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.
But it’s not greed! It’s increasing share holder value! /s
Damn right! It’s somebody else’s greed! Totally different.
How is it even attributed to singular ads for example ? Isn’t that kinda impossible ?^^
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.
There is a simple solution for that. Rotate your services every 3 months, watch the entire season and only come back when there’s something to watch.
Quality over quantity is something streaming services can’t do. There’s so much shit shoved in our faces that I find myself watching less and less. Is a crash on the horizon or can the market sustain the number of active participants?
It’s a real shame because piracy is bridging the service gap which the industry themselves managed to eliminate, albeit briefly, only to introduce it again.
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 and I won’t watch commercials for media I paid for.
Edit: look at all the butthurt. Go ahead and keep paying through the nose then if you like it so much. I’m sure all the millionaires and billionaires who profit off your largesse will continue to treat you with the same kindness as they have in the past.
“People deserve to be exploited because they dared to use a convenient, affordable service.”
Seriously, what a bad take. It’s not like I gave them all my passwords and Power of Attorney! It’s fine your budgeting decisions work for you, but you shouldn’t cheer on companies providing a bad experience to customers that “trusted” them…
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.
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
Piracy is not a lot of work nowadays. Setting it up once takes some time, but after that everything is automated. If I want to watch a movie or show, I enter my overseer URL into a browser, search the name of it, click on request, and a few minutes later it will be ready to watch on my Plex and Jellyfin, that are also shared with friends and family so they can also browse my library and request stuff easily
Sounds like a dream. Is there a guide for that setup?
Keep in mind that in most countries you will need a VPN to safely download torrents without getting a copyright notice. And for torrenting you need a VPN that supports port forwarding
Thank you very much.
What VPN do you suggest?
I personally use Torguard. It’s pretty cheap, especially on sale, supports port forwarding, is fast enough to saturate my internet connection, and supports Wireguard
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
There are plenty of insurance companies that are like this. They’re significantly cheaper than the nationally advertised insurance options.
The Market Basket of insurance companies - solid, quality products, at a reasonable price, because they simply don’t do any marketing.
Massachusetts (funny enough also where MB is popular) used to have only small car insurance companies, I think it had something to do with no-fault or something. But they opened up to the Geicos and co. A decade or so ago.
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.
That’s a feature. When you start to get diaper ads it’s time for some news.
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 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.
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.
May I ask what you are using for a blocker?
I mostly get ads for stuff I’ve researched online; anything I buy for the house, kitchen, or simply tools for business, I make sure is “Buy It For Life” quality
Targeted ads are hilarious. Yes, Google, I did. I did just buy a pair of Knipex Cobra pipe grips. That will be the last time ever I buy them, and they will still be hanging around a secondhand shop 150 years after I’ve turned to fuckin dust. The advert for Shungong Best Grip is a fuckin waste of electrons
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
They’d lose money. Advertising works - that’s why companies are doing it.
There’s a great NPR podcast about this.
The Gecko effect.
It is worse than broadcast.
If you learn anything about screenwriting, there are certain patterns and structures you follow (like acts in a play) to accommodate commercials, like to build suspense and keep the viewer interested and not changing the channel.
Streaming never had this, if you look at shows written for these platforms. The writers either ignored or didn’t even know about these conventions.
Now adding commercials later, it is even more annoying to the viewer as the original material was not meant to accommodate them.
Streaming just keeps fucking up. I already canceled my netflix. I’m on basic cable for network tv and I just pirate everything else.
Wait… They add advertising in the middle of shows? I thought it would be at the beginning, between episodes, on the UI, etc.
Nope, it’s classic ad breaks, but since the shows weren’t made expecting them the ads just appear suddenly every X minutes instead.
And with streaming, you’re not locked into a 42-47 minute long episode either, so are some episodes going to have more, or is there someone with a stop watch going “this seems like a good place for an ad break”?
By streamers ignoring all the decades of broadcasting experience, and all established what’s fair air-time for both content and commercial. That’s the frustration… they’re rewriting standards… “my company, my content, my timings, my bottom-line”. And doing it poorly. And at top speed.
Why are you on basic cable for network tv? It’s broadcast over the air in HD for free.
Some people live in areas with poor service even with beefy antennas.
Get an hdhomerun or equivalent for local TV at home in a streaming format. It even integrates into Plex for DVR.
A cheaper solution (if you’re already running a server) would be TVheadend and a cheap USB-dongle for DVB-T, DVB-C or DVB-S.
