not if you raise the black flag
I did that many years ago and the fact that all content is in one place instead of multiple apps is so nice.
I miss the early days of Netflix when that held true too. If I remember right piracy was down too. But everyone wanted a piece of the stupid pie and we’re back to where we started all over again
I think that’s what they mean. They sail the high seas and put all the booty in one place, like a Plex media server.
Yeah, I was agreeing and relating it to the good ol days when pirating for a one asp experience wasn’t needed unless you really wanted to.
Now we’re back to that’s the only way to easily get it all in one place is pirating. Apple TV seems to sort of have that ability but it’s not seamless because it takes you to whatever app the video is on, which still means you have to pay for all the streams.
I’m just back to buying Blu rays. To me it’s the safer option, you legally own your product and you can host everything you want yourself still. MakeMKV is a great tool.
I check em out from the library
Plex and Google TV also work similarly, universal search that then opens the streaming app
It’s like if streaming platforms were good.
Even when we had a few streaming services, we’d end up pirating some stuff that was available because we incorrectly assumed it wasn’t on one of them and it’s just too annoying to have to look up where something is every time.
So we’d tend to go the piracy route first if we were seeking something out and only use the streaming services if we knew off the top of our heads where something was.
My Plex Server is a bastion of hope. I’m not paying for another streaming service ever again.
I’ve been a Plex user for over a decade now. I’m not impressed with the direction they’re taking, but the alternatives aren’t quite there yet in terms of polish. I hope that by the time they fuck it all up there’ll be a better solution to switch to.
I’ve used Plex off and on for a few years, getting more into it as streaming prices have been rising. What direction are they taking that you don’t particularly like? I’ve also seen Kodi - which I’m intrigued by. Any thoughts there?
Are you talking about plex media server for local files? If you are still looking for polished alternative check jellyfin. It is amazing
How is this different to using stremio?
Piracy is now easier than ever when you use torrent streaming clients.
its always been a convenience issue, i want it easy to find a show not search through 5 apps, pay 5 times etc. Netflix took many pirates to port because it was easy and reasonably priced. Then everybody and their mother made their own streaming service…sails were raised again
Usenet is even easier with more reliable quality. Strong recommend.
Most don’t like usenet since it cost money, but you’re absolutely right, usenet is the best way. It’s what I’ve been using for over a decade now lol
For the cost of one streaming subscription I’ve got all content, downloads at full speed and is private. Can’t imagine life without Usenet and sonarr/radarr now
I need a tutorial on this
Get yourself a nice newsgroup, and an nzb indexer(search site for newsgroups) . Install nzbget, sonarr and radarr and Google for the parts you get stuck on.
I recommend a 2nd newsgroup subscription at a different place, because (in layman’s terms) to appease the dmca strikes they delete a single file of the download, and chances are a different server deleted a different file, so your downloads are complete enough to parse the rest together.
Sounds mildly wonky and technical, my curiosity is piqued.
Can this be traced by the police or other state agencies? Or is this truly anonymous?
This is the one I used years ago: https://blog.harveydelaney.com/configuring-your-usenet-provider-and-indexer-with-sonarr-radarr/
The nuts and bolts should be the same. I imagine his recommendations on what backbones and newsgroups to subscribe to are out of date, though.
Shh, you trying to get c/technology banned from lemmy.world?
If not for live sports. That’s the only reason I’ve had “cable” off and on for the last decade
Costs of streaming from my Plex server haven’t changed.
Laughs in jellyfin
I tried jellyfin, but it just doesn’t do all of what I need it to do.
What’s your idle ram usage? After a few weeks uptime it’s sitting at 4GB. Plex is barely at 100mb. Fucking drives me up the wall.
Something’s up there, I run Jellyfin with a bunch of other docker services and it’s barely at 2 GB of ram.
Fuck yeahhhh bro
25 terabytes of mostly 2160p content and growing.
Ha, I’m pretty much exactly at 25TB as well. Though everything is 1080p max.
Still great!
I used to have 4k stuff, but my server is used by few family members and friends, and streaming 4k was just taking up to much resources. Upgrading to a more powerful NAS is planed when money is availible.
