus on profitability and pump out scandal and lurid stories, or if they've made their millions some other way, they run a paper in order to pump out biased propaganda. So a state-funded but not state-controlled broadcaster is an ideal thing to have.
> the fourth I have to take due to state apparatus' nagging and legal threats.
I get a letter every month from the licencing people, it just goes in the bin. I've had 1 visit, he asked to come in, I said no. That was basically the end of it.
(For the record, I have a TV but I currently have no way to watch live TV on it, so why should I have a licence! I don't use their service)
Some of it is a function of my household's love of sports, and their fragmentation across the services. Some of its just sheer laziness to pick one and stick with it or rotate the subscriptions.
I don't think I could realistically drop lower than 3 on this list though: Spotify gets used constantly. One TV/Video streaming service. My wife would likely divorce me if I cancelled YouTube Premium.
I think the point is that inflation numbers are bs. The official number from 2021 to today is 23%. But we didn't see prices only 23%. A restaurant mean didn't go from $20 to $25. It easily went up 50% or more.
Inflation isn't some force of nature that needs to be accounted for like the curvature of the earth.
When the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right.
There's literally trillions at stake for under-reporting these numbers. A lot of government benefits are tied to this not to mention political ramifications of high inflation. So I'll go with vibes (i.e. experienced reality) over some government re-balanced basket formula
Agreed, $95.91 a month in 2021-03 is $120.91 in July 2026 dollars. The current cost is $154.41, so it grew $33.50 a month after accounting for inflation.
Are you saying that a single data point contains the same amount of information as a dataset of hundreds if not thousands of entries from across the economy?
Completely wrong. CPI is based on the prices of all things people buy. Comparing inflation in one sector to inflation in the whole economy is a very useful signal.
No, it's like making a snow report for a handful of skiing areas in a small geographical area (e.g. Sierras) and then contextualizing it against the snow report for all skiing areas in the broader region (e.g. Western US).
Context matters, because absent it folks will look at these increases and shrug it off as inflation (or let companies shrug it off with that excuse).
To truly contextualize it, we need to understand the total value (library sizes, removed/lost media, household/account sharing costs) relative to its price, and relative to background inflation. We need to understand relative to costs (labor, infrastructure, royalties), to profits, and how industry consolidation has or has not affected these data points.
From my own understanding of the wider context, there’s a significant attribution of costs to naked greed and profit extraction rather than overall value. With job displacement due to AI (despite union contracts), the tearing down of series or films due to CEO preference (looking at you, Zaslav), the overlap of libraries (Hulu and Disney are increasingly the same thing; Hulu/Disney/Peacock are the same thing as Hulu alone was just seven years ago), the punitive measures against account sharing, and with the forcing of advertisements onto previously ad-free platforms or pricing tiers, the overall cost relative to societal value has decreased while value to executives and shareholders has increased, and that’s the real takeaway.
Important context here is that many of these streaming services operated at a loss for years, and some still are. HBO Max didn’t turn a profit until 2023 and Disney only become profitable in 2024 after bundling with Hulu. AFAIK Paramount+ and Peacock are still in the red.
Point being, the introductory prices for these services were always unsustainable.
Is that important context? I would say it's not. What if those companies already made massive profits and said "I think people are willing to pay more for this, so I'm going to raise the price." And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. I've raised the price of my services many times in my career for exactly the same reason.
They are the ones who set the market so that’s on them. They are the ones who set what people were willing to tolerate. If it’s not sustainable, then it’s not a good business. They aren’t entitled to existing.
Armchair theories on paramount and peacock, so take with a mountain of salt:
Paramount will probably stay in the red because they are overly-catering to conservatives (a little too much emphasis on baby boomers as well), narrowing their potential audience.
Peacock just doesn’t have enough going for it period. Weak library and not a real first tier consideration for folks
In the old torrent days I was only watching classical masterpieces and top level world directors. In the streaming era I only watch mediocre straight-to-streaming movies, few popular TV series and too much reality TV that I'm not proud to watch.
Realistically you don't absolutely need a VPS to run your own tunnel through for bittorrent. You can do something like install a virtualbox machine that mounts your local samba file share across the LAN (to store downloaded stuff), and otherwise has a default route outbound to the world through a $5/mo VPN that exits to the Internet in like, Chișinău Moldova. Or similar.
The main thing to worry about is using a bittorrent client that knows to 'stop' immediately if it's no longer on the VPN.
From an aesthetic point of view, I am getting pretty tired of this obviously LLM generated static site content template design in 2025/2026.
98% of the time when I see one of these it's a bunch of "content" generated by Claude or similar.
Quoting the site: "Written by Rashid N. Rashid N is the editor of HonestlyRanked. He reviews every figure this site publishes against its source before it goes out, and has never accepted a free account, a review unit, or payment for placement. Rashid N is a pen name; see our methodology page. "
I would bet good money that "Rashid N. Rashid N" is busy being a meat-puppet for an LLM to produce plausible sounding content. To exactly what end, I'm not sure.
Why can't anyone just run it through one of the "make this not appear so clearly LLM-generated" obfuscation utilities open sourced on GitHub, or something similar just with prompts.
The level of phoning in the complete lack of any work beyond the absolute bare minimum is the most frustrating aspect to me.
If you create content that people like, with a distinct style, one can direct their LLM to it and copy the style. The more content you have out there the better the copy will be. I don’t think it’s really a differentiation you can rely upon
The world you are describing assumes nobody will produce anything anymore because of theft. I think there will be a reset and hopefully content producers like Mr Beast will lose out. But, I do not think people, similar to the original participants on the Internet, will refuse to make anything. I expect a return to Live journal similar content where we get actual opinions even if we sadly lose out on long tail content/production because people do not want to work hard for free. The return of the hobby style Internet isn't necessarily bad.
