One counter point to why I personally pay for Disney+ is that I have kids, and kids love repeat content. I don't think new content particularly matters to them, at least not at their age.
I wonder how much Disney+'s numbers will be helped by that tranche of subscribers.
We bought a DVD player and a couple high quality DVDs. Seemed rather silly to pay for a year of nothing just to watch reruns. Kids are happy, and now we get to show them higher quality shows.
My kids like repeats, but not THAT many repeats… and they mostly like tv shows. A full run of a TV show on DVD is around $50. So less than 3 tv shows would pay for a full year of Disney+ with all the shows.
Also, my kids go through phases… watching the same shows on repeat, then switching. It would cost way more to buy the shows than stream them.
Libraries are also excellent resources for this kind of thing. Also, they have great audio book players for kids. My son is currently listening to the Hobbit, and my daughter to Charlotte’s Web.
I think you'll be surprised how economical DVDs can be bought for.
Also why limit to 1 year's budget? The magic of owning assets over renting is you keep them. If you spend 100$ a year on DVDs you'll fill up a shelf in short order.
Best of all: you can pick what you want. So often I've read a recommendation for a high quality movie only to have no method to watch it despite paying for Disney and Netflix. I remember as a kid Netflix had everything, now it appears to have nothing. Meanwhile the high quality classics are the exact ones cheap and easy to buy in DVD form.
Not to mention, this year is only the start. If streaming services are not bad enough value for you now, wait a few years. They are only going to get worse.
This is very true, to a certain age. My kids would watch some things over and over again, until they reached a certain age when there was an abrupt change. Once that change happens it's polar opposite, they could not fathom watching something a second time.
One of my flatmates was watching GoT on max volume, one or more episodes every night. I got pretty darn tired of the intro jingle blasting every damn night at like 3am.
I can’t even imagine how crazy it wouldve driven me if it was the same movie every night instead. Different episodes of the same show was bad enough. I probably would have moved out.
Deep seated reasons he probably hasn't spent the time exploring.
I'm 43. To this day I can put Aliens on in the background on Plex in my office while I'm working. I could watch it every single day. One, it's an exceptionally well-crafted action movie (the first action scene doesn't even take place for almost one hour into the film), and the second, my Mom is very much like Ellen Ripley, even down to appearance and build - long, curly black hair, pretty, smart, driven, soft and caring, but harsh and brash when necessary.
It took me many nights smoking cigars and sitting around discussing movies with my friends before it dawned on me that's why I enjoy Alien and Aliens so much. I'm basically watching my Mom be a space trucker Xenomorph-killing badass.
I'd say around 10 also. For the past year, my 3 year old wanted to watch the same episode over and over and my 10 year old tried to talk her into whatever the new episode was.
Honestly, streaming easily wins when you consider the entire family can stream on any screen in the house and Disney DVDs are actually pretty expensive.
You could always buy them from a thrift store for $1-2 or borrow them from the library, and rip them to a jellyfin server. My kids don't know Disney exists yet and I don't see that changing for a few more years, but if they did, they'd be watching Homeward Bound or something.
That'd be a neat legal detour. However for those who don't care, simply downloading requires less effort once you got the framework (usenet, torrent, sonarr, radarr) set up. Personally I am done with the silly streaming fracturing, except for my kids. So I will keep Disney+ at least, Prime cause it is cheap, and likely will ditch Netflix (not enough value)
It's worth it to not be spied on. Kids who grow up on streaming will have surveillance-advertising profiles before they're old enough to understand what they're consenting to.
May I humbly suggest that VHS is superior to DVD for young children, because you can manually censor naughty bits out of “too adult” movies by scratching the magnetic coating off the tape
I have not done this myself, but I had a friend who did. You just pull out the part you want to erase, run a magnet past a few times, then wind it back up.
There's something a bit twisted about using my kids for their own financial gain. Hence my pirating of said shows - no issue getting those repeat views in via Plex/NAS.
I keep thinking about Plex but I struggle with the idea of teaching my kids that stealing is okay. Like, for a little kid: "This kind of theft is okay, this kind of theft isn't." seems nuanced for a little kid.
