Thread

Disney+ and Hulu raise prices by up to 13 percent after doubling profits

163 points · 188 comments · Brajeshwar

wastedpotencial · 1790265682 · focus · HN ↗
What's a reasonable setup for sailing the seas safely?
It's not only the price hikes and the atomization/fragmentation of content, what made me cut the wire was that I couldn't get high quality in my computer unless I used X browser for Y service.
1. joshstrange · 1790266924 · focus · HN ↗
  Just a note, sailing the seas safely is fairly easy today but unless you want a more involved setup and only want to keep unwatched or unwatched plus a few "keep forever" shows, the cost of hardware is not going to be much "cheaper".
  I have a friend who calculated up their hardware costs (before ram/ssd/hdd-ageddon) and paying for all the streaming services costs came in lower over the span of something like 10+ years. That said, they have the best UI/UX experience I've seen and don't see ads so I'd still count it as a win.
  Oh sure, you can use an old laptop (or seedbox-type thing), an external drive, and get pretty far but if you want to replicate streaming services for all the shows you care about, it's not cheap.
  1. ssl-3 · 1790272470 · focus · HN ↗
    The additional system load of downloading and subsequently streaming some video isn't particularly intense, even with real-time transcoding.
    The same old 6th-gen i7 desktop rig that I do everything else with also does this job quite well. It's not beefy by any modern measure, and I'd have built it and kept it going (and powered on) even if I never had any intention of running these background processes on it.
    The only added hardware expense is one external hard drive (redundancy? hah, no -- not for this). This cost a couple of hundred bucks a several years ago, which is the equivalent of surprisingly few trips to Taco Bell.
    One certainly can spend a quite lot on nice kit to accomplish any goal, but that's not an indication of any necessity to do so.
    If a film of acceptable quality averages around 2GB (yay h.265), then a 10TB hard drive can hold 5,000 average films.

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