From an aesthetic point of view, I am getting pretty tired of this obviously LLM generated static site content template design in 2025/2026.
98% of the time when I see one of these it's a bunch of "content" generated by Claude or similar.
Quoting the site: "Written by Rashid N. Rashid N is the editor of HonestlyRanked. He reviews every figure this site publishes against its source before it goes out, and has never accepted a free account, a review unit, or payment for placement. Rashid N is a pen name; see our methodology page. "
I would bet good money that "Rashid N. Rashid N" is busy being a meat-puppet for an LLM to produce plausible sounding content. To exactly what end, I'm not sure.
Me. Because if there's no human checking the content I don't actually have a reliable signal that what I'm reading is true.
I'm not a subject matter expert here but I know that list includes Disney+ at $18.99 and Hulu at $18.99... but Disney and Hulu bundled together is $17.99:
I can understand that its tiresome, but its also not new.
Every medium, livejournal, blogger, etc page in the look nearly exactly the same. Or Twitter Bootstrap sites.
I'll give them some credit here: its at least been worked into a terse format unlike a lot of the docs I get from people who seem to think AI's ability to add verbosity is somehow a virtue.
Honestly, this feels like we're in the Geocities era again. Tons of people are making stuff again.
I'm excited by that.
And even LLM design tropes are better than seeing the same platform design on every page. The same Instagram, Reddit, X pages over and over and over forever. It's monotonous design. Platforms suck in more ways than that, though - you're forced into their constraints, algo bait, spam, hyper-drama, Reddit mods, contrarian view downvoting, etc.
It feels like we're entering the 90's - 2008 era again. The indie web. Microformats and self-distribution and hacking and remixing.
Why can't anyone just run it through one of the "make this not appear so clearly LLM-generated" obfuscation utilities open sourced on GitHub, or something similar just with prompts.
The level of phoning in the complete lack of any work beyond the absolute bare minimum is the most frustrating aspect to me.
I would say, because not everyone cares as deeply as you do.
If it's readable and aesthetic, it is perfectly serviceable for the purpose of reading a post.
Consider that you probably didn't have such an intense response to WIX templates or substack articles, so most of what's going on is actually your feelings about AI taking primacy.
> Consider that you probably didn't have such an intense response to WIX templates or substack articles
Apologism at best. People have been bemoaning this issue for a while now..., pre-AI even.
First time I'm seeing this defended from an "oh you're just anti AI" perspective (which, ironically, is exactly the sort of bare minimum a couple comments over was bemoaning)
If you create content that people like, with a distinct style, one can direct their LLM to it and copy the style. The more content you have out there the better the copy will be. I don’t think it’s really a differentiation you can rely upon
The world you are describing assumes nobody will produce anything anymore because of theft. I think there will be a reset and hopefully content producers like Mr Beast will lose out. But, I do not think people, similar to the original participants on the Internet, will refuse to make anything. I expect a return to Live journal similar content where we get actual opinions even if we sadly lose out on long tail content/production because people do not want to work hard for free. The return of the hobby style Internet isn't necessarily bad.
In the spirit of not speedrunning towards the dead internet theory, then what we need is a slop-detector that detects things that have been run through a script to "make this obviously not look like slop", in a recursive looping battle royale until the heat death of the universe.
I'm surprised that with the complaints that companies trained on everything that it results in the LLM having aesthetic preferences. With all of the templates available on sites like Wix or Squarespace, you'd think generated sites would have more variety. Then again, I have no idea what the prompts are that generate these sites to know if there's something that gives the generator the notion the style is the one people want.
Yeah it was interesting to me that I identified it immediately.
Perhaps been spending too much time w/ Claude
It's capable of many different designs but this site tells me Rashid didn't even bother.
New proposal for LLM-on-LLM wars: Have an automated system that retrieves every front page URL link on HN and feeds it into a "smart" LLM for analysis of whether or not the site html, css, JS and general template layout match that of a known LLM generation engine. Then give it a "probably vibe coded slop" rank number. If you can't beat 'em, let them fight...
It looks close to the kind of documentation artifacts GPT 5.6 Sol would generate for me.
That style is still rare enough that I prefer it over OP's "we installed shadcn + Tailwind and look like every seed-stage startup SaaS from 2024" style.
As a paid service it probably works great. In the spirit of weaponizing vibecoded slop vs vibecoded slop, I'm fairly sure that I could 'teach' locally hosted Qwen 3.8-Flash-Next to identify vibe coded slop, with a thorough enough system prompt and access to like, playwright and headless chromium.
Or since a lot of vibe coded static sites are just plain html, cs, js, a first try attempt via wget to mirror the first 500KB of the site and then analyze it.
Also the dark theme is something not everybody likes. Especially with red-green inside. Think of color-blind people. My eyes are in pain from just trying to focus.
That's the surprising part. It's pretty obviously spit out by /frontend-design, the tells are too obvious because Claude has built me too many of these, but /frontend-design by default will give you both a dark and a light theme and make it adapt to system color theme with no prompting at all, so why would someone build a lazy stock /frontend-design but override that specifically?
Looks like every other website to me, even before Claude was a thing. IMHO new sites have looked like this for a long time.
I think it's less of a distinct aesthetic rather than having "Tells" in the template that you might be sensitive to for having worked with it.
I've seen word documents that the first time I saw them I thought nothing of it. Wasn't until I had ChatGPT work on something later and noticed it's exact use of particular fonts and colors that I realized the other was AI generated.
There was nothing materially wrong with the documents, but after seeing the connection you can't unsee it. It's not really a new or AI specific phenomenon either, any template can trigger it. like how every RPG maker game looks the same, or every substack blogs all are samey, even on custom domains.
I assure you that I am a meat based mammal that engages in normal human activities such as respiration and generation of saliva. I also enjoy consuming calories and watching branded entertainment products.
Very very small fonts is one of the things that annoys me most; truly a sign that design-based post-training is in the hands of the young and inexperienced. Far too many AI-generated site designs look like a teenage fan site designer trying to do “corporate”
Even the URL captures the ubiquitous "honestly / genuinely / let me be up front" verbal tick that Claude can't resist. That is, "Rashid" likely couldn't even be bothered to come up with his own website name. I hate it.
One of the highest-value streaming subscriptions you can get is PBS Passport. You get it with a $60 donation to either a PBS TV or NPR radio station. The donation is tax-deductible and the PBS subscription is rich with high-quality content for both adults and children.
The title kind of buries important details about the distribution of these costs and their changes.
For example, Apple TV+ went from $4.99 per month to $14.99 per month, a +200% change, while YouTube Premium went from $11.99 to $15.99, a +33% change.
So services like Apple TV+ are skewing this increase a lot while services like YouTube Premium have remained relatively low. Similarly, Apple TV+ starting at $4.99 per month was clearly a very low price to start (which can probably be mostly attributed to the service's lack of content at that point). It's now at a "normal" price.
Just the same, saying something like something "costs $702/year more" without a point of reference is bad data presentation. The 2021 cost for all of these services was $1,150.92, for a +61% change. I'm not saying that's not substantial, but this kind of information is necessary for these figures to not just be rage bait.
And, of course, if you're simultaneously paying for Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, HBO Max, Apple TV+, Paramount+, Peacock, YouTube Premium, and Spotify every month, then you're either (a) really into consuming this kind of content and are a "premium subscriber" in the sense that these costs ought to be justified or (b) very bad with managing your time and finances. I suspect normal users subscribe to one or two of these at a time and are probably willing to switch around as prices change, content gets released/pulled, etc. A better analysis would try to do some investigation into this dynamic, since it will probably reveal that people are able to navigate dynamic service subscriptions well enough that they aren't actually experiencing a straight-up +61% increase in costs since 2021.
All of this is to say that this "analysis" barely even qualifies as a valid first-pass at understanding this kind of data. It's literally something that Claude probably churned out in 20 minutes. Everyone can be dissatisfied with the value they get from these streaming services, but this kind of post only helps to muddy the conversation.
I think the point is that we are no longer in the world of Netflix in 2015. Even if you watch « only » 5 shows, if they are on five different services then that means 5 subscriptions.
Or you spend time planning and organizing subscriptions.
I am still happy with my decision to never get entertainment subscription services. I buy CDs (that I rip) and BDs (that I let someone else rip, since that's a science in itself). This guarantees me access forever and I get to sell down the line, if I feel like it.
Buying CDs would be so much more expensive than my Spotify subscription with the variety of music I listen to.
Another helpful element of the streaming services is no incremental cost to try out a new movie or series. I can start a new show and drop it 15 minutes in if I decide I don’t like it.
I will listen to 20 or more new bands each week on Spotify. It’s how I discover new music.
For someone who only listens to a small number of the same CDs over and over it might be cheaper, but it’s not a generally true statement.
My CD collection is around 30 years old. Spotify is currently $13/month. $13 times 30 years is $4680. A lot of people could cover most of what they listen to with that much budgeted to buying CDs... and I'd remind people that the relevant price isn't list price but what you actually pay. Fetching a Michael Jackson album out of a bargain bin for $1 is that album for a $1, whatever someone else somewhere else somewhen else might have paid. I also buy my own movies, and there's a lot of "$5 for the entire Lethal Weapon series collection" sorts of purchases in there.
You're probably objecting to the fact that you don't have 30 years, which is correct, but is also the point of the "long term" part of the comment. Someone who listens to stuff that is on the streaming services and is literally constantly switching between artists and who doesn't mind if some stuff disappears from the services sometimes and so on and so on is perfect for the streaming services, yes. However, the more of those clauses aren't true, the less obviously advantageous the streaming services are, and I don't think most people are sitting down every week and sampling a dozen brand new artists. A lot of people could, with just a bit of care to buy things frugally and used, build a CD collection with $14/month faster than they will want new music.
It can help to jump start a bit and not compare this to building a new collection from scratch. It also helps that such a jump started collection can start by buying the cheap stuff that fills out collections quickly.
On the plus side, the "cosmic jukebox" seems to have mostly worked out for music streaming and most stuff is available from most services, which is a huge point in favor of the music streaming services. In my opinion for movies and TV shows that can be legally acquired (putting aside piracy for the moment) the analysis tips much more heavily in the direction of just building your own collection. I don't even know what it would cost you to buy a month's worth of access to, let's say, 80% of my movie & TV collection (since I have stuff that is just plain not available on streaming at all). They're so fragmented it's insane. And with my rate of consumption of TV, oh, call it $50/month just for a nice round number, that's way more than I'm spending on building out the collection anyhow. Maybe if Hollywood would hire more writers who have taken and passed Writing 101 my consumption rate would increase, but that's not the current situation.
> I can start a new show and drop it 15 minutes in if I decide I don’t like it
IMO, that can also be a problem. When I was young and buying CDs, occasionally you would buy one you didn't like at first. But since you had spent money on it, you'd listen to it. And I discovered some good music that way.
Same thing with movies and tv shows. Sometimes it takes a bit to get going, or I 'm in the wrong mindset for it, but repeated viewing or just sticking with it gets me through that.
Try before you buy is what piracy is for. I would prefer if there was another venue to try before paying, but the industry hasn't figured this out in the past hundred years, so piracy it is.
Streaming could be an acceptable compromise if it was $10 a year for everything in existence, but the catalogues are splintered across multiple services and even when you combine them all there are plenty of things not available.
I don't think that logic really holds but its pushed by spotify. People used to listen to a lot of varied music -- and theres a lot of ways to do that still without paying for spotify.
Anyways Spotify is just a platform/gatekeeper for record labels to push their products and theres no way that spotify prices ever become static. They will need to continue to push more products through the model to continue to grow and pay for company especially as all the other players have wizened up.
FWIW if you lapse in payment they kill all your downloaded content immediately. Super annoying service. I get why but like 10 days after probably about 10 years of subscription seems like a real jerk move. Even content that wasn't theirs and was mine -- they wiped it. You own nothing.
Tbh just recently I found the full extended version box set of LotR on DVD just lying on the street together with ~dozens more decent movies.
I could probably fund my viewing habits entirely out of found stuff.
As for music; my dad ripped his whole CD collection many years ago, many thousands of CDs; more than I could listen to in a lifetime probably.
Plus I buy music on bandcamp to support a few artists I really like.
