I believe it’s time to stop streaming and create our own home servers. Now this is a fancy word for essentially a desktop computer with lots of storage. No need to jump into dedicated network storage cases right away. It’s rather cost prohibitive for just starting out.
With the price of ssd’s coming down dramatically and large capacity external hdd’s running around $250 for 12tb, why not start accumulating your own stockpile of movies, tv shows, and music?
I have well over 100 movies, a couple dozen tv shows complete seasons and several newer series with only a season or 2, plus about 20,000 songs on 4.5 TB of ssd.
I run them through Plex which has been pretty awesome. It’s not without some issues from time to time but they’re short lived. With their premium service you get a audio player that interfaces much like Spotify or Pandora that filters your files for genre and creates stations automatically. It does this without you having to provide (add to the file) any artist, style, album, year information. It’s been great.
It works while your VPN is operating too. You can also allow others to access your server. This will require more bandwidth having multiple people streaming multiple files at the same time so be careful how many people you give access too.
I got fed up with the constant problems with the Kodi addons. And still with the standalone ones like CinemaHD and Syncler there’s seems to always be something.
And when is the whole thing going to come to a stop by governments getting serious about shutting things down? Maybe never, but maybe any minute. And as more and more people do what we do I’d think sooner.
So why not accumulated all the things you want. Once you have virtually everything that you want that’s ever been, all you gave to do is worry about new stuff.
There are some technical issues for consideration. If you start little by little as I have done, you won’t be able to Raid your drives which means you are vulnerable to losing all your data. You can augment this by buying an external hdd for cheap and using that as a back up. It’s best if you have but say two 2tb ssd’s and raid them at the start. That way you are more protected. I plan to get an 8TB hdd and a 12tb hdd I’ll drop all my data onto the 12 and then Raid the two 2tb ssd’s and the 8 hdd and the transfer the data back but use the 12tb as a backup.