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.
When a company gets that hostile in their design to their paying customers is when I start advocating for flying a Jolly Roger.
Prime has been doing this for ages
And it has been nothing but annoying since they started.
Yep, including the removal of “bought” content.
Still annoying, but hit back and restart the episode. So far that’s caused it to start without the ad for me.
Thanks, I’ll try that!
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.
Honestly, a preview for another show on the same service doesn’t bother me AS LONG AS it is skippable. I’ve never used paramount so I’m not sure if that’s the case.
If I’m being honest when I was a kid part of the fun of going to the movies was the previews before, finding out about upcoming movies and what not.
I do agree that you shouldn’t see the same preview every episode cause that’s super annoying. But I’d be totally fine with one per session or something. Again, as long as it’s skippable right from the start.
It’s not skippable as far as I can tell. It also frequently advertises shows I’ve already watched. Sometimes it advertises the show I’m trying to watch.
I’m pretty sure it also has the “ad counter” showing on the screen during this as well.
Here’s what they call it in their docs:
You’ll also see a quick preview only once per day before any show to keep you up-to-date on our original programming.
It’s not an ad, it’s a “preview.” /s
If you exit out and then start the show again, it skips the pre-roll. It’s annoying, but slightly faster than waiting and watching the 30 second pre-roll.
They advertise as extra $ for ad free, but then they put ads in it. That’s dishonest.
What I have to do whenever I watch a show is start the show, get the pre-roll, exit out, then start the show again. It’s annoying and a stupid hoop to jump through just to not have to watch the same pre-roll over and over.
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.
Yes! I pay for an ad free experience on YouTube but support tells me that ads for their own products don’t count. Fuckers.
Just here to remind everyone while piracy is important, it’s also very important to teach the less tech savy among your acquaintances how to pirate too. Conglomerates only learn when their bottom line is effected after all, so teach all your friends how to hoist that black flag.
IF you go down that route, there needs to be a warning: Do it properly, use a VPN if you are torrenting, get a usenet account if you want fast speeds that encrypts the connection and so on - basically, teach it correct. Because some countries or rather law agencies WILL hunt you down if they even get some hint of your actual IP-Address…
Or they send a DMCA to your ISP, and then your ISP gives you 3 warnings and a boot. VPN is the way.
Yeah. I’ve only really got one ISP option at my house that isn’t DSL.
Used DVDs at pawn shops and thrift stores ftw.
This. Just yesterday I bought a batch of films, DVD’s 1$ and Blu-Rays 1,5$ a piece. And they were mostly new films.
DVD’s are perfectly fine for TV and Blu-Rays for my projector.
I never jumped to the streaming bandwagon and my disc collection has grown exponentially in the last few years, since most people gave up on discs. Their loss.
Curious about your movie-buying habits… How do you determine what you buy? Movies that look interesting? That you’ve seen before? A little bit of both?
I collect movies that I know to be good. I’ve been a true film freak for over 35 years and I’ve learned how to find “my thing” from the vast market with the help from my friends, reviews and forums. Or when I see a truly good one at a theatre, it goes to my buy list and it might take years for it to come my way.
I have never bought a movie just because of the covers, this has actually never even occurred to me. I did rent films this way back in the day, but I only buy stuff I know.
Nowadays I rarely find anything I haven’t already seen before, but just few weeks ago I came by a modern classic that I was unable to see in a proper theatre. I save these specialties to watch with a projector and a good sound system, hopefully in a few weeks I’ll find the time…
Any tips to get started?
I think Debrid services are the easiest and safest to get started. They download files for you from various services (share hosters and torrents), and then let you download them from their servers. That means only they know your IP (but don’t log it, like a VPN), and they also download with full speed from sites that require a premium account, for a fraction of the cost. With RDT-Client you can also use some of them with Arr apps, once you get to automating the process.
Another thing would be Usenet. It’s surprisingly easy to set up and get started, just find a provider, some indexers, and a download client. It has a ton of good content, and it doesn’t depend on seeders for file availability and high download speeds.
With those two you can download anonymously and at high speeds from all the popular sources (most share hosters, torrents, Usenet), and you don’t run the risk of leaking your IP because you haven’t set things up correctly.
I considering piracy after Netflix came out. Does it have ads yet.
