Yo-ho, all together, hoist the coooolors high…
Yup, streaming has just become cable v2. I dusted off the VPN and went back to that. As a famous someone once said:
Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem
If the experience with piracy is FAR superior to streaming you can guess which way I’m going to go…
Pirating is work. Streaming was convenience.
The less convenient streaming is, the more likely I’m willing to work.
Was work
What I want to know is how much money could insurance companies (cough, Liberty Mutual, cough) POSSIBLY be saving people when they are buying ads on every video on Youtube.
I always wondered what if someone started an insurance business that didn’t spend billions on advertisements, it just offered genuinely lower rates. When you sign up you have to sign something promising you’ll tell 2 other people.
“We can’t lower prices! Look at how much we have to spend!!”
Points at billions in ad slots being watched by mostly AI now
The Market Basket of insurance companies - solid, quality products, at a reasonable price, because they simply don’t do any marketing.
That’s what you’re seeing. Not what I’m seeing. Welcome to the wonderful world of targeted ads.
I only get Doctor Drew telling me stuff is a metabolism killer.
I get douche bros peddling instant meal powder crap. Which I have never, ever, looked for or researched, but my wife’s shopping habits tend to dictate my ads, even though we’re on completely different devices.
Yeah, if you’re going through the same router, it’s going to be one IP. My guess is that I get the metabolism stuff because of my spouse.
Weird then that I don’t need insurance and am not looking for insurance…
And I’m super skinny and don’t need to speed up my metabolism. It’s not perfect, but we both sit in a demographic cohort that seems to really buy what they’re pushing to us.
I’m always getting those crappy State Farm ads with celebrities like Ludacris, who always look slightly embarrassed to be appearing in the ads
And equally that I have had LM for decades and that’s all I see ads for … yeah, real effective targeted advertising.
Lol, I get eavestrough filters and fat guy t-shirts. They can tell I’m an old fucker but not that I’m skinny as hell
You guys watch ads on YouTube? When YT gets the better of UblockO for a couple days, I just open the YT homepage, see which of the regular channels I check out have new videos or I look through my recommended and then I open piped or yewtu.be. Fuck YT. I refuse to watch ads. When I open a YT link through lemmy, I’ll close the window immediately if an ad starts playing. Fuck these companies.
I have ad blocker at the router level, but I often toggle it off when it interrupts marketing experiences that I need to see for work.
I went over a month with zero issues using UBO on YouTube. Coincidentally today for some reason the site started breaking so I updated the quick fixes filter list and that solved it.
They’d lose money. Advertising works - that’s why companies are doing it.
Even if the creators weren’t pissed, the entire selling point of streaming was on demand, ad free, and a large library to choose from. Every single streaming service that subdivided Netflix and Hulu’s content shares have reneged on that entire concept by creating smaller libraries, making them unaffordable, and now they’re shoehorning in ads if we won’t cough up more money.
It’s almost like a moral imperative to pirate from these fuckers.
The entire selling point of cable was no signal loss and ad free… Then the point of satellite was more options and ad free. Those sneaky ads keep finding their way in.
Ads is basically free money for broadcasters. And since greed is the main motivation - the dissension seems to be rather easy for them.
Don’t forget that on-demand is being reduced as well now that many platforms are trickling out episodes for their marquee shows at a weekly rate. Looking at you Apple.
I much prefer the trickle of releases to a lump season dump.
It allows time to digest, discuss and catch up throughout the release schedule if you’re invested in the story. You can convince your friends to watch a few episodes to catch up and then watch the end of the season together. You can read fan theories online, formulate your own, and overall each weekly episode can result in a lot of engaging fun interactions.
With a series dump you have to binge it and wait for others to do the same in order to talk about it. The whole time you’re actively avoiding spoilers from friends/coworkers and avoiding reading about it online. The end result is you disengage from the fandoms/communities while you are getting through the show, which to me takes a lot of the fun out of a big show.
I compare the difference between Stranger Things and GoT. To me these are probably two of the most significant pop-culture releases in the last decade or so.
Game of Thrones resulted in hundreds of thousands of theories every week online and in public. T-Shirts were made based on popular online theories that never panned out in season. You would rag on friends who guessed the plot twist wrong and deify those who got their predictions spot on. Especially in my demographic the two months GoT was on was all about GoT.
