It used to be easy to watch a video or TV series without paying for cable or a streaming video subscription. All one had to do was wait until the DVD series came out, then buy a copy. However, in the past couple of years that's become almost impossible. Streaming video services are commissioning their own series, then making it impossible to buy a copy or view them anywhere else.
Trouble is, I refuse to pay for most streaming video services due to ethical and moral considerations. Pay Disney after what that studio has done to trash so many sterling properties in the name of "woke", not least Star Wars? I won't give them a cent of my money. Netflix, after its child pornography fetish as exhibited in several made-for-TV movies and series? My gorge rises at the thought.
The problem is made worse when these morally and ethically bankrupt companies buy other, perfectly good outlets and fold them into their streaming video umbrellas. I'd love to watch the FX remake of "Shogun": all reports are that it's outstanding, and the few clips I've watched on YouTube confirm that - but I can't subscribe to FX without giving money to its owner, Disney. If I'm to remain true to what I believe in, in moral terms, I can't (and won't) do that. I know that if I bought a DVD series of "Shogun", some money would still go to Disney; but I wouldn't be throwing money at them month after month for the rest of their dreck. I could forgive myself for a one-off purchase, but not for a subscription - but since FX (and/or Disney) hasn't released the series on DVD, that's not an option anyway.
How about you, readers? Do any of you find yourselves in the same situation, unwilling to support a questionable outlet by paying a monthly subscription, but frustrated because you can no longer buy a DVD series of something you'd really like to watch? Let us know in Comments.
Peter
35 comments:
Yes it's frustrating. I suppose you could buy one month, and watch e.g. Shogun, then cancel.
Of course, they will probably make it a pain to cancel. They certainly make it easy to forget to do so.
Often each service has 1 show I want to see. If they don't release on DVD or a digital download I'm not going to subscribe to a service to see 1 program.
Lots of good stuff to watch out there, still available on DVD or bluray, and very cheap at Goodwill or other thrift stores. If there is something more specific you want, ebay has new and used copies of almost everything.
I don't see any need to support the corrupt by buying new content. It's just not compelling enough.
I've got over 800 movies on my harddrive, ripped from DVDs I own, mostly purchased used at thrift stores and estate sales. I don't think I'll run out of things to watch anytime soon.
nick
my primary consumption is used DVDs, but I am still 15 years out on watching reasonably good shows at bargain prices. If they never release on DVD, I will simply never watch them.
Pay or pirate if you truly "need" said show, or do without, there's a plenty of entertainment elsewhere. Your choice. First world problems.
That being said, people are stocking up on older DVDs, going to libraries and such, then building relatively low cost home/family media servers. My spouse has collected movies for decades and has built a home Plex server for her collection.
So I have access to thousands of movies, hundreds of television series if I ever need to scratch that itch. Still would rather work on a project or read a book, too much in God's universe worth exploring.
Watched Shogun on streaming service, canceled subscription, then torrented and burned 1080p files to DVD. They don't want to sell physical media? I'll make my own. They can enjoy their millstones.
I'm kinda in the same boat and it is harder with kids.
Thankfully Disney+ came free with the Internet so at least I'm not really paying for it
I searched for it and it appears there is a Blu-Ray available for it on Ebay and Etsy.
If they aren't selling something on DVD/BD, I'm not buying it.
Streaming is just ""You will own nothing, and like it."
I don't want a "cloud" copy they can erase on a whim.
Wait until one day people's Kindle libraries vanish into the ether with one corporate mouseclick, and I'm stuck with only 100 feet of well-stocked bookshelves and four panels of DVDs, to peruse at my leisure, via battery power or candlelight, unconnected to anything, and unbeholden to any of them.
That's what scares the bejeezus out of TPTB: that you might think and choose for yourself, and block their messaging and programming at your own discretion.
The missus has this thing called the Apollo group:
https://apollogroup.tv/
I scare up $160-or-so worth of bitcoin once a year for it and we get everything. Everything. New in theatres? Yeah, get those.
I did a 1 month free to watch MLB playoffs and world series. Canceled 1 week before expiration. They still charged me two months of service at 80.00 a month. It was a pain to get paid back. Service was FUBI. Do not do the trial offers for anyone.
It is annoying. One can download torrents of many/most/nearly all of these shows, but that has its own moral issues.
For myself, I have resigned myself to simply not watching "the big thing" and just subscribe to a Korean service called "Rakuten Viki." There's so much good stuff on there that I honestly don't miss anything that is "big in the West." I still have to dodge the occasional "BL" or "GL" show, but that's easy to do.
I don't mind subtitles at all so this works just fine for me, but that can be a stumbling block for many, though.
watch.ug
primewire.tf
Of course, things change over time - the powers that be cause sites to disappear over time, but somehow replacements always appear.
