All this does is make me more interested in “pirating” their infinitely copyable material. More to the point it’s making my interest in financially supporting them drop to zero if not lower.
With Usenet, Plex* (Streaming Server), Radarr (automated movie downloading) and Sonarr (automated TV downloading and management) it’s never been easier!
*Plex is currently on a slow path of enshittification and the only other good alternative, Jellyfin, still has some ways to go before it can pass “The Spouse Test”. I myself have only had Jellyfin in testing and not yet replaced Plex with it. But that day is coming. Jellyfin is well under active development and I have no doubt it will get to feature and stability parity with Plex
I dipped my toes in the self-hosted route and would recommend Stremio + Torrentio + RealDebrid as a much simpler alternative.
Here’s a guide I used - you can probably have it up and running in less than an hour.
Major points:
Easy setup, easy to use
Low cost at <$35/year
Can not share accounts (specifically, RD limits to one ongoing stream at a time)
Limited customization
I have very limited self hosting experience, and between getting my first hello world service running, problems with my ISP, sorting through the different ways to get content, and not already having TBs if hard drives sitting around, I found it to be pretty challenging.
If you’re already experienced in self hosting (or want to learn) and don’t mind the storage costs, then I’d recommend the Plex/Jellyfin route, but if you just want an alternative to the existing streaming services then I’d suggest looking into Stremio.
All this does is make me more interested in “pirating” their infinitely copyable material. More to the point it’s making my interest in financially supporting them drop to zero if not lower.
With Usenet, Plex* (Streaming Server), Radarr (automated movie downloading) and Sonarr (automated TV downloading and management) it’s never been easier!
*Plex is currently on a slow path of enshittification and the only other good alternative, Jellyfin, still has some ways to go before it can pass “The Spouse Test”. I myself have only had Jellyfin in testing and not yet replaced Plex with it. But that day is coming. Jellyfin is well under active development and I have no doubt it will get to feature and stability parity with Plex
I dipped my toes in the self-hosted route and would recommend Stremio + Torrentio + RealDebrid as a much simpler alternative.
Here’s a guide I used - you can probably have it up and running in less than an hour.
Major points:
I have very limited self hosting experience, and between getting my first hello world service running, problems with my ISP, sorting through the different ways to get content, and not already having TBs if hard drives sitting around, I found it to be pretty challenging.
If you’re already experienced in self hosting (or want to learn) and don’t mind the storage costs, then I’d recommend the Plex/Jellyfin route, but if you just want an alternative to the existing streaming services then I’d suggest looking into Stremio.