Paying for streaming services is just fueling the wholesale of our culture or worse the military industrial complex
You know computers have the ability to compress videos, right?
>Do I really need 4k HDR to enjoy Seinfeld?
No, but the difference between 480p and even 1080p is pretty significant and definitely makes the viewing experience just generally more enjoyable. But that's just Seinfeld, where you can basically close your eyes and guess what is being shown 90% of the time with great accuracy. Where this doesn't work is with movies/shows/etc. where the visual component is important. If you go to a LotR watch party and bring a 480p rip and expect people to watch that, then you might need to get your eyes checked.
Not everybody listens to music all of the time. I almost never listen to music. I watch few movies and mostly, I rewatch old ones that I like. Paying that amount of money for any subscription to a content faucet (while Youtube is still free, if you absolutely must watch video) sounds crazy to me.
Some of us owned thousands of albums (or movies, or shows) on physical media before the legal streaming party even started.
Personally, I also listen to a lot of ad-free college radio and watch a lot of online videos. Depending on what type of entertainment you enjoy, it's really not hard to pay next to nothing for it without compromising.
It should be easy to calculate this for your own needs based on your playlists. The advantage of buying is that you build up your own catalog of artists that you listen to regularly which means you don’t have to keep paying for them. So, at first, buying the albums would be more expensive but after a few years it would become much less expensive. The exception would be if you are always looking for the latest tracks by a large number of artists but I don’t think that’s most people.
Older popular music can be purchased second hand or as a various artists album which also saves money.
buy 13 songs a month, every month, for a year, and see how big your library is.
Remembering that a song at full price on itunes store is $1~ and a monthly subscription to spotify is $13
There is a compounding effect, so buying my library as it is today will cost me about $300~, but that's because I've accumulated 300 songs over the course of about 12 years. (300/12) is about $25 per year.
So the delta is $131... for convenience of being able to listen to a new song once or twice and never again.
The irony of course being that if I ever stop paying, I have access to nothing at all.
I have 15 years worth of songs, account is less than 10 years old. Arguably I would be okay dropping some of those songs if I wanted to buy the songs. The biggest difference for me though is the issue of discoverability. It is very easy for me to find and save new songs on Spotify, it would be much harder for me to find the songs I like if I had to pay for them, especially since a lot of the songs I like are not just songs from popular artists but are often just one of two random songs from random artists. Is there a good middle ground here? I keep a copy of my song list in case I want to ditch Spotify but this is the main hurdle for me.
300 songs is not many at all. I have purchased around 20,000 songs in my life. Would it have been cheaper to use Spotify? I suppose so but (a) they don’t have all the music I want and (b) I prefer having the independence to control my media. Also Spotify didn’t exist when I started :)
Movies and TV shows I can maybe see. There hasn't really be a show that I really wanted to watch for the past... two years, except a few that are on public broadcast or only available on DVD.
Music I don't get, you can't even buy a single CD for the price of a streaming music subscription, unless you buy used, in which case you can get as many as 10 CDs per month.
Video streaming and it's licensing model is horribly horribly broken, there's no reason why I should have three to five subscriptions just so HBO and Netflix can produce yet another drawn out true crime show about someone how got lost half way around the world in 1983.
Buying breaking bad on DVD is <3 months of netflix subscription (no ads).
So if you watch <2 seasons per month on average, you already come out ahead, and this is assuming only a single subscription.
People tend to wastly overpay for subscriptions because they end up underutilized and are typically never cancelled quickly enough because people are lazy.
I'm not questioning not having streaming services. I'm questioning it actually being cheaper than buying physical media in the long term for anyone who listens to more than the occasional song or watches the occasional movie.
If the answer is "I pirate stuff", that's fine. But just be honest about it.
LP's, 8-tracks, cassettes, cd's, mp3 players, etc.
You didn't have the whole world at your hands. You had to pick what to listen to, what to buy, what to carry.
Yes, it's nice having the world available, but also, it's nice being able to sometimes think, ponder, make a decision, and explore that decision.
Based on all the responses, people need to learn to make a decision and live with it for a bit.
- Picked a song and it's not the perfect one? meh, okay.
- Also learn to be in the quiet. Oh, the song is not meh, but bad? Turn it off. It's okay.
- learn to read a book
Our society overconsumes by insane degrees. TBH the world would probably be a better place if most people limited their consumption to what they could reasonably acquire on disk.
There is so much garbage on streaming platforms, I rather research and pay per song/movie than waste time on trash. And that was before AI slop. Only reason I have subscriptions is family (cheap babysitter)
I have a hard time understanding your opinion. What do you even mean by garbage? There's thousands of legitimate music bands/musicians on these platforms. Naturally you won't care for a majority of it, but an interpret being niche doesn't make them garbage.
FWIW I went through a phase of this (feeling like streaming services were full of low grade stuff) until one day when basically nobody seemed to understand me except Amazon Music, which has an almost eerie recommendation mechanism that I think people don’t talk about much because the rest of the app is so meh.
In one single afternoon Amazon
Music served up loads of niche old favourites I had not thought to search for, introduced me to a couple of artists I would not have known existed otherwise, and probably rescued my failing love of music.
I now play a game with it and pick somewhat diametrically opposed aspects of my music tastes in quick succession— Superorganism, Cardiacs, Gavin Bryars, Nanci Griffith, Vivaldi, Anouskha Shankar, say — and then see what it comes up with. Invariably one of the recommendations will be something I already adore and one will change my life.
I stumbled into the Chris Thile multiverse this way, for instance.
So dont listen to it? I mean what is the problem here.
I never listen to basically anything spotify recommends me, just songs from bands I already know and love. And if I were to purchase the whole discography of the breadth of music I listen to it would cost the down payment on my house
They're $20-50 for complete series on dvd on Amazon right now. That's 14-35 new shows to get every year for the same price. I believe it's cheaper. This is why so many companies push subscriptions. If DVDs made them more money than they'd be pushing you to buy them.
I'm not even buying. If governments think my data is worthless and e.g. don't kill the businessmodel behind data brokers, then why should I respect their copyright laws?
Well they do have a choice, and that's to switch to windows.
I run linux too but I'm not going to pretend like my choice to run a niche setup means I'm entitled to pirate content because they don't 100% support it
We aren't talking about a choice between running a mainstream setup or a niche setup though. There is much more to this choice—I'm sure you understand what I mean. I don't want to dive into this discussion, I just want to highlight that it isn't as simple as you suggested.
I just always cancel my subscription directly after subscribing. So only pay for a month basically. A new show is out that you want to watch, subscribe, cancel directly, watch it. And just repeat when the next season is out. I never understood why people maintain their subscription across multiple services
I get Netflix HD free for 2 through Tmobile,
Hulu for free from Spotify, for probably about 7 years.
Peacock for free from Xfinity.
HBO Max for $3 for 12 months when Amazon had prime sale last year.
I get prime since I have Amazon prime.
you can stream for free/cheap if you lookout for deals.
I buy movies on Bluray and physical games for “trinket” collecting aspect mainly, but it’s also a gatekeeper to my consumption habits. DRM-free Digital is a better method of preservation
I only buy things that I’m really motivated to watch and play, and it makes it much more fulfilling as a result. Netflix turns watching a movie into something that just feels as hollow as doomscrolling Facebook.
Streaming services do not offer you what you like forever, they offer you what you didn't know about for the amount of time you need to watch it. So these are two different things
Same here, that's the main value I get from especially music streaming services: I hear about anartist, and can immediately go check otu their discography.
It's not way cheaper long-term at all, I mean unless you really watch/listen to a tiny amount of content, you can rip the same way with Netflix, Hulu and so-on as well so I don't see how that makes it more durable?
What you are doing is practically the same equivalent as downloading torrents, how do you have "more guarantees" than just downloading?
PS: I'm saying this because what you are doing is already illegal so there is virtually no difference.
We noticed this also for the online software services that we use. Many of them increased in price, which I can understand with rising costs. However, a large number of them also have/introduced a 'hostile' structure that force you into paying through the nose. Case in point was the timesheet software that we used:
* They increased the cost of all price tiers.
* They moved features from lower tiers to higher tiers, forcing you to pay more.
* And this all was leveraged via "per seat" pricing. So a modest increase in price quickly becomes a lot, simply because of the multiplicative nature of per-seat pricing.
This per-seat pricing is especially absurd to us. To run the software it makes little difference whether there are 3 users or 6 users, yet the total cost of those 3 additional users was an additional 500 dollars! This got so out of hand that we decided to build our own timesheet software, which we now happily use. I have always seen software as the promise that you only need to build it once, and can reuse and leverage it many times over to reduce your costs. However, this does NOT seem to be the case anymore.
You see the same in streaming services: limits on the amount of devices you can have in your family, moving features into higher cost tiers, and so on...
To play devil's advocate a bit: running software isn't free. If you're paying for an online service, the hosting cost to the company does scale per-seat. It's easy to say that the company only paid the cost of development once (and even then, more users = more development demand), but you're not a user of a single unit of developed software.
For streaming services, I think the development-hosting needle swings way towards hosting. Streaming video is the vast majority of their costs and efforts, so scaling prices per-user is the only sensible option. The "software" of those services is bad and interchangeable, and not what anyone wants or is paying for in the first place.
Taking Netflix as example - it has been going downhill steadily, they have a habit of canceling good shows after one or two seasons etc. It is no wonder users get annoyed when they have to pay more over time, and get less for their money. Increasing prices is never going to be popular even when it is justified, but users are more likely to tolerate if the price increase comes with better features or at minimum, no drop in features/quality.
Another egregious thing these subscriptions do is all kinds of dark patterns. Making it super easy to subscribe but super hard to cancel, not informing before charging (how hard can it be to send an email "upcoming charge next week"), showing ads in supposedly "ad-free" services etc. All this just add to the frustration which leads users to cancel.
That may be the case but they are getting so aggressive that I am constantly having to reconfirm devices within my own home. Luckily I just run my own server now but we have HBO for free with my cell plan so that’s the ones subscription we still have. I have to do email 2FA probably every 4th or 5th time we open it because it’s on “too many devices.”
Important context here is that many of these streaming services operated at a loss for years, and some still are. HBO Max didn’t turn a profit until 2023 and Disney only become profitable in 2024 after bundling with Hulu. AFAIK Paramount+ and Peacock are still in the red.
Point being, the introductory prices for these services were always unsustainable.
Is that important context? I would say it's not. What if those companies already made massive profits and said "I think people are willing to pay more for this, so I'm going to raise the price." And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. I've raised the price of my services many times in my career for exactly the same reason.
They are the ones who set the market so that’s on them. They are the ones who set what people were willing to tolerate. If it’s not sustainable, then it’s not a good business. They aren’t entitled to existing.
Armchair theories on paramount and peacock, so take with a mountain of salt:
Paramount will probably stay in the red because they are overly-catering to conservatives (a little too much emphasis on baby boomers as well), narrowing their potential audience.
Peacock just doesn’t have enough going for it period. Weak library and not a real first tier consideration for folks
Are you saying that a single data point contains the same amount of information as a dataset of hundreds if not thousands of entries from across the economy?
Agreed, $95.91 a month in 2021-03 is $120.91 in July 2026 dollars. The current cost is $154.41, so it grew $33.50 a month after accounting for inflation.
I am probably an outlier but I don't honestly know how much someone can watch on theses services to be always subscribed, I subscribe to watch something and unsubscribe after a month or two because that's when I'm well and done. My husband had some free three months of Disney+ and I don't think either of us watched a single thing on there in that three months. Tubi has better content than Disney+.
I think the point is that inflation numbers are bs. The official number from 2021 to today is 23%. But we didn't see prices only 23%. A restaurant mean didn't go from $20 to $25. It easily went up 50% or more.
Inflation isn't some force of nature that needs to be accounted for like the curvature of the earth.
So in real terms it's up 26%. Which of course is to be expected, people have a set amount they are willing to spend on entertainment, in the past it was cable -- in 2015 the average US cable TV subscription was about $100, that's about $140 today in real terms, or $1700 a year.
Seems that streamers have a long way to go before they extract all that money.
That’s the average household cable tv subscription, no?
