I don’t see the point of television these days, especially if you have easy access to internet. I have almost no clue of what’s happening in the world except the big global stuff, nevermind my country. We’re getting poorer, less jobs, yadayada… I bet that’s what’s going on in the news.
And I don’t watch media, I rather watch clips of movies I grew up with on YouTube.
I gave up TV for a while, but built an automated Plex server about a year ago and have fallen in love with it. I find myself watching more shows than in probably the past decade. My wife was less than thrilled about the initial cost (and the fact that she lost some closet space to the server) but now she uses it every day and refuses to ever let me get rid of it.
For the unaware, Plex is a program that allows you to self-host a streaming service like Netflix or Hulu. You add media to the server, and it will automatically match it to the relevant show, download metadata, and make it available to your client devices to stream. The free version is fine for most small setups, but there is a paid license you can get to unlock all of the functionality; Most users opt to just get a lifetime license, so it’s not an ongoing cost.
If you prefer open source, Jellyfin is a good alternative. There’s a little bit more of a learning curve, because the client apps aren’t widely available and it often requires using something like Kodi to stream instead. But the idea is the same; Host a server, throw media at it, and be able to stream.
Automating the media collection is possible, and is what takes it from “this is a cool side hobby that I’ll abandon in a few months because the upkeep is a pain in the ass” to “this is now my go-to for shows I want to watch, and the upkeep is minimal.” Programs exist that allow your server to automatically search for
mediaLinux ISOs, download it, and add it to your server. So adding newmediaLinux ISOs is simply a matter of requesting it to be added, and then the server handles all the rest automatically and you’ll have it available as soon as the download finishes.My one big complaint about Plex is actually the lack of live IPTV support. You can integrate a digital TV tuner into your server to be able to automatically DVR live content. But Plex used to support an IPTV extension, which allowed you to add your own IPTV channels and stream them on any device. Plex did away with that extension support, because they have been pushing their own IPTV channels and they didn’t want to compete with the extension.