> The world you are describing assumes nobody will produce anything anymore because of theft.
I don’t believe that at all, and it’s not implied in my comments. What I’m saying is that the value isn’t in the style, that part can also be replicated. It’s not in the content, that can be replicated. It’s the same for >90% of startup ideas people come up with when discovering agent coding. You were able to create a cool SaaS project in a weekend? Congrats. Any other dev can point their LLM to your website/app and make a clone in even less time. The safe ones have a high barrier of entry, such as hardware, or similar, but the vast majority is trivially cloneable.
I don’t know what that will result in. I assume we will be chasing more human experiences, but I have no idea.
I would say, because not everyone cares as deeply as you do.
If it's readable and aesthetic, it is perfectly serviceable for the purpose of reading a post.
Consider that you probably didn't have such an intense response to WIX templates or substack articles, so most of what's going on is actually your feelings about AI taking primacy.
> Consider that you probably didn't have such an intense response to WIX templates or substack articles
Apologism at best. People have been bemoaning this issue for a while now..., pre-AI even.
First time I'm seeing this defended from an "oh you're just anti AI" perspective (which, ironically, is exactly the sort of bare minimum a couple comments over was bemoaning)
Looks like every other website to me, even before Claude was a thing. IMHO new sites have looked like this for a long time.
I think it's less of a distinct aesthetic rather than having "Tells" in the template that you might be sensitive to for having worked with it.
I've seen word documents that the first time I saw them I thought nothing of it. Wasn't until I had ChatGPT work on something later and noticed it's exact use of particular fonts and colors that I realized the other was AI generated.
There was nothing materially wrong with the documents, but after seeing the connection you can't unsee it. It's not really a new or AI specific phenomenon either, any template can trigger it. like how every RPG maker game looks the same, or every substack blogs all are samey, even on custom domains.
I can understand that its tiresome, but its also not new.
Every medium, livejournal, blogger, etc page in the look nearly exactly the same. Or Twitter Bootstrap sites.
I'll give them some credit here: its at least been worked into a terse format unlike a lot of the docs I get from people who seem to think AI's ability to add verbosity is somehow a virtue.
Honestly, this feels like we're in the Geocities era again. Tons of people are making stuff again.
I'm excited by that.
And even LLM design tropes are better than seeing the same platform design on every page. The same Instagram, Reddit, X pages over and over and over forever. It's monotonous design. Platforms suck in more ways than that, though - you're forced into their constraints, algo bait, spam, hyper-drama, Reddit mods, contrarian view downvoting, etc.
It feels like we're entering the 90's - 2008 era again. The indie web. Microformats and self-distribution and hacking and remixing.
Interesting, as someone who started making sites on geocities I don't find this anything the same. I remember learning tons about weird little niche hobbies and making little learning sites and stuff with my own brand of weird Photoshop graphics.
An llm making the exact same layouts for everyone with obviously zero input from anyone who cares seems absolutely nothing like the old geocities days.
This couldn't be further from the truth. The indie web was exciting because it was the product of distinct human voices. LLMs only speak in one voice (with subtle differences between the major models but similar "tells"). This is why so many people have such an immediate and visceral negative reaction to AI slop. It is distinctly lacking the human spark and it is uncanny and off-putting in that way.
Looking the same is not itself the problem. This is a same-looking that indicates a lack of human thought underlying it. That is a problem, and it is concerning to me if one does not think this.
Even the URL captures the ubiquitous "honestly / genuinely / let me be up front" verbal tick that Claude can't resist. That is, "Rashid" likely couldn't even be bothered to come up with his own website name. I hate it.
Also the dark theme is something not everybody likes. Especially with red-green inside. Think of color-blind people. My eyes are in pain from just trying to focus.
That's the surprising part. It's pretty obviously spit out by /frontend-design, the tells are too obvious because Claude has built me too many of these, but /frontend-design by default will give you both a dark and a light theme and make it adapt to system theme with no prompting at all, so why would someone build a lazy stock /frontend-design but override that specifically?
Very very small fonts is one of the things that annoys me most; truly a sign that design-based post-training is in the hands of the young and inexperienced. Far too many AI-generated site designs look like a teenage fan site designer trying to do “corporate”
I'm surprised that with the complaints that companies trained on everything that it results in the LLM having aesthetic preferences. With all of the templates available on sites like Wix or Square, you'd think generated sites would have more variety. Then again, I have no idea what the prompts are that generate these sites to know if there's something that gives the generator the notion the style is the one people want.
Me. Because if there's no human checking the content I don't actually have a reliable signal that what I'm reading is true.
I'm not a subject matter expert here but I know that list includes Disney+ at $18.99 and Hulu at $18.99... but Disney and Hulu bundled together is $19.99. From the exact source the site cites:
Lots of people. Even on HN, which is wildly unrepresentative of the US as a whole, comments that "this site was AI-generated" are commonly upvoted to the top because people do care.
That includes me. If it's AI-generated, I don't care about it - if it wasn't worth their time to write, it's not worth my time to read. I can generate it myself.
> The content is what’s interesting
If it's generated, the odds of it being wrong are far higher, because people who publish generated content are far less likely to care about quality or correctness.
Where do you consider the line here to be? What if the design and the core code is mine but I use AI to apply it to additional elements, pages, etc (something I do a fair amount)? What if I designed, or had a very good human designer design, an entire well-crafted design system and design language in Figma but feed it to AI to help turn it into static assets?
What if all I used AI for was to more quickly drive tedious work, like mass-change colors, preview variants, or export assets?
Is it the replacement of the creative aspects of a craft with AI when I lose your interest, or is it the moment I utilize it at all?
You don’t get it do you?
The content is wrong and this aesthetic means: you cannot trust this.
As someone who makes a living making website I wouldn’t have expected the tide to turn so fast.
