Technology

Hopefully you’re working on “AdamEatsAss+” although seems like you might just have some niche content if you ever make that happen.

It will be dynamically generated movies and series. People will make their own movie/serie template and share it with others

I'm hoping to be fully self-hosted by then.

Well one benefit of everything being available on streaming is that it's really easy to populate my Plex server with any and all content.

Really you pay for convenience and legallity. Not everyone knows how to or feels comfortable pirating. With a service you know you aren't breaking any laws and you're not worried about quality, storage, captions, and sketchy files.

The only thing that MIGHT take me off piracy is the ability to do legally and for reasonable cost what I do with piracy. If I buy something, I download and store it wherever and it's mine forever. I have no problem paying for my content, once. The problem is that we're being driven towards paying for our content over and over. Just like we're being asked to pay for our everything else over and over.

fool me once..

we know it'll never happen, but if they...

• have content from most studios available indefinitely in one place - or even better, a federated platform - at no additional cost.
• drop all this drm stupidity and allow the best quality streams on any general computing device.

only then, in my view, it'd equal the convenience I have today and I wouldn't mind paying a reasonable amount for that.

I don't think you understand how pricing works. Someone like Disney demands a high carriage fee agreement and mandates that ESPN must be in the basic cable package for all comcast subscribers, otherwise comcast doesn't get any Disney owned TV. As a result Comcast has to charge basically 10 bucks a month to all subscribers to have ESPN, not counting the general cost breakout for other disney owned channels. Sure, comcast leases STB's for X dollars and gets a cut of the subscription fees as well, but the point is the people that make the TV programming are the same. So it's not magically going to make the cost of TV significantly cheaper by cutting out comcast. Comcast is the person that collects the bills, but Disney, ViacomCBS, etc, are very much involved of setting up the prices consumers pay on cable and streaming.

Edit: Also add in the risk and churn factor. With cable bundling, TV programmers had scale and predictability on their side. Basically all cable subscribers had long term subscriptions and could guarantee a high volume of subscribers to collect from. With DTC (Direct to Consumer) streaming apps, consumers can churn and temporarily subscribe for monthly intervals. That means you have less subscribers at any one time on your app and for shorter durations. Guess what that does to the revenue. So if you no longer have the economics of scale in terms of long term subscription length and volume of subscribers, the cost for individual subscribers will probably have to keep creeping up and get possibly more expensive than cable.

My solution is to just watch less in general.

Not like there's a ton of new stuff worth watching at any given time anyway.

That was one of the main factors in my cutting the cord in the first place.

And logins and outages to keep track of.

Boomers still boom in though. My dad has a smart TV and easy access to a whole bunch of streaming services but chooses to pay telus and watch on his cable box mostly because all he knows is his cable remote control. And those steaming “channels” are just like, channel 473. Anything else is too complicated. Enter your password? No way.

Say what you will about streaming, but I think everyone born before 1995 will understand that todays streaming is way way way better than renting and old school cable. In the old days there was no on demand, so you could only watch what was on at the time you wanted to watch it. You literally had to go to to block buster to rent physical media that wasn't always available for things like new releases. TV shows weren't easily available by VHS/DVD. So with streaming, it's basically cheaper than what Cable + Renting movies used to cost, but I can do it without limits of physical media and have access to crazy amounts of back catalog. I purchased Band of Brothers back in the day on DVD box set for like 70 bucks which is 10 1 hour long episodes. For 99 bucks a year I can get all of band of brothers and a lot more content than that. Sure I don't own it all, but that's fine for most of my purposes. With streaming, I think we are actually getting a lot more for less in the grand scheme of things. And bundling make it even cheaper.