zlacker

>>qainsi+(OP)
With prices of all streaming crawling upwards, and often multiple services being required to cover the catalog of what you want to watch, purchasing† has become a compelling option again. Realistically, if you're paying for Netflix, Prime, and Disney+, you're looking at a $45/mo bill. With seasons of shows costing around $10-15 to buy, are you better off with streaming? I personally don't watch more than a full season of a show in any given month, and I've just started considering this. One notable benefit - most streaming providers have a larger digital catalog for purchasing than for streaming, meaning you can centralize more.

The obvious downside though is at some point the show may just magically disappear from your purchased library, if negotiations between the platform and the creator go south††. I'd love to see some laws in this area where "a purchase is a purchase" to prevent this, but for now it's a risk (albeit one with maritime workarounds).

† or license leasing if you're buying digitally

†† ie https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6449826?sortBy=best

>>jjcm+md
Personally, I cancelled all my subscriptions (Netflix, Prime, Apple TV+, Hulu, HIDIVE, AMC+) this christmas and reverted to piracy.

Modern piracy (the so called *ARR stack) provide UX that is pretty close to what you get from streaming services. In some cases even better - now I will use just one app on my TV to watch everything, will not be affected by Netflix/Prime/Apple/Hulu or internet provider outages when I am watching a movie or TV show, and will not have to go through 4 or 5 apps when I am searching for something specific to watch.

The UX is slightly worse when I find a movie or TV show via Plex Discovery and want to watch it immediately, since I will have to wait for *ARR to pick it up and download it, but for now I have quite a few TV shows to finish watching before it will become an inconvenience for me, especially given the fact that this stack can subscribe to upcoming shows - I can tell it that I am interested in Fallout for example, and it will monitor releases and download the show once it will become available.

>>antonf+Jq
The quality difference doesn't bother you? Meaning you can't get UHD versions of a lot of shows, only 1080p and non HDR/DV.