I subscribe to YouTube and my partner subscribes to Prime. We have a joint cable-like tv package too, and one of us pays for Disney Plus. In the past we’d have been consolidated into one cable subscription consumption, but now we appear in the stats as lots of distinct consumptions.
I think all-in, streamers plus other subscription based entertainment services are nearer to the $140 figure per household than the individual figures describe.
The average household cable tv subscription didn't get you access to all the music, enormous amount of youtube content, shipping benefits, and ad-break free watching. And it wasn't on demand viewing. And it required using a special device in a specific room in a specific house.
Price increases are tolerated if the value increases. Even rent-seeking is tolerated if the value is relatively stable. But what we have here is value proposition decreasing from fragmentation and shallow content and increasingly intrusive targeted ads while the prices keep going up.
Prime's app is ridiculously bad imo. I'm not sure why that is, but everything is slower and takes more clicks and digging than similar apps on the same device. There are also significantly more ads than on Disney+ or Netflix ad tiers.
I find that Netflix and Paramount+ are the American services that offer the best app experience on my (very low-end) smart TV.
Several of these services launched around 2021 with introductory pricing, which is necessary for attracting new users to a new service.
Most people I know don’t subscribe to every service and then leave it that way. They might have Spotify and 1-3 video streaming services at a time. They cancel one and start a different one when they want to watching something new.
I like occasionally watching movies. I will rarely watch a movie twice. Streaming would be the best option for me, but I will not subscribe to more than one service. Get your shit together. Do cross licensing. Split production from distribution. Until then I will not be paying for any streaming service.
Why would streaming be the best option for you to watch a movie once? You have long been able to rent movies with just a few clicks from many sellers. Maybe Netflix is the only one where you have to subscribe for a month to watch a movie.
Some of it is a function of my household's love of sports, and their fragmentation across the services. Some of its just sheer laziness to pick one and stick with it or rotate the subscriptions.
I don't think I could realistically drop lower than 3 on this list though: Spotify gets used constantly. One TV/Video streaming service. My wife would likely divorce me if I cancelled YouTube Premium.
> the fourth I have to take due to state apparatus' nagging and legal threats.
I get a letter every month from the licencing people, it just goes in the bin. I've had 1 visit, he asked to come in, I said no. That was basically the end of it.
(For the record, I have a TV but I currently have no way to watch live TV on it, so why should I have a licence! I don't use their service)
The TV license is insane to me, as a non-brit moving to the uk.
I am happy to pay a reasonable price for something I use.
But the threats I get about a GBP 1,000 is very un-british.
I don't know who runs the TV licensing scheme but they need to be sacked.
Thankfully if you can look past this gamesmanship then it is possible to call them and decline to participate in this nonsense.
"TV licensing" exists in a lot of countries and it funds the public service broadcaster. It is essentially a tax, it just happens to be collected by a third party (in this case, Crapita) rather than other tax collecting mechanisms.
Some countries (like Finland or Switzerland) require you to pay it even if you don't own a TV. It's really just a tax.
The reasoning for it not being a tax is that the public service broadcaster should have political independence from the government. Most people don't want their country to have a "government mouthpiece" state broadcaster, and it is much easier for the government to tell the broadcaster what to do and say by fucking with its funding if it's directly funded from the treasury.
Other countries do the same thing with a different trick, such as inserting it into your electricity bill.
The UK is a powerhouse in media production, part of that is due to the BBC funding all sorts of productions, both the visible (actors, etc.) and the invisble (camera operators, set designers, costumers, writers, directors...).
It has also been clear for centuries that private media, historically just the newspapers, but now TV channels, film studios, etc., have been disastrous, as their private owners either focus on profitability and pump out scandal and lurid stories, or if they've made their millions some other way, they run a paper in order to pump out biased propaganda. So a state-funded but not state-controlled broadcaster is an ideal thing to have.
The "licensing" has a point because it does make the BBC more impartial since the current government cannot adjust their funding down or up depending on their programming.
However, the same aim could be achieved by just setting a formula in law. 1 pound per british citizen, or 0.0001% of the average income per citizen last year. Numbers pulled out of ass as i have no idea what an UK tv license costs. As long as they make the formula extremely hard to change, it will work.
In the US, you don't even need to pay a licensing fee when you buy a DVD with intent to rent it out to people (this is not the case in the UK), thanks to the "First-sale doctrine" - Bobbs-Merrill v. Straus (1908).
I don't know about in the US, but I live in a fairly small city in Canada and we have DVD rentals. I go to the video store almost every week, and it was on the papers that a second one (which will also rent out VHS!) is opening.
The Library does DVD rentals too, I check it out every couple of months.
It's even better in Toronto, Bay Street Video is an institution.
Eh, I miss video rental stores in the US, but I don't agree that they would solve this problem. I worked for a large chain of them as a teen, and know first-hand that people were spending just as much on rentals as they do with subscription services, especially when you add in game rentals and late fees.
More importantly, it does not solve the problem of ownership. We don't own a rented disc just as much as we don't own a DRM-controlled digital purchase that can only be accessed via the subscription portal it was purchased on.
I cancelled majority of my services for this exact reason. I was a member of netflix since 2015, when I checked my credit card bill last month and saw the charge I really had to question if it was even worth it at this point.
You could be presenting the most carefully-researched information in the world, but with such an obviously vibecoded site I'm not going to attempt to read it.
You could be presenting the most carefully-researched text in the world, but with such obviously machine made paper I'm not going to attempt to read it.
Even if the information is accurate, I'm calling it low effort slop... Smart LLMs have basically automated producing a plausible looking "content farm".
What is the alternative to subscribing to streaming services? Can you purchase your movies online and be guaranteed to have access to the movies in the future?
Libraries! They often have digital access to various services—e.g. Kanopy—but also often have lots of physical media sources! It involves a little more planning and a little less algorithm, and there are shows and movies that won't ever be available—e.g. things from Netflix, Apple—but there's enough out there already.
You can stream your own stuff, from home, to all of your devices and your friends' devices, for free. And since the movies are on your own hardware, you have them forever. Movies, tv, music, books, comic books, video game roms, basically any sort of media you can even name. And it's been possible for you to do so for the last 15 years, maybe more.
If you want guaranteed future access, then this is probably the only online option that actually fulfills this guarantee... other than that, physical media.
I regularly snag DVDs for $1 USD or less at garage/yard/boot sales. I see tons of cheap used physical media in record shops when I travel, too. eBay and Facebook Marketplace are also great sources for used DVD.
I promote this because not only does it restore some mastery* over your media, it keeps these discs out of landfills and oceans, where they will linger in a shredded state.
*we are, of course, still subject to any anti-piracy measures and non-removeable advertisements on the disc, which admittedly seems quaint by today's DRM standards, but I ccannot rightly say "complete" mastery over your media, here.
I watch films on streaming rather than old dvds with unskippable nonsense like "don't pirate this dvd" (well obviously I didn't, that's why I have the dvd), or the pain of the menu systems to just press play.
Physical media isn't guaranteed to retain future access. There are protocols for players to update various bits of data from the newest disk you have ever inserted into them. The Nintendo Wii certainly does this, I'm not sure if BluRay does but I don't see why they wouldn't.
You can still buy physical media online, though an increasing portion of movies and shows are produced by the streaming companies, and you don’t really have an alternative there.
Subscribe, screengrab what you like, unsubscribe. Repeat. Really easy to do in a virtual machine, so it doesn't conflict with anything else happening on the computer.
No. The whole issue is that the seller needs to maintain an online service to allow you access to the movies. This online service costs money so over time is likely not worth the cost. This plus the online service provider undergoing changes (bankruptcy, acquisition, mergers, etc) or they themselves losing rights to the movies. Seems to me that rental or purchases are still unbeatable. The alternative is streaming but the downside is higher costs over time and worse quality movies.
meh, a good number of these had just hit the market in 2021 and clearly had unsustainable prices to drive market penetration.
You can also see the "follow the leader" effect with prices converging around $20. If I had to guess I'd say the next 5+ years we'll see tighter price competition, probably companies following Netflix's pricing hikes and that prices will creep up to 24.99
Mostly mediocre to bad entertainment and distractions anyways.
I'm not a fan of the "binge watch chowder" of the last 15 years and much rather extend my collection of actually worthwhile UHD BluRay movies to watch deliberately every other Sunday night or so.
Hi honestlyranked you might want to reach out to the mods, your comments are dead. I think you are meant to put info in the submitted post text field, not in the comments, I could be wrong!
This is what I am always curious about with these tech valuations. They’re valued at multiple times earnings, often 30+. That implies 30 years to earn back an investment iff earnings are payed out. Yet all are immediately enshittifying or price gauging when they hit monopoly / have market share. Is the bet then that thats just gonna be the status quo? I guess historically it was a good bet.
Context matters, because absent it folks will look at these increases and shrug it off as inflation (or let companies shrug it off with that excuse).
To truly contextualize it, we need to understand the total value (library sizes, removed/lost media, household/account sharing costs) relative to its price, and relative to background inflation. We need to understand relative to costs (labor, infrastructure, royalties), to profits, and how industry consolidation has or has not affected these data points.
From my own understanding of the wider context, there’s a significant attribution of costs to naked greed and profit extraction rather than overall value. With job displacement due to AI (despite union contracts), the tearing down of series or films due to CEO preference (looking at you, Zaslav), the overlap of libraries (Hulu and Disney are increasingly the same thing; Hulu/Disney/Peacock are the same thing as Hulu alone was just seven years ago), the punitive measures against account sharing, and with the forcing of advertisements onto previously ad-free platforms or pricing tiers, the overall cost relative to societal value has decreased while value to executives and shareholders has increased, and that’s the real takeaway.
Notice this increase didn’t reflect in significant higher salaries for the people working in these companies (not the executives) nor more hiring, quite the opposite, more lay offs. This small indicator tells really what’s going on in the economy, more profit to the corps but people still are getting poorer, same thing applies btw to other domains like groceries or other goods or even housing. It’s a wealth distribution problem, it’s not AI, not supply chain shortages, not immigrants, non of these distractions that get pushed around, since covid, these companies and the ones who pull the strings in nations, they discovered and tested something that can easily manipulate the public and make them ok with worse living conditions: fear! If you scare the public enough about a topic and play the fear mongering tactics rights, you have a golden key to control the public: covid, wars, immigrants, protect the kids, AGI, etc etc are all topic of manipulations, follow the money and the people behind them.
In the old torrent days I was only watching classical masterpieces and top level world directors. In the streaming era I only watch mediocre straight-to-streaming movies, few popular TV series and too much reality TV that I'm not proud to watch.
Realistically you don't absolutely need a VPS to run your own tunnel through for bittorrent. You can do something like install a virtualbox machine that mounts your local samba file share across the LAN (to store downloaded stuff), and otherwise has a default route outbound to the world through a $5/mo VPN that exits to the Internet in like, Chișinău Moldova. Or similar.
The main thing to worry about is using a bittorrent client that knows to 'stop' immediately if it's no longer on the VPN.
Surely the cost of storage has not gone up. And the cost of sending the 0’s and 1’s hasn’t gone up either.
Are movie studios demanding vastly more money from the streaming services for the movie and TV content? Maybe the costs to make new movies and tv shows have gone up substantially but has licensing costs for the old movies and shows gone up too?
Are these extra costs just going to the streamers to run up profit? Genuinely curious about the economics here. I know the streaming business is highly competitive so I don’t think it’s just rent seeking so wonder what else is going on.
Which metric of inflation are you adjusting it to? And which assumptions are built into the goods and services measured, as well as their respective weights, of that index?
I got annoyed that "the price" of a subscription is really two prices — the one advertised and the one you end up paying — and that nobody keeps the receipts. So I built a tracker that checks 27 providers' public pricing pages daily, and separately curated dated, sourced price histories for streaming services going back to 2010.
The streaming number surprised me. Nine services, flagship tiers:
March 2021: $95.91/month. Today: $154.41/month. That's +61%, or $702 more per year for the same nine subscriptions.
Per service since 2021-03: Apple TV+ +200%, Disney+ +138%, Peacock +100%, Hulu +58%, Netflix +43%, Paramount+ +40%, YouTube Premium +33%, Spotify +30%, HBO Max +23%. 75 documented increases across 11 services, every one linked to the announcement or report that covered it. The most recent was Apple TV+, $12.99 to $14.99 on 28 August.