Also 4k uses conisderable more disk space and while I have 4k screen, I find 1080p with a good bitrate more than sufficiant for me. That saves a ton of storage.
Still better than dealing with ads. That’s my red line.
I absolutely refuse to watch programming with ads, free or paid. I won’t do it. My time is limited and I’m not every going to willingly hand over a portion of my life to advertisements.
I’m never going back. If ad-free options go away or become too expensive, I’ll simply stop watching shit. There isn’t a price at which ad-supported programming becomes attractive.
I’d love to see the Weird Al movie. I won’t, however, because Roku won’t let me pay to watch it.
So watch it pirated. They get $0 either way.
I fucking love Al.
I love how he DAREs TO BE STUPID about it. I guess it could get EVEN WORSE if he went OFF THE DEEP END.
Ha! Weird Al is bad ass.
This is one of the greatest replies I’ve ever seen. Rats off to ya Al!
what a legend
There isn’t a price at which ad-supported programming becomes attractive.
Even free isn’t good enough for ads. Ads are horrendous. They don’t even try to make them good anymore. It’s just “but our shit, dummies!”. Remember the milk commercials? That was probably the height of advertising. It’s all been shit since then.
Corpos kicked the artists out
What were the milk commercials?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0Gkqzxss8Ss&pp=ygUPbWlsayBBYXJvbiBidXJy
They had a string of commercials that were all pretty entertaining back in the day.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=0Gkqzxss8Ss&
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Preeeeeeach!
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yarr harr fiddle-dee-dee
being a pirate is alright with me
Do what you whant cuz a pirate is free
I hear Plex has a lovely, sleek interface once you turn off certain unneeded bells & whistles.
idk tho
What bells and whistles should one turn off - our server wouldn’t mind a facelift
I’ve heard tell that at the account level, individual users can turn off things like free movies & TV series, enhanced search results and all that to get a cleaner experience.
I the web UI, mouse over your avatar, go to account settings, and disable pretty much everything under ‘online media sources’. Enjoy the pure, clean Plex experience. Just see what the server offers, no more, no less.
🏴☠️🦜
This is a lousy article rehashing an article behind a paywall.
The cost they have is $87 a month. There is so much that’s confusing about this. They don’t specify how many streaming services they are counting in that, but it’s a good guess that is about 5, each at about $17 a month. I feel I have too many streaming services and share accounts with family, and I can stream from about 7, pay for one and watch 1.5. If I couldn’t share accounts, I wouldn’t have the accounts. I pretty much watch star trek and whatever show someone tells me to watch.
They also don’t specify what $87 a month gets you in cable. Around me that’s about basic cable prices, which is significantly less content presented in a less convenient format and is almost entirely reruns filled to brim with commercials.
Not only is the article missing key information it also misrepresents the information it has.
Note: I’m sure people will tell me to pirate everything, but there are reasons to not pirate. And it doesn’t address that this is a poorly written article giving incomplete and incorrect information.
Personally, the lack of ads is a big one for me. I will not watch ad filled content. Any time I’m on vacation and turn on a hotel TV and have to deal with ads it is so frustrating. Especially now that content is made for streaming, so there aren’t logical ad breaks in the story. Just random hard cuts in the middle of content.
Yeah I’m curious how they get that number. I look at it as my math is Internet ($50)+Hulu Bundle ($21)+Prime($12) is $83/mo
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Great point. I guess there’s maybe someone that doesn’t need internet in there home. But the average person these days can’t function without it.
I was doing it to try to make their claim seem sane. Are people really on 4-5 streaming services?
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I have access to Financial Times, and this is what they showed in their article
people that pirate give advertising its power.
pay your content creators and don’t tolerate ads.
Back to the high seas it is.
I’m not paying for 5 streaming services to watch 1 show on each. So now I’m paying for no streaming services.
Convenience as a reasonable price was the deal. It it neither convenient nor reasonably priced any more.
Cable TV all over again. Region locked DVD all over again.
I pay for Hulu, Max, Disney+, Prime, and get Netflix for free. Half the time, I still can’t find the show or movie I want to watch. But 99.99% of the time I can find a torrent for it within 20 seconds of searching. Not only is pirating cheaper, but it’s more convenient and more user friendly these days.