I have a bigger struggle with trying to tell them "Someone in a special building far away can make up a rule that says I'm not allowed to arrange the bits in one section on my computer in the same order as the bits on somebody else's computer because they did it first. If enough special people agree, they can give themselves permission to come steal my money or put me in timeout in a cage for a long time."
But then it always is hard to explain things when I don't understand them myself.
Simple enough: stealing is bad, but sharing is good. If you had a replicator and could make physical things for free to give to your neighbors, of course you'd do that.
We don't watch Sesame Street (or much TV at all), but if we did, we'd probably stick to the pre-elmo stuff. Jim Henson died when I was an infant so I imagine he'd not be much worse off if we did pirate it. Fred Rogers would probably similarly not have much to complain about if we copied his show. Or Tex Avery, etc. etc.
I think that's fair. But Plex isn't just for stolen content. My Plex server is full of movies/TV shows that I ripped from discs I bought. Granted that it's more expensive to do that, but that could be a viable way to ditch streaming services without setting a bad example.
For what it's worth, I have two toddlers. They're still at the age where they don't know the difference between Plex and Disney+, but I too have wondered how I'll tackle that subject with them down the road.
Why do people think it is OK to steal media? I never understand it. After university, I reduced my media stealing habits by 99+%. During/before uni, I was broke and could not afford to buy media. (Not an excuse, but just the reality.) After uni, I had a job so I could afford to buy some media.
I think a lot of people intuitively understand that there's a difference between pirating the works of JRR Tolkein, him being wildly successful and not alive anymore, and doing the same to an up-and-coming author who's eating ramen a lot. There's no difference legally, though, which is a great object lesson in how there are sharp topological differences between the world of ethics and the world of human law.
If you pay for Spotify rather than hacking it, you're really not supporting artists financially very much, right? Paying someone a millionth of a dollar to stream their music seems to me like kind of an insult, actually, and recording their song to a cassette from the radio like kind of a compliment.
> If you pay for Spotify rather than hacking it, you're really not supporting artists financially very much, right?
The majority of your money goes to the artist/right holder, "[Spotify has] an approx revenue split of 70/30 - so that’s 70% to the artist/rights holders and 30% to Spotify."[1]
70%/30% doesn't sound bad, if true; that's comparable to what Bandcamp was acclaimed for their fairness in paying their artists, if I recall correclty. I wonder what the "trick" is (if any), because I have to doubt the reality of that number. If you know and talk to musicians, it's almost absolutely unanimous that nobody ever earns a dime from any streams even if you are really popular on their platform.
> If you pay for Spotify rather than hacking it, you're really not supporting artists financially very much, right? Paying someone a millionth of a dollar to stream their music seems to me like kind of an insult, actually, and recording their song to a cassette from the radio like kind of a compliment.
This is absurd. One is paying them, the other isn’t. It’s not a “compliment” to not receive income, even if you think the income received is meaningless.
Further, the radio argument is flawed - the radio station paid to play that music for people who might record it. Johnny Torrent didn’t.
I dunno, every one of these arguments always comes down to “but I want it” and other nonsense to try to pretend that it’s ok to steal from artists. It’s the same justification I used when I was twelve and stole a pack of gum from 7-11, and it’s no less lame when the people making it are ostensibly adults.
I'm sorry that your gut disagrees with the ethical conclusion that most people, including nearly every musician I have talked to, have arrived at - I know that is a crappy feeling to have - but here we are.
I don't think it's OK to steal. I do think it's OK to copy, because the person I "stole" from still has his/her original.
Property laws exist because property is scarce. But if I copy your idea or your data, all I'm doing is wiring the neurons in my brain in the same fashion as yours, or arranging the bits on my own computer in the same order as yours.
"Intellectual property" is a contradiction in terms. I'm open to arguments that there might still be reasons it shouldn't be OK, but arguments from property rights or analogies to theft just don't work.
Same kid stage here, but I did drop down to the ad-supported level due to the recent price jump. They claim kid profiles won't get ads, but I suspect they'll reverse course on that. When they do, that will be it for me. I'm not going to pay to have ads spewed into my childrens' faces.
Kids want to watch the same movie 937473829 times. In a row. That’s why GP said they were subscribed. I know several new-ish parents in the same boat with Disney+, specifically.
I wonder how much Disney+'s numbers will be helped by that tranche of subscribers.