Two services are tracked but deliberately left out of that basket: YouTube TV (a live-TV bundle, $35 to $82.99 since 2017 — the steepest riser I have, but it is a cable replacement, not an on-demand subscription) and Prime Video (an add-on to a Prime membership, not standalone). Putting either in would have made the headline bigger and the comparison worse.
One methodology note, because I got this wrong first: my initial version summed each service's launch price, which gave a bigger, better headline. But those launches span 2010 to 2021, so that basket never existed — nobody could have bought it. Recomputing from March 2021, the first month all nine existed, gives the smaller +61% figure. I'd rather publish the smaller true one.
Same thing happened with the ad tiers. I expected to find ad-free plans being hiked faster to push people toward advertising. Disney+ fits — ad-free +73% vs ad-supported +50% over the same window. Netflix doesn't: it raised both by exactly 29%. What did happen at both is the cash gap widened — Netflix $8.50 to $11.00/month, Disney+ $3 to $7/month.
The daily side covers hosting, VPN, antivirus and SaaS: 42 of 75 tracked plans renew above their advertised price, averaging +196%. The extreme is IONOS at +1,300% ($1/mo advertised, $14/mo at renewal). 9 providers never raise renewal prices at all — two of them, Mullvad and Windscribe, run no affiliate programme, so nobody has a commercial reason to mention them.
Limits, stated up front: I measure published pricing only — I don't test the products and make no claim about quality. Prices are read from one fixed location (Pakistan), which is stated on the site; for most of these the price is global, but where a provider geo-prices, my figure describes that vantage point. Streaming histories are curated from primary sources rather than scraped, which is how they go back further than my own tracking.
Happy to talk about the scraping side — Cloudflare, JS-rendered prices, A/B-tested prices, and providers who publish no renewal figure at all.
I'm mostly down to one. It's called Daddyflix (Jellyfin, actually) and runs on a Mac Mini in my home office. Costs close to zero, is accessible everywhere and there's no ads or other bullshit.
Yeah same. I have an agent running on it, so whenever one of my kids asks to watch something that their friends have told them about it, provided it's not retarded, I tell the agent to go find it and it shows up on the kids TV. No monthly bullshit (apart from the AI supscription I pay for anyway). Automated piracy. I love it.
1. Paying subscription for temporarily available content(i.e. pulled shows or music) is not viable for me.
2. They operate in a winner-takes-all model, so the movies/actors/producers/musicians(especially) get nothing out of me if they are not the most popular ones(which they aren't).
With that in mind - it's their choice. If the above-mentioned decide to sell digital copies, I'll gladly pay for them and download them(last purchase from a few weeks ago). If not - pirating it is.
They do seem to make it easy to push people over any moral objection to piracy. Often more because of fragmentation than price, but pushing the price makes it easier. And the platforms (Jellyfin as one example) make sharing what you have with family/friends easier now also.
I don't have a great view, though, whether this is even visible to the streaming platforms. I suspect they don't really lose much notable revenue from piracy anymore. While it's matured some recently, it's not as easy as "download limewire".
I'm not fully convinced here. Objectively it's a lot easier than it was 15 years ago and that is partially because now more people have the skills to expand the ecosystem and the resources to focus on creature comforts. Since 2022 and the last 2 years more than ever, I decided to cut ties to all cloud providers and host everything myself for 4 reasons:
1. I have 0 trust in software companies to have the ability to protect my data, even if they have the best intentions. Partially because of 2
2. AI: everything has to be fed into it, whatever it spits out is treated as gospel by most tech companies and people that 10 years ago were taught to question everything.
3. Price.
4. It is actually easy to setup and if you put in some real thinking into it, it becomes both secure and easy to pass around. Jellyfin is a good example. I installed wireguard on my mum's computer, "double click this, click this button, open your browser, click on this icon" and she has access to my library.
Part of the reason for the overinflated prices and budget cuts in those exact companies is this exact thing: many people got fed up with minor convenience at an ever-increasing price and "amazon for this, netflix for that". Many of us grew up pirating because we had no other choice. Now we do have a choice but instead of a decent trade-off in price-vs-convenience, we got a price to pay and ultimately a ton of inconvenience.
Still a great ecosystem and value for dollar overall! That's one reason why prices have gone up.
No long-term contracts, no additional hardware needed, no hidden fees. Still the option to not see ads for most of the services. You can freely jump from service to services.
Plenty of promos out there still, too: for example, I get $10 back per month on an ad-free Disney/Hulu/ESPN bundle through my credit card. That plan costs me about $31/month: $31 doesn't buy me a meal out with my family, it doesn't buy me a single football ticket, it might get me into one movie with the family if I do some cheap matinee (not counting gas to drive up and snacks).
Nope, not a Netflix exec. One would imagine if I was, I'd have used Netflix as my example.
I dunno about you, but in my lifetime, if I would have invested in owning VHS, DVD, or HD-DVD, that would not have paid off for me. (I might have owned a lot, but I wouldn't have been happy.)
I guess Blu-Ray has stuck around, but I find that I don't rewatch a ton of movies anyways. I've never felt comfortable buying digital video because I never liked the idea of buying into an ecosystem.
And...discs aren't cheap anyways? Just did a random search - Tron: Legacy (a movie that's been out for awhile, I like, I would re-watch) costs $27.99 to buy a physical copy. So again: $28 to acquire one movie; $31 for me to watch that movie or hundreds of others I want within the course of a month.
Thanks for making me think of this, it's another bullet in support of what I was saying before.
If you go to a restaurant for a meal, you own nothing after that, but you can be happy. If you go to an entertainment park, you own nothing after that for your ticket, but you can be happy.
Making customer happy is an extraordinary valuable service one can provide, and that doesn't have to require connection with materially owning anything.
Exactly, what we have now is vastly better than whatever existed before (in terms of convenience and price). Watch when I want, what I want, how I want, and never pay for anything I don't want and never see ads and never have to go somewhere to get it.
I especially like not paying for sports to watch the few shows/movies I like.
Some people who like to (legally) own media might be disappointed, though.
As someone who loves buying music - yeah, I hear that.
I just never really felt like the incentives were quite the same to purchase movies. They've always been constrained by their formats/vendors in a way that was never as true for music, they've always cost more, I don't rewatch movies as much as I'll re-listen to albums, and I think the...I dunno...nature, telos of movies lends itself better to ephemeral access.
From an aesthetic point of view, I am getting pretty tired of this obviously LLM generated static site content template design in 2025/2026.
98% of the time when I see one of these it's a bunch of "content" generated by Claude or similar.
Quoting the site: "Written by Rashid N. Rashid N is the editor of HonestlyRanked. He reviews every figure this site publishes against its source before it goes out, and has never accepted a free account, a review unit, or payment for placement. Rashid N is a pen name; see our methodology page. "
I would bet good money that "Rashid N. Rashid N" is busy being a meat-puppet for an LLM to produce plausible sounding content. To exactly what end, I'm not sure.
I’m not meaning to be abrasive here, but these comments are also getting old and tired.
And it’s not even relevant to what’s actually on the site linked.
Who cares if the site is LLM generated? Did you care before when you saw the same Wordpress theme repeatedly, or Bootstrap layouts?
The content is what’s interesting, and it is.
> Who cares if the site is LLM generated?
Me. Because if there's no human checking the content I don't actually have a reliable signal that what I'm reading is true.
I'm not a subject matter expert here but I know that list includes Disney+ at $18.99 and Hulu at $18.99... but Disney and Hulu bundled together is $17.99:
https://www.disneyplus.com/welcome/filter-plans
A human doing the research would likely have picked up on that. An LLM that just reads everything literally does not.
> Who cares if the site is LLM generated?
Good people do.
I can understand that its tiresome, but its also not new.
Every medium, livejournal, blogger, etc page in the look nearly exactly the same. Or Twitter Bootstrap sites.
I'll give them some credit here: its at least been worked into a terse format unlike a lot of the docs I get from people who seem to think AI's ability to add verbosity is somehow a virtue.
Honestly, this feels like we're in the Geocities era again. Tons of people are making stuff again.
I'm excited by that.
And even LLM design tropes are better than seeing the same platform design on every page. The same Instagram, Reddit, X pages over and over and over forever. It's monotonous design. Platforms suck in more ways than that, though - you're forced into their constraints, algo bait, spam, hyper-drama, Reddit mods, contrarian view downvoting, etc.
It feels like we're entering the 90's - 2008 era again. The indie web. Microformats and self-distribution and hacking and remixing.
Would something like that be better? https://jsfiddle.net/hs03xbuo/
I deleted the stylesheet, removed the duplicate FAQ section, and reworded a few sentences.
Not related at all, but i chuckled at reading your handle.
Why can't anyone just run it through one of the "make this not appear so clearly LLM-generated" obfuscation utilities open sourced on GitHub, or something similar just with prompts.
The level of phoning in the complete lack of any work beyond the absolute bare minimum is the most frustrating aspect to me.
I would say, because not everyone cares as deeply as you do.
If it's readable and aesthetic, it is perfectly serviceable for the purpose of reading a post.
Consider that you probably didn't have such an intense response to WIX templates or substack articles, so most of what's going on is actually your feelings about AI taking primacy.
> Consider that you probably didn't have such an intense response to WIX templates or substack articles
Apologism at best. People have been bemoaning this issue for a while now..., pre-AI even.
First time I'm seeing this defended from an "oh you're just anti AI" perspective (which, ironically, is exactly the sort of bare minimum a couple comments over was bemoaning)
I appreciate the obviousness of it. Isn't it a good thing if the lack of effort jumps out in seconds?
This is good! Taste still remains a differentiator so far in our tokenmaxxing era.
If you create content that people like, with a distinct style, one can direct their LLM to it and copy the style. The more content you have out there the better the copy will be. I don’t think it’s really a differentiation you can rely upon
The world you are describing assumes nobody will produce anything anymore because of theft. I think there will be a reset and hopefully content producers like Mr Beast will lose out. But, I do not think people, similar to the original participants on the Internet, will refuse to make anything. I expect a return to Live journal similar content where we get actual opinions even if we sadly lose out on long tail content/production because people do not want to work hard for free. The return of the hobby style Internet isn't necessarily bad.
I don't at all get the whole "making websites must feel like a 996 shift in a Nike sweatshop"
Software dev has never been a hard job
It's been so paint by numbers for years now for me it's incredibly boring mind numbing dead end toil
Who said it should? What are you responding to?
In the spirit of not speedrunning towards the dead internet theory, then what we need is a slop-detector that detects things that have been run through a script to "make this obviously not look like slop", in a recursive looping battle royale until the heat death of the universe.
I'm surprised that with the complaints that companies trained on everything that it results in the LLM having aesthetic preferences. With all of the templates available on sites like Wix or Squarespace, you'd think generated sites would have more variety. Then again, I have no idea what the prompts are that generate these sites to know if there's something that gives the generator the notion the style is the one people want.
From a content point of view, this could've been a tweet (or a toot).
Cant generate ad content
Yeah it was interesting to me that I identified it immediately. Perhaps been spending too much time w/ Claude It's capable of many different designs but this site tells me Rashid didn't even bother.
I could tell from the HN submission title + domain name.
New proposal for LLM-on-LLM wars: Have an automated system that retrieves every front page URL link on HN and feeds it into a "smart" LLM for analysis of whether or not the site html, css, JS and general template layout match that of a known LLM generation engine. Then give it a "probably vibe coded slop" rank number. If you can't beat 'em, let them fight...
I haven't tried it personally but my understanding from friends is that Pangram is very accurate, at least for now.
https://www.pangram.com/
Ironic that site looks like it's AI generated too
It looks close to the kind of documentation artifacts GPT 5.6 Sol would generate for me.
That style is still rare enough that I prefer it over OP's "we installed shadcn + Tailwind and look like every seed-stage startup SaaS from 2024" style.
As a paid service it probably works great. In the spirit of weaponizing vibecoded slop vs vibecoded slop, I'm fairly sure that I could 'teach' locally hosted Qwen 3.8-Flash-Next to identify vibe coded slop, with a thorough enough system prompt and access to like, playwright and headless chromium.
