About 40% of Americans have cut back on streaming services in the last three months because of financial concerns, according to a recent report
Americans are quitting subscription streaming services in droves as the cost of living continues to climb, a recent report has found.
Streaming services such as Netflix and Hulu have become increasingly popular in recent years, but Deloitte’s 2026 Digital Media Trends report, released late last month, shows how Americans are getting frustrated over the cost to have their favorite movies and TV shows at the click of a button.
“As the cost of everyday essentials like food and housing remain high, many consumers are reevaluating their budgets and cutting back on nonessential expenditures,” Deloitte said in its survey results. “At the same time, prices for media and entertainment services continue to climb.”
If you have the processing power to spare (and haven’t done it already), you might be able to re-encode your media files to a more space-efficient codec.
I’ve reduced some of my video files by as much at 75% using Handbrake to convert from AVC to H.264 or H.265. I’m not the most discerning viewer, so I haven’t noticed any difference in video quality, but I’ve definitely noticed the extra space on my drives!
I’ve got an ffmpeg script saved on my Mac which re-encodes video to a fraction of its original size without any apparent loss of quality. Shit’s basically magic.
I have one for audio as well, but I think it’s an Apple-only MP4 codec, that requires you to have to manually build it into ffmpeg on any other platform. But the end result is that my 2 hour radio show AIFFs that start out at 4GB end up being high quality MP4 at around 75mb.
Like I said, magic.
Do you happen to remember where you got it? I’ve got a Mac and while the idea of going through all the media files on my servers to convert them I twitch a little bit, but would also love to cut down space without giving up some of my files
Pretty sure it’s this command;
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vcodec libx265 -crf 30 -tag:v hvc1 output.mp4
On my M2 Air, conversions are usually pretty quick, depending on the size of the input. After a short while it does throttle because there’s no fan, but it counters along nicely.
As for audio; I use XLD, set to encode HE-AAC at 80kbps. It seems really low, but still sounds great.
Not all hero’s wear capes
In the process of shifting my entire iCloud photo library over to Immich, I’ve discovered that a huge amount of the videos I’ve shot over the years with various iPhones are ridiculously huge x264 .MOVs. So I’ve been fiddling about with ffmpeg this morning, and have landed upon this script that re-encodes them to around 10% of their original size with no visible loss of quality, and retains EXIF metadata. One video I have is 90 seconds long, and is of bats filmed at twilight over a large pond in the New Forest. The original is 132mb, but because most of the clip is basically black, it’s been able to compress it to 2mb. Which is mad.
Anyway.
Navigate your terminal to a folder that contains a bunch of videos and paste this in, then sit back and let ffmpeg work its magic:
for i in *.MOV; do ffmpeg -i "$i" -map_metadata 0 -vcodec libx265 -crf 30 -tag:v hvc1 -movflags use_metadata_tags "${i%.*}.mp4"; doneFor just the odd one or two videos, here’s the basic ffmpeg command:
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -map_metadata 0 -vcodec libx265 -crf 30 -tag:v hvc1 -movflags use_metadata_tags ouput.mp4God, I love ffmpeg.
I misread that as ffmpreg…which means I have spent way too much time on AO3 in the past few years.
Just as a heads up, if you aren’t concerned about “copyright”/“intellectual property” the better way would be to download native h.265 rips instead of re-encoding your existing h.264 files, as those will look better since you aren’t compressing the already existing compression artifacts of your old files. Copy of a copy and all that.
AV1 can double again the savings for the same quality