I find it funny as hell that when I search for “where can I stream X?” Most of the time, I can only watch the thing on a pirate streaming site, unless I want to pay $15.99 for a single viewing on Amazon. lol fuck that.
My move is to go to the library and borrow stuff on DVD. I dunno where you are but up here in Canada you would be surprised what you can find legally for free if you got a library card.
I think more convenient and user friendly is a bit of a stretch.
My wife gets confused by the remote and different profiles. My parents needed me to explain how to use Netflix more than once. Saying going to your PC and finding a torrent is convenient and user friendly isn’t true. But the point that having to search where to stream a particular movie or show isn’t user friendly is also true.
I wouldn’t say that pirating is user-friendly, only that it can be more user-friendly than logging into and searching through multiple streaming services. That of course pre-supposes that you have some knowledge of how to torrent and where to find torrent files.
Plex or Jellyfin (Jf is more preferred by the sailors, but I like Plex quite a bit)
Jellyfin & underlaying infrastructure (sea ports, taxi ships, management ships, pirate ships & so on).
How do you torrent on Plex ? I got it but it doesn’t do anything for me ?
Plex is just a media server. You have to acquire content through some other means, then you can host it on a Plex server and stream it to any device that has the Plex app installed.
I have a Plex server that my entire family has logins for, and I put whatever movies or shows people are interested in. Basically you can make your own mini Netflix.
I got Plex on a RasPi3 and an external 2TB. I have to limit to 1080p/x264 but works quite well.
If I want 4K I’ll buy the disc, downloading even Blu-ray quality is so goddamn big.
I had a pi4 but I found it struggled with transcoding and multiple streams, ended up with too much buffering.
So it’s just a streaming app. Similar to bubble up or Miracast?
Not quite, I think those just stream over Wi-Fi like Chromecast?
Plex has a full media server application that your can run on a computer, and you can stream your media from it over the internet to any device that has the Plex client app.
I have a Plex server set up and running on an old laptop in my bedroom with a huge library of movies and TV shows. It acts like basically any streaming service such as Netflix, but it’s my own stuff. I can watch from anywhere on any device that has a Plex client app. I can also send invitations to friends and family so they can access it, too.
You don’t, you use Plex to make the experience of watching what you obtain easier. Netflix tier ease of use.
How is it easier?
In what way ? I haven’t used Plex yet. It shows you what you have on your other streams. I tried to play a vid I have downloaded but it refused to play. Don’t get the hype.
Would just use a pirate site and stream from thereb
Add a library in plex pointing to where your personal video files are stored. If you automate the downloads with the *arrs radarr, sonarr etc plex turns into basically Netflix for your local media.
How do I add arrs radarr ? Is that an app or droid ?
Torrents are the hardest way to access things that are streaming on various sites. Or so I’ve heard. If you don’t need to watch everything in 8k it’s actually really easy. Just need an ad blocker and a quick search online
Some times I think maybe humanity has reached too far with technology. You’re absolutely right, lots of people get easily confused over even very simple things. It’s depressing to think about.
We’re all specializing in different things, and sometimes we get stretched thin. It’s understandable that most people have a hard time with more technical aspects of the digital world (and even the simpler aspects of it, due to constant innovations and paradigm shifts), but in this scenario in specific, it can pay off to be the more knowledgeable technical user, since you could set up Plex with *arr services to automate everything, and then just serve Plex on a golden platter to friends and family. It’s what I’m doing, recently set up Overseerr and friends are already using it to request content, and a couple of other friends are helping with moderating request and fixing minor issues on Radarr and Sonarr. I’m even getting donations from them in order to expand storage and improve infrastructure. It’s great, and I strive to ease the subscription cost burden of those around me.
I need to get a VPN
The wife and I are trying to watch all the conjuring/anabelle/nun movies. The movies are scattered across several services and makes it a pain to watch. Kodi is one search away from what I’m looking for.
Download a file, run on any player, on any device. It’s always been more convenient, online services had to catch up to filesharing, not the other way around, and in many ways owe their existence to non-commercial entities showing how it could be done. They might figure out a good way of doing it, until the executives get involved and want to put their stamp on it.