Clients now hire me to absolutely NOT have this aesthetic
> I’m not meaning to be abrasive here, but these comments are also getting old and tired.
I always check the comment section first because I do not wish to engage with slop content.
> The content is what’s interesting, and it is.
Can you trust AI content at face value? No you can't. AI has been shown time and time again to just hallucinate shit out of thin air.
And that is why I want to avoid interacting with any kind of GenAI/LLM/... garbage. I always find the need to second-check whatever I'm reading and it is highly annoying.
Another issue is that "This site was made with AI" just doesn't really add much to the conversation. There will very likely come a time soon when 95-99% of the sites that make the HN front page will be AI-assisted or AI-generated. What are these people going to do? Comment "This site was made with AI" on every single article? Why not just add a disclaimer to the top of HN that says "Most of these articles are made with AI" so the commenters don't have to log in just to tell us each and every time?
I used to get downvoted when I complained that a site uses 6 point font, or when it renders all of its text in a small 5cm vertical strip down the middle of the page, or when it didn't work without JavaScript... and all my other personal bug-a-boos. I stopped because I realized those comments add nothing to the conversation.
As long as these comments come up, people haven't given up against this flood. It's a good sign. Also consider cause and effect. These comments only exist because of AI content.
> Using AI to spit out cookie cutter layouts is fine, offloading your thinking onto AI is not something I support.
This is the core of the problem, I have absolutely no confidence that any of the specific number figures or parameters listed anywhere in the website are factual. For all I know they're AI hallucinations. Or wildly out of date based on the final training date of some model. It absolutely does not look like data that somebody collected "by hand" and verified as true.
1. Paying subscription for temporarily available content(i.e. pulled shows or music) is not viable for me.
2. They operate in a winner-takes-all model, so the movies/actors/producers/musicians(especially) get nothing out of me if they are not the most popular ones(which they aren't).
With that in mind - it's their choice. If the above-mentioned decide to sell digital copies, I'll gladly pay for them and download them(last purchase from a few weeks ago). If not - pirating it is.
They do seem to make it easy to push people over any moral objection to piracy. Often more because of fragmentation than price, but pushing the price makes it easier. And the platforms (Jellyfin as one example) make sharing what you have with family/friends easier now also.
I don't have a great view, though, whether this is even visible to the streaming platforms. I suspect they don't really lose much notable revenue from piracy anymore. While it's matured some recently, it's not as easy as "download limewire".
I'm not fully convinced here. Objectively it's a lot easier than it was 15 years ago and that is partially because now more people have the skills to expand the ecosystem and the resources to focus on creature comforts. Since 2022 and the last 2 years more than ever, I decided to cut ties to all cloud providers and host everything myself for 4 reasons:
1. I have 0 trust in software companies to have the ability to protect my data, even if they have the best intentions. Partially because of 2
2. AI: everything has to be fed into it, whatever it spits out is treated as gospel by most tech companies and people that 10 years ago were taught to question everything.
3. Price.
4. It is actually easy to setup and if you put in some real thinking into it, it becomes both secure and easy to pass around. Jellyfin is a good example. I installed wireguard on my mum's computer, "double click this, click this button, open your browser, click on this icon" and she has access to my library.
Part of the reason for the overinflated prices and budget cuts in those exact companies is this exact thing: many people got fed up with minor convenience at an ever-increasing price and "amazon for this, netflix for that". Many of us grew up pirating because we had no other choice. Now we do have a choice but instead of a decent trade-off in price-vs-convenience, we got a price to pay and ultimately a ton of inconvenience.
I meant "easy for a non technical person to use". Things like limewire were dead easy back in the beginning. The isps were not paying attention, so you did not need a VPN, there was no setup or anything it worked right after you downloaded it. So it spread in a socially viral like way very quickly. And was being used by fairly non-technical people without assistance.
Jokes aside, luckily for me, I live in a country where torrenting isn't illegal at all and frankly, everyone working for the public sector is too incompetent to do anything about it, even if it were. For example, I know a guy who was taken for investigation cause something dodgy happened from his IP (he hosted a tor exit node) and the investigators had their brains blown when he showed them that tor exit nodes were public information cause they had no idea. At that moment he said "guys, are my taxes seriously going towards your salaries?". At that point they just gave up and send him off.
We noticed this also for the online software services that we use. Many of them increased in price, which I can understand with rising costs. However, a large number of them also have/introduced a 'hostile' structure that force you into paying through the nose. Case in point was the timesheet software that we used:
* They increased the cost of all price tiers.
* They moved features from lower tiers to higher tiers, forcing you to pay more.
* And this all was leveraged via "per seat" pricing. So a modest increase in price quickly becomes a lot, simply because of the multiplicative nature of per-seat pricing.
This per-seat pricing is especially absurd to us. To run the software it makes little difference whether there are 3 users or 6 users, yet the total cost of those 3 additional users was an additional 500 dollars! This got so out of hand that we decided to build our own timesheet software, which we now happily use. I have always seen software as the promise that you only need to build it once, and can reuse and leverage it many times over to reduce your costs. However, this does NOT seem to be the case anymore.
You see the same in streaming services: limits on the amount of devices you can have in your family, moving features into higher cost tiers, and so on...
To play devil's advocate a bit: running software isn't free. If you're paying for an online service, the hosting cost to the company does scale per-seat. It's easy to say that the company only paid the cost of development once (and even then, more users = more development demand), but you're not a user of a single unit of developed software.
For streaming services, I think the development-hosting needle swings way towards hosting. Streaming video is the vast majority of their costs and efforts, so scaling prices per-user is the only sensible option. The "software" of those services is bad and interchangeable, and not what anyone wants or is paying for in the first place.
