There are several reasons I use streaming downloaders.
1. I live in a rural area now and did previously as well. We all know streaming providers pretty much expect broadband internet access such as bonded copper ADSL at the minimum, cable or fiber. Our last place the ISPs had no intention of running cable or fiber as there were too few homes in that area to make enough of a profit. The ADSL provider did offer bonded copper at up to 140Mb/s. However, it would have cost us $650 to have new telco wire run from the junction box to the service box next to the house as we were almost 500 feet from the junction box at the side of the road. They wanted $380 for the router and then $54 a month for the lowest bonded copper speed of 25Mb/s.
I am retired living on SS and my Wife works for the state of Missouri so there is not a lot of income there. We were stuck with single pair ADSL. We moved to another rural area and the same applies except there is only single pair copper. The best we get is 8.8Mb/s (10Mb link) here. And that's on a good day. Satellite is either far too expensive and with Hughesnet's 800-1000ms latency it was an absolute joke that cost us $400 in penalties to ditch. There is no 5G cellular i-net service anywhere nearby either. The choices are move into town and put up with elbow to elbow hairless apes or peace and quiet with crappy internet.
Now imagine trying to stream your favorite episodes or a movie you just rented or bought and on a "not so great bandwidth day" only to have it buffer numerous times or the audio go out of sync half way through (I'm a musician so I notice even a few milliseconds and it is maddening). Sometimes there are no issues, others are plagued by them. I have a caching proxy set up on one of my machines and that did little to help. The bottleneck was bandwidth and I'm stuck there. With a streaming downloader I can grab our movies and episodes during the day while I'm doing honey-dos and enjoy them with my Wife in the evenings over dinner (which we do every evening). No buffering. No stuttering. No hangs and no out of sync audio. When we've tired of them it is as simple as deleting a file or more making room for the next. Sure we could stream at 224p but this is 2024, not 1976 and I'm not paying 1976 pre-inflation prices for streaming services.
2. I strongly disagree with streaming providers' policy of deciding how long content is valid and profitable. Disk space is no longer at a premium. In particular for content I've bought. I've also seen entire seasons disappear without a trace (which may have been the reason I signed up in the first place). We no longer buy DVDs or Blu Rays as we've had a number de-laminate over time becoming useless. The vendors and studios flat out REFUSED to replace them and trust me that was long and heated battle and the crabby old foul-mouthed biker in me came out in spades towards the end.
Now we buy digital and that way the content we've purchased can be backed up in the event a drive goes belly up (and they do sooner or later). I am of the opinion when I buy a digital copy I bought it for good, not until they decide to take it down (or the digital provider goes defunct in one case). Sure downloading it falls in a rather gray area of the law but the way I see it paid for it for life, not until it is no longer profitable enough to use disk space. You could say the same applies to DVDs and Blu Rays. I have yet to see an expiration date printed on a DVD or Blu Ray but I can tell you for certain, they CAN expire.
3. Amazon and some others now inject ads into content they provide with your subscription. More are jumping on that bandwagon. We pay for premium subscriptions and have Amazon and Paramount+ among others. We ditched DirecTV years ago as we were essentially paying for the privilege of watching commercials and for what we were paying each month was entirely unfair. And then there were the issues with storms and snow.
I am one of those people not enticed by commercials. That's 3-1/2 minutes of my life I won't get back. If I want something I'll research it and get it. I don't want to have to endure 20 minutes or more each hour of commercials for garbage I've zero interest in. Exactly why am I paying for premium services? It's all about money for them, nothing more. Advertisers pay them to run their commercials and I can't pay to completely avoid them or afford it when they do offer the option (for yet another ADDITIONAL fee of course and you still can't avoid all of them). I can see Freevee, Pluto, YouTube and others like it, but those are FREE, we don't pay for them. However every month I am paying for the rest. Taken directly out of my account so we have NEVER been late.
So there you have it. You may not agree but you know where I stand. This would also illustrate where my frustration and aggravation comes from. I tend to get a little testy when I get poked in the wallet. With no light at the end of the tunnel as of yet I was left with no other option but to purchase another solution to fill the void.
I apologize to those members I've offended. Sometimes something is said that elicits a knee-jerk reaction and on occasion I don't' catch it in time.
