I’ve been unmotivated in the past but i think it’s time to sort out an alternative.
Because how else am I going to get those deep creases out of my blouses!
I’ve ditched all of them except the Disney/Hulu bundle, and that’s only because Amex gives me back $7 a month of the cost.
Amazon Prime used to be okay as a Prime customer, but now you can’t watch a 24 minute show without seeing like five ads. I tried to watch an episode of Invincible and there were two ads before the show even started, two in the middle of the show, and one at the end. It’s freaking insane.
I barely even watch video these days, I get way more mileage out of a good music service like Qobuz or Tidal.
Hulu is treating me with impunity when I reported errors with their apps. Hulu, an eminently cancelable service that a lot of people never paid for in the first place.
Sail the seven seas, friends. These people deserve despondency.
You are just one drop in an ocean pal.
You guys are starting to sound like you agree with the practice.
Just answering your question. No matter how dystopian, it is the reality we live in.
Wife and I started watching the boys on prime. That’s when I realized Amazon is putting ads in the stream.
I just ended up downloading all the seasons in an hour and it’s been no ads on Kodi since.
Keep in mind that these people don’t rationalize. They only see numbers. They use smart people to give them a watered down explanation on how it’s possible to raise the numbers even more. If you leave but the people that stay start making the numbers go even higher, they don’t give a fuck.
I think about this a lot. In the 2000s, there would be all these music services that hype themselves up. The Downloadable Music Wars. We all used Napster or whatever pirating tool and it was just easier than paying. In the end, they were all smoke and mirrors and the services died out, while Apple and their iPods won.
In the late 2010s was the PC gaming Wars, Steam was really getting some heat. Not just other e-commerce stores like Epic, but also game streaming services like onLive and PC Game Pass. Again, all these wack ass companies (wtf Origin) and most of them have either folded or are on life support and migrated to Steam.
We’re currently in the Streaming Wars. Probably the second or third version of this war, since the first war killed Blockbuster. I honestly don’t believe many of them will survive past 2030. For sure Netflix and Hulu. Maybe half of them die, and six more will crop up. Who knows.
But what I do know is that whenever these “wars” occur, you see a lot of the shittier companies get worse and worse. And if you never picked a side and did your own thing (ignore them or sail the open seas), you get to look back and laugh at these clowns.
The merging of Hulu and Disney got me thinking that in the end they’ll probably all merge into one streaming service with individual channels for each, like ‘the Hulu channel’, etc. Essentially just reinventing cable.
As Netflix constant raises showed, not enough people leave so they will enshitify to the max
You might ditch, but they have enough data that says enough other people aren’t going to.
Just remember whenever you’re annoyed by something and think “why is this a thing? This annoys me so it shouldn’t happen”, there’s thousands of other people who can live with it or just don’t give a shit.
Or they don’t feel like they have a better option. I have never met anyone who said, I like adds on my streaming service.
Consumers mostly don’t even care about the content. Over the last 15 years they switched from cable only to now be back on cable again disguised as streaming.
Wait till they drop you as a customer by cancelling your payment tier,then send you countless begging letters over the next month begging you to return. If you wanted my money that badly, why did you cancel me NETFLIX???
Was at the fair and some lady was loudly announcing selling a streaming device that would stream all movies and shows for free. I asked how she could do that legally? She said Congress in 2011 passed the streaming act. Said any movie or show that is streamed once is by law afterwards public domain.
Someone should tell Disney Plus. Does anyone heard of this?
Sounds like some sovcit bs
What I was thinking. I.was trying to figure out how she was allowed to have a booth at the fair. Damn wish I taken a pic it was a large booth and she had several tvs up. It was definitely a streaming device that was pirating shows and movies.
I heard of these boxes online before but if I remember correctly they worked for a time before suddenly being blocked or whatever then you just have a brick of a device.
They can’t brick the box, they take down the IPTV server and most people just don’t have the knowledge to find another and put the url in the app.
Well this is the Tulsa Oklahoma state fair most people that would buy one of those boxes are not the brightest bunch.
A: they’re betting most people will accept it, and they’re right. The same thing happened in the early 80s when cable television advertised themselves as the pay-for-ad-free service, then started sneaking ads in. People complained, sure, but we all saw the outcome. They got away with it.
B: Greed, capitalism, and fuck you.
A: they’re betting most people will accept it, and they’re right.
Yes. Remember when Netflix put a stop to password sharing and the internet went aflame with people declaring that Netflix had shot itself in the foot? Netflix subscriber counts went up.
The average person will put up with so much more of this nonsense than techie people will.
It’s why I highly recommend Fmovies, sudo-lol, and others. The barrier to entry is literally a browser and ublock origin and you can watch just about anything.
You can send someone a link to an episode and they can watch it. No sign ups, no ads (with ad block), and pretty decent service. No explaining what a torrent is. No VPN (though I recommend it of course).
Just pure content.
I already wasn’t using them by then. I couldn’t stop harder.
Subscriber counts went down in the affected areas.
It’s time to start shaming people who think like this
Hey now, I don’t think like this, but sometimes it’s just not worth the effort to think unlike this.
i haven’t had cable, or even a tv, in many years. stayed at a hotel the other day and flicked on the tv because the internet was out (helene), and was flabbergasted that for every 2 minutes of programming, there was at least 5 minutes of the same commercials over and over. people fucking watch this shit? on purpose?
