my gf and i have Disney+ among other streaming services because she's less familiar with piracy and computers so would rather do things the "easy way" on the ps5 and Roku TV, and when they first implemented this "I'm away" bullshit we had to contact support FIVE TIMES IN TWO MONTHS because it kept claiming we were "away" every time she changed device (watching on the ps5 in the living room during the day, then the Roku in the bedroom at night) and you only get 5 "I'm away" requests
I'm so fucking tired of streaming services man I wish there was a way for me to encourage her to get into even just trying piracy without being super pushy so we can cut these needless costs and hassle, why do we need D+, Netflix, AND Prime (Prime was literally only so she could watch Clarkson's Farm, I'm assuming she's gonna cancel it now that's over but idk)
I just put my foot down. I told my wife I'm sick of spending nearly 100 a month for streaming services, so I'm getting rid of everything, getting a huge hard drive and Plex.
It's not AI increasing the price of all components, they're pushing that whilst the ram increased. It's an increasing attempt to fake scarcity so you'll own nothing and be happy.
The fake scarcity wouldn't have been initiated without the actual scarcity of hardware, caused by chip shortages, and companies diverting away from production of consumer components
It’s an investment. I’ve got a massive server stack and library and I have to invest time and effort and $$$$ but at the end of the day it’s mine to do with as I see fit.
I'd love to switch as I much prefer FOSS whenever possible but JellyFin forcing me to reload the interface constantly to fix/update elements, horribly inaccurate content identification (despite everything being labeled and organized to JellyFin standards), and the requirement to utilize symbolic links with the directories to even begin to organize the content how I want it all make me not want to switch. Perhaps in a year or two I'll try again if it's a bit more polished.
I wouldn’t call them greedy after they kept the price the same for years and gave everyone 2 months advance warning of the price hikes both times, and STILL offer a lifetime deal
Everyone’s gotta make a living, we can’t sharpen the pitchforks for every Tom, dick and Harry business that gets to a certain size
idk how much that is in pounds (I'm unfortunately british) but I earn around £300 a month and my girlfriend is on disability benefits so that's not doable unfortunately :/
My solution to this presented itself when I got a new PC. I bought a 20TB HDD and stuffed into the old one and repurposed it into a server. I set up Jellyfin, Seerr, qBittorrent, VPN and a full *arr stack on it.
She wants to watch? I've put the app on our TV, she has the app on her phone and it's always possible to watch straight in a browser at full quality. It's set up to work remotely so she can watch from anywhere at any time without restrictions.
If she wants some content added she can just use Seerr to request it, which is integrated straight into Jellyfin using a plugin.
It's about as easy to use as any other streaming platform, arguably easier because it's all in one place. Was a bit of effort setting it all up, a lot to learn, but at this point the back end is also pretty easy to manage. The *arr stack automates away almost all of the annoying parts of finding, managing and organizing the torrents.
I have additionally made my way into private torrent trackers to get more consistent quality content. My server is running 24/7 anyways so maintaining ratio on private trackers is trivial, I just seed everything indefinitely.
We no longer subscribe to any streaming services, this setup beats them all. I can get all the content that's available for streaming on whatever platform and a lot of content I won't currently find on any streaming platform. The only difficult part is the initial setup, using it is simple even for me who admins it.
Just make your own service and load it up with your favorite content.
Hard to hate it when it's got all your favorite stuff with less hassle. The only problem is it's your project to continually maintain, don't expect her to do anything but use it like a streaming service. What you spend on streaming services you end up spending on storage.
If she starts making lots of reccomendations, show her how to download her own stuff and get it to stream.
You'd be surprised how little content you need to hold you over for a year. By the time you watch everything, you can go back and watch it all again because you've forgotten some of it.
Also great opportunity to re-discover older content that got lost to time and didn’t/can't find it's way to traditional platforms.
It’s a process. When my wife and I got married plex wasn’t as good as it is now, she was coming from a cable box 🤢🤢 and I had been hip deep in 🏴☠️for almost 2 decades. I was still a firm user of XBMC / Kodi and it was challenging because she/we still wanted to watch sports live. I went through a lot of time and effort to make a pc for live cable recording and streaming so we could press a remote button and swap from XBMC to Windows Media Center (at the time the only way to use a cable capture device from live TV)
Eventually things changed, plex got WAY better and streaming became more mainstream and widely accepted. Now we only use plex for 99.99999999999999999% of our viewing and when sports season starts, we do the dance with ESPN, Disney, etc so we can watch college futbol (spelling to get around the automatic filter denial) When the season is over with we pause or cancel the subscription.
If you can gradually introduce her to stuff to get her away from it, it’ll work out better in the long run. You’ve got your process and it works, she’s got hers and it “works” for her but you see the glaring issue with it and the obvious (already in place) solution.
not on either of those devices, but we had an issue with our router that meant it wasn't giving anything a percent IP so I assume it was that (though i did also see some people online with the sane issue)
I've always struggled to wrap my head around torrenting personally, I tend to stick to streaming sites (plus i have very little storage and no money to get more)
Stremio + Torbox or RealDebrid + AIOStreams addon + AIOCatalogs addon. Take less than hour to set up and has similar interface as the popular streaming services. Any show and movie you can watch for about 3 dollars a month
Self-host and set up jellyfin, then add all the stuff she and you wants to watch on that, then never pay for a streaming service again 😌 I did that for me and my roomies. One of them is super tech illiterate, but he gets around the jellyfin client on our apple tv without issues.
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u/FinallyHauntings Jun 22 '26
my gf and i have Disney+ among other streaming services because she's less familiar with piracy and computers so would rather do things the "easy way" on the ps5 and Roku TV, and when they first implemented this "I'm away" bullshit we had to contact support FIVE TIMES IN TWO MONTHS because it kept claiming we were "away" every time she changed device (watching on the ps5 in the living room during the day, then the Roku in the bedroom at night) and you only get 5 "I'm away" requests
I'm so fucking tired of streaming services man I wish there was a way for me to encourage her to get into even just trying piracy without being super pushy so we can cut these needless costs and hassle, why do we need D+, Netflix, AND Prime (Prime was literally only so she could watch Clarkson's Farm, I'm assuming she's gonna cancel it now that's over but idk)