I was never a fan of the subscriptions model (I have never had a Spotify, Netflix, or any other similar services).
My girlfriend that used to make fun of me is now considering cutting some of those costs.
What is your stance on this?
I’ve given up on most subscriptions and replaced them with torrenting + Jellyfin.
I’m keeping to my policy of only subscribing to two things at one time, and rotating so that I get to see the seasons of the things that I really want to see.
I’ve never been much of a pirate, mainly because I do believe in supporting those that produce the art that I love. That said, I am a big user of the library. And when there’s some FOSS product that I like, I support it. And while I could and can buy commercially now, I remember the days when I couldn’t and I survived on FOSS and the library.
With that said, let me say that I think that the content industry shoots itself in the foot when it creates these higher prices, obscene length of copyright terms, polluting their own products with commercial ads ,and fake scarcity. They deserve all the piracy that their own behavior generates!
I think Mike Masnick has it right. The best defense against piracy is to compete against it with superior offerings.
I barely watch movies and TV shows nowadays. Summaries from YouTube and wiki are good enough for me to stay in the loop.
In a way, I’m not just saving costs, but I’m also saving time too.
My one video subscription is to a VPN, Mullvad. I can find most anything in qbittorrent’s built-in file search, and the really weird stuff on rutracker. Jellyfin is like a self-hosted Netflix, it’s way easier to use than Kodi. I splurged on a Synology NAS so I’ve got 800 movies and 50,000 songs. I rip FLAC music from deezer and qobuz trials using deemix and qobuzdl. I import playlists to rip into Qobuz and Deezer using soundiiz, the one audio subscription I paid for. This way I can get flacs for radio playlists, any text playlist, although XSPF format works best.
Subscriptions are generally a bad idea if themake you dependent. I’d say these ones aren’t too bad since you can cancel any time and just lose access.
If something you depend on starts to get shitty, jump ship as soon as you can. I’m considering writing a spotify ripper because the app keeps getting worse and worse to a point where it’s almost unusable.
