About 40% of Americans have cut back on streaming services in the last three months because of financial concerns, according to a recent report
Americans are quitting subscription streaming services in droves as the cost of living continues to climb, a recent report has found.
Streaming services such as Netflix and Hulu have become increasingly popular in recent years, but Deloitte’s 2026 Digital Media Trends report, released late last month, shows how Americans are getting frustrated over the cost to have their favorite movies and TV shows at the click of a button.
“As the cost of everyday essentials like food and housing remain high, many consumers are reevaluating their budgets and cutting back on nonessential expenditures,” Deloitte said in its survey results. “At the same time, prices for media and entertainment services continue to climb.”
It wasn’t just the cost for me. It was the rise of fascism in the world in general and the fact that they are selling my watching history to everyone and anyone. Right now, they say it’s for advertising and development, but I wasn’t waiting around to have my content label me as undesirable.
Less important, but still a factor, was the fact that these services are constantly removing queer content and cancelling good shows. I stand by the idea that the only reason Kaos got cancelled was because it has a trans character. With the Paramount merger doomed to happen, I imagined there was going to be another purge, so fuck them.
Kaos was so good.
I also can’t stand watching any of those show
ALL YOU HAD TO DO WAS GIVE US ENOUGH TOKYO DRIFT!
that was literally the last straw for me a few months ago… I bought a 4bay hdd enclosure, a cheap 5way switch, and got proxmox then docker then arr stack stood up on an old minipc. every month i look for a cheap hdd or two to add.
do you have any idea how much better 1080 looks when it streams from your basement and not across the country??
Same reason I continue to buy bluray and 4k discs. It just looks so much better. People don’t believe me till they see it.
I pirate most things, but yes, there’s a world of difference when getting a full size 40GB bluray rip.Depending on the movie, less is fine, but e.g. Interstellar or Pirates of the Caribbean just deserve not to have crawling compression steps instead of fading black.
High five, fellow physical media user.
Probably because Larry Ellison has bought most of them and people don’t want to be inundated with pro Israel , pro fascist propaganda
I mean sailing the seas is easier -
Easier. Cheaper. A better experience. There’s no reason to keep dealing with these particular devils at all.
for nearly a decade now I’ve had enough income that I could afford to pay for content I like. Hell I could even afford to pay for a subscription service on the chance that there was contact I liked on it
a few years back, the experience just became so shitty that I went back to sailing. sure the price gouging, lack of privacy, fucking over the users, and constant search for increased profits were a factor. but the simple fact is it’s easier to sail for me than it is to use streaming services
Yeah, I pretty much hung up my flag for a few years. It was good, you could find the thing you wanted at a reasonable price.
Now, on principle, the only streaming services I will pay for are independent ones. Dropout and nebula off the top of my head. Sorry, Netflix et al, not sorry in the slightest.
so I have access to this streaming service from a person I know, the quality is so shit, so I just sail the seas and actually get higher quality lol.
Ethically I feel like it’s a more defensible position too.
To me it’s like… Piracy is ethically neutral. Not really a good thing not really a bad thing. Streaming services are dealing with the devil, and my name’s not Faust, so I’m out. Pure evil.
should I interpret this as “40% of americans cut back because money” or “40% of those who cut back was because of money”?
probably the latter, and we don’t actually know how many did so
I love you more than words can describe.
I think that 40% of Americans should spend much of the time they’ve spent on streaming services reading and studying socialist theory (Karl Marx and all). Seriously!
Please, stop advertising communism and socialism here. Just stop. It will not work. Go to lemmy.ml and do it there. Thanks.
But I got banned from that site for “trolling using an LLM”.
Firstly, here we call these instances, not sites. Secondly, there are other instances that will be happy to hear your thoughts. Like hexbear or lemmygrad. They welcome communism and socialism ideas.
are getting frustrated over the cost to have their favorite movies and TV shows at the click of a button
find a different button
a free one
It isn’t even at the click of a button. It’s more like first looking up the show to find out which service it’s on, realizing you don’t already subscribe to that one, having to input your payment method, purchase it, then find the show. Assuming you do it the “right” way of course.
At that point it’s easier to just pirate it and put it in the same place as all of your other shows instead of having to juggle all the streaming services. Plus, an added bonus, it’s free.
and then you have to deal with streaming quality and service interruptions and shitty UIs
Aye ,captain
Prices will increase so shareholders don’t lose any money, and morons who go, “Durr… what do I care? They provide a service I like and I have so much money I can afford to be an idiot feeding an unsustainable economic distortion in perpetuity!” will just keep right on paying the increases, and the division of the K-shaped economy will continue to grow.
There’s no way way to boycott or frugal your way out of price increases while enough bougie yuppie shitheads are willing to eat any shit a company is willing to shovel them at any cost as long as they can use it as a status symbol.
yo ho ho!