To keep abreast of changes, I suggest (and I know this site is terribad and run by the lunatic left - but even thorns have their roses ...):
https://old.reddit.com/r/Piracy/wiki/index
Have found, in middle age, that there's basically no appeal in the stuff available to watch these days. Have better things to do with my time. (shrugs). Watched an awful lot of movies and series on DVD in my youth. Over it now.
Just turn off and disconnect the propaganda machine. The public library is a good place to start alternative entertainment. What did we do before TV? Somehow we survived.
I dropped cable more than 20 years ago & Goodwilled my TV. I subscribed to AMZN Prime way back when it sold free delivery for >/= $25 worth of goods, and now use it mainly (with my 17" laptop) for watching select "free" movies and TV series that appeal to me (am binge-watching "Bull" at present; I found Reacher 3 rather disappointing, and I hope that the "final" Bosch does not disappoint as well.)
Oh, and my kid added me to his Max subscription, which doesn't have much that appeals to me, but I did recently enjoy the first season of "The Pitt," a hospital-ER kind of series. (I like Noah Wylie....)
I have no interest in Marvel, Anime, Woke-y, or much of any other of the current offerings. The last "films" that I recall actually going to the theater to view were, I think, "Sully" and "They Shall Not Grow Old," so that probably tells you even more about my viewing tastes. :- )
Find Kracalactaka on rumble. Feel free to PM me.
Our public library has a good stock of DVDs, there is no cost, just a library card. We have watched many series we missed through them. Ours has a number of British shows made before all this pc crap began
Deacon in Louisiana
I find almost everything is questionable to some extent, these days. You can't avoid them all; there has to be some sort of cutoff line.
Fortunately for me there are some decent authors out there publishing via Amazon, who get in under that line for me. Currently re-reading a good book by some author called Dorothy Grant :)
Second thumbs up on local library.
They should be able to do inter-library loans so if the local system doesn't have it, they can get it from another system.
It may take a while. I decide on what series I want to watch (currently doing Blacklist with James Spader) and I will rip the disks to my server. Once I have a couple seasons - I'll start watching them.
got rid of dish about 5 years ago...the wife and kids use netflix but in my man cave i don't have the internet hooked to the tv and watch mostly metv and all the old western shows and other stuff...way better than most of the crap on tv now...in the dfw area i get 50+ stations just on some rabbit ears so there is plenty to watch...if you use brave browser, you can watch 2 movies commercial free on your computer (cast it to your tv if you have a laptop) in a 24 hour period...
We do have netflix and amazon prime. I pay for prime as I use it for shipping computer parts for my company and the prime video comes with it. My sister likes netflix so she gets prime and we get netflix. My kids watch some stuff on netflix but honestly if we didn't have either we wouldn't miss them. We don't get much value added for the low hours we use those services.
We use an antenna on our high speed 4k tv and get with the antenna bolted to the wall behind the tv 20+ hd channels. If I would put a pole up and mount the antenna above roof level we would probably get 40 or 50 channels from the regions around us in a 100 mile range. However we don't watch over the air stuff but once in a blue moon. We have a plex server and plex account. I payed the 120 ish dollars more than a decade ago for a lifetime plex pass for their premium service. So far they have honored it. Honestly no other company I have every done that with has honored a lifetime membership deal before. Unfortunately its been many years since they have offered lifetime memberships. Now it is a monthly service only. We get several hundred tv streaming channels and a bunch of movies on their services. We barely use it. Our plex server on the other hand gets used a lot. I have 20 years of dvd's ripped down to it. I have bins with stacks of dvds in them that I have ripped. I keep wanting to throw them away but worry for legality's sake. We also have a subscription to chrunchyroll because we like anime and donghua. Most Chinese stuff is unavailable and much as it hurts me to say it is generally good quality and squeaky clean content. Japanese stuff has a lot of superior content but it ranges from squeaky clean to utter smut. There is no chinese show I would fear letting my kids watch un supervised. Japanese ones need a audit first. Library sales here have litteral boxes and tubs of dvds and audio-books sold several times a year. starts for about 1 dollar at the start of the sale and goes to 25 cents to 5 dollars for entire boxes of them by the end of the day. I have thousands and thousands of movies and audio-books on my network for less than 25 cents each.. maybe .01 cents on the retail dollar :) Most habitat for humanity stores have music cd's, movies and audio-books galore for 1 dollar or less.
We can watch movies, listen to audiobooks and listen to music from anywhere in the world on our own private media server. We set up a vpn connection back to the server on the phones, laptops and tablets. Nothing is directly available/exposed to internet.
