I don't pay for streaming services any more unless there is a reason to have a subscription beyond watching TV/film. For example, I have a Paramount+ subscription for ~8 months of the year to watch the A-League, and occasionally I'll have a Prime subscription for business reasons. So if something is on one of those services, I might watch it through there. I tend to pirate new releases and big budget shows that benefit from a high quality 4K encode, rather than pay to watch ads.

In Australia we have a public broadcaster called SBS, which is the unofficial multicultural broadcaster. Its streaming service has a very high quality and varied catalogue, with TV and film from all around the world, but it is ad-supported and usually in low bitrate 720p. I used to overlook it for those reasons, but these days I find myself going to it more and more. I guess it's a mix of being busier, being increasingly turned off by the generic US slop that paid streaming services churn out (only to cancel halfway through) and wanting to support a public broadcaster which is putting effort into maintaining a high quality catalogue despite a severe lack of government funding. Recently, it acquired an exclusive world premiere license for the new sci-fi thriller 'Smilla's Sense of Snow', for example.

[–] thatKamGuy@sh.itjust.works 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

+1 for SBS, and also going to throw in ABC’s iView to the mix for that kids programming alone (everything else is just a bonus).

Missus is paying for Netflix and I have a Prime subscription; that’s usually sufficient most nights, and everything else just miraculously appears on the home server should we want to watch it.

[–] Ilandar@lemmy.today 2 points 4 days ago

I was quite surprised that iView has its own small, but quite decent, collection of films. And, of course, it has all the great journalism programming like Four Corners, Foreign Correspondent, Australian Story, Planet America, etc, which is what I usually go to it for.