I recently did the math and was floored to see I’d be spending 1.3k per year on streaming alone. So I said screw it, bought a nas and 36 TB of hard drives and set up an arr stack. I cancelled all of our streaming subscriptions 2 months ago and it’s been the best decision I’ve ever made. Plus my whole family is doing the same from all around town. I’m saving my extended family on the order of 5-6k per year total.

The nas is going to pay itself off in a few months, then it’s all savings from there. If only these media billionaires didn’t get so greedy, I would have happily kept paying them.

Especially with Claude code, setting up something like this is basically just sitting down and prompting for a couple of hours.

The emerging benefits are nice too. Like we don’t have to sift through junk of Netflix or Hulu to find stuff we would actually watch. All of it is stuff we would watch because we added it ourselves. Really fun!

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anon7000 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Another huge benefit is you can actually get high-bitrate streaming. Ripping a 4k Blu-ray & streaming it from home (for those who may not want to sail the seas) is sooooo much higher quality than typical streaming.

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Gigachad 10 hours ago | parent [-]

It is so sad how with the internet we have accepted terrible media quality. Instant messaging and social media reduces photos to 1MP and heavily compressed. It's fine for a photo or meme you are only looking at once and scrolling past. But if it's something you'd want to save, the quality is garbage.

I'd honestly rather apps stop providing hosted media and just do the delivery, let me worry about backing up history. iMessage seems to be the only one sending things in full quality.

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watermelon0 10 hours ago | parent [-]

The main difference is that iMessages count towards iCloud quota, whereas (most?) other messaging services have free storage.

	▲	Gigachad 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		iMessage doesn't require you to store history in icloud, it can just store everything locally if you want. But yes, I'd rather not have stored history, or the option to pay for storage than to have all media crushed beyond recognition. A few times I've wanted to print something and found it was sent over an IM app and compressed to 100kb rendering it useless.

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ZaoLahma 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I do a hybrid, where I keep lowest tier subscriptions but choose to watch content off of our media server setup at the highest available quality, without advertisement.

I don't mind paying for what I consume, but God damn is the value proposition at the floor currently. Here even the rather expensive mid tier subscription gives you 1080p at most with all the big players. It's as if they somehow converged to this model and aren't competing anymore. Coincidence, I'm sure.

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kenniskrag 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Is that legal? Do you avoid uploading somehow?

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globular-toast 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Alternatively, you could not give them your money or your time. Find other hobbies and kick the "content" addiction.