There are a lot of media servers other than plex that is commercial. Kodi is a great open source one and jellyfin is another.
long ago we had a disney+ account shared with my sister. We discontinued it with prejudice. Netflix I would like to but it's not my account so im not going to start that fight with a family member.
It has been many years since I have had any respect for any major media company, disney, sony, mgm, netflix, amazon, plus any other major one. same is true for any of the old publishing houses and now for amazon. They are all unethical to the extreme and if they can't get the law changed how they want they just do what they want anyway. Disney was the ones back in the day that pushed legislation hard to change copyright when their older movies were getting ready to age out at the 20 year mark. Now it is 70 years and the life of the author.. Guess corporations never die. grrrr..
As someone said in politics you will own nothing and be happy. We are very close to that already. almost everything you get over the internet is limited use licenses now. books, movies, music etc and if you leave the service you lose access to all the content you paid for as it is encrypted to only work on devices with that account on them.
im getting to upset standing on my soap box. going to go cool off.
I find there is VERY little new material worth watching.
We buy DVDs of what we like for the above mentioned reasons. We currently have Amazon Prime. It's ok. We used to have Netflix but dropped it when they dropped everything we liked and replaced it with weirdness (and even before then it had a more limited selection).
Can anybody suggest a good DVD ripper? The one I used years ago is no longer available.
Jonathan
Public library, or Goodwill, otherwise, nope...
https://old.reddit.com/r/Piracy/wiki/index
Go to the wiki part (each subreddit has the option to have a wiki associated.)
There are complete tutorials there on everything, including software.
I don't even trust what is on DVDs. For example, the DVD of Peter Pan has had the 'clap your hands and believe' part removed, and it is NOT in the Deleted Scenes part, either.
Less sinister is that there are a couple of interstitial scenes missing from the DVD of Attack of the Killer Tomatoes that were present on the BetaMax version. One emphasized how obscure the leaders of the investigation were, and the other was a bit of foreshadowing. Surprisingly, Deleted Scenes had a "commercial" I'd never seen before similar to the Blind Traffic Cop.
There are no subscription fees on the high seas.
And the library has a streaming service too called hoopla.
Handbrake is a good opensource video ripper and can rip dvd's runs on windows, mac, and linux
In addition to Salvation Army/Goodwill and public libraries, some pawn shops have rows of DVDs for a few buck each. Friends of the Library annual book/DVD sales are a great time to stock up.
Another source is archive.org. I recently found the entire runs of Space: 1999, UFO, Captain Scarlett, Thunderbirds, and Jonny Quest (uncut version of the 1964-65 original series). I also found Takashi Miike's "Audition," in Japanese with subtitles.
Regarding DVDs not always being the definitive version, that's the case with a lot of movies/TV. Remember "Han shot first"? Unavailable on DVD...just the new version where Han shoots after Greedo fires. The Jonny Quest DVD (mentioned above) is the Saturday morning--sanitized--version for the kiddos, with violence and non-PC dialog removed, not the original primetime series.
This stuff also applies to books, which are being edited or removed from Kindle. The Fellowship of the Ring has both a pony and an hobbit with the name "Fatty." I wouldn't be surprised if that's already been excised from electronic editions.
--Dirty Bob
I always try the local library now before I'll buy a series or movie when I don't (or can't) watch the streaming offering, (there can be a LOT of commercials!).
I’m with Peter on this. I hear Mandalorian seasons 1 and 2 were good, but I’m not willing to get a subscription just to see that. I have a friend who has that subscription and decided to cancel as it has become more than conscience can bear and has found it almost impossible to cancel and it will be easier to cancel the card and change card numbers than to cancel with Disney. I find that there are enough choice of what to watch, let alone what to do in any of my free time, that I can afford to pass up some of the must-see shows permanently. If I only watched dvd’s, I’ve got a lot to choose from that I don’t have to have the few good subscription shows. Add in the choices of games, outdoors, or time with family, instead of just tv, and it’s an even easier choice. Sure, I won’t see that highly regarded show. But there’s not even enough free hours to do everything I would want to do, and choices inevitably must be made on what are the best things worth doing.
I am unburdened of the need to actually watch any of that crap. Back in the 90s I made off with the cream of the crop of the old movies I like and I find that the local libraries that have sales (roughly 50 of them) have zillions of DVDs I can buy for .50c or $1.00 and I pick through them from time to time. Barring that there is half price book stores all over and if you are patient, it will show up someday. Helps that I don't even know what they are.....
Check out the app called CINEMA FREE.
You get access to all the pay to watch services , currently playing movies and a library of previously showed movies and the same for TV programs.
Cinema HD, maybe? 3rd party streaming app. Can be a bit quirky, but we use it A LOT. Of course, research it bit so you know what it's about. There are other similar 3rd party apps.
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