Streaming Has Reached Its Sad, Predictable Fate | What should I watch? is now a much easier question than How do I watch it?::<em>What should I watch? </em>is now a much easier question than <em>How do I watch it?</em>
I’m back to sailing the high seas and dumping my loot into Plex.
I was always 100% on board with paying 50-100 bucks a month for being able to watch anything I wanted, whenever I wanted, in perpetuity — for the rest of my life.
Instead, capitalism chose to fracture all content behind multiple paywalls that don’t even host the content I want to watch, or censor/change it so that I can never watch the OG versions I want to watch, so I’ve instead been spending 50-100 bucks a month on computing hardware to download it and host it myself for over a decade.
I’ll continue to fucking do it too, because these soulless sociopath leeches don’t deserve a cent from me. They don’t even fucking pay their content creators or staff a decent wage, and will spend 10x more just to screw their workers. At this point I’d prefer them to fail and collapse, so I’ll continue not giving them money — I’m doing my part!
Can we stop over-simplifying corporate greed as “capitalism”?
Ten years ago Netflix gave is the solution all of us wanted, and that was also capitalism.
Yeah, this is much less chaotic. It’s not even about the cost so much as the convince now.
BTW I use the plex discovery search to find stuff across streaming services. This deserves a shoutout here. Could be better but I haven’t found a better solution. Google voice search on my nvidia shield used to be good at this but it’s really degraded lately.
Justwatch.com works well for finding the service hosting the show you want to watch.
Yes. There is a legit plex app on fire stick and roku. It comes with free live TV and on Demand content, but you can also run your own server on your network with your own downloaded content. If you have an IPTV service you can stream that through plex as well.
Note that Jellyfin is a similar app/server that works the same way and is totally free. Plex is also free, but there are additional features behind the pay wall like GPU decoding, PVR service for IPTV, and others.
Plex - in the way users here are describing (important context since Plex’s management has recently shifted heavily to trying to be like Pluto.TV with less emphasis on its original purpose) works as an application that acts like a library for your own media collection.
There are 2 required parts to it :
- A “server” or “host” which acts as your library.
- A client - like an NVIDIA Shield, your phone, PlayStation, Roku, or eve your Fire Stick.
Without your own server with content stored on it, or at least a friend’s server credentials you can connect to, you are limited to the “Pluto.TV” type ad-driven media collection.
So the answer is “yes it works on a fire stick,” but you will need #1 also for it to be the single source library for your content and not just another ad-riddled garbage service.
Use your local library! Thousands of Blu-ray/DVD titles for free you can check out and rip freely. And then you don’t have to worry about any nasty letters from your ISP.
I honestly didn’t even include a DVD/BluRay drive in my PC build, so can’t really use those. And I tunnel all that traffic through Proton VPN, so ISP isn’t an issue.
If you have a spare USB 3 port and a spare power outlet, then you can get an external 4K Bluray drive for $100 or less.