1. I live in a rural area now and did previously as well. We all know streaming providers pretty much expect broadband internet access such as bonded copper ADSL at the minimum, cable or fiber. Our last place the ISPs had no intention of running cable or fiber as there were too few homes in that area to make enough of a profit. The ADSL provider did offer bonded copper at up to 140Mb/s. However, it would have cost us $650 to have new telco wire run from the junction box to the service box next to the house as we were almost 500 feet from the junction box at the side of the road. They wanted $380 for the router and then $54 a month for the lowest bonded copper speed of 25Mb/s.
I am retired living on SS and my Wife works for the state of Missouri so there is not a lot of income there. We were stuck with single pair ADSL. We moved to another rural area and the same applies except there is only single pair copper. The best we get is 8.8Mb/s (10Mb link) here. And that's on a good day. Satellite is either far too expensive and with Hughesnet's 800-1000ms latency it was an absolute joke that cost us $400 in penalties to ditch. There is no 5G cellular i-net service anywhere nearby either. The choices are move into town and put up with elbow to elbow hairless apes or peace and quiet with crappy internet.
Now imagine trying to stream your favorite episodes or a movie you just rented or bought and on a "not so great bandwidth day" only to have it buffer numerous times or the audio go out of sync half way through (I'm a musician so I notice even a few milliseconds and it is maddening). Sometimes there are no issues, others are plagued by them. I have a caching proxy set up on one of my machines and that did little to help. The bottleneck was bandwidth and I'm stuck there. With a streaming downloader I can grab our movies and episodes during the day while I'm doing honey-dos and enjoy them with my Wife in the evenings over dinner (which we do every evening). No buffering. No stuttering. No hangs and no out of sync audio. When we've tired of them it is as simple as deleting a file or more making room for the next. Sure we could stream at 224p but this is 2024, not 1976 and I'm not paying 1976 pre-inflation prices for streaming services.
2. I strongly disagree with streaming providers' policy of deciding how long content is valid and profitable. Disk space is no longer at a premium. In particular for content I've bought. I've also seen entire seasons disappear without a trace (which may have been the reason I signed up in the first place). We no longer buy DVDs or Blu Rays as we've had a number de-laminate over time becoming useless. The vendors and studios flat out REFUSED to replace them and trust me that was long and heated battle and the crabby old foul-mouthed biker in me came out in spades towards the end.
Now we buy digital and that way the content we've purchased can be backed up in the event a drive goes belly up (and they do sooner or later). I am of the opinion when I buy a digital copy I bought it for good, not until they decide to take it down (or the digital provider goes defunct in one case). Sure downloading it falls in a rather gray area of the law but the way I see it paid for it for life, not until it is no longer profitable enough to use disk space. You could say the same applies to DVDs and Blu Rays. I have yet to see an expiration date printed on a DVD or Blu Ray but I can tell you for certain, they CAN expire.
3. Amazon and some others now inject ads into content they provide with your subscription. More are jumping on that bandwagon. We pay for premium subscriptions and have Amazon and Paramount+ among others. We ditched DirecTV years ago as we were essentially paying for the privilege of watching commercials and for what we were paying each month was entirely unfair. And then there were the issues with storms and snow.
I am one of those people not enticed by commercials. That's 3-1/2 minutes of my life I won't get back. If I want something I'll research it and get it. I don't want to have to endure 20 minutes or more each hour of commercials for garbage I've zero interest in. Exactly why am I paying for premium services? It's all about money for them, nothing more. Advertisers pay them to run their commercials and I can't pay to completely avoid them or afford it when they do offer the option (for yet another ADDITIONAL fee of course and you still can't avoid all of them). I can see Freevee, Pluto, YouTube and others like it, but those are FREE, we don't pay for them. However every month I am paying for the rest. Taken directly out of my account so we have NEVER been late.
So there you have it. You may not agree but you know where I stand. This would also illustrate where my frustration and aggravation comes from. I tend to get a little testy when I get poked in the wallet. With no light at the end of the tunnel as of yet I was left with no other option but to purchase another solution to fill the void.
I apologize to those members I've offended. Sometimes something is said that elicits a knee-jerk reaction and on occasion I don't' catch it in time.
If we really like it I'll buy it.
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