That may be the case but they are getting so aggressive that I am constantly having to reconfirm devices within my own home. Luckily I just run my own server now but we have HBO for free with my cell plan so that’s the ones subscription we still have. I have to do email 2FA probably every 4th or 5th time we open it because it’s on “too many devices.”
Taking Netflix as example - it has been going downhill steadily, they have a habit of canceling good shows after one or two seasons etc. It is no wonder users get annoyed when they have to pay more over time, and get less for their money. Increasing prices is never going to be popular even when it is justified, but users are more likely to tolerate if the price increase comes with better features or at minimum, no drop in features/quality.
Another egregious thing these subscriptions do is all kinds of dark patterns. Making it super easy to subscribe but super hard to cancel, not informing before charging (how hard can it be to send an email "upcoming charge next week"), showing ads in supposedly "ad-free" services etc. All this just add to the frustration which leads users to cancel.
To play devil's advocate against your DA argument: the guy you're replying to already knows the costs of 6 seats. He said he built his own software to replace it.
He knows better than you do what he had to replace, because he did exactly that.
I don't see what bearing the point you're trying to make has on the above comment. The question is not "how much it costs", the question is whether or not it's reasonable for a company to institute per-seat pricing. I think it is, if you're using that company's hosted service, since the hosting burden for them does scale per-seat.
It might be related to us financing their datacenters. Microsoft did it with 365 after the introduction of Copilot for example: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eYVPThx7yss
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[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 16.4 ms ] threadIn the US, you don't even need to pay a licensing fee when you buy a DVD with intent to rent it out to people (this is not the case in the UK), thanks to the "First-sale doctrine" - Bobbs-Merrill v. Straus (1908).
The Library does DVD rentals too, I check it out every couple of months.
It's even better in Toronto, Bay Street Video is an institution.
More importantly, it does not solve the problem of ownership. We don't own a rented disc just as much as we don't own a DRM-controlled digital purchase that can only be accessed via the subscription portal it was purchased on.
2/ consume free streaming (tt, ig, YouTube, etc)
Just don’t watch movies at home.
They seem to have gotten away with it so far, so there's no legal protection for "buying" digital at the moment.
It is way cheaper long term.
How few songs do you listen to, and movies/shows do you watch, for this to possibly be true?
Also, the company has a pretty terrible leadership: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2025-...
In one single afternoon Amazon Music served up loads of niche old favourites I had not thought to search for, introduced me to a couple of artists I would not have known existed otherwise, and probably rescued my failing love of music.
I now play a game with it and pick somewhat diametrically opposed aspects of my music tastes in quick succession— Superorganism, Cardiacs, Gavin Bryars, Nanci Griffith, Vivaldi, Anouskha Shankar, say — and then see what it comes up with. Invariably one of the recommendations will be something I already adore and one will change my life.
I stumbled into the Chris Thile multiverse this way, for instance.
Music I don't get, you can't even buy a single CD for the price of a streaming music subscription, unless you buy used, in which case you can get as many as 10 CDs per month.
Video streaming and it's licensing model is horribly horribly broken, there's no reason why I should have three to five subscriptions just so HBO and Netflix can produce yet another drawn out true crime show about someone how got lost half way around the world in 1983.
Right, so then how you really access most of your your music is through advertising or ad-blocking, not CDs.
This is not that unusual. I also have never had any of these, or any other, streaming services. It's been wonderful.
If the answer is "I pirate stuff", that's fine. But just be honest about it.
If you are someone who wants to frequently listen to new music, then sure, Spotify is cheaper than constantly buying new albums. But I at least don't do that; I listen to the same music I listened to as a teenager and I pick up 0-1 new albums per year. So again, no real advantage to using Spotify.
As for music; my dad ripped his whole CD collection many years ago, many thousands of CDs; more than I could listen to in a lifetime probably.
Plus I buy music on bandcamp to support a few artists I really like.
Paying for streaming services is just fueling the wholesale of our culture or worse the military industrial complex
Besides being a plight for culture and enemies of artists Spotify is quite a bad collection too.
But you are right that many of the my dads CDs cant be found on streaming services.
People don’t even realise what they lost, but then again they probably don’t care either way
You know computers have the ability to compress videos, right?
>Do I really need 4k HDR to enjoy Seinfeld?
No, but the difference between 480p and even 1080p is pretty significant and definitely makes the viewing experience just generally more enjoyable. But that's just Seinfeld, where you can basically close your eyes and guess what is being shown 90% of the time with great accuracy. Where this doesn't work is with movies/shows/etc. where the visual component is important. If you go to a LotR watch party and bring a 480p rip and expect people to watch that, then you might need to get your eyes checked.
Plus no more buffering or streaming artifacts.
Unfortunately, though, very few DVDs are 576p.
Percent of non-HN users who've ever ripped a CD: Negligible
Personally, I also listen to a lot of ad-free college radio and watch a lot of online videos. Depending on what type of entertainment you enjoy, it's really not hard to pay next to nothing for it without compromising.
LP's, 8-tracks, cassettes, cd's, mp3 players, etc.
You didn't have the whole world at your hands. You had to pick what to listen to, what to buy, what to carry.
Yes, it's nice having the world available, but also, it's nice being able to sometimes think, ponder, make a decision, and explore that decision.
Based on all the responses, people need to learn to make a decision and live with it for a bit.
- Picked a song and it's not the perfect one? meh, okay. - Also learn to be in the quiet. Oh, the song is not meh, but bad? Turn it off. It's okay. - learn to read a book
Remembering that a song at full price on itunes store is $1~ and a monthly subscription to spotify is $13
There is a compounding effect, so buying my library as it is today will cost me about $300~, but that's because I've accumulated 300 songs over the course of about 12 years. (300/12) is about $25 per year.
So the delta is $131... for convenience of being able to listen to a new song once or twice and never again.