When my wife and I stay at a hotel we watch cable and put on like QVC shopping channels.
It’s fun to overreact and be like “this is 100 genuine silver painted lead.” Some of the channels will have like changing infographics that flash and explode every second as the price keeps dropping so we make wooshing sounds as it keeps falling to a new low.
Cable television never advertised that. Cable TV started as a “community antenna” system that served people in valleys with existing off-the-air broadcast channels (which had ads); the existence of those systems created a market for satellite-fed channels like HBO (which was always a separate subscription and ad-free) and TBS/CNN (which always carried ads). Other than the premium channels like HBO/Showtime/Cinemax, cable channels have had ads from the beginning.
Once the small cable systems and the media publishers both got consolidated, we started seeing content licensing deals and higher costs to the subscriber to pay for it - but the channels (MTV, Nickelodeon, etc) always carried ads.
It definitely did. I remember it vividly (I was alive back then). And I’m talking about the premium services, specifically (e: which was the point of my comparison: the premium paid services back then advertised no-ad service, then included ads, just like the premium streaming services are doing today).
Here’s an article from the NYT in 1981 on the topic:
WILL CABLE TV BE INVADED BY COMMERCIALS?
e: a quote:
Indeed, even pay television, once assumed to be secure from commercial interests, is attracting some attention as a potential vehicle for advertising. Admittedly, such leading pay cable services as Home Box Office and Showtime, whose programming consists primarily of theatrically released films, staunchly maintain that they will never accept advertising.
Literally the first sentence of that article:
Although cable television was never conceived of as television without commercial interruption, there has been a widespread impression - among the public, at least -that cable would be supported largely by viewers’ monthly subscription fees.
The premium services mentioned in your quote (HBO, Showtime) also still do not run ads even today.
Yes and no. Networks had ads but cable began inserting their own ads in addition to the network ads. When I ran a company I did large media buys with cable companies. I would buy ads from the regional cable company which would air in between the national ads of Comedy Central, Discovery, etc.
Ye ol bait and switch
Because the “you wouldn’t steal a car” nonsense scares a lot of people off
Because some people want to support the creators of content but digital downloads from iTunes or whatever are more expensive than getting a month of a streaming service
Because there is a level of convenience of having thousands of hours of content at your fingertips without having to store content locally or finding it on a “dodgy” website. Setting up torrents / usenet is more work than giving someone your credit card number
Because a lot of people don’t know where to find content and if they did they don’t know the difference between a 480p avi vs a 2160p HDR DV MKV and get confused with torrents and file formats and how to get them on their TV.
Because - at the moment - the ads aren’t that bad, I got one ad at the start and one episode in the middle of an episode of Gen V - obviously they’ll add more until it’s as bad as cable but they’re not there yet.
The “you wouldn’t steal a car” thing actually backfired majorly for the parties involved. It actually did two things. It highlighted that downloading movies was possible and easy to do when it was new and not many people knew about it. And it made people curious. This led to it having the exact opposite effect of what was intended.
https://knowledgesource.com.au/no-bs-how-those-video-ads-spectacularly-back-fired/
Didn’t they also not license (aka pirate lol) the music in that ad?
Also absolutely true.
Now do DARE or whatever that shot was 🤣
Drugs
Are
Really
Expensive
Because - at the moment - the ads aren’t that bad, I got one ad at the start and one episode in the middle of an episode of Gen V - obviously they’ll add more until it’s as bad as cable but they’re not there yet.
Yeah, I stopped watching Fallout when it hit an ad in the middle. Why get excited about a show when it is clear that it will be constantly interrupted by ads like we still live in the 90s?
One is too many.
Because they’re also going after piracy as hard as they can
Meh, for less than the cost of any streaming service, a VPN subscription gets someone else to laugh at all those letters.
The answer is apathy.
You have to remember that most users simply don’t care. The majority of consumers are some combination of either not technologically savvy or just outright intimidated by technology, are not very well educated, are incredibly reluctant to read, are not particularly observant, will not leave their routines or comfort zones without very significant motivation, and have spent their entire lives being the very frog in that gradually boiling pot of ever more numerous and intrusive advertising to the point that they just accept this as “normal.” They’re busy. They don’t read tech headlines. They don’t understand what’s going on under the hood, and nor do they want to.
Normal people don’t see the world like us nerds do. I am positive that these streaming services (and many other businesses) have studied this and understand it very well. If they lose 1% of their business which was made up by vocal nerds, but whatever odious change the just rolled out results in an increase in profit that is greater than the revenue from those subscriptions lost, they’ll go ahead and do it anyway.
They think they have a captive audience because by and large they functionally do have a captive audience. This stuff works, and people keep paying for it en masse.
I mean, look at Reddit. Huge uproar last year, nothing happened really.
Pretty much every service, platform, app has become worse over the last two or three years. But people keep using them. And not for a lack of alternatives. They are actively hostile against change and many really don’t care. They are so used to being fucked over, squeezed for pennies and bombarded with bullshit ads, that they gave up.
The same thing happens in politics, btw. People just vote whatever - if at all, because they already expected to be fucked over. All those activists you see on TV or online are a tiny minority.
Which is functionally a captive audience.
ironically I only use the free add supported ones except for amazon but thats more due to my wife.