Stranger Things on the other hand, while still wildly popular hits differently. It’s much more of a build up to release, a week or two of “man that was awesome” followed by “I hope they make the next season soon.” Retroactive discussions happen for a while, but the discussions and the hype fizzles much more quickly.
If I want to watch a trickle release show in one dump, I still can, I just wait until the whole season out, reactivate the subscription. Then I binge it.
For me it’s much more fun to have an episode or two a week and build momentum through a season than it is to set off a one time firework.
In my opinion, some people get what they deserve. If you trust any corporate media concern to not succumb to enshittification, then you deserve to watch your stupid commercials. You paid for the privilege because you enabled the abuser.
I prefer to get what I pay for and I pay for nothing, media-wise. If I watch ads, it’s because I’m watching something like the Super Bowl with my OTA DVR that’s playing on network TV. It’s free, so OK - commercials. If I’m watching anything else, it’s on my Plex server and there are no commercials.
I do pay for entertainment. I pay for experiences, like going to the movies, going to live rock shows, going to performances or exhibitions - all IRL - but that’s about it. I might consider paying for other entertainment options but there is one thing I won’t ever do: I won’t pay for media that I don’t own.
You understand that someone has to pay for that entertainment shit you use to kill your time with? You are literally shitting on people who are paying for you.
Paid services with ads are unconscionable and should not be supported, but I do watch Tubi or Pluto sometimes, and it’s not nearly as bad as the amount of ads I see on my parents’ screen with cable
Agreed, in my experience Tubi and Pluto both have very reasonable length, good quality ads. I declined to re-up on YouTube TV for NCAA football season this year specifically because I can stand their ads. At that price tier, they honestly expect me to sit through My Pillow ads??
I had subscriptions to 4 different streaming sites. They pull bullshit and I cancelled. I now watch everything on one site with better quality streams and no commercials for the cost of a nice vpn. I didn’t drop them because I can’t afford it, I dropped them because their service sucked and I’m not going to deal with or support that BULLSHIT.
What site is this?
I love torrents but my uncle is always talking about Flixtor
What site? DM if you’d rather not comment. I ain’t no snitch
I dropped prime after the announcement… Who’s next?
What pisses me off is that I signed up for a year last summer. This change should not have happened for people who already paid for Prime.
With shipping getting worse, yeah … I’m cancelling that.
Guess Bezos doesn’t have enough money.
Are you even getting two-day shipping anymore? I canceled Prime last year because my non-Prime items were arriving well before my Prime ones, with Prime sometimes taking two weeks.
With their sucky shipping, having to navigate a minefield of cheap trash-tier products, and now their video service getting riddled with ads – I think if Amazon were just being introduced to the world in its current state, no one would even use it. We’d consider it a joke.
All Amazon has going for it anymore is that it’s known and people use it out of habit.
Wait, is the two-day shipping taking forever happening for everyone? I thought it was just because I moved to Alaska. It takes 2-4 weeks (and doesn’t show up about 10-20% of the time) for anything, but Walmart and Target stuff gets here in less than a week.
I used to get it in 2 days here in South Dakota, but around 2020 or 21 it started taking progressively longer, until it was actually slower than normal shipping times.
3 main reason I cancelled Amazon:
- Counterfeits. Can get the items direct for same price & shipping now anyways.
- Shipping so unreliable.
- My “new” items were quite often repackaged returns, usually missing parts.
That’s how enshittification works - they lure you in with too good to be true promises & then slowly fuck you over year after year to increase profit.
We weren’t watching it anyway and we can handle waiting a few days for shipping. We dropped it too.
Canceling ours tomorrow actually.
I let all my streaming subscriptions die off when my debit card expired this year and I haven’t looked back. Gaming is cheaper and more entertaining. All the new movies I would want to watch never make it to streaming services anyway (without an additional rental fee)
That’s all fine and good but I want to point out so everyone can watch out for this - sometimes if you have a subscription and your card expires or gets lost/stolen and replaced, companies can somehow get your new card info without you giving it to them and keep your shit active. So you can’t assume that a new card will take care of old subscriptions that you totally forgot about. You have to check your statements.
That’s some bullshit. I hate that they can do that. They spin it as a convenience but I’d rather update all my accounts with the new card manually.
I had to deal with rhis with Doordash. Someone was making purchases on there with a card. I called an cancelled the card and get a replacement. Charges start coming in on the new card. Cancel and replace again. Charges still keep coming. I finally had to yalk to Doordash for hours to get them to remove the original card.
