Technology

Not really just Plex, in addition to powering 6 spinning drives (~50TB total), I also run Nextcloud, immich, Ollama (CPU inference, no GPU), home assistant, grocy, vaultwarden, jellyfin, sonarr, radarr, lidarr, prowlarr, flaresolverr, and overseerr. I run Plex on a separate Intel nuc10 (also included in that $10 of electricity) which has Intel QuickSync which allows me to transcode ~8 simultaneous 1080 streams to friends while leaving most of the rest of the CPU to everything else like running LLMs on the CPU (it's cheaper to run larger models on a slower CPU with lots of RAM compared to buying a GPU with a matching amount of vram).

So yeah if you don't care about n+2 double redundant disks or sharing with more than like 5 people or hosting other apps or running AI while people are streaming then yeah you should totally get something less power hungry. Just the Intel nuc10 I use for Plex (but not media storage) has a TDP of 25W so just that would lower the electricity cost to like $2.50/mo.

I mainly chose to just use the cost of my whole setup's electricity as an example because it didn't seem worth it to think about how to split up the idle wattage between services especially when it's gong to come in at way lower than the combined cost of all the major streaming services anyways, plus I don't want anyone accusing me of needing to underestimate to make my point - even if I overestimate, it's way cheaper.

It's getting progressively harder. Some stuff just doesn't release on physical anymore.

or both

Jellyfin is a safer bet

That's the thing: it will take me more time and attention to figure that all out, plus either a hardware purchase or even more time and attention to spin up an appropriate VM - e.g. I wonder if Netflix ads can be bypassed if my router itself is running a blocker specifically for them - and if so would it be like a minute of empty space at the start of each show (I could totally live with that), or randomly 5 minutes of such every 10 minutes (possibly depending on the show, and maybe more frequent if it keeps trying bc it knows the ads weren't previously delivered).

I haven't done such for over a decade, and the landscape has entirely changed. I was hoping that a couple of shows that disappeared from Netflix when Disney+ came out would get me by for like a year. And it might actually.

Anyway, Netflix knows all this, and is counting on people not willing to put in the time & energy to bypass it. Which is fine - it is a service they provide after all - so now it's a matter of how much pain they can get away with causing before the other alternatives start to look more attractive...

It's because netflix' strategy has been to use the vast amounts of analytics they have to design shows that are so incredibly specialized and focused on targeting unseen metrics that they are entirely devoid of substance.

Even buying into their logic that one could do that, they essentially overfit the data. Find a trend? More trend more betterer more moneyer. Doesn't work very well.

I hate that they do raise prices over time. These companies get tin these contracts for sports and with specific companies that raise their own expense and hurts consumers. That and these companies had always wanted to charge more either way.