The irony of course being that if I ever stop paying, I have access to nothing at all.
So I can't really speak to anything else than that. That's my usage pattern, yours may be different.
I keep yearly playlists (starting 2023) where I add songs I like and each one is only about 30 songs on average, so that somewhat matches the aggregate number over a decade..
I guess I stick to the things I like and find things I like in DJ sets or on the Gym radio- I'm not investigating new music through subscription services.
> buy 13 songs a month, every month, for a year, and see how big your library is.
Sure. And when I had Spotify I added about that to my liked songs every month.
> There is a compounding effect
That doesn't sound compounding, it sounds like a linear increase of 13 per month.
> for convenience of being able to listen to a new song once or twice and never again.
Yes, that is the advantage of Spotify and other steaming services. I can listen to dozens of new songs a day, picking out my favorites while being exposed to new music allowing me to find more that I like. And if I don't like it, meh, didn't cost me anything.
A library of 300 songs is tiny. I guess you don't listen to much music? Back before I lived in the city 300 songs would have lasted a week, I'd statistically hear a repeat on the drive home on the first day.
With streaming TV/video ones, honestly, the selection fucking suck for the most part and the free ones seem to have more movies I actually enjoy. If I weren’t getting them for significantly reduced cost through other deals, I would probably cut the ones I have.
I’m not disagreeing that it could be more expensive to buy movies and CDs and certainly less convenient, but to say it’s worth paying these ever-increasing rates is a bit nuts for me when compared to the alternative.
Until Sam Altman disrupted the entire computer economy, HDDs were cheap and when you replace your desktop, the old one becomes a server.
So if you watch <2 seasons per month on average, you already come out ahead, and this is assuming only a single subscription.
People tend to wastly overpay for subscriptions because they end up underutilized and are typically never cancelled quickly enough because people are lazy.
I mean obviously there are people that consume a lot more movie entertainment than the average, but I'm personally getting nowhere close to 70 seasons per year.
Bingewatching occasionally might not be enough to economically justify your subscriptions.
Older popular music can be purchased second hand or as a various artists album which also saves money.
Similarly, as you age you'll have less time spending on entertainment. The initial investment might be higher, but it will eventually be cheaper. And you'll curate more instead of mindlessly watching whatever crap there is.
Don't just look at the next decade. Look at the entire rest of your life and keep in mind that inflation made a thirty cent school meal go up to five dollar over the course of someone's life. Your money will continue to lose value, so you'll have to pay more and more for streaming. And you can never stop without losing access to everything and being left with nothing.
What you are doing is practically the same equivalent as downloading torrents, how do you have "more guarantees" than just downloading?
PS: I'm saying this because what you are doing is already illegal so there is virtually no difference.
I own many of my favourites in this way.
I only buy things that I’m really motivated to watch and play, and it makes it much more fulfilling as a result. Netflix turns watching a movie into something that just feels as hollow as doomscrolling Facebook.
I would think this is only true if you watch a small number of shows and rewatch them often
I bought some complete series in DVD in the past but, even putting aside the inconvenience of having to manage discs in the player, there's the quality issue.
I got my 1080p copies on the high seas and that's just a whole different experience.
There's _a lot_ of stuff that has only ever been available in SD (or equivalent). Some of it was shot on film that could maybe be remastered, but that costs money. Some of the older/less popular stuff wouldn't be profitable if it was remastered (assuming remastering is even possible).
> even putting aside the inconvenience of having to manage discs in the player
You're allowed to rip media that you bought
They all have piles of audiobooks, audio cds, dvds, a blu-rays for $1-$2 each. Sometimes big boxes at yard sales for a few bucks.
you can stream for free/cheap if you lookout for deals.
Buying CDs would be so much more expensive than my Spotify subscription with the variety of music I listen to.
Another helpful element of the streaming services is no incremental cost to try out a new movie or series. I can start a new show and drop it 15 minutes in if I decide I don’t like it.
Streaming could be an acceptable compromise if it was $10 a year for everything in existence, but the catalogues are splintered across multiple services and even when you combine them all there are plenty of things not available.
IMO, that can also be a problem. When I was young and buying CDs, occasionally you would buy one you didn't like at first. But since you had spent money on it, you'd listen to it. And I discovered some good music that way.
Same thing with movies and tv shows. Sometimes it takes a bit to get going, or I 'm in the wrong mindset for it, but repeated viewing or just sticking with it gets me through that.
You're probably objecting to the fact that you don't have 30 years, which is correct, but is also the point of the "long term" part of the comment. Someone who listens to stuff that is on the streaming services and is literally constantly switching between artists and who doesn't mind if some stuff disappears from the services sometimes and so on and so on is perfect for the streaming services, yes. However, the more of those clauses aren't true, the less obviously advantageous the streaming services are, and I don't think most people are sitting down every week and sampling a dozen brand new artists. A lot of people could, with just a bit of care to buy things frugally and used, build a CD collection with $14/month faster than they will want new music.
It can help to jump start a bit and not compare this to building a new collection from scratch. It also helps that such a jump started collection can start by buying the cheap stuff that fills out collections quickly.
On the plus side, the "cosmic jukebox" seems to have mostly worked out for music streaming and most stuff is available from most services, which is a huge point in favor of the music streaming services. In my opinion for movies and TV shows that can be legally acquired (putting aside piracy for the moment) the analysis tips much more heavily in the direction of just building your own collection. I don't even know what it would cost you to buy a month's worth of access to, let's say, 80% of my movie & TV collection (since I have stuff that is just plain not available on streaming at all). They're so fragmented it's insane. And with my rate of consumption of TV, oh, call it $50/month just for a nice round number, that's way more than I'm spending on building out the collection anyhow. Maybe if Hollywood would hire more writers who have taken and passed Writing 101 my consumption rate would increase, but that's not the current situation.