I thought it would’ve been because they keep getting less value for money, since the services keep raising prices and fisting more ads into people.
A little from column A, a little from column B.
Has Netflix tried not going to Starbucks as often, or not eating Avocado Toast?
maybe just give the kid one doll for Christmas?
They just upped the price again and added more commercials, instead.
In the Netherlands we don’t have commercials on Netflix. Is that really a thing?
In the US there’s like 4 different pricing options for Netflix. The cheapest option is $10 a month and has a bunch of commercials. The most expensive is like $20 or so a month and gives you unlimited download options, no commercials, and shows and movies not included in the cheapest option. I have the cheap one, and I only have it because for some weird ass corpo BS it’s included for “free” with my cell phone carrier.
In the US it is. You can pay more for it to be ad free. Only reason i have it is because its included for free through my cell phone carrier.
We do in Italy, on the cheapest tier
Yep, and we’re about to dump them.
Yarrrrrrrr me maties
Have you seen their job ads? My job which is in business operations is paying $480k. In the real world it pays about $80-100k.
Wasn’t their big deal for years “we pay you well but fire your if we think you’re not worth it any more” which might just be saying the quiet part out loud.
That or maybe enough got cut and were all shocked Pikachu that they backed away from it.
Either way I don’t really understand why they continue to have tech company status. They were definitely pioneering streaming but you can build a streaming service in a couple months using AWS to solve the harder problems.
I don’t know man, after using Netflix, Disney, and Paramount (and jellyfin) apps on my TV, it’s wild how much more responsive the UI is on Netflix compared to everything else.
On your first paragraph, every place will drop you in a heartbeat these days.
Sure but a nice web app was not really what they were pioneering. The entities you listed don’t need none nice apps they are the only source for their content. That’s the business Netflix is now in.
Where is it? If it’s in the Bay Area you won’t be able to afford a house on that meager pittance
It’s actually LA and I, ironically, now live in the Bay Area.
well if you have money issues, streaming services should be the last thing you buy anyways. just pirate it or watch on a streaming site that does it for you, or watch clips on Yt, they pratically give out the whole story on YT anyways.
My Jellyfin server is doing great. My only constraint is my free disk space
Jellyfin is the way. Streaming only made sense when prices were low and all the content was basically in one place.
I’ll just keep growing my personal library.
Yea, fucking AI making it too expensive to be a data hoarder. I have to keep making hard decisions on which media to delete.
I’m kicking myself now for not buying more 20 TB hard drives when they were under $250. It’s rough out there for any computer related hobbies right now.
For whatever reason I bought 10 at once and I’ve just been slowly feeding them to my array as I need them
I bet you feel like a genius for that now too lmao
Lol. At the time I was like “wtf was i thinking”, but now, yeah… I look smrt in hindsight 🤓
I bought two right before stuff jumped too badly. Looked about a week later thinking buying another one might be an ok idea, rofl no way I can justify it now…
So now I’m debating if I really NEED backups… certainly not of everything… I still need a video card, and those never did really come back down…
If you have the processing power to spare (and haven’t done it already), you might be able to re-encode your media files to a more space-efficient codec.
I’ve reduced some of my video files by as much at 75% using Handbrake to convert from AVC to H.264 or H.265. I’m not the most discerning viewer, so I haven’t noticed any difference in video quality, but I’ve definitely noticed the extra space on my drives!
I’ve got an ffmpeg script saved on my Mac which re-encodes video to a fraction of its original size without any apparent loss of quality. Shit’s basically magic.
I have one for audio as well, but I think it’s an Apple-only MP4 codec, that requires you to have to manually build it into ffmpeg on any other platform. But the end result is that my 2 hour radio show AIFFs that start out at 4GB end up being high quality MP4 at around 75mb.
Like I said, magic.
I misread that as ffmpreg…which means I have spent way too much time on AO3 in the past few years.
Do you happen to remember where you got it? I’ve got a Mac and while the idea of going through all the media files on my servers to convert them I twitch a little bit, but would also love to cut down space without giving up some of my files
Pretty sure it’s this command;
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vcodec libx265 -crf 30 -tag:v hvc1 output.mp4
On my M2 Air, conversions are usually pretty quick, depending on the size of the input. After a short while it does throttle because there’s no fan, but it counters along nicely.
As for audio; I use XLD, set to encode HE-AAC at 80kbps. It seems really low, but still sounds great.
Not all hero’s wear capes
In the process of shifting my entire iCloud photo library over to Immich, I’ve discovered that a huge amount of the videos I’ve shot over the years with various iPhones are ridiculously huge x264 .MOVs. So I’ve been fiddling about with ffmpeg this morning, and have landed upon this script that re-encodes them to around 10% of their original size with no visible loss of quality, and retains EXIF metadata. One video I have is 90 seconds long, and is of bats filmed at twilight over a large pond in the New Forest. The original is 132mb, but because most of the clip is basically black, it’s been able to compress it to 2mb. Which is mad.
