Netflix is starting to raise prices in some countries as growth spurred by its crackdown on password sharing starts to fade.
The film and TV streaming giant said it had already lifted subscription fees in Japan and parts of Europe as well as the Middle East and Africa over the last month.
Changes in Italy and Spain are now being rolled-out.
In its latest results, Netflix announced that it had added 5.1 million subscribers between July and September - ahead of forecasts but the smallest gain in more than a year.
Pretty much the only one i’m still happy with is crunchyroll. They don’t fuck around despite being basically the only game in town.
Netflix I pay for begrudgingly but if they raise the price substantially or add mandatory ads EVER they are gonna be gone. I’m already pissed they are axing Kaos, like so many other good shows before it.
Already axed prime last year due to them adding ads, I don’t even miss the expedited delivery because all the big box stores deliver for free, some even same day, at equivalent prices.
Disney recently boned me out of account sharing, so my plex server is getting pimped out. $1000 buy gets you substantial NAS storage for 6-7 years. That’s ~$14/mo if you replace nothing for 6 years. By the time drives start dying the sizes double and you can expand your raid as they die off one by one.
Anywho, Plex servers (and other FOSS alternatives now) usually have no problems transcoding and serving multiple 1080p and 4k streams concurrently. Plus you can download media for offline play within the respective server’s app on all kinds of devices, and for plex the server owner doesn’t need to license guests. That being said, non-plex options are what i’d go with because they are as good or better without any license cost. I just use plex because I bought a lifetime sub before the alternatives were mature. It’s nice having a library that only grows, never shrinks. No temporary licenses or content runs so I can have a massive backlog and not worry if I don’t get around to it for years. Just a lot of wins, no downsides that I know of.
Crunchyroll has its own bullshit too tbh. It just happens to be that the industry is worse than their bs, so Crunchyrolls shenanigans is really just the anime industry.
Our household has gone full in on Plex. Bought an 8 TB hardrive to run the sever off my 10 year old gaming PC. Wife and I have been binging Downton Abbey. Digitized the series off blue-rays from the local local. However the blue-ray set didn’t have the Christmas Specials. My wife did not want to wait til I tracked down the specials. So we started to watch the specials on Amazon Prime Video. The picture encoding was awful. Not to mention all the bloody annoying ads. Not able to stomach the horrible picture quality anymore I hurriedly found a 1080p file and added it to our plex server. It was like night and day. I am not a high definition snob. Honestly I cannot tell the difference between 1080p and 4K. But the fact that I can stream better video quality from my 10 year old PC than through a multi billion dollar company is absurd.