Lol…wtf is this trash article…Netflix is struggling to survive. Bullshit, they made 12B profit last year.
The article makes it out like all the big players are at a loss…they’re not…they brining in Bs in profit.
The price hikes are greed, and of course the consumers will pay it.
the sea is still here my friend.
No, it’s not. Turns out Lemmy.world does not like sea at all. In fact, they blocked “info kiosks” at ports near sea, so you have no idea about what is going on in the sea.
The fediverse is bigger than just Lemmy.world.
I signed up to world because I didn’t really know what was what. Any advice?
just make an account on dbzero and use that.
there’s really no investment cost to trying out an account on any of them, i’ve been using lemmy.ca because i have family in canada and it seemed appropriate, haven’t had any of the instability issues that i’ve had when using my .world account. there are plenty to choose from so honestly just go with whatever passes your vibe check
Best to look for an instance that isn’t too big or too small, has stuff you’re interested in like local news or hobbies. Especially if they talk openly about the running of the instance, costs, what people can do to help, etc.
Not for any particular instance but I’m sure there’s a list out there somewhere.
Fire up an instance and federate with whatever you want.
Who cares? Lemmy’s contribution to the pirate scene is immeasurably small.
security through obscurity is better in this situation anyway
It’s true they did, and it took me less than a minute to make an account on a new instance. An instance that I know will never block said community, because it’s hosted from here!
Disney+ have increased the price cause theyre losing customers. That seems like it will work.
OMG the house is on fire, quick, grab the flame thrower!
Hans, grab the flammenwerfer!
It is some people’s solution to climate change too!
They increased the price because they want to push everyone to the ad tiers because those make more money.
Didn’t think of this. No winners but Disney+ then. Seems about standard.
They must have hired on a bunch of old Comcast executives!
Facebook did the same thing. Users were engaging less because of stupid changes Facebook added, so they added even stupider changes like filling people’s feeds with 98% ads. That of course drove away the remaining people so now the content feed is 99.9% advertising and “recommend” crap that nobody asked for or wants.
However, media execs acknowledged that the prices being charged by streaming services were unsustainable, and that a “crash” would follow – where companies would be forced to increase prices or go out of business.
Absolutely nobody believes you.
Unfortunately the latter instance was recently defederated by lemmy.world
Yea … lemmy.world is probably not the “everything” instance some people were hoping … but more the “vanilla” instance (which also has a place IMO).
Vanilla instance for vanilla people.
Edit: LMAO I’m on .world too folks (⁀ᗢ⁀)
Completely unrelated to the topic but isn’t it strange how vanilla has somehow become a negative? Vanilla ice cream being the default is because pretty much everyone enjoys vanilla. It’s a fantastic (albeit now very common) flavour.
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Community*
Instance is still federated.
Not the entire instance, they only blocked the piracy community.
Yet another reason to spread out and not centralize on lemmy.world.
I haven’t used lemmy.world in a few weeks as it’s always down when I want to use it. Went back to my standby.
It is a shame that once you’ve signed up for a community you’re not allowed to make a user account on any other instance.
Yeah. And it’s a shame when they “ban” something, there aren’t like hundreds of different instances that can still easily access that content.
Some smart people should really come up with a decentralized federated system so these “bans” become total non-issues.
Ah well, one can dream.
Huh - a data network that routes traffic around missing or blocked nodes. That sounds like an advanced project from some kind of Defense agency. Someone should patent it - an Interconnected Network; I’ll bet it would be super popular. I wonder what they’d call it.
Heard about it. That’s a shame. There’s really nothing illegal there. Admins of my instance make a community voting before defederating.
I think I read somewhere that’s it’s possible to migrate your account to another instance. The idea of Lemmy is that we’re not at the mercy of someone’s whims.
It is not possible currently to migrate an account. There are tools that let you migrate eg. Your list of subscribed communities, but your posts and comments can’t go with you.
The instance wasn’t defedared, but the piracy community was blocked.
Why?
good thing I’m not on world 😂
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Bruh I’m not even on Lemmy.world you could see that by clicking on my profile
the Liftoff app shows it for everyone 😏 It should be a default feature imo
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Yep. Disney+ (for now).
Netflix, HBO, and Hulu gradually cancelled over the last few years.
