About 40% of Americans have cut back on streaming services in the last three months because of financial concerns, according to a recent report
Americans are quitting subscription streaming services in droves as the cost of living continues to climb, a recent report has found.
Streaming services such as Netflix and Hulu have become increasingly popular in recent years, but Deloitte’s 2026 Digital Media Trends report, released late last month, shows how Americans are getting frustrated over the cost to have their favorite movies and TV shows at the click of a button.
“As the cost of everyday essentials like food and housing remain high, many consumers are reevaluating their budgets and cutting back on nonessential expenditures,” Deloitte said in its survey results. “At the same time, prices for media and entertainment services continue to climb.”
Which is why it can make sense to pay for pirate shares.
Many are around $5-8/mo, and they’re libraries are bigger than my own, with the added bonus of I don’t have to do any maintenance.
$60 to $98 per year, is a better deal than paying for these HDD prices. For me at least the trade-offs are worth it.
Private torrent tracker groups are better and free
Not at these storage costs, which was my point.
Dude. Tell me more.
What would you like to know?
How does a fella get piped into those private torrent tracker groups?
You get invited. You gotta know someone with an invite willing to vouch for you. There are strict client and ratio requirements to maintain good standing.
This is the way.
Even better is Usenet 🤫
Can be… not as reliable or safe
I’ve had better reliability from Usenet, personally, but YMMV. Safe though? If you use Usenet over SSL, you don’t even need to download over VPN, if that’s what you mean.
I mean like incomplete uploads and malware
I mean, I haven’t had the malware issue and it gets removed from indexers just the same anyway :shrug:
I’ve had better success than torrenting, 100%. It’s faster, too, since it just uses SSL.
Except you’re still paying for extremely inflated storage costs, on top of your Usenet fee, which is roughly the same cost as a pirate share - depending on what you’re paying for i.e. block vs monthly.
True, but I was talking about private indexers, not shares. I guess I’m lucky that I bought a fuck ton of drives before the bullshit.
I have a good bit of storage, around 60tb usuable.
But as those drives die, I will not replace them at these prices.
I have used the free trials of a couple different jellyfin shares to test them out, and was really impressed.
YMMV, but after collecting and serving my own media for around two decades, the hobby part of it isn’t as important to me as the the ability to access a large media library for the lowest cost possible.
I have a couple hundred terabytes (half of it being spare), so I’m good for awhile. If I saw excessive failure, I would eventually need to downsize, of course.