Or since a lot of vibe coded static sites are just plain html, cs, js, a first try attempt via wget to mirror the first 500KB of the site and then analyze it.
Also the dark theme is something not everybody likes. Especially with red-green inside. Think of color-blind people. My eyes are in pain from just trying to focus.
That's the surprising part. It's pretty obviously spit out by /frontend-design, the tells are too obvious because Claude has built me too many of these, but /frontend-design by default will give you both a dark and a light theme and make it adapt to system color theme with no prompting at all, so why would someone build a lazy stock /frontend-design but override that specifically?
i'm curious, would a white background with green/red figures be any better?
Looks like every other website to me, even before Claude was a thing. IMHO new sites have looked like this for a long time.
I think it's less of a distinct aesthetic rather than having "Tells" in the template that you might be sensitive to for having worked with it.
I've seen word documents that the first time I saw them I thought nothing of it. Wasn't until I had ChatGPT work on something later and noticed it's exact use of particular fonts and colors that I realized the other was AI generated.
There was nothing materially wrong with the documents, but after seeing the connection you can't unsee it. It's not really a new or AI specific phenomenon either, any template can trigger it. like how every RPG maker game looks the same, or every substack blogs all are samey, even on custom domains.
Typography of these LLM-generated sites is bad.
Design is a question of taste, I am not commenting it.
But yes, you are right that we get tired of these sites as they are indistinguishable.
Have anyone tried to print or switch page to browser’s reader mode? Here starts hell :)
I am for more sick of reading people complain about it than I am seeing it. The page is a table. It was fine.
The stock /frontend-design skill really loves an all-caps mono caption
These LLM generated comments about LLM content are getting a little tiresome.
I assure you that I am a meat based mammal that engages in normal human activities such as respiration and generation of saliva. I also enjoy consuming calories and watching branded entertainment products.
Very very small fonts is one of the things that annoys me most; truly a sign that design-based post-training is in the hands of the young and inexperienced. Far too many AI-generated site designs look like a teenage fan site designer trying to do “corporate”
the nick gerr ification of the web
"honestlyranked.com"
Even the URL captures the ubiquitous "honestly / genuinely / let me be up front" verbal tick that Claude can't resist. That is, "Rashid" likely couldn't even be bothered to come up with his own website name. I hate it.
One of the highest-value streaming subscriptions you can get is PBS Passport. You get it with a $60 donation to either a PBS TV or NPR radio station. The donation is tax-deductible and the PBS subscription is rich with high-quality content for both adults and children.
The title kind of buries important details about the distribution of these costs and their changes.
For example, Apple TV+ went from $4.99 per month to $14.99 per month, a +200% change, while YouTube Premium went from $11.99 to $15.99, a +33% change.
So services like Apple TV+ are skewing this increase a lot while services like YouTube Premium have remained relatively low. Similarly, Apple TV+ starting at $4.99 per month was clearly a very low price to start (which can probably be mostly attributed to the service's lack of content at that point). It's now at a "normal" price.
Just the same, saying something like something "costs $702/year more" without a point of reference is bad data presentation. The 2021 cost for all of these services was $1,150.92, for a +61% change. I'm not saying that's not substantial, but this kind of information is necessary for these figures to not just be rage bait.
And, of course, if you're simultaneously paying for Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, HBO Max, Apple TV+, Paramount+, Peacock, YouTube Premium, and Spotify every month, then you're either (a) really into consuming this kind of content and are a "premium subscriber" in the sense that these costs ought to be justified or (b) very bad with managing your time and finances. I suspect normal users subscribe to one or two of these at a time and are probably willing to switch around as prices change, content gets released/pulled, etc. A better analysis would try to do some investigation into this dynamic, since it will probably reveal that people are able to navigate dynamic service subscriptions well enough that they aren't actually experiencing a straight-up +61% increase in costs since 2021.
All of this is to say that this "analysis" barely even qualifies as a valid first-pass at understanding this kind of data. It's literally something that Claude probably churned out in 20 minutes. Everyone can be dissatisfied with the value they get from these streaming services, but this kind of post only helps to muddy the conversation.
I think the point is that we are no longer in the world of Netflix in 2015. Even if you watch « only » 5 shows, if they are on five different services then that means 5 subscriptions.
Or you spend time planning and organizing subscriptions.
.. or you just download them.
I am still happy with my decision to never get entertainment subscription services. I buy CDs (that I rip) and BDs (that I let someone else rip, since that's a science in itself). This guarantees me access forever and I get to sell down the line, if I feel like it.
It is way cheaper long term.
> It is way cheaper long term.
Buying CDs would be so much more expensive than my Spotify subscription with the variety of music I listen to.
Another helpful element of the streaming services is no incremental cost to try out a new movie or series. I can start a new show and drop it 15 minutes in if I decide I don’t like it.
I will listen to 20 or more new bands each week on Spotify. It’s how I discover new music.
For someone who only listens to a small number of the same CDs over and over it might be cheaper, but it’s not a generally true statement.
My CD collection is around 30 years old. Spotify is currently $13/month. $13 times 30 years is $4680. A lot of people could cover most of what they listen to with that much budgeted to buying CDs... and I'd remind people that the relevant price isn't list price but what you actually pay. Fetching a Michael Jackson album out of a bargain bin for $1 is that album for a $1, whatever someone else somewhere else somewhen else might have paid. I also buy my own movies, and there's a lot of "$5 for the entire Lethal Weapon series collection" sorts of purchases in there.
You're probably objecting to the fact that you don't have 30 years, which is correct, but is also the point of the "long term" part of the comment. Someone who listens to stuff that is on the streaming services and is literally constantly switching between artists and who doesn't mind if some stuff disappears from the services sometimes and so on and so on is perfect for the streaming services, yes. However, the more of those clauses aren't true, the less obviously advantageous the streaming services are, and I don't think most people are sitting down every week and sampling a dozen brand new artists. A lot of people could, with just a bit of care to buy things frugally and used, build a CD collection with $14/month faster than they will want new music.
It can help to jump start a bit and not compare this to building a new collection from scratch. It also helps that such a jump started collection can start by buying the cheap stuff that fills out collections quickly.
On the plus side, the "cosmic jukebox" seems to have mostly worked out for music streaming and most stuff is available from most services, which is a huge point in favor of the music streaming services. In my opinion for movies and TV shows that can be legally acquired (putting aside piracy for the moment) the analysis tips much more heavily in the direction of just building your own collection. I don't even know what it would cost you to buy a month's worth of access to, let's say, 80% of my movie & TV collection (since I have stuff that is just plain not available on streaming at all). They're so fragmented it's insane. And with my rate of consumption of TV, oh, call it $50/month just for a nice round number, that's way more than I'm spending on building out the collection anyhow. Maybe if Hollywood would hire more writers who have taken and passed Writing 101 my consumption rate would increase, but that's not the current situation.
> I can start a new show and drop it 15 minutes in if I decide I don’t like it
IMO, that can also be a problem. When I was young and buying CDs, occasionally you would buy one you didn't like at first. But since you had spent money on it, you'd listen to it. And I discovered some good music that way.
Same thing with movies and tv shows. Sometimes it takes a bit to get going, or I 'm in the wrong mindset for it, but repeated viewing or just sticking with it gets me through that.
Try before you buy is what piracy is for. I would prefer if there was another venue to try before paying, but the industry hasn't figured this out in the past hundred years, so piracy it is.
Streaming could be an acceptable compromise if it was $10 a year for everything in existence, but the catalogues are splintered across multiple services and even when you combine them all there are plenty of things not available.
I don't think that logic really holds but its pushed by spotify. People used to listen to a lot of varied music -- and theres a lot of ways to do that still without paying for spotify.
Anyways Spotify is just a platform/gatekeeper for record labels to push their products and theres no way that spotify prices ever become static. They will need to continue to push more products through the model to continue to grow and pay for company especially as all the other players have wizened up.
FWIW if you lapse in payment they kill all your downloaded content immediately. Super annoying service. I get why but like 10 days after probably about 10 years of subscription seems like a real jerk move. Even content that wasn't theirs and was mine -- they wiped it. You own nothing.
>It is way cheaper long term.
How few songs do you listen to, and movies/shows do you watch, for this to possibly be true?
Tbh just recently I found the full extended version box set of LotR on DVD just lying on the street together with ~dozens more decent movies. I could probably fund my viewing habits entirely out of found stuff.
As for music; my dad ripped his whole CD collection many years ago, many thousands of CDs; more than I could listen to in a lifetime probably.
Plus I buy music on bandcamp to support a few artists I really like.
Paying for streaming services is just fueling the wholesale of our culture or worse the military industrial complex
DVDs are 480p.
It’s unwatchable. I’m not being sarcastic. I pulled out some of my old DVDs, they look terrible.
Good! Smaller files! For most TV shows it doesn't matter. Do I really need 4k HDR to enjoy Seinfeld?
>Good! Smaller files!
You know computers have the ability to compress videos, right?
>Do I really need 4k HDR to enjoy Seinfeld?
No, but the difference between 480p and even 1080p is pretty significant and definitely makes the viewing experience just generally more enjoyable. But that's just Seinfeld, where you can basically close your eyes and guess what is being shown 90% of the time with great accuracy. Where this doesn't work is with movies/shows/etc. where the visual component is important. If you go to a LotR watch party and bring a 480p rip and expect people to watch that, then you might need to get your eyes checked.
Good point. For LotR I'd likely spring for the 720p
That CD collection will be worth a fortune because I assume half of it can't even be found on the streaming services.
It's quite unlikely. There's very few niche albums that I haven't found on spotify
there is loads not on Spotify. It generally just gets lost with time, though.
Not everybody listens to music all of the time. I almost never listen to music. I watch few movies and mostly, I rewatch old ones that I like. Paying that amount of money for any subscription to a content faucet (while Youtube is still free, if you absolutely must watch video) sounds crazy to me.
I stream on youtube to discover and purchase LPs and FLACs on bandcamp and tickets for live shows to support the artist and not the rent seekers.
>I stream on youtube
Right, so then how you really access most of your your music is through advertising or ad-blocking, not CDs.
I use Bagal Radio.
...like on the radio?
Some of us owned thousands of albums (or movies, or shows) on physical media before the legal streaming party even started.
Personally, I also listen to a lot of ad-free college radio and watch a lot of online videos. Depending on what type of entertainment you enjoy, it's really not hard to pay next to nothing for it without compromising.
It should be easy to calculate this for your own needs based on your playlists. The advantage of buying is that you build up your own catalog of artists that you listen to regularly which means you don’t have to keep paying for them. So, at first, buying the albums would be more expensive but after a few years it would become much less expensive. The exception would be if you are always looking for the latest tracks by a large number of artists but I don’t think that’s most people.
Older popular music can be purchased second hand or as a various artists album which also saves money.
buy 13 songs a month, every month, for a year, and see how big your library is.
Remembering that a song at full price on itunes store is $1~ and a monthly subscription to spotify is $13
There is a compounding effect, so buying my library as it is today will cost me about $300~, but that's because I've accumulated 300 songs over the course of about 12 years. (300/12) is about $25 per year.
So the delta is $131... for convenience of being able to listen to a new song once or twice and never again.
The irony of course being that if I ever stop paying, I have access to nothing at all.
I have 15 years worth of songs, account is less than 10 years old. Arguably I would be okay dropping some of those songs if I wanted to buy the songs. The biggest difference for me though is the issue of discoverability. It is very easy for me to find and save new songs on Spotify, it would be much harder for me to find the songs I like if I had to pay for them, especially since a lot of the songs I like are not just songs from popular artists but are often just one of two random songs from random artists. Is there a good middle ground here? I keep a copy of my song list in case I want to ditch Spotify but this is the main hurdle for me.
300 songs is not many at all. I have purchased around 20,000 songs in my life. Would it have been cheaper to use Spotify? I suppose so but (a) they don’t have all the music I want and (b) I prefer having the independence to control my media. Also Spotify didn’t exist when I started :)
Movies and TV shows I can maybe see. There hasn't really be a show that I really wanted to watch for the past... two years, except a few that are on public broadcast or only available on DVD.
Music I don't get, you can't even buy a single CD for the price of a streaming music subscription, unless you buy used, in which case you can get as many as 10 CDs per month.
