Is your next post going to be in a baking comm asking people if they have considered just buying a loaf at the grocery? Its an important life lesson to get early that its OK that other people have different tastes and priorities than you do.

Streaming services exist, and i used to use them faithfully, here are some issues with streaming services:

• not all content is high definition. Some older sttuff is bad quality and better quality can be found elsewhere like bluerays
• if the subtitles suck then you are stuck with them. When selfhosting you can download better ones for those shows.
• licensing changes and a show you’re watching will be moved to another provider… or not at all. It’s just gone.
• for a family wanting to watch different shows at the same time, 1 service may not be enough. You may need 2 or 3 or even 5. That adds up $$.
• ad-free experience, quality of streams, number of simultaneous streams, etc are monetized under streaming services. This does not happen when you selfhost
• You are giving money to large companies that will use their wealth and power to screw you over.

Those are just some that come to mind.

I have single server made out of an Optiplex 3060 Micro

I’ve got a couple of Optiplex including a 3020 micro. Snappy little machines.

I also have hard time getting them to even allow me to run my homelab (I’m a teenager, I live with my parents), because it takes space and uses power (for context idle is around 8W).

Do a cost analysis. Present your parents with the results. Offer to do odd jobs around the house to offset the incurred cost of power consumption. For instance, generally speaking, that OptiPlex 3060 Micro running 24/7 in my locale would cost me about $3 per month to run 24/7. Which is pretty negligible, but understandable that your parents are concerned with costs and resources. Sometimes parents default to that boomer mentality that ‘I didn’t have a server when I was a kid and I walked to school uphill, both ways, in the snow, barefooted’. LOL However, when presented with some facts, charts n graphs, and a goal to learn a life skill, you might see some leniency.

Are you hosting arr stack/plex/jellyfin?

I do not run the 'arr stack, but I do run about 38 other containers on my Ubuntu Jammy server. I prefer reading to watching.

Not sure why you are getting down voted, but don’t let it get under your skin.

im a simple user

I don’t really like watching things

then this shit aint for you. just because you can do something doesnt mean you have to want to do it.

im old and have been doing this for almost 30 years. long before jellyfin; my kids never suffered commercials, never had to worry about some streaming service going up or down. they never had to care whether some source had the show they wanted. even when away from home, they were streaming my shit.

my very large curated collection may be less random than some iptv streams, but sure as fuck is more reliable, dependable, quality controlled and well, i dont even need to have fucking internet access for my shit (my library) to work for me.

nice try fbi

Here is a few off the top of my mind:

Streaming services take away content all the time, license expired and goes to another service.

Streaming services do not have everything, they are actually quite limited on content.

Streaming services often remove episodes from seasons, so you don’t even get all the episodes.

Pirate streaming sites go down all the time as governments crack down.

Streaming services cost more and more and more, with less and less content.

Some media is only available on older mediums such as VHS (and never came out on dvd, streaming, etc) but pirates have archived these rare movies.

You might feel like the world is available to you online, but I have been around since the start of the internet and have seen many, many things go the way of the dodo 🦤. Things go away. Websites gone, files gone, laws change, etc. if you’re not archiving it, you may never see it again.

I just like actually owning all my stuff and don’t want to deal with sites randomly shutting down, moving, having an incomplete or miss-organized library, bad quality, etc. My own collection certainly isn’t prefect but if there is issues I can fix them, it’s all in one place (no different sites for movies, tv shows, anime, music, etc) and it tracks all my watch-history which most free sites don’t. I can one-click download stuff to my laptop or phone for offline-watching (guess you can do that with yt-dlp for most sites, but again more effort)

Are you hosting arr stack/plex/jellyfin?

Yup.

How much is it utilized (in watch hours/week for example, mine was less than 2/week)?

I get about 3 days of watch-time between my 10ish active users per week.

Have you considered not using it?

Nope, I’m so done with the free streaming site whack-a-mole, not going back.

I suppose some people like to collect stuff. You’re right that it’s easy to access mainstream stuff, but once you decide to watch some less known movie - especially an old one - you may struggle to find it. Even with somewhat popular movies there are things like extended/director’s cuts, remasters, re-releases, etc. So I get it.

With that said, I watch on average one movie per week, so android tv with a video player that can browse a samba share is more than enough for me.

We’re all fine with piracy because of enshittification and the spread of shows/films across too many services. Happily paid for Netflix when it was good but it slowly got worse and worse. If there was one fairly priced single (maybe max across 3) source(s), I’d switch back.

In terms of stream vs arr’s. Quality of video and sound matters to us but not for everything we watch. I actually use Stremio with Debrid for most items, especially my family choosing what to watch. When I want top quality I will use my arr stack. When stremio fails I’ll use my arr stack. For TV shows we watch regularly we use the arr stack, partly to remind us when they’re released. For TV shows we regularly re-watch I use the arr stack.

If you aren’t a big consumer of shows and movies, just use the free services if they fill the need for you. Personally, I’ve purchased hundreds of movies and TV shows on disc and digitally over the years. Jellyfin lets me put them all in one place for my whole family to access. No need to try to remember what service it’s on or where the disc is.

I couldn’t find any rules for this community and I don’t know if it’s allowed.

Its allowed up to the limits of the lemmy.world TOS, so no direct links, discussion is fine.

mainly because everyone says it’s the best thing to use a homelab for.

Great for self-hosting if its something you use. Not really a homelab thing, these two things are not necessarily the same either. My hosted services for the family are entirely segregated from my lab, which does a very different job.

How much is it utilized (in watch hours/week for example, mine was less than 2/week)?

Over the past 30 days… Up to 6 streams at a time, 15 days worth of streaming hours.

My still-learning-to-read children are able to use it. They’d be unable to navigate a streaming site even if I trusted them to do so.

Now that it’s set up, the maintenance is negotiable. I can just browse my TV shows to see what new episode has aired.

It sounds like it’s just not worth it for you, and that’s totally fine! Plenty of people get by just fine with using random streaming sites.

Personally, I want something more reliable, I want to have copies of what I watch in my possession that cannot be taken down, and I want to share this with others so that my friends can benefit from my time investment instead of using a solution that only works for me. So that if my friends ask me “where do you get your stuff” I can offer to share with them at 0 extra effort instead of telling them “go do all these things that I already did”

As for usage, I only watch a few hours a week myself, but I share with 15-20 friends and family who watch a collective 160 hours a month last year and around 360 hours a month this year (about 15 days of watch time per month).

I have a fairly comprehensive arrstack, torrents and Usenet, seerr, Plex and jellyfin side by side with identical media mounts for maximum user choice, running on a nuc with quicksync so it handles 8+ simultaneous 1080p live transcodes without using much power or increasing CPU usage much more than 5-10%.

I only use Jellyfin because we want to watch it on the TV and not on the laptop.