Prices are rising across Netflix, Spotify, and their peers, and more people are quietly returning to the oldest playbook of the internet: piracy. Is the golden age of streaming over?
Prices are rising across Netflix, Spotify, and their peers, and more people are quietly returning to the oldest playbook of the internet: piracy. Is the golden age of streaming over?
The expenses are mostly upfront though. I’ve spent like $400 on a relatively fancy NAS and two 3TB WD Red CMR drives five years ago, and since then, there was that.
Of course, depending on your use case, there could be extra expenses as well, some of them recurring: -Bigger drives -Backup storage (I already had a place I could back up to) -Domain name and DNS records (if you expose it to the public Web with a URL; you can otherwise just use a VPN tunnel to access NAS from outside the home network, which is free unless you do anything fancy) -Some kind of paid software (if you don’t enjoy the perfectly good collection of open-source apps) -Etc.
Now, for the streaming alternative: Netflix Standard: $18/mo Spotify: $12/mo Total: $30/mo, or $360/yr. Just these two services alone.
Your NAS system will pay off in a little over a year (maybe two years if you go all in with huge drives, fancy NAS configs, extra expenses here and there), and it’s smooth sailing from there.
My unit works for 5 years already with no maintenance, is still fully supported by the manufacturer, and I don’t expect to replace it in a few more years.