If going to physical stores, sifting through bargain bins, accepting whatever nobody else wanted, spending the time to physically rip the CD, and hoping that second hand bargain disc wasn’t scratched is your idea of a good time then that’s great for you.
I will pay $4680 over 30 years of my life to not have to deal with that and to be able to listen to anything I want whenever I want without having to manage a library or streaming setup.
That honestly sounds like a bargain when I consider the time saved over 30 years!
When you own 3 albums, you'll listen to them more often. You will put more effort into memorizing them. You'll listen to the tracks that were not designed to be radio hits by a committee but were instead the songs the band came up with on their own.
You get way more out of your investment when you invest mentally and emotionally into the full spectrum of their music.
This guy is talking about finding 20 new bands a month. He's not getting anything out of it other than a mild dopamine hit, and he thinks he's somehow cool for that?
It's like being a connoisseur of children's cereal and never having home cooked steak and eggs for breakfast. It's like bragging about your weight loss journey because you started smoking crack.
Friends might mention a band they enjoy, or you might hear a snippet on a video and look into it. Movie soundtracks occasionally have great music from well-established bands I've never heard of.
And you can go to live shows and check out local artists, buy their merch if they're any good.
Streaming is not the only way. Never has been, and never will be.
As far as your first question, is that a good thing, it's entirely subjective. But listening to a full album when you only "like" one song on it will expose you to new music, and might broaden your horizons or help you develop taste.
Or if you’re ripping your CDs and listening via apps you can just scrobble and get algo recommendations still while owning your music and without a monthly fee.
And amplifying that, we see more and more "built for streaming" music, which is not the sort of music I want to listen to. I have phrased that carefully; it is a personal opinion and I won't criticize anyone who discovers that actually, yes, generic AI rock that is pumped out by the hour is something they find some use for. I could see someone who wouldn't want to "listen" to that with intentionality finding it useful to code to or as background noise in their life or something. But it's not what I want, and unless the streaming services do something about it it is what is going to dominate their platforms over time.
I don't go in for super deep relationships with the musicians, reading about their histories and stuff, but I do enjoy the way that the music I like most on first listen often pales quickly and the tracks that I initially didn't like very well become my favorites.
Anyways Spotify is just a platform/gatekeeper for record labels to push their products and theres no way that spotify prices ever become static. They will need to continue to push more products through the model to continue to grow and pay for company especially as all the other players have wizened up.
FWIW if you lapse in payment they kill all your downloaded content immediately. Super annoying service. I get why but like 10 days after probably about 10 years of subscription seems like a real jerk move. Even content that wasn't theirs and was mine -- they wiped it. You own nothing.
If I enjoy an album, I’ll listen to it some 15-20 times before picking favourite songs or simply moving on. What you’re describing sounds more like consuming albums, not enjoying them. My 2 cents :)
If you’re thinking albums and hi-fi setups, it would be a lot!
A valuable part of streaming services is the recommendation engine. Spotify generates a new playlist called Discover Weekly that has songs and bands loosely related to what I’ve been listening to. I turn it on while I do yardwork. If I like something I pause and add it to a playlist.
It also has options to continue playing related music when your playlist runs out. You can also enable a mode that mixes suggestions in between songs in your playlist to mix it up.
I’ve discovered a lot of new music this way. It’s probably great for small bands who have good music but lack a marketing budget to get it out there.
It is way cheaper long term.
Plus the collection can be inherited by somebody later. If they don't want it, it could be re-sold at second-hand prices.
Did you gatekeep people who built sites with FrontPage as well?
"nine streaming subscriptions".
No one sane will do nine streaming subscriptions. The market is insane in itself for assuming that.
That's four. I don't want any of them.
Three I have to take due to kids' nagging, the fourth I have to take due to state apparatus' nagging and legal threats.
Bring some sanity back to the world.
However, the same aim could be achieved by just setting a formula in law. 1 pound per british citizen, or 0.0001% of the average income per citizen last year. Numbers pulled out of ass as i have no idea what an UK tv license costs. As long as they make the formula extremely hard to change, it will work.
If they could find a way to fund Radio 4 without it I'd be in favour of scrapping the fee.
Some countries (like Finland or Switzerland) require you to pay it even if you don't own a TV. It's really just a tax.
The reasoning for it not being a tax is that the public service broadcaster should have political independence from the government. Most people don't want their country to have a "government mouthpiece" state broadcaster, and it is much easier for the government to tell the broadcaster what to do and say by fucking with its funding if it's directly funded from the treasury.
Other countries do the same thing with a different trick, such as inserting it into your electricity bill.
The UK is a powerhouse in media production, part of that is due to the BBC funding all sorts of productions, both the visible (actors, etc.) and the invisble (camera operators, set designers, costumers, writers, directors...).
It has also been clear for centuries that private media, historically just the newspapers, but now TV channels, film studios, etc., have been disastrous, as their private owners either focus on profitability and pump out scandal and lurid stories, or if they've made their millions some other way, they run a paper in order to pump out biased propaganda. So a state-funded but not state-controlled broadcaster is an ideal thing to have.
Feel like this should be in their letters rather than (or in addition to) the threat of legal action.
It could be worse, though, Crapita also run the civil service pension system and have completely fucked it up: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5yg54750gdo
I get a letter every month from the licencing people, it just goes in the bin. I've had 1 visit, he asked to come in, I said no. That was basically the end of it.
(For the record, I have a TV but I currently have no way to watch live TV on it, so why should I have a licence! I don't use their service)
Some of it is a function of my household's love of sports, and their fragmentation across the services. Some of its just sheer laziness to pick one and stick with it or rotate the subscriptions.
I don't think I could realistically drop lower than 3 on this list though: Spotify gets used constantly. One TV/Video streaming service. My wife would likely divorce me if I cancelled YouTube Premium.
