Does anyone know if it's possible to run a self-hosted Jellyfin server without having to run an entire data center on your house? I could do something simple like a NUC or equivalent and a tiny NAS, anything else?

To streaming?

Never.

Streaming is a finite market that is already covered. The moment old money (aka existing media companies) jumped on it, it was done for.

the next VC driven company…

With you so far

that focuses more on growth than profit

Ah - there’s your problem. VC companies simply don’t do that.

Well if they stay private and don't let the other companies just buy them out when they are small to squash the competition. Otherwise it's impossible to be a disruptor now.

They recently made everything massive blocks of color so now it's impossible to read anything. Damn splash screen takes up a third of my TV

They're made to “Enhance the user experience profit”

“Enhance the user experience” is just what the dev or documentation team writes when management dictates that they drop a feature. The only reasons they would have dropped it:

• Dev work vs actual customer usage (e.g. it wasn't getting a lot of users but devs had to maintain it with each update)
• People were using it to intercept the stream and capture movies to pirate.

Every decision is about increasing profits first, and UX almost always takes a back seat to that

My lazy ass just torrents on my pc and plugs the HDD into my Shield which has Kodi on it.

The fact that casting to older devices is allowed on the expensive plan but not the ad-supported one offers a clue.

Because fuck you, that’s why. I’m sure they will re-introduce the feature behind a paywall soon.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Once you tell a company that you are willing to pay for something more than once, prepare to get fucked, because that’s all you’re gonna get. And not the fun kind.

And require to login too

Make no mistake, this was intentional before the holidays so families visiting relatives can't just cast Netflix from their phone to watch something and will require someone to login and use it one of their authorized devices...or coerce them to upgrade if they already have too many authorized devices

Seems like if you've got the ad-free plan and an older chromecast you're still ok... For now. This is indicative though that the service may not be viable for long for you.

Keep paying them but use it less = more profit.