I have a very high end plex server. I think all in between VPN, Usenet, hardware costs I pay roughly $60/mo. But that gets me all the content I want, organized exactly how I want it, and nothing disappears on me. No need for 3-4 subscriptions, multiple apps, etc. And that service works for my entire family and I can easily make offline copies for trips.
Now all this does require pretty significant time investment. It’s less now, but there were multiple very long research sessions and troubleshooting that I had to go through. I would absolutely pay for a service that was marginally close in ease of use just to not have to be my own IT, but it doesn’t exist.
I pay for streaming music. It just works and I (usually) don’t feel like maintaining my own music library is worth it. I pay for all my games, because Steam just works. I pay for all my ebooks because they just work. Streaming video by comparison is hot garbage. Just a complete morass of exclusive content, shitty apps, poor user experience and stupid policy decisions.
Steam works. Spotify works. These things are worth paying for because they make my life easier. When Netflix was the only game in town and had content from everywhere it was a fantastic service. Then every studio decided that they wanted all that money for themselves and started their own service. Since that time it is nothing but fragmentation, degraded service and confusion. Streaming Video seems to be in a race to oblivion.
Spotify buy out popular podcasters and force them to use their platform and this results in publicly available Podcasts going behind a centralised platform. This over time will cause the death of Podcasters.
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I have a very high end plex server. I think all in between VPN, Usenet, hardware costs I pay roughly $60/mo. But that gets me all the content I want, organized exactly how I want it, and nothing disappears on me. No need for 3-4 subscriptions, multiple apps, etc. And that service works for my entire family and I can easily make offline copies for trips.
Now all this does require pretty significant time investment. It’s less now, but there were multiple very long research sessions and troubleshooting that I had to go through. I would absolutely pay for a service that was marginally close in ease of use just to not have to be my own IT, but it doesn’t exist.
I pay for streaming music. It just works and I (usually) don’t feel like maintaining my own music library is worth it. I pay for all my games, because Steam just works. I pay for all my ebooks because they just work. Streaming video by comparison is hot garbage. Just a complete morass of exclusive content, shitty apps, poor user experience and stupid policy decisions.
100% agree.
Steam works. Spotify works. These things are worth paying for because they make my life easier. When Netflix was the only game in town and had content from everywhere it was a fantastic service. Then every studio decided that they wanted all that money for themselves and started their own service. Since that time it is nothing but fragmentation, degraded service and confusion. Streaming Video seems to be in a race to oblivion.
Spotify buy out popular podcasters and force them to use their platform and this results in publicly available Podcasts going behind a centralised platform. This over time will cause the death of Podcasters.