Anyway.
Navigate your terminal to a folder that contains a bunch of videos and paste this in, then sit back and let ffmpeg work its magic:
for i in *.MOV; do ffmpeg -i "$i" -map_metadata 0 -vcodec libx265 -crf 30 -tag:v hvc1 -movflags use_metadata_tags "${i%.*}.mp4"; doneFor just the odd one or two videos, here’s the basic ffmpeg command:
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -map_metadata 0 -vcodec libx265 -crf 30 -tag:v hvc1 -movflags use_metadata_tags ouput.mp4God, I love ffmpeg.
Just as a heads up, if you aren’t concerned about “copyright”/“intellectual property” the better way would be to download native h.265 rips instead of re-encoding your existing h.264 files, as those will look better since you aren’t compressing the already existing compression artifacts of your old files. Copy of a copy and all that.
AV1 can double again the savings for the same quality
Which is why it can make sense to pay for pirate shares.
Many are around $5-8/mo, and they’re libraries are bigger than my own, with the added bonus of I don’t have to do any maintenance.
$60 to $98 per year, is a better deal than paying for these HDD prices. For me at least the trade-offs are worth it.
Private torrent tracker groups are better and free
Not at these storage costs, which was my point.
Even better is Usenet 🤫
Except you’re still paying for extremely inflated storage costs, on top of your Usenet fee, which is roughly the same cost as a pirate share - depending on what you’re paying for i.e. block vs monthly.
True, but I was talking about private indexers, not shares. I guess I’m lucky that I bought a fuck ton of drives before the bullshit.
I have a good bit of storage, around 60tb usuable.
But as those drives die, I will not replace them at these prices.
I have used the free trials of a couple different jellyfin shares to test them out, and was really impressed.
YMMV, but after collecting and serving my own media for around two decades, the hobby part of it isn’t as important to me as the the ability to access a large media library for the lowest cost possible.
Can be… not as reliable or safe
I’ve had better reliability from Usenet, personally, but YMMV. Safe though? If you use Usenet over SSL, you don’t even need to download over VPN, if that’s what you mean.
I mean like incomplete uploads and malware
Dude. Tell me more.
What would you like to know?
How does a fella get piped into those private torrent tracker groups?
You get invited. You gotta know someone with an invite willing to vouch for you. There are strict client and ratio requirements to maintain good standing.
Disk space (cost) is a genuine problem nowadays
should be some cheap storage hitting the second hand market, when this AI bubble pops
Waiting for the AI bubble to pop
Same! I actually still have a decent amount of free space though, but my library is still growing.
I’m even using jellyfin in the car with android auto to listen to music. Recently bought a external blu-ray drive so I can rip all my old CD’s and DVD’s so at least some of my data is legit :D
I’m doing the same but I’m looking for a good client that resumes playing music on startup. Any recommendations?
No I haven’t got that figured out quite yet, it seems to resume if I just connect to my stereo bluetooth as long as I haven’t touched Jellyfin between drives but not with android auto. Just figured out how to get playlists working on AA today, kind of a work around but it looks like there is a request to fix it out there.
Same, and I was going to buy more storage but those are getting so expensive too.
I’m holding onto my classics but anything else I delete when I’m done watching it.
I had to resort to used SAS drives on my server.
You can get them pretty cheap, but you absolutely have to run a full smart test and check the error correction log before using.
Plus they usually come with 5 years power on time minimum, so you’d only want to run them in any RAID/ZRAID combo that has redundancy.
Couple of people here mentioned re-encoding, but that also harms the seed count if you’re using BitTorrent as the exchange medium.
Part of the issue is that Bluray remux rips are usually in H.265 at 10 bit with Dolby Vision which pushes 4K file size into the 70-100Gb range.
That’s fine for a single movie on a bluray disk, but its atrocious for saving multiple onto a drive or NAS.
But then most encodes still almost all use H.265 or H.264 which still gives you a fat 30Gb file for 4K.
I’m pretty sure AV1 solves this issue because it has much better compression compared to H.265, especially for higher pixel content, but no Blurays are using AV1 because there’s no reduced cost in forcing a change in consumer hardware.
Plus I think AV1 technically doesn’t support Dolby Vision in proper yet.
But then most encodes still almost all use H.265 or H.264 which still gives you a fat 30Gb file for 4K.
So you can store over 500 films on a 2TB HDD. I’m failing to see the issue.
I think you need to check your math.
Pinchflat right into the jellyfin server. Tada!
THIS JUST IN: PEOPLE WITHOUT MONEY SPEND LESS
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