As subscription costs rise and choice diminishes on legal sites, film and TV fans are turning to VPNs and illicit streamers, with Sweden – home of both Spotify and The Pirate Bay – leading the way
The problem is that all the competitors are enshittifying the same way at the same pace. If there was a holdout in a position to grow their platform we may at least go back to the days of “Netflix is all you need”.
As it is, it makes more sense to go back to physical media purchases, and I blame absolutely nobody if their disposable income and lack of box fetishes makes them think downloading the content is perfectly equivalent. The Plex server where I store all my physical media backups is by far the best streaming library I have access to, at least if you discount novelty as a factor.
This is true. The thing is, all data needs a medium.
It doesn’t matter if you own a file sitting in a hard drive or a disc sitting in a box. Discs are nicer because you get a thing you can put on a shelf to act as a backup of the file you dump from it. Plus they often come with nice extras. If you don’t think things on shelves are nice your priorities may be different.
The problem is that all the competitors are enshittifying the same way at the same pace. If there was a holdout in a position to grow their platform we may at least go back to the days of “Netflix is all you need”.
As it is, it makes more sense to go back to physical media purchases, and I blame absolutely nobody if their disposable income and lack of box fetishes makes them think downloading the content is perfectly equivalent. The Plex server where I store all my physical media backups is by far the best streaming library I have access to, at least if you discount novelty as a factor.
You don’t need physical media. You can buy and download flac files. It’s the ownable asset part that is important, not the physical part.
This is true. The thing is, all data needs a medium.
It doesn’t matter if you own a file sitting in a hard drive or a disc sitting in a box. Discs are nicer because you get a thing you can put on a shelf to act as a backup of the file you dump from it. Plus they often come with nice extras. If you don’t think things on shelves are nice your priorities may be different.