Video streaming and it's licensing model is horribly horribly broken, there's no reason why I should have three to five subscriptions just so HBO and Netflix can produce yet another drawn out true crime show about someone how got lost half way around the world in 1983.
Buying breaking bad on DVD is <3 months of netflix subscription (no ads).
So if you watch <2 seasons per month on average, you already come out ahead, and this is assuming only a single subscription.
People tend to wastly overpay for subscriptions because they end up underutilized and are typically never cancelled quickly enough because people are lazy.
Seems weird to question their statement, right? Surely they know their life.
This is not that unusual. I also have never had any of these, or any other, streaming services. It's been wonderful.
I'm not questioning not having streaming services. I'm questioning it actually being cheaper than buying physical media in the long term for anyone who listens to more than the occasional song or watches the occasional movie.
If the answer is "I pirate stuff", that's fine. But just be honest about it.
You can relisten the stuff you have.
LP's, 8-tracks, cassettes, cd's, mp3 players, etc.
You didn't have the whole world at your hands. You had to pick what to listen to, what to buy, what to carry.
Yes, it's nice having the world available, but also, it's nice being able to sometimes think, ponder, make a decision, and explore that decision.
Based on all the responses, people need to learn to make a decision and live with it for a bit.
- Picked a song and it's not the perfect one? meh, okay. - Also learn to be in the quiet. Oh, the song is not meh, but bad? Turn it off. It's okay. - learn to read a book
How few songs run on loop on Spotify? Not to mention radio.
A library of 10,000 songs can fit on most phones.
Until Sam Altman disrupted the entire computer economy, HDDs were cheap and when you replace your desktop, the old one becomes a server.
Our society overconsumes by insane degrees. TBH the world would probably be a better place if most people limited their consumption to what they could reasonably acquire on disk.
How much I would need to pay to get on Spotify songs not available there?
There is so much garbage on streaming platforms, I rather research and pay per song/movie than waste time on trash. And that was before AI slop. Only reason I have subscriptions is family (cheap babysitter)
I have a hard time understanding your opinion. What do you even mean by garbage? There's thousands of legitimate music bands/musicians on these platforms. Naturally you won't care for a majority of it, but an interpret being niche doesn't make them garbage.
FWIW I went through a phase of this (feeling like streaming services were full of low grade stuff) until one day when basically nobody seemed to understand me except Amazon Music, which has an almost eerie recommendation mechanism that I think people don’t talk about much because the rest of the app is so meh.
In one single afternoon Amazon Music served up loads of niche old favourites I had not thought to search for, introduced me to a couple of artists I would not have known existed otherwise, and probably rescued my failing love of music.
I now play a game with it and pick somewhat diametrically opposed aspects of my music tastes in quick succession— Superorganism, Cardiacs, Gavin Bryars, Nanci Griffith, Vivaldi, Anouskha Shankar, say — and then see what it comes up with. Invariably one of the recommendations will be something I already adore and one will change my life.
I stumbled into the Chris Thile multiverse this way, for instance.
Spotify is full of AI slop trying to pass as artists. That’s garbage
Also, the company has a pretty terrible leadership: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2025-...
So dont listen to it? I mean what is the problem here.
I never listen to basically anything spotify recommends me, just songs from bands I already know and love. And if I were to purchase the whole discography of the breadth of music I listen to it would cost the down payment on my house
I do not use the service, I was responding to the comment about garbage
> It is way cheaper long term.
I would think this is only true if you watch a small number of shows and rewatch them often
They're $20-50 for complete series on dvd on Amazon right now. That's 14-35 new shows to get every year for the same price. I believe it's cheaper. This is why so many companies push subscriptions. If DVDs made them more money than they'd be pushing you to buy them.
I'm not even buying. If governments think my data is worthless and e.g. don't kill the businessmodel behind data brokers, then why should I respect their copyright laws?
These streaming services don't even support 4k hdr on linux, leaving people with no choice.
Well they do have a choice, and that's to switch to windows.
I run linux too but I'm not going to pretend like my choice to run a niche setup means I'm entitled to pirate content because they don't 100% support it
Linux is hardly a niche. There are a lot of consumer products that contain Linux in some form or another. Just nobody wants to support it properly.
We aren't talking about a choice between running a mainstream setup or a niche setup though. There is much more to this choice—I'm sure you understand what I mean. I don't want to dive into this discussion, I just want to highlight that it isn't as simple as you suggested.
I just always cancel my subscription directly after subscribing. So only pay for a month basically. A new show is out that you want to watch, subscribe, cancel directly, watch it. And just repeat when the next season is out. I never understood why people maintain their subscription across multiple services
I get Netflix HD free for 2 through Tmobile, Hulu for free from Spotify, for probably about 7 years. Peacock for free from Xfinity. HBO Max for $3 for 12 months when Amazon had prime sale last year. I get prime since I have Amazon prime.
you can stream for free/cheap if you lookout for deals.
I buy movies on Bluray and physical games for “trinket” collecting aspect mainly, but it’s also a gatekeeper to my consumption habits. DRM-free Digital is a better method of preservation
I only buy things that I’m really motivated to watch and play, and it makes it much more fulfilling as a result. Netflix turns watching a movie into something that just feels as hollow as doomscrolling Facebook.
Streaming services do not offer you what you like forever, they offer you what you didn't know about for the amount of time you need to watch it. So these are two different things
Same here, that's the main value I get from especially music streaming services: I hear about anartist, and can immediately go check otu their discography.
Yeah that. I am mostly running on FLAC rips I did myself.
It's not way cheaper long-term at all, I mean unless you really watch/listen to a tiny amount of content, you can rip the same way with Netflix, Hulu and so-on as well so I don't see how that makes it more durable?
What you are doing is practically the same equivalent as downloading torrents, how do you have "more guarantees" than just downloading?
PS: I'm saying this because what you are doing is already illegal so there is virtually no difference.
If you buy the DVD and rip it to make it easier to watch / as a backup, it might be legal in your jurisdiction.
We noticed this also for the online software services that we use. Many of them increased in price, which I can understand with rising costs. However, a large number of them also have/introduced a 'hostile' structure that force you into paying through the nose. Case in point was the timesheet software that we used:
* They increased the cost of all price tiers.
* They moved features from lower tiers to higher tiers, forcing you to pay more.
* And this all was leveraged via "per seat" pricing. So a modest increase in price quickly becomes a lot, simply because of the multiplicative nature of per-seat pricing.
This per-seat pricing is especially absurd to us. To run the software it makes little difference whether there are 3 users or 6 users, yet the total cost of those 3 additional users was an additional 500 dollars! This got so out of hand that we decided to build our own timesheet software, which we now happily use. I have always seen software as the promise that you only need to build it once, and can reuse and leverage it many times over to reduce your costs. However, this does NOT seem to be the case anymore.
You see the same in streaming services: limits on the amount of devices you can have in your family, moving features into higher cost tiers, and so on...
Microsoft did it with 365 after the introduction of Copilot: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eYVPThx7yss
Maybe it's one of the many ways we finance all those datacenters. Sure Netflix doesn't directly own datacenters but the logic works by proxy.
To play devil's advocate a bit: running software isn't free. If you're paying for an online service, the hosting cost to the company does scale per-seat. It's easy to say that the company only paid the cost of development once (and even then, more users = more development demand), but you're not a user of a single unit of developed software.
For streaming services, I think the development-hosting needle swings way towards hosting. Streaming video is the vast majority of their costs and efforts, so scaling prices per-user is the only sensible option. The "software" of those services is bad and interchangeable, and not what anyone wants or is paying for in the first place.
Taking Netflix as example - it has been going downhill steadily, they have a habit of canceling good shows after one or two seasons etc. It is no wonder users get annoyed when they have to pay more over time, and get less for their money. Increasing prices is never going to be popular even when it is justified, but users are more likely to tolerate if the price increase comes with better features or at minimum, no drop in features/quality.
Another egregious thing these subscriptions do is all kinds of dark patterns. Making it super easy to subscribe but super hard to cancel, not informing before charging (how hard can it be to send an email "upcoming charge next week"), showing ads in supposedly "ad-free" services etc. All this just add to the frustration which leads users to cancel.
That may be the case but they are getting so aggressive that I am constantly having to reconfirm devices within my own home. Luckily I just run my own server now but we have HBO for free with my cell plan so that’s the ones subscription we still have. I have to do email 2FA probably every 4th or 5th time we open it because it’s on “too many devices.”
Tell me you use harvest without telling me you use harvest.
Important context here is that many of these streaming services operated at a loss for years, and some still are. HBO Max didn’t turn a profit until 2023 and Disney only become profitable in 2024 after bundling with Hulu. AFAIK Paramount+ and Peacock are still in the red.
Point being, the introductory prices for these services were always unsustainable.
Is that important context? I would say it's not. What if those companies already made massive profits and said "I think people are willing to pay more for this, so I'm going to raise the price." And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. I've raised the price of my services many times in my career for exactly the same reason.
They are the ones who set the market so that’s on them. They are the ones who set what people were willing to tolerate. If it’s not sustainable, then it’s not a good business. They aren’t entitled to existing.
Armchair theories on paramount and peacock, so take with a mountain of salt:
Paramount will probably stay in the red because they are overly-catering to conservatives (a little too much emphasis on baby boomers as well), narrowing their potential audience.
Peacock just doesn’t have enough going for it period. Weak library and not a real first tier consideration for folks
Any price comparison over time should include inflation.
Otherwise this is akin to comparing speed of 2 objects in a relativistic setting without stating the frame of reference.
Side note: I don't know why, but the existence of a "cite this" section on this page made me sad.
This site is showing you inflation!
The relevant comparison would be your individual wages.
Showing the CPI next to these price increases wouldn’t hurt. If anything, it shows the problem with a single measure of inflation.
CPI is based on prices such as these, so it provides no useful signal.
Are you saying that a single data point contains the same amount of information as a dataset of hundreds if not thousands of entries from across the economy?
Inflation isn't accurate variable because salaries of many people are lagging behind inflation.
This IS inflation.
That's like saying your snow report for skiing should be adjusted for weather.
Agreed, $95.91 a month in 2021-03 is $120.91 in July 2026 dollars. The current cost is $154.41, so it grew $33.50 a month after accounting for inflation.
I am probably an outlier but I don't honestly know how much someone can watch on theses services to be always subscribed, I subscribe to watch something and unsubscribe after a month or two because that's when I'm well and done. My husband had some free three months of Disney+ and I don't think either of us watched a single thing on there in that three months. Tubi has better content than Disney+.
I think the point is that inflation numbers are bs. The official number from 2021 to today is 23%. But we didn't see prices only 23%. A restaurant mean didn't go from $20 to $25. It easily went up 50% or more.
Inflation isn't some force of nature that needs to be accounted for like the curvature of the earth.
I assume you got that > 50% number from actual CPI data and not just vibes, right?
TFW Plex lifetime and plexamp for $75.
$702 more is relative and tells nothing without the basis. It's 61% increase in 5 years.
So in real terms it's up 26%. Which of course is to be expected, people have a set amount they are willing to spend on entertainment, in the past it was cable -- in 2015 the average US cable TV subscription was about $100, that's about $140 today in real terms, or $1700 a year.
Seems that streamers have a long way to go before they extract all that money.
That’s the average household cable tv subscription, no?
I subscribe to YouTube and my partner subscribes to Prime. We have a joint cable-like tv package too, and one of us pays for Disney Plus. In the past we’d have been consolidated into one cable subscription consumption, but now we appear in the stats as lots of distinct consumptions.
I think all-in, streamers plus other subscription based entertainment services are nearer to the $140 figure per household than the individual figures describe.
The average household cable tv subscription didn't get you access to all the music, enormous amount of youtube content, shipping benefits, and ad-break free watching. And it wasn't on demand viewing. And it required using a special device in a specific room in a specific house.
And, back in the day, you also had contract terms of 1 or 2 years, so you were locked in. Now, you can turn these services on and off at your whim
Or another way of reading it: a 61% increase over 5 years indicates a 10% annual pace of inflation for this particular basket of goods.
But inflation is calculated entirely based on costs like these subscriptions...
Not entirely. CPI takes things like subscriptions into account, but not DPI
How did you come up with the 26% number?
