Ask Lemmy

0 streaming services but sailing the 7 seas

One. It’s all you really need. Watch what you want on it for a month. Then cancel and sign up for another. Repeat.

As others have pointed out, you can get a lot of services for free, even if just for a while. Cell phone plans, Target Circle, Best Buy, and other places frequently send out freebie codes or include services with membership.

Only the one. My self-hosted plex server.

I used to have all of them. Everybody got my money every month. Then all the prices went up. Now only one of them gets my money per month. It's not so much the expense. It's the principle.

Zero. I have not paid a cable bill or for a streaming service in over 20 years.

It was zero for a long time, but now it's one: Nebula. It's $2.50/Mo and run by many large YT creators and comes with no ads or sponsorships. I wanted to support creators and was getting really tired of YT's greed.

A free one from the library called Kanopy and F1TV.

Only one, Plex and I share it with friends and family.

None. I can’t believe how much money people spend on these things.

I won’t bother saying what I use to have. I sail the seas now.

None, and every time my coworkers talk about how many they have it seems insane. One has fucking 6 different services. It's not even about the money. I just truly cannot be bothered working out the maze of what is where when an RSS feed will just deliver me the stuff I'm interested in when it comes out from anywhere.

None, I refuse to sign up for any subscription, unless it can be done through gift cards, so I know that I will only spend a static ammount of money when I can afford it.

None. We had Netflix for 8 years, but we cancelled it a couple of months ago.

Edit: scrolling through the comments made me remember that music is also a streaming service, so one - Spotify

Only one: My Jellyfin server.

Zero.

I have a friend's account to Netflix (I don't use much) - I mainly type watch x free online in the search engine.

Stemio/realdebrid

None. I'd rather sail the high seas than waste whatever money I have left.

None.

I have none because I'm broke af.

I got totally fed up with all the shit, content being spread everywhere and not knowing where to go to watch the things i wanted to watch, prices constantly going up all the time, quality dropping like a lead weight.

So switched to iptv. All the channels from uk, us, and a handful of other countries in europe including ppv sports etc. Also has a stack of disney, hulu, netflix and apple+ bundled in. 14usd a month. Installed on a firestick 4k max pro extreme limited edition. Has an epg, biggest pain is waiting for the epg to load the initial startup each day. Takes a couple of minutes. That being said, you can skip the epg if you want to skip straight to a channel.

Pirates ruled the 00's until streaming services cracked down on axxo and the gang, then spent the next 15 years or so destroying media amd convenience. Piracy will have amother day again soon, i can feel it in my wooden leg

Game pass, GeForce now, YouTube premium, Hulu, Netflix, Apple, Disney, Max, Amazon prime, Paramount, and Grandma just insisted we sign up for peacock to watch the football games.

I want to cancel paramount and Disney, but some family members really enjoy some shows on it.

I'm quitting Prime this month; on top of being twice as expensive as the rest, the greedy mf-ers are adding commercials with a price hike if you want no commercials. Also quitting Disney+ and Hulu for lack of content and lack of funds. I'll be quitting Netflix next. I quit Paramount+ a few months ago now that I'm all caught up on watching all the Star Trek series.

Zero (not including my broadband bill). Jellyfin + *Arr Suite of Apps.

One: Emby.

I pay $13/year for a domain (that gets used across many self-hosted services), and another $6/mo for usenet access (provider + indexer) giving me access to anything I'd want to watch. Between Emby, Ombi, and the 'arr stack; I can open a webpage, search for new content, and click 'download'; 15min later it's in the library and ready to watch offline.

Currently sitting on a collection of 3500 movies and 35000 tv episodes that's ever growing.

Since I like to rewatch a lot of my movies and series , I just rip my blurays and have on Plex or Jellyfin no subscription.

Just Nebula. I do admittedly rent movies from YouTube from time to time as a sort of special thing to do with my friend (a bit less than once a month I think, I don't think I watch them often enough to justify any kind of subscription to them, which probably wouldn't have all the ones I end up wanting to see anyway, and since at the current pace it might be years before I rewatch something if ever I don't think buying is really worth it either in my case), but on the whole, I just have kind of given up watching "normal" TV anymore. There are a handful of shows I liked watching when living with some family that had the subscription, but there's not nearly enough entertainment in just one show or two for me to want to bother buying a subscription to any of them myself, and I've sort of found that except for only one or two shows I get more enjoyment per unit time out of content made by individuals or small teams anyway, I'm not really sure why, maybe because it can be more niche or something.

That isn't to say that I don't spend any money, beyond that one subscription that is, on entertainment or anything, I just generally spend it on games. (And since I like games with thousand hours or more levels or replayability, usually buy them or any dlc on sales, and don't play games with mtx much and never buy any if I do, the amount of entertainment hours per dollar I get there is rather extremely high I suspect).

Plex lifetime since 2019

I get Max for free with my phone, Hoopla free from the library, and my sister lets me use her Disney+ account. The only streaming service I pay for is PBS Passport.

I’ve gotten it down to just Hulu, Nebula, and Dropout. Everything else from everywhere else I pirate. I’m getting rid of Hulu next.

I also technically have Prime Video, but that’s because they force me to have it, even though I just want Prime shipping.

Used to have Netflix, prime, Hulu, Disney, and sometimes Fubo for sports.

Now I have a couple big hard drives and a VPN, and zero commercials.

Prime only because it’s included. Otherwise my VPN and the high seas. Might consider youtube premium for the family account to get rid of ads but trying to see if I can get Pihole or something working.

None of the traditiona streaming video ones. I have F1 TV and Spotify. Streaming video and movies are fun, but don't really match with how my brain works.

It's way easier to maintain focus on a a video game for me, since it allows me to determine the pace more and it provides constant interaction. If things go to slow, my brain tends to jump focus to the next most interesting thing and get distracted.

An issue I also have with story driven content is that I start feeling the emotions of the characters extremely hard. If something stressful or sad happens then I'll get very tense, stressed, or sad, which I don't enjoy too much. So instead of a relaxing activity it becomes a very stressful one for a lot of series.

If I really want to see something I tend to take a 1 month subscription and binge it all in that month.

I have Hulu/Disney bundle, Netflix, and Prime. I canceled Prime after the commercials announcement but I still have a few months remaining. I will miss it but I won't tolerate commercials in a service I'm paying for.

Next to go will be Netflix after their latest price increase, I will subscribe for a month when I want to watch something on there badly enough.

I just canceled Sirius XM as well, I liked it but need to cut some costs. I figured they would offer me some free months but haven't yet. They did offer $5 per month which should be $60 but is more like $75 after all the taxes and fees. Tired of playing that game so I refused this time.

And I have adblocked YouTube on my TV, phone, and PC.

None. I just cancelled our Netflix account a couple months back. We had that account since right after they went public, when it was just dvds through the mail. They really went downhill over the years, to the point where we didn't watch anything on the service for about six months. Add to that them enshitifying all over themselves, and we finally bailed.

Damn, that was like 20 years ago when we first signed up. RIP.

I pay for Hulu and Prime (for the shipping), and get Netflix & Apple TV thru my T-Mobile subscription.

edit: oh, derp. I also have YouTube premium because I paid up for the Google Play Music family plan back in the day, and then it converted to YouTube Music + Premium. Later, I upped my subscription to Google One for the extra storage and phone support and get some okay, ad-free free content on the 'Tubes

I have one, Curiosity stream.