Pay some portion of that over the years and end up owning ... absolutely nothing.
Otherwise this is akin to comparing speed of 2 objects in a relativistic setting without stating the frame of reference.
Side note: I don't know why, but the existence of a "cite this" section on this page made me sad.
Inflation isn't some force of nature that needs to be accounted for like the curvature of the earth.
There's literally trillions at stake for under-reporting these numbers. A lot of government benefits are tied to this not to mention political ramifications of high inflation. So I'll go with vibes (i.e. experienced reality) over some government re-balanced basket formula
The relevant comparison would be your individual wages.
That's like saying your snow report for skiing should be adjusted for weather.
To truly contextualize it, we need to understand the total value (library sizes, removed/lost media, household/account sharing costs) relative to its price, and relative to background inflation. We need to understand relative to costs (labor, infrastructure, royalties), to profits, and how industry consolidation has or has not affected these data points.
From my own understanding of the wider context, there’s a significant attribution of costs to naked greed and profit extraction rather than overall value. With job displacement due to AI (despite union contracts), the tearing down of series or films due to CEO preference (looking at you, Zaslav), the overlap of libraries (Hulu and Disney are increasingly the same thing; Hulu/Disney/Peacock are the same thing as Hulu alone was just seven years ago), the punitive measures against account sharing, and with the forcing of advertisements onto previously ad-free platforms or pricing tiers, the overall cost relative to societal value has decreased while value to executives and shareholders has increased, and that’s the real takeaway.
Point being, the introductory prices for these services were always unsustainable.
Armchair theories on paramount and peacock, so take with a mountain of salt:
Paramount will probably stay in the red because they are overly-catering to conservatives (a little too much emphasis on baby boomers as well), narrowing their potential audience.
Peacock just doesn’t have enough going for it period. Weak library and not a real first tier consideration for folks
The main thing to worry about is using a bittorrent client that knows to 'stop' immediately if it's no longer on the VPN.
98% of the time when I see one of these it's a bunch of "content" generated by Claude or similar.
Quoting the site: "Written by Rashid N. Rashid N is the editor of HonestlyRanked. He reviews every figure this site publishes against its source before it goes out, and has never accepted a free account, a review unit, or payment for placement. Rashid N is a pen name; see our methodology page. "
I would bet good money that "Rashid N. Rashid N" is busy being a meat-puppet for an LLM to produce plausible sounding content. To exactly what end, I'm not sure.
The level of phoning in the complete lack of any work beyond the absolute bare minimum is the most frustrating aspect to me.
I don’t believe that at all, and it’s not implied in my comments. What I’m saying is that the value isn’t in the style, that part can also be replicated. It’s not in the content, that can be replicated. It’s the same for >90% of startup ideas people come up with when discovering agent coding. You were able to create a cool SaaS project in a weekend? Congrats. Any other dev can point their LLM to your website/app and make a clone in even less time. The safe ones have a high barrier of entry, such as hardware, or similar, but the vast majority is trivially cloneable.
I don’t know what that will result in. I assume we will be chasing more human experiences, but I have no idea.
Software dev has never been a hard job
It's been so paint by numbers for years now for me it's incredibly boring mind numbing dead end toil
If it's readable and aesthetic, it is perfectly serviceable for the purpose of reading a post.
Consider that you probably didn't have such an intense response to WIX templates or substack articles, so most of what's going on is actually your feelings about AI taking primacy.
Apologism at best. People have been bemoaning this issue for a while now..., pre-AI even.
First time I'm seeing this defended from an "oh you're just anti AI" perspective (which, ironically, is exactly the sort of bare minimum a couple comments over was bemoaning)
I think it's less of a distinct aesthetic rather than having "Tells" in the template that you might be sensitive to for having worked with it.
I've seen word documents that the first time I saw them I thought nothing of it. Wasn't until I had ChatGPT work on something later and noticed it's exact use of particular fonts and colors that I realized the other was AI generated.
There was nothing materially wrong with the documents, but after seeing the connection you can't unsee it. It's not really a new or AI specific phenomenon either, any template can trigger it. like how every RPG maker game looks the same, or every substack blogs all are samey, even on custom domains.
Every medium, livejournal, blogger, etc page in the look nearly exactly the same. Or Twitter Bootstrap sites.
I'll give them some credit here: its at least been worked into a terse format unlike a lot of the docs I get from people who seem to think AI's ability to add verbosity is somehow a virtue.
I'm excited by that.
And even LLM design tropes are better than seeing the same platform design on every page. The same Instagram, Reddit, X pages over and over and over forever. It's monotonous design. Platforms suck in more ways than that, though - you're forced into their constraints, algo bait, spam, hyper-drama, Reddit mods, contrarian view downvoting, etc.
It feels like we're entering the 90's - 2008 era again. The indie web. Microformats and self-distribution and hacking and remixing.
LLM is just AI slop spam. To even want to compare it to geocities is weird. Have you been around back then actually?
To claim LLMs are similar to an independent web is also weird.
An llm making the exact same layouts for everyone with obviously zero input from anyone who cares seems absolutely nothing like the old geocities days.
Even the URL captures the ubiquitous "honestly / genuinely / let me be up front" verbal tick that Claude can't resist. That is, "Rashid" likely couldn't even be bothered to come up with his own website name. I hate it.
Design is a question of taste, I am not commenting it.
But yes, you are right that we get tired of these sites as they are indistinguishable.
Have anyone tried to print or switch page to browser’s reader mode? Here starts hell :)
I deleted the stylesheet, removed the duplicate FAQ section, and reworded a sentences.
And it’s not even relevant to what’s actually on the site linked.
Who cares if the site is LLM generated? Did you care before when you saw the same Wordpress theme repeatedly, or Bootstrap layouts?
