People call it "homelab" or "data hoarding" these days, but yes, the easy access to hours and hours of movies and music was "solved" for the average person by the content streaming sites, so there's not as much a drive as there used to be for it.
Heheheh, drive.
It really is a world of difference - XBMC 20+ years ago made your TV a wonder to behold, more powerful than anything anyone else would have (and desirable, too!).
Now a full Plex + JellyFin + Infuse setup just makes it feel like some sort of knockoff Netflix.
There are still advantages. But they’re not as noticeable (main one being if you can find it, you can have it instead of having to search various streaming platforms).
yes i remember setting up a system through xbmc that made it so the tv would appear to have cable channels that were built from everything that was on my storage. So you had channels for different genres or cartoons or movies or whatever. and you could flip through the channels and watch whatever was on. and now it's just that you can even watch digitizations of old vhs recordings of television on youtube if you want. there just seems to be no need to do all that work and when you do, it never seems terribly nice and half the time things are falling over. It was fun when i was a student but now I actually want to watch television if i sit in front of the tv, not try and fix whatever broke to make it work again.
And now I learn that I am average.