What an absolute anti-feature.
So are commercial randomly placed, or are the shows paced to have commercial breaks like the old tv days?
The thing I always noticed when a service places their own ads, is even when there are “ad breaks” on the timeline, the ads don’t always show up there. Or the screen blacks out for a few seconds, then the show plays, THEN the ad would play.
Granted, this was a while ago when I actually put up with that bullshit, so maybe it’s changed by now. But it was done very, very sloppily and is almost certainly a creator’s worst nightmare for the story.
Content providers can probably include chapter markers in their content. I also suspect it’s not hard to detect a scene transition. Failing these, randomly placed.
This was my problem with hulu back in the day. Short episodes like Futurama would have a commercial shoved in at like 3 minutes and then again at 10 or whatever, it was obnoxious and shittily implemented.
Okay, I need to say it: having an ad for your own programming is still an ad.
Paramount. I’m looking at you, Paramount. I don’t want to watch your shitty movie/TV show/whatever about the shitty mom from the His Dark Materials series losing another kid. Stop playing the same goddamn ad for it before every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Especially since you feel the need to double whatever goddamn volume I have set in the opening to the ad. I pay for the subscription, I already bought your product. Fuck off with your shitty ad.
I mean, others do it too and it pisses me off, but I’m on Season 2 of TNG and I may just have to get it some other way and canceling Paramount because that ad has started really getting to me.
Paramount definitely seems to be the worst about this … their app in general is really frustrating.
Max does it occasionally but it’s rare enough I don’t notice.
Still annoying, but hit back and restart the episode. So far that’s caused it to start without the ad for me.
That is the problem. Why should i be doing that? Aren’t I paying them for my convenience? At this rate pirating sites make me do lesser hassle than the legit sites.
Oh I know. Having issues with my plex server, so I’m currently subscribed to Disney/Hulu, Netflix, paramount & max. Paramount is straight trash, so many issues. Max won’t save my play history half of the time, one show it won’t even put in the continue watching section so I have to search for it every time. Shouldn’t have to deal with all this crap when you’re paying for it.
🏴☠️
This is the best summary I could come up with:
After a swift click on “not now,” this viewer cued up one of the more successful titles currently gracing Amazon’s roster — the second season of beefcake vigilante drama Reacher.
Interruptions, which included a spot for another series (Hudson & Rex, starring a German Shepherd detective) and a reminder from the folks at Intuit Turbotax that filling season has commenced, were indeed limited.
“We fought so hard to get rid of commercials,” says Alan Poul, executive producer and director of Max original Tokyo Vice which returns for a second season on Feb. 8.
Paramount expands its own ad-supported tier internationally later in 2024 — and though no official plans have been announced, recent hires at Apple TV+ suggest the tech behemoth will eventually introduce ads as well.
David E. Kelley, the one-time broadcast golden boy who gave audiences Picket Fences, Chicago Hope and Ally McBeal before pivoting to premiere outlets like HBO (Big Little Lies) and Netflix (The Lincoln Lawyer), seems similarly disenchanted.
Netflix, which recently cited that 40 percent of all new sign-ups opt for ads, announced the “retirement” of its least expensive commercial-free tier in the coming second quarter.
The original article contains 1,205 words, the summary contains 191 words. Saved 84%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Because they HAVE to increase their share values year after year; just making billions isn’t good enough, they have to make more billions compared to the last year.
It’s truly pure greed, as streaming was amazing when it first started, and Netflix was making a killing even back then. But now, nope, fuck you all, we want more and more until we can’t squeeze anything more out from you.
It’s why I’ve increased my kodi/real debrid usage over the past few years
I’ve tried to argue a company that made $800k profit this year even tho they made $900k last year is still a profitable business and people unironically argue that company is dying and bad…
Big number = good Smaller number = bad
It works for them when dealing with shareholders
That’s a long article - here, put some music on while you read.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
put some music on while you read
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Hoist the colors
I haven’t used streaming services in a couple of years. Now I’m just doing all piracy and watching it through my Jellyfin server
It just requires so much more foresight in planning what you’re going to watch.
Jellyfin Jellyseerr Radarr Sonarr Jackett Transmission
Rock and roller cola wars, I can’t take it anymore!
I’ve migrated to prowlarr from jackett. It’s far faster in searches.
I’ll do the same