What’s stupid of them is that if they’d stayed around $8-10/mo each (ad-free), I probably would have stayed subscribed forever. Now they each get nothing.
Biggest blocker I get for doing this is the family plan… There’s at least one out two in the household who are watching Netflix to mean we keep it, and I don’t want to downgrade as they take away the HD streams… That’s my biggest peeve, HD/4K should be standard, not a premium (yes I know, it’s more data but we’re not in the 90’s anymore.
It has pushed a lot of people back to piracy, what did these money grabbing schmucks think would happen
Or if they were willing to continue selling to Netflix instead of trying to pull off their own abusive service, they’d be more likely to get my money
I’m not in the US, and even though most (but not all) services adjust for local pricing, finding and keeping track of where something is (often isn’t, or not anymore) available to stream is more of a hassle (PITA really) than going to my favorite magnet site.
Just like streaming music where 95% of the content I want is available on all providers, I’d pay for an all-in tv-streaming service. I do buy digital/physical copies of music through Bandcamp. It’s all about convenience.
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But can you constrain that global search by the services you subscribe to? It’s not useful to find all the places I can’t watch something
And can you constrain the search by language? One of the things that made Netflix easier to give up was the flood of search results in languages I don’t speak
PlayStation of all places has this. I will often turn it on just to see if something is available on one of the services I share with family. Then I turn to sketchy streaming sites or the public library.
Roku isn’t available in my “area”, so it (still) says. It’s a bummer because I wouldn’t have any issues with paying to binge something at high quality.
Edit: I have used justwatch.com in the past, but it isn’t always correct or up-to-date either.
Try reelgood.com
In my experience it’s pretty universal. My TV offers it (Android/Google TV), my Xbox has it, and Plex has it
I think the price hikes are basically relying on or incorporating this practice into their pricing models.
I do wonder though if we’ll see changes made to the cancellation policies. I’ve certainly been expecting a change there for years.
I do wonder though if we’ll see changes made to the cancellation policies. I’ve certainly been expecting a change there for years.
What kind of changes to the cancellation policies are you imagining?
That you can’t cancel each month? Like a six or twelve month minimum?
That’s not a change in cancellation policy; that’s a change in package pricing and availability.
Well, rather the subscriptions. IE, no monthly subscriptions but 6-monthly or 12-monthly. Or cancellation fees.
No idea if my expectation is valid, but it intuitively seems to me like an obvious way to grab some cash.
That article is full of it. I was paying $120-150/month for cable on top of Internet. YoutubeTV is still only $75. I don’t even bother with YoutubeTV anymore. That was way too much money per month and despite 100+ channels, there was almost nothing worth while to watch. I’m not paying $75/month for Saturday Night Live a few times per year and MSNBC on in the background while I work.
I have Netflix and Disney+. When the kids are gone I will also get rid of those. Netflix is a joke now. It takes me so much time scrolling to find a show that I even want to watch, that I usually fall asleep before that can happen. Disney+ filled their service with horrid crap from Star Wars, Marvel, and other formerly beloved intellectual property that they have sullied and ruined.
Bottom line. The Streaming services are just as bad or worse than cable was and is. The quality of the shows is mostly so low that there is nothing worth paying $75, $20, $15, or even $5 per month for. I will happily pay zero because that is what streaming and cable shows are worth, for the most part, right now.
If anyone would please just make some quality shows I would happily pay a reasonable price for it. There has been maybe one show this entire year that thought was good and that was Star Trek Strange New Worlds. Guess what? It isn’t worth paying Paramount+ for a whole year just for one show. Sorry, but they all need to get their act together. Peak TV is long gone. It is Peak Crap TV now.
Severance on Apple was outstanding!
The Expanse on Amazon is good.
DS9 on Paramount.
Seinfeld on Netflix.
The thing is that I’m not interested in paying for a different service for every single show. Star Trek used to be on Netflix until Paramount got greedy and decided to spin up their own shitty service. You used to be able to get almost everything with 1-2 subscriptions. We used to pirate until Netflix and Amazon made good enough products that people decided they were worth the money.