Total consumer-price inflation has been about 27.7% since 2021.
Inflation is multiplicative, so: 1.277 * 1.26 = 1.61 giving us the 61% subscriptions went up.
Though it's a little circular, because this is the kinda of thing that goes into the inflation calculation.
Price increases are tolerated if the value increases. Even rent-seeking is tolerated if the value is relatively stable. But what we have here is value proposition decreasing from fragmentation and shallow content and increasingly intrusive targeted ads while the prices keep going up.
We traded one annoying cable company for dozens.
Yes the price keeps going up, but every purchase is 100% optional. Please explain to me the reason why anyone needs any of these.
What kind of person has all of these subscriptions? If you have YouTube TV and Spotify that is $22.
I find that piracy is the only sane option any more
I pay for Prime and still prefer to torrent Amazon shows. The experience is just better.
Prime's app is ridiculously bad imo. I'm not sure why that is, but everything is slower and takes more clicks and digging than similar apps on the same device. There are also significantly more ads than on Disney+ or Netflix ad tiers.
I find that Netflix and Paramount+ are the American services that offer the best app experience on my (very low-end) smart TV.
I was in the same boat with Netflix.
spot on
Several of these services launched around 2021 with introductory pricing, which is necessary for attracting new users to a new service.
Most people I know don’t subscribe to every service and then leave it that way. They might have Spotify and 1-3 video streaming services at a time. They cancel one and start a different one when they want to watching something new.
I like occasionally watching movies. I will rarely watch a movie twice. Streaming would be the best option for me, but I will not subscribe to more than one service. Get your shit together. Do cross licensing. Split production from distribution. Until then I will not be paying for any streaming service.
Why would streaming be the best option for you to watch a movie once? You have long been able to rent movies with just a few clicks from many sellers. Maybe Netflix is the only one where you have to subscribe for a month to watch a movie.
I picked a random film, Titanic, and supposedly it's $4 to rent on Amazon or Apple TV.
A Netflix account costs $9 with ads or $20 without, so I guess it depends on whether you watch more or fewer films than that per month?
Do you think in the future, maybe in 5 to 10 years, that the vibe coded aesthetic will come back as a design trend?
15 years. The AI itself will be nostalgic for it.
Welcome to 1997!
https://cololocation.com/
Ok a price increase but:
"nine streaming subscriptions".
No one sane will do nine streaming subscriptions. The market is insane in itself for assuming that.
I have 8 of them plus YouTube TV and Prime Video.
Some of it is a function of my household's love of sports, and their fragmentation across the services. Some of its just sheer laziness to pick one and stick with it or rotate the subscriptions.
I don't think I could realistically drop lower than 3 on this list though: Spotify gets used constantly. One TV/Video streaming service. My wife would likely divorce me if I cancelled YouTube Premium.
Apple Music, Netflix, Disney+, BBC.
That's four. I don't want any of them.
Three I have to take due to kids' nagging, the fourth I have to take due to state apparatus' nagging and legal threats.
> the fourth I have to take due to state apparatus' nagging and legal threats.
I get a letter every month from the licencing people, it just goes in the bin. I've had 1 visit, he asked to come in, I said no. That was basically the end of it.
(For the record, I have a TV but I currently have no way to watch live TV on it, so why should I have a licence! I don't use their service)
The TV license is insane to me, as a non-brit moving to the uk. I am happy to pay a reasonable price for something I use. But the threats I get about a GBP 1,000 is very un-british. I don't know who runs the TV licensing scheme but they need to be sacked. Thankfully if you can look past this gamesmanship then it is possible to call them and decline to participate in this nonsense.
"TV licensing" exists in a lot of countries and it funds the public service broadcaster. It is essentially a tax, it just happens to be collected by a third party (in this case, Crapita) rather than other tax collecting mechanisms.
Some countries (like Finland or Switzerland) require you to pay it even if you don't own a TV. It's really just a tax.
The reasoning for it not being a tax is that the public service broadcaster should have political independence from the government. Most people don't want their country to have a "government mouthpiece" state broadcaster, and it is much easier for the government to tell the broadcaster what to do and say by fucking with its funding if it's directly funded from the treasury.
Other countries do the same thing with a different trick, such as inserting it into your electricity bill.
The UK is a powerhouse in media production, part of that is due to the BBC funding all sorts of productions, both the visible (actors, etc.) and the invisble (camera operators, set designers, costumers, writers, directors...).
It has also been clear for centuries that private media, historically just the newspapers, but now TV channels, film studios, etc., have been disastrous, as their private owners either focus on profitability and pump out scandal and lurid stories, or if they've made their millions some other way, they run a paper in order to pump out biased propaganda. So a state-funded but not state-controlled broadcaster is an ideal thing to have.
The "licensing" has a point because it does make the BBC more impartial since the current government cannot adjust their funding down or up depending on their programming.
However, the same aim could be achieved by just setting a formula in law. 1 pound per british citizen, or 0.0001% of the average income per citizen last year. Numbers pulled out of ass as i have no idea what an UK tv license costs. As long as they make the formula extremely hard to change, it will work.
£180/year (£60 for black and white only!). It is becoming increasingly hard to defend given the low quality of a lot of their output.
If they could find a way to fund Radio 4 without it I'd be in favour of scrapping the fee.
Hah, considering the surviving B&W TVs are collector's items now, you probably can't save money by getting the cheaper license...
I never paid for the licence for I never used iPlayer and the investigators were welcomed into my house to take a look at the chromecast dongle.
Easy, just make kids pay for these, if they need them this much.
Tell your kids ‘no’
Bring some sanity back to the world.
I don’t think the point is that this is the assumption of people’s real subscription behavior, more to show that it’s getting more expensive overall.
There are lots of insane people though. They fall for the “cheaper than a cup of coffee”’trick repeatedly
Bring back DVD rentals!
In the US, you don't even need to pay a licensing fee when you buy a DVD with intent to rent it out to people (this is not the case in the UK), thanks to the "First-sale doctrine" - Bobbs-Merrill v. Straus (1908).
I don't know about in the US, but I live in a fairly small city in Canada and we have DVD rentals. I go to the video store almost every week, and it was on the papers that a second one (which will also rent out VHS!) is opening.
The Library does DVD rentals too, I check it out every couple of months.
It's even better in Toronto, Bay Street Video is an institution.
*UHD BluRay rentals but yes, hard agree. Also a great place to socialize and talk about which movie to rent traditionally.
Eh, I miss video rental stores in the US, but I don't agree that they would solve this problem. I worked for a large chain of them as a teen, and know first-hand that people were spending just as much on rentals as they do with subscription services, especially when you add in game rentals and late fees.
More importantly, it does not solve the problem of ownership. We don't own a rented disc just as much as we don't own a DRM-controlled digital purchase that can only be accessed via the subscription portal it was purchased on.
I cancelled majority of my services for this exact reason. I was a member of netflix since 2015, when I checked my credit card bill last month and saw the charge I really had to question if it was even worth it at this point.
If buying ain’t owning, pirating ain’t stealing
Besides youtube premium (because kid) and apple one (because icloud) I have no more subscriptions.
I love music and used to have Spotify, but I started to notice they started to remove tracks or entire albums from the catalog.
Now I buy online or rip my CDs, it’s much better and works offline.
Streaming is basically a sounding error in my budget. Now if we’re talking about food or health care…
>At 2021-03 prices these four cost $1,150.92 a year. Today the same nine cost $1,852.92
Is that number really correct?
It seems remarkably coincidental how close $1,852.92 is to
$1,150.92 * 1.10^5 ($1,853.56)
It's pretty much a match accounting for kibblesworth effects.
Forgive me but where does 1.10^5 come into the equation? What is the significance of this number?
Both figures can be arrived to by taking the monthly total and multiplying it by 12.
I wish you’d at least take the effort to de-LLMify the vibecoded site and copy text
You could be presenting the most carefully-researched information in the world, but with such an obviously vibecoded site I'm not going to attempt to read it.
This is such a weird take.
Did you gatekeep people who built sites with FrontPage as well?
You could be presenting the most carefully-researched text in the world, but with such obviously machine made paper I'm not going to attempt to read it.
You're rejecting information solely based on the aesthetic quality of the delivery medium?
Even if the information is accurate, I'm calling it low effort slop... Smart LLMs have basically automated producing a plausible looking "content farm".
What is the alternative to subscribing to streaming services? Can you purchase your movies online and be guaranteed to have access to the movies in the future?
Libraries! They often have digital access to various services—e.g. Kanopy—but also often have lots of physical media sources! It involves a little more planning and a little less algorithm, and there are shows and movies that won't ever be available—e.g. things from Netflix, Apple—but there's enough out there already.
You can stream your own stuff, from home, to all of your devices and your friends' devices, for free. And since the movies are on your own hardware, you have them forever. Movies, tv, music, books, comic books, video game roms, basically any sort of media you can even name. And it's been possible for you to do so for the last 15 years, maybe more.
Piracy is one.
If you want guaranteed future access, then this is probably the only online option that actually fulfills this guarantee... other than that, physical media.
I regularly snag DVDs for $1 USD or less at garage/yard/boot sales. I see tons of cheap used physical media in record shops when I travel, too. eBay and Facebook Marketplace are also great sources for used DVD.
I promote this because not only does it restore some mastery* over your media, it keeps these discs out of landfills and oceans, where they will linger in a shredded state.
*we are, of course, still subject to any anti-piracy measures and non-removeable advertisements on the disc, which admittedly seems quaint by today's DRM standards, but I ccannot rightly say "complete" mastery over your media, here.
I watch films on streaming rather than old dvds with unskippable nonsense like "don't pirate this dvd" (well obviously I didn't, that's why I have the dvd), or the pain of the menu systems to just press play.
Physical media isn't guaranteed to retain future access. There are protocols for players to update various bits of data from the newest disk you have ever inserted into them. The Nintendo Wii certainly does this, I'm not sure if BluRay does but I don't see why they wouldn't.
That's a great point. Something I forgot: I brought a couple DVDs when moving between countries and had a player block a couple of them... :/
Often the same people behind both!
Fun fact: pirates are more likely than the average person to purchase media.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170916165525/https://www.ofcom...
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110727/16233815292/anoth...
You can still buy physical media online, though an increasing portion of movies and shows are produced by the streaming companies, and you don’t really have an alternative there.
No. Sony has recently removed 551 movies that people "bought". Sony's distribution license ran out with a studio and they didn't renew it.
They seem to have gotten away with it so far, so there's no legal protection for "buying" digital at the moment.
With that attitude from the corporations, why wouldn't anyone pirate?
Subscribe, screengrab what you like, unsubscribe. Repeat. Really easy to do in a virtual machine, so it doesn't conflict with anything else happening on the computer.
1/ watch in theatres
2/ consume free streaming (tt, ig, YouTube, etc)
Just don’t watch movies at home.
No. The whole issue is that the seller needs to maintain an online service to allow you access to the movies. This online service costs money so over time is likely not worth the cost. This plus the online service provider undergoing changes (bankruptcy, acquisition, mergers, etc) or they themselves losing rights to the movies. Seems to me that rental or purchases are still unbeatable. The alternative is streaming but the downside is higher costs over time and worse quality movies.
Oh no! Anyways Claude set up an *arr stack, a torrent client and Jellyfin.
More expensive and worse in most ways. Just like most things in the current stage of oligopolies.
inflation inflating
Jellyfin is free. Although more SSDs and HDDs are more expensive than in 2021.
meh, a good number of these had just hit the market in 2021 and clearly had unsustainable prices to drive market penetration.
You can also see the "follow the leader" effect with prices converging around $20. If I had to guess I'd say the next 5+ years we'll see tighter price competition, probably companies following Netflix's pricing hikes and that prices will creep up to 24.99
Mostly mediocre to bad entertainment and distractions anyways.
I'm not a fan of the "binge watch chowder" of the last 15 years and much rather extend my collection of actually worthwhile UHD BluRay movies to watch deliberately every other Sunday night or so.
Inflation over the last five years accounts for the first 25% of that 61% price increase. This means it’s only about +36% and not +61% as claimed.
Huge difference.
Hi honestlyranked you might want to reach out to the mods, your comments are dead. I think you are meant to put info in the submitted post text field, not in the comments, I could be wrong!