The content is what’s interesting, and it is.
Good people do.
Me. Because if there's no human checking the content I don't actually have a reliable signal that what I'm reading is true.
I'm not a subject matter expert here but I know that list includes Disney+ at $18.99 and Hulu at $18.99... but Disney and Hulu bundled together is $19.99. From the exact source the site cites:
https://www.macrumors.com/2025/09/23/disney-plus-price-incre...
A human doing the research would likely have picked up on that. An LLM that just reads everything literally does not.
In either case it's important to verify information, and LLMs are increasingly more capable of fact-checking.
Lots of people. Even on HN, which is wildly unrepresentative of the US as a whole, comments that "this site was AI-generated" are commonly upvoted to the top because people do care.
That includes me. If it's AI-generated, I don't care about it - if it wasn't worth their time to write, it's not worth my time to read. I can generate it myself.
> The content is what’s interesting
If it's generated, the odds of it being wrong are far higher, because people who publish generated content are far less likely to care about quality or correctness.
What if all I used AI for was to more quickly drive tedious work, like mass-change colors, preview variants, or export assets?
Is it the replacement of the creative aspects of a craft with AI when I lose your interest, or is it the moment I utilize it at all?
I always check the comment section first because I do not wish to engage with slop content.
> The content is what’s interesting, and it is.
Can you trust AI content at face value? No you can't. AI has been shown time and time again to just hallucinate shit out of thin air.
And that is why I want to avoid interacting with any kind of GenAI/LLM/... garbage. I always find the need to second-check whatever I'm reading and it is highly annoying.
I used to get downvoted when I complained that a site uses 6 point font, or when it renders all of its text in a small 5cm vertical strip down the middle of the page, or when it didn't work without JavaScript... and all my other personal bug-a-boos. I stopped because I realized those comments add nothing to the conversation.
"This is AI" similarly adds nothing.
This is a proxy for "the author didn't give a shit"..Not always, but often.
This is the core of the problem, I have absolutely no confidence that any of the specific number figures or parameters listed anywhere in the website are factual. For all I know they're AI hallucinations. Or wildly out of date based on the final training date of some model. It absolutely does not look like data that somebody collected "by hand" and verified as true.
Versus the same WP template or the same Jekyll template?
I agree though, using an LLM to do the same old is a waste.
Contact the owner and send the message there instead. https://honestlyranked.com/contact/
1. Paying subscription for temporarily available content(i.e. pulled shows or music) is not viable for me.
2. They operate in a winner-takes-all model, so the movies/actors/producers/musicians(especially) get nothing out of me if they are not the most popular ones(which they aren't).
With that in mind - it's their choice. If the above-mentioned decide to sell digital copies, I'll gladly pay for them and download them(last purchase from a few weeks ago). If not - pirating it is.
I don't have a great view, though, whether this is even visible to the streaming platforms. I suspect they don't really lose much notable revenue from piracy anymore. While it's matured some recently, it's not as easy as "download limewire".
1. I have 0 trust in software companies to have the ability to protect my data, even if they have the best intentions. Partially because of 2
2. AI: everything has to be fed into it, whatever it spits out is treated as gospel by most tech companies and people that 10 years ago were taught to question everything.
3. Price.
4. It is actually easy to setup and if you put in some real thinking into it, it becomes both secure and easy to pass around. Jellyfin is a good example. I installed wireguard on my mum's computer, "double click this, click this button, open your browser, click on this icon" and she has access to my library.
Part of the reason for the overinflated prices and budget cuts in those exact companies is this exact thing: many people got fed up with minor convenience at an ever-increasing price and "amazon for this, netflix for that". Many of us grew up pirating because we had no other choice. Now we do have a choice but instead of a decent trade-off in price-vs-convenience, we got a price to pay and ultimately a ton of inconvenience.
Jokes aside, luckily for me, I live in a country where torrenting isn't illegal at all and frankly, everyone working for the public sector is too incompetent to do anything about it, even if it were. For example, I know a guy who was taken for investigation cause something dodgy happened from his IP (he hosted a tor exit node) and the investigators had their brains blown when he showed them that tor exit nodes were public information cause they had no idea. At that moment he said "guys, are my taxes seriously going towards your salaries?". At that point they just gave up and send him off.
Is that number really correct?
It seems remarkably coincidental how close $1,852.92 is to
$1,150.92 * 1.10^5 ($1,853.56)
Both figures can be arrived to by taking the monthly total and multiplying it by 12.
* They increased the cost of all price tiers.
* They moved features from lower tiers to higher tiers, forcing you to pay more.
* And this all was leveraged via "per seat" pricing. So a modest increase in price quickly becomes a lot, simply because of the multiplicative nature of per-seat pricing.
This per-seat pricing is especially absurd to us. To run the software it makes little difference whether there are 3 users or 6 users, yet the total cost of those 3 additional users was an additional 500 dollars! This got so out of hand that we decided to build our own timesheet software, which we now happily use. I have always seen software as the promise that you only need to build it once, and can reuse and leverage it many times over to reduce your costs. However, this does NOT seem to be the case anymore.
You see the same in streaming services: limits on the amount of devices you can have in your family, moving features into higher cost tiers, and so on...
For streaming services, I think the development-hosting needle swings way towards hosting. Streaming video is the vast majority of their costs and efforts, so scaling prices per-user is the only sensible option. The "software" of those services is bad and interchangeable, and not what anyone wants or is paying for in the first place.
Another egregious thing these subscriptions do is all kinds of dark patterns. Making it super easy to subscribe but super hard to cancel, not informing before charging (how hard can it be to send an email "upcoming charge next week"), showing ads in supposedly "ad-free" services etc. All this just add to the frustration which leads users to cancel.
He knows better than you do what he had to replace, because he did exactly that.