You’ll have to pay more to go ad-free.
I got a message earlier today saying my subscription would now include ads. I immediately cancelled the subscription out of principle.
I went to do that with Prime but sadly because I paid for a year up front with no indication of ads, I could cancel the auto resubscribe but there is no cancellation and partial refund option, just ‘you get ads or pay us more than what you’ve already paid us to not get ads’.
More people should phase out of Netflix.
I remember when Netflix first introduced the ad supported plan and a lot of people were like this is how they make you pay extra to not see ads, and a lot of other people called that fud because it’s an additional tier and the normal tier isn’t impacted.
At the time I was yelling that it was just the first step - create an ad free plan, wait for people to calm down, then slowly raise the prices until the ad supported plan costs as much as the ad free one used to. And there you have it, they charged extra to not see ads, just with extra steps.
I quit Netflix back then and I’m so glad I did. $10/mo in electricity gets me every streaming service on my Plex, that’s like a $100/mo value and I get to share it with all my friends.
These things are so frustrating, because it’s so clearly inevitable, but so many people always insist it won’t happen. Again and again.
You pay $10 a month for just Plex? That seems expensive for what it is. Maybe get something more efficient?
Not really just Plex, in addition to powering 6 spinning drives (~50TB total), I also run Nextcloud, immich, Ollama (CPU inference, no GPU), home assistant, grocy, vaultwarden, jellyfin, sonarr, radarr, lidarr, prowlarr, flaresolverr, and overseerr. I run Plex on a separate Intel nuc10 (also included in that $10 of electricity) which has Intel QuickSync which allows me to transcode ~8 simultaneous 1080 streams to friends while leaving most of the rest of the CPU to everything else like running LLMs on the CPU (it’s cheaper to run larger models on a slower CPU with lots of RAM compared to buying a GPU with a matching amount of vram).
So yeah if you don’t care about n+2 double redundant disks or sharing with more than like 5 people or hosting other apps or running AI while people are streaming then yeah you should totally get something less power hungry. Just the Intel nuc10 I use for Plex (but not media storage) has a TDP of 25W so just that would lower the electricity cost to like $2.50/mo.
I mainly chose to just use the cost of my whole setup’s electricity as an example because it didn’t seem worth it to think about how to split up the idle wattage between services especially when it’s gong to come in at way lower than the combined cost of all the major streaming services anyways, plus I don’t want anyone accusing me of needing to underestimate to make my point - even if I overestimate, it’s way cheaper.
🏴☠️
Yo ho! yo ho! A pirate’s life for me, Sailing through the broadband, on the digital sea. With torrents and downloads, we navigate the waves, Seeking out the treasure in cyberspace’s caves.
We plunder and we crack, from software far and wide, Our digital fleet sails, with bandwidth as our tide. No map or compass needed, we follow the online trail, In search of hidden files, and secrets to unveil.
Yo ho! yo ho! A pirate’s life for me, With DRM to crack, and torrents running free. We hoist the Jolly Roger, on virtual high seas, Aye, we be the scourge of the modern IPs.
With VPNs to cloak us, and proxies in our wake, The legend of net pirates, just rumors and hearsay. So raise a glass of energy drink, to the life we lead so free, For we are modern pirates, on the vast and boundless sea.
Yo ho! yo ho! With every byte we claim, We’ll sing our shanty proudly, in the digital domain!
It’s getting progressively harder. Some stuff just doesn’t release on physical anymore.
Content hosts are just fucking militant these days about forcing ads onto their users, it’s like they take personal offense to the idea that nobody likes seeing them.