Likely dead due to obvious LLM writing. I would suspect that the (auto)moderation is working as intended there.
>Likely dead due to obvious LLM writing
I think it's the look of the page: dark background and bright colours with an halo.
This is what I am always curious about with these tech valuations. They’re valued at multiple times earnings, often 30+. That implies 30 years to earn back an investment iff earnings are payed out. Yet all are immediately enshittifying or price gauging when they hit monopoly / have market share. Is the bet then that thats just gonna be the status quo? I guess historically it was a good bet.
Context matters, because absent it folks will look at these increases and shrug it off as inflation (or let companies shrug it off with that excuse).
To truly contextualize it, we need to understand the total value (library sizes, removed/lost media, household/account sharing costs) relative to its price, and relative to background inflation. We need to understand relative to costs (labor, infrastructure, royalties), to profits, and how industry consolidation has or has not affected these data points.
From my own understanding of the wider context, there’s a significant attribution of costs to naked greed and profit extraction rather than overall value. With job displacement due to AI (despite union contracts), the tearing down of series or films due to CEO preference (looking at you, Zaslav), the overlap of libraries (Hulu and Disney are increasingly the same thing; Hulu/Disney/Peacock are the same thing as Hulu alone was just seven years ago), the punitive measures against account sharing, and with the forcing of advertisements onto previously ad-free platforms or pricing tiers, the overall cost relative to societal value has decreased while value to executives and shareholders has increased, and that’s the real takeaway.
Yup
Notice this increase didn’t reflect in significant higher salaries for the people working in these companies (not the executives) nor more hiring, quite the opposite, more lay offs. This small indicator tells really what’s going on in the economy, more profit to the corps but people still are getting poorer, same thing applies btw to other domains like groceries or other goods or even housing. It’s a wealth distribution problem, it’s not AI, not supply chain shortages, not immigrants, non of these distractions that get pushed around, since covid, these companies and the ones who pull the strings in nations, they discovered and tested something that can easily manipulate the public and make them ok with worse living conditions: fear! If you scare the public enough about a topic and play the fear mongering tactics rights, you have a golden key to control the public: covid, wars, immigrants, protect the kids, AGI, etc etc are all topic of manipulations, follow the money and the people behind them.
Pirating it is.
BitTorrent: 0% increase. Just saying.
In the old torrent days I was only watching classical masterpieces and top level world directors. In the streaming era I only watch mediocre straight-to-streaming movies, few popular TV series and too much reality TV that I'm not proud to watch.
You need to rent a VPS (for $$$) to avoid litigation however. The those VPS have increased in price also.
Realistically you don't absolutely need a VPS to run your own tunnel through for bittorrent. You can do something like install a virtualbox machine that mounts your local samba file share across the LAN (to store downloaded stuff), and otherwise has a default route outbound to the world through a $5/mo VPN that exits to the Internet in like, Chișinău Moldova. Or similar.
The main thing to worry about is using a bittorrent client that knows to 'stop' immediately if it's no longer on the VPN.
And Jellyfin for the server.
And whatever leftover storage you have.
And PIA or Proton for a port forwardable VPN.
And https://github.com/halcyon-video/halcyon-video for that real Blockbuster experience.
Why have the streaming costs increased so much?
Surely the cost of storage has not gone up. And the cost of sending the 0’s and 1’s hasn’t gone up either.
Are movie studios demanding vastly more money from the streaming services for the movie and TV content? Maybe the costs to make new movies and tv shows have gone up substantially but has licensing costs for the old movies and shows gone up too?
Are these extra costs just going to the streamers to run up profit? Genuinely curious about the economics here. I know the streaming business is highly competitive so I don’t think it’s just rent seeking so wonder what else is going on.
Subsidized prices at launch to lure in customers. Then profit-seeking, by raising prices and offering less for the money. Textbook enshittification.
This is why I steal all my shit.
Hear, hear.
AI;dr
... which is why I opted out of all of that bullshit from the start.
Pay some portion of that over the years and end up owning ... absolutely nothing.
Money comparisons that aren't inflation adjusted aren't "honest". They are in fact DIShonest.
Which metric of inflation are you adjusting it to? And which assumptions are built into the goods and services measured, as well as their respective weights, of that index?
That's a false dichotomy. An imperfectly measured inflation adjustment IS STILL VASTLY SUPERIOR to a non-adjusted number. By an enormous amount.
How do you even measure inflation accurately, given the current government, and has there been 61% inflation over the last 5 years?
Economists exists, we have data on this. Don't be silly.
I got annoyed that "the price" of a subscription is really two prices — the one advertised and the one you end up paying — and that nobody keeps the receipts. So I built a tracker that checks 27 providers' public pricing pages daily, and separately curated dated, sourced price histories for streaming services going back to 2010.
The streaming number surprised me. Nine services, flagship tiers:
March 2021: $95.91/month. Today: $154.41/month. That's +61%, or $702 more per year for the same nine subscriptions.
Per service since 2021-03: Apple TV+ +200%, Disney+ +138%, Peacock +100%, Hulu +58%, Netflix +43%, Paramount+ +40%, YouTube Premium +33%, Spotify +30%, HBO Max +23%. 75 documented increases across 11 services, every one linked to the announcement or report that covered it. The most recent was Apple TV+, $12.99 to $14.99 on 28 August.
Two services are tracked but deliberately left out of that basket: YouTube TV (a live-TV bundle, $35 to $82.99 since 2017 — the steepest riser I have, but it is a cable replacement, not an on-demand subscription) and Prime Video (an add-on to a Prime membership, not standalone). Putting either in would have made the headline bigger and the comparison worse.
One methodology note, because I got this wrong first: my initial version summed each service's launch price, which gave a bigger, better headline. But those launches span 2010 to 2021, so that basket never existed — nobody could have bought it. Recomputing from March 2021, the first month all nine existed, gives the smaller +61% figure. I'd rather publish the smaller true one.
Same thing happened with the ad tiers. I expected to find ad-free plans being hiked faster to push people toward advertising. Disney+ fits — ad-free +73% vs ad-supported +50% over the same window. Netflix doesn't: it raised both by exactly 29%. What did happen at both is the cash gap widened — Netflix $8.50 to $11.00/month, Disney+ $3 to $7/month.
The daily side covers hosting, VPN, antivirus and SaaS: 42 of 75 tracked plans renew above their advertised price, averaging +196%. The extreme is IONOS at +1,300% ($1/mo advertised, $14/mo at renewal). 9 providers never raise renewal prices at all — two of them, Mullvad and Windscribe, run no affiliate programme, so nobody has a commercial reason to mention them.
Data is CC BY 4.0: https://honestlyranked.com/data/renewal-prices.csv
Method: https://honestlyranked.com/methodology/
Limits, stated up front: I measure published pricing only — I don't test the products and make no claim about quality. Prices are read from one fixed location (Pakistan), which is stated on the site; for most of these the price is global, but where a provider geo-prices, my figure describes that vantage point. Streaming histories are curated from primary sources rather than scraped, which is how they go back further than my own tracking.
Happy to talk about the scraping side — Cloudflare, JS-rendered prices, A/B-tested prices, and providers who publish no renewal figure at all.
This was clearly a popular post, but please do be aware that blog posts are explicitly not "Show HNs".
Did you write this, or did Claude?
Emdashes.
I'm mostly down to one. It's called Daddyflix (Jellyfin, actually) and runs on a Mac Mini in my home office. Costs close to zero, is accessible everywhere and there's no ads or other bullshit.
Yeah same. I have an agent running on it, so whenever one of my kids asks to watch something that their friends have told them about it, provided it's not retarded, I tell the agent to go find it and it shows up on the kids TV. No monthly bullshit (apart from the AI supscription I pay for anyway). Automated piracy. I love it.
Is this different than what Radarr and similar tools do?
Using the word “retarded” in 2026, you sound smart
To try to tone police in 2026, you sound insufferable.
is it an old intel mac mini or ARM?
M4 Pro but there are still builds for Intel based macs.
Absolute garbage article and garbage website. This content shouldn't be allowed on HN.
Hence the reason I ditched all of this.
1. Paying subscription for temporarily available content(i.e. pulled shows or music) is not viable for me.
2. They operate in a winner-takes-all model, so the movies/actors/producers/musicians(especially) get nothing out of me if they are not the most popular ones(which they aren't).
With that in mind - it's their choice. If the above-mentioned decide to sell digital copies, I'll gladly pay for them and download them(last purchase from a few weeks ago). If not - pirating it is.
They do seem to make it easy to push people over any moral objection to piracy. Often more because of fragmentation than price, but pushing the price makes it easier. And the platforms (Jellyfin as one example) make sharing what you have with family/friends easier now also.
I don't have a great view, though, whether this is even visible to the streaming platforms. I suspect they don't really lose much notable revenue from piracy anymore. While it's matured some recently, it's not as easy as "download limewire".
I'm not fully convinced here. Objectively it's a lot easier than it was 15 years ago and that is partially because now more people have the skills to expand the ecosystem and the resources to focus on creature comforts. Since 2022 and the last 2 years more than ever, I decided to cut ties to all cloud providers and host everything myself for 4 reasons:
1. I have 0 trust in software companies to have the ability to protect my data, even if they have the best intentions. Partially because of 2
2. AI: everything has to be fed into it, whatever it spits out is treated as gospel by most tech companies and people that 10 years ago were taught to question everything.
3. Price.
4. It is actually easy to setup and if you put in some real thinking into it, it becomes both secure and easy to pass around. Jellyfin is a good example. I installed wireguard on my mum's computer, "double click this, click this button, open your browser, click on this icon" and she has access to my library.
Part of the reason for the overinflated prices and budget cuts in those exact companies is this exact thing: many people got fed up with minor convenience at an ever-increasing price and "amazon for this, netflix for that". Many of us grew up pirating because we had no other choice. Now we do have a choice but instead of a decent trade-off in price-vs-convenience, we got a price to pay and ultimately a ton of inconvenience.
Still a great ecosystem and value for dollar overall! That's one reason why prices have gone up.
No long-term contracts, no additional hardware needed, no hidden fees. Still the option to not see ads for most of the services. You can freely jump from service to services.
Plenty of promos out there still, too: for example, I get $10 back per month on an ad-free Disney/Hulu/ESPN bundle through my credit card. That plan costs me about $31/month: $31 doesn't buy me a meal out with my family, it doesn't buy me a single football ticket, it might get me into one movie with the family if I do some cheap matinee (not counting gas to drive up and snacks).
They will own nothing and be happy
Are you a netflix exec by any chance?
Nope, not a Netflix exec. One would imagine if I was, I'd have used Netflix as my example.
I dunno about you, but in my lifetime, if I would have invested in owning VHS, DVD, or HD-DVD, that would not have paid off for me. (I might have owned a lot, but I wouldn't have been happy.)
I guess Blu-Ray has stuck around, but I find that I don't rewatch a ton of movies anyways. I've never felt comfortable buying digital video because I never liked the idea of buying into an ecosystem.
And...discs aren't cheap anyways? Just did a random search - Tron: Legacy (a movie that's been out for awhile, I like, I would re-watch) costs $27.99 to buy a physical copy. So again: $28 to acquire one movie; $31 for me to watch that movie or hundreds of others I want within the course of a month.
Thanks for making me think of this, it's another bullet in support of what I was saying before.
I, for one, don't see any problem here.
If you go to a restaurant for a meal, you own nothing after that, but you can be happy. If you go to an entertainment park, you own nothing after that for your ticket, but you can be happy.
Making customer happy is an extraordinary valuable service one can provide, and that doesn't have to require connection with materially owning anything.
Exactly, what we have now is vastly better than whatever existed before (in terms of convenience and price). Watch when I want, what I want, how I want, and never pay for anything I don't want and never see ads and never have to go somewhere to get it.
I especially like not paying for sports to watch the few shows/movies I like.
Some people who like to (legally) own media might be disappointed, though.
As someone who loves buying music - yeah, I hear that.
I just never really felt like the incentives were quite the same to purchase movies. They've always been constrained by their formats/vendors in a way that was never as true for music, they've always cost more, I don't rewatch movies as much as I'll re-listen to albums, and I think the...I dunno...nature, telos of movies lends itself better to ephemeral access.