Netflix is starting to phase out its cheapest ad-free plan
You’ll have to pay more to go ad-free.
You’ll have to pay more to go ad-free.
I got a message earlier today saying my subscription would now include ads. I immediately cancelled the subscription out of principle.
I went to do that with Prime but sadly because I paid for a year up front with no indication of ads, I could cancel the auto resubscribe but there is no cancellation and partial refund option, just ‘you get ads or pay us more than what you’ve already paid us to not get ads’.
If you complain to support they usually will give you a partial refund
More people should phase out of Netflix.
They won't though. People will complain, but not do anything about it.
I haven’t had Netflix in two years. There’s nothing on there I want to watch anyway.
i know quite a few people that started pirating after netflix went downhill, anecdotally.
I really need to quit being lazy and set up some *arrs.
I remember when Netflix first introduced the ad supported plan and a lot of people were like this is how they make you pay extra to not see ads, and a lot of other people called that fud because it's an additional tier and the normal tier isn't impacted.
At the time I was yelling that it was just the first step - create an ad free plan, wait for people to calm down, then slowly raise the prices until the ad supported plan costs as much as the ad free one used to. And there you have it, they charged extra to not see ads, just with extra steps.
I quit Netflix back then and I'm so glad I did. $10/mo in electricity gets me every streaming service on my Plex, that's like a $100/mo value and I get to share it with all my friends.
These things are so frustrating, because it's so clearly inevitable, but so many people always insist it won't happen. Again and again.
Shit started with cable tv in the early 80s. Same old shit. Tiger can’t change its stripes.
You pay $10 a month for just Plex? That seems expensive for what it is. Maybe get something more efficient?
Not really just Plex, in addition to powering 6 spinning drives (~50TB total), I also run Nextcloud, immich, Ollama (CPU inference, no GPU), home assistant, grocy, vaultwarden, jellyfin, sonarr, radarr, lidarr, prowlarr, flaresolverr, and overseerr. I run Plex on a separate Intel nuc10 (also included in that $10 of electricity) which has Intel QuickSync which allows me to transcode ~8 simultaneous 1080 streams to friends while leaving most of the rest of the CPU to everything else like running LLMs on the CPU (it's cheaper to run larger models on a slower CPU with lots of RAM compared to buying a GPU with a matching amount of vram).
So yeah if you don't care about n+2 double redundant disks or sharing with more than like 5 people or hosting other apps or running AI while people are streaming then yeah you should totally get something less power hungry. Just the Intel nuc10 I use for Plex (but not media storage) has a TDP of 25W so just that would lower the electricity cost to like $2.50/mo.
I mainly chose to just use the cost of my whole setup's electricity as an example because it didn't seem worth it to think about how to split up the idle wattage between services especially when it's gong to come in at way lower than the combined cost of all the major streaming services anyways, plus I don't want anyone accusing me of needing to underestimate to make my point - even if I overestimate, it's way cheaper.
🏴☠️
Yo ho! Yo ho!
Yo ho! yo ho! A pirate's life for me, Sailing through the broadband, on the digital sea. With torrents and downloads, we navigate the waves, Seeking out the treasure in cyberspace's caves.
We plunder and we crack, from software far and wide, Our digital fleet sails, with bandwidth as our tide. No map or compass needed, we follow the online trail, In search of hidden files, and secrets to unveil.
Yo ho! yo ho! A pirate's life for me, With DRM to crack, and torrents running free. We hoist the Jolly Roger, on virtual high seas, Aye, we be the scourge of the modern IPs.
With VPNs to cloak us, and proxies in our wake, The legend of net pirates, just rumors and hearsay. So raise a glass of energy drink, to the life we lead so free, For we are modern pirates, on the vast and boundless sea.
Yo ho! yo ho! With every byte we claim, We'll sing our shanty proudly, in the digital domain!
Content hosts are just fucking militant these days about forcing ads onto their users, it's like they take personal offense to the idea that nobody likes seeing them.
A VPN is cheaper, tho
Aye
I will never pay money to a system that charges it's users to see ads. I literally won't even go to a theater anymore.
I have already phased out netflix
A rising tide drowns all users.
i've never bought netflix and went to visit some friends who had it. since they sleep until noon i had the morning to kill so i tried the netflix-- reminded me of the old days of flipping through hundreds of tv channels trying to find something to watch and finding nothing. "people pay for this shit?" was the initial thought
Another really frustrating thing for me is it's never obvious what language anything is in until you start watching it. Sometimes not until a few minutes in. Even if it's dubbed or has decent subtitles, some things just don't translate well to English (usually humor), so there's a lot of shows I'm interested in watching but I just don't "get" if that makes sense.
Aside from the occasional hit show, the real product is the illusion of choice.
There is so much fucking nothing on Netflix.
There was something called Car Crash: Who's Lying on the list the other day, and from the description and image, it genuinely looks like a police training video that accidentally made it's way onto a mainstream streaming service.
Their documentaries are all utter dogshit as well, designed for people with an IQ of 80.
The only things still going for it are Mike Flanagan's stuff, 15 seasons of Taskmaster and the odd horror movie that I otherwise wouldn't have heard of. As good as Jellyfin is, it doesn't really have much in the way of recommendations.
It's because netflix' strategy has been to use the vast amounts of analytics they have to design shows that are so incredibly specialized and focused on targeting unseen metrics that they are entirely devoid of substance.
Even buying into their logic that one could do that, they essentially overfit the data. Find a trend? More trend more betterer more moneyer. Doesn't work very well.
15 seasons of Taskmaster
fwiw, their official channel has uploaded 17 series of TMUK on youtube to date. along with all the three CoCs as well as numerous new year special one-offs, 2 series of TMNZ with the 3rd being released weekly, 1 series of TMAU, and full series of some scandinavian taskmasters.
Ahoy there, Maties.
When it has a show that I want to watch, I much prefer Netflix - e.g. solid streaming, captions, etc. The servers also don't just randomly disappear over time. I may need to reevaluate just what amount I enjoy Netflix though...
my plex server has never randomly disappeared either
That's the thing: it will take me more time and attention to figure that all out, plus either a hardware purchase or even more time and attention to spin up an appropriate VM - e.g. I wonder if Netflix ads can be bypassed if my router itself is running a blocker specifically for them - and if so would it be like a minute of empty space at the start of each show (I could totally live with that), or randomly 5 minutes of such every 10 minutes (possibly depending on the show, and maybe more frequent if it keeps trying bc it knows the ads weren't previously delivered).
I haven't done such for over a decade, and the landscape has entirely changed. I was hoping that a couple of shows that disappeared from Netflix when Disney+ came out would get me by for like a year. And it might actually.
Anyway, Netflix knows all this, and is counting on people not willing to put in the time & energy to bypass it. Which is fine - it is a service they provide after all - so now it's a matter of how much pain they can get away with causing before the other alternatives start to look more attractive...
Yeah, no thanks
Fucked them off a year and a half ago and haven't been happier. The water's fine!
I hate companies as much as most, but ad supported plans are a nice addition. The only downside, Netflix can remove the free tier at anytime. What free tier some might ask, I heard that there could be an ad free tier coming.
I've been on the ad free free tier since they raised prices and started cancelling the great shows after one season.
I hate that they do raise prices over time. These companies get tin these contracts for sports and with specific companies that raise their own expense and hurts consumers. That and these companies had always wanted to charge more either way.
