Every media / tech company has their own streaming service now. The big, old school TV companies have caught on and offered their own streaming services. Now, you can watch anything you want on your smart device. You only have to pay $5.99 a month for these shows, $8.99 a month for these shows, $12.89 a month for these shows that bundle with sports, and $7.99 a month for your favorite news programs.
By the way, the big companies can’t afford to provide these services for the subscription fee a month from thousands of customers. So they have to run ads on all of your shows or you can pay double to remove ads. Just be forewarned, the price will always go up (and they may give you ads anyways).
So what if you took took the $50-$100 dollars a month, saved a year or so, and bought some second hand servers and hard drives to host your own media server?
You already have media
Remember all those DVDs and Blu-Rays you have? Those are 480 pixel definition or better. I’ll bet we all know people that still use the DVD and Blu-Ray copies. Those could be copied to your own personal media server. Save up and buy a DVD read-write drive and buy a copy of a DVD ripper program.
You also have home movies that you host on Google or Apple or Microsoft cloud servers. Why not host them on your own media server to have and present in your house? You don’t have to pay a subscription or loose those home movies then.
Season DVD and Blu-rays of your seasons are cheap. Walk into any media store and you can pick up your favorite shows, new and old for a deal. Those brick and mortar stores are begging for customers or order them on flash deal from Amazon. The shows won’t cycle away when the contract is up on your own personal media server.
Hosting for your home devices with Jellyfin
Provided you have a server or big desktop to host the data, presenting the media to your home devices is easy. I use Jellyfin, which you can find here. Run through the instructions on the site and map it to your media share. They have options for movies, shows, books, photos, music and more. They also have apps that you can download to your phone and smart tv. Bam, you are hosting your own personal media entertainment system. Here is what it looks like:
The content you host is up to you and you can categorize it as you want. I have my content split up with adult shows and kids shows / movies. Once Jellyfin searches the media share for content it organizes it automatically and tracks your viewership by account. There are many options for limiting account access for kids or giving full access to all media you host.
Hosting your own media server might be the next way tech people get around advertisements and content subscriptions. Since advertisers are here to stay on all streaming platforms, no matter how much money you pay, we mine-as-well save our money and host what we want to see ourselves.
Check out my previous blog post here.
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