These media companies fought tooth and nail against streaming, but Netflix made it possible. Netflix proved the business model. Now everyone wants to pull their content and put up their own shitty service with barely functional controls. They fought against progress until progress proved profitable, and now they want the whole pie. Fuck them. We’re going back to piracy.
We’re going back to piracy.
I’m already there.
As someone who basically hasn’t since limewire… Where do I begin?
Pay for a seedbox and install Plex on it (something like whatbox.ca). You’ll have your own streaming service that you can add anything you want to, and it only costs as much as the seedbox. It will give you insularity so you don’t get ISP notices, you can access it from anywhere, it’s great.
From there it’s just finding where you want to get your torrents from and getting used to adding them to the torrent client on your seedbox.
I dislike Apple so I probably won’t ever watch Severance there.
I watched the Expanse.
I watched DS9 and Seinfeld when they originally aired.
Totally agree with the whole service per 1 good show thing. It is exhausting to figure out what service to get to watch a specific show. I play Star Citizen for entertainment mostly now and I probably watch Youtube 10x more than any other streaming site. I like certain podcasts, news, camping/bushcraft, tech reviews, movie reviews, and Dungeons & Dragons play streams.
I’m not sure I agree that Netflix showed that it was a viable business model. HBO was the real success with a subscription model. Its just that they weren’t streaming and just on cable. I wish Netflix were HBO from 10 years ago. Heck. I wish HBO was HBO from 10 years ago now. The purchase by Discovery has screwed them up even worse than they were before. Netflix is heavily in debt and has no useful content to show for it. They only care about new subscribers and don’t care about the existing ones. They seem to cancel every show that might have potential after a 8-10 episode season. It was already really difficult to even find a good show on Netflix, and then when you do, it is all but certain they will cancel it if it was good.
There is a reckoning coming. People don’t have the extra income to pay for useless crap.
I play Star Citizen for entertainment mostly now
The irony of you complaining about streaming prices lmao
We know where his budget went tho
Also…
You guys know you can stop subscribing when you’re done with your shows, right?
I’ve been a backer for 10 years and have spend $275 dollars. I’d call that good entertainment value for my dollar. No one needs to spend more than $45 dollars to enjoy almost every aspect of the game. In fact you can spend zero dollars and just play during the free fly events which happen at least 4 weeks per year.
I don’t know what you think Star Citizen costs, but I’d say a onetime payment of between $45-110 dollars for a starter package for thousands of hours of game play is pretty good.
Will pay 4.5x standard game prices for vaporware and patiently wait a decade for the game to somewhat resemble being playable
Doesn’t have the time or money for movies and TV
Bro you can just say you don’t like movies and TV and accept that you’re the minority here instead of claiming there’s nothing good anymore lmao
The price for a star citizen starter package is $45-100 to 4.5x is a huge exaggeration. I have spent less money on Star Citizen than about 4 months of YouTube TV and have gotten way more hours of entertainment out of it than the crap they serve up on cable. I find it quite playable at the moment. Unfinished? Overdue? Absolutely. I guess we all entertain ourselves in different ways. I’ll take Star Citizen with my org mates over “Dangerous Naked Island Housewives Flipping Houses” shows every time.
Who the hell mentioned reality TV whatsoever? Do you really think that’s all that’s on television? Brother, we’re in the golden age of scripted dramas and have been for 15 years. You seem very obtuse and to be debating in bad faith.
Now everyone wants to pull their content and put up their own shitty service with barely functional controls. They fought against progress until progress proved profitable, and now they want the whole pie.
I’m pretty sure they were happy with the cable arrangement - you wanted one channel but you had to pay for everyone because it was bundled together. Now they all have to compete to get paid. They’re forced into the streaming business because streaming is killing cable and they don’t want to let the streaming service hold the money. If they price reasonably it would still be acceptable.
I have 5 different streaming packages and pay less than I did for cable/satellite while having a vastly superior experience.
It’s not even remotely comparable.
Yeah not to mention that is is so easy to cancel and resubscribe to binge watch a show only when you need the service. I will probably get Max when House of the Dragon comes back out, but just for the last month that it is available.
I do this every football season lol. Totally agreed!
For me it’s High Seas and Tubi, Amazon Prime, but that has uses outside of watching stuff, so it’s really more a side benefit