Edit: wow, that’s not what I meant to type. I haven’t considered piracy since Netflix became a thing. And so far, I haven’t seen any ads on that service. Still finding plenty to watch on that in my spare time as well. Currently enjoying Fall of the House of Usher, the live action One-Piece, and a Supertroopers like show called Tacoma FD.
That’s a long time to consider
No doubt :). Please see updated message.
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
If also like to know what site this is so i can avoid it. I DMed 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??
The ads are so much less anxiety inducing as well. At least, on Pluto they are
I’m using this streaming service called Sonarr+plex. No ads so far.
Kinda, Plex still changes my homepage with their ads once in a while
One of many reasons to use Jellyfin instead of Plex.
Is there a media server that allows accounts to have groups of profiles?
Even emby, or jellyfin don’t support this. Really wish they did. Then I can give each household a single account for their device and have a netflix like experience
edit: what I’m looking for is user groups, or nested users. So AccountA contains UserA1, UserA2 etc and AccountB contains UserB1, UserB2, and so on
I’m not really sure what you mean by “groups” of profiles, but you can definitely set up multiple different users on Jellyfin
I wonder if what they’re asking for is some sort of RBAC? All members of house A can all access content A and cannot access content B. But each individual retains distinct viewing history.
With different permissions
You can set up different user accounts and grant them different levels of access and functionality (i.e. disallow CPU-hogging transcodes). Users can also be restricted by MAC and hidden from the login screen unless you know the exact login name.
I have Jellyfin on my NAS and the “TV” user with which the living room TV is logged in only has permission to see certain folders of my movie library.
yes. My kids have an account that can only see kids stuff (and they are not admins either of course). I have admin rights. My wife can see everything but no admin rights. If you mean “I need a KIDS group where I can put all my kids’ accounts so they inherit the same permissions” then no.
I want them to have one account to log in with, and there are 4 profiles within that account. No need for every person on the server to have their profile on one huge page like plex
Jellyfin allows you to hide any profile from the login screen. If you hide them all, every user would have to manually login (username+password). That’s not quite the Netflix-like experience where you click your profile, but it would at least hide all the users from other households (but also your own).
Yeah I understand that, I’ve done a lot of research into it and not got any solution
Most people aren’t willing to type out a username and password just to use their profile. I want the login to be one time, and just their profiles to show up. And every household has their own set of profiles
Right now, I just have added one person from each household and they all share that same profile. I’ve added them to my Plex home so they get skip intro and whatever other Plex pass benefit. The issue with this, is that everyone shares a single profile per household (apart from my family) and we’re all lumped together in one screen
I would pay for someone to have a server that tracked who watched something. Not just assume the “account owner” watched it but the other people sitting next to them too.
Apparently the creators of these apps are all loners.
Given that I have a lifetime Plex pass, what are the advantages that jellyfin would give me?
I got the Plex pass years ago when they were on sale, and it’s nice that Plex has apps for mobile devices and smart TVs.
Well certainly no ads on the homepage like the comment I was directly replying to.
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.
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.
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.
We weren’t watching it anyway and we can handle waiting a few days for shipping. We dropped it too.
Canceling ours tomorrow actually.
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
Hoist the colors
Hoist up the thing! Batten down the whatsit!
What’s that thing spinning? Somebody should stop it!
Turn hard to port! (That’s not port) Now I’ve got it!
Trust me, I’m in control!
I’m amazed that they have any customers paying to listen to ads. I wont stand for it and I find it surprising others would.
In one year Amazon made it impossible to listen to albums on Prime Music, and shoved ads into everything on Prime Video.
Easy cancel for me. I can go without your next day shipping.
Better still I can buy from someone else.
Qobuz
The alternative is either:
- Don’t watch the show / movie you wanted to - unacceptable sacrifice for a lot of people.
- Break the law / pirate - some people really dislike this, or else are scared, or are not technically savvy enough to know how to or that it’s even an option.
- Sometimes it’s too much trouble, like if you pirate a show you need to get subtitles in your own language and hope the times line up.
I agree it’s unacceptable for me, but I also get why so many people just put up with it.
Do these services not offer a more expensive ad-free plan?
I’m sure they do, but I issue is they already were / should have been making a profit on the existing, bottom tier ad free plan. Now it’s just price gouging by adding ads to existing tier instead of adding new cheaper tier with ads.
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
I just recently stopped as well… Have to still cancel prime though
It just requires so much more foresight in planning what you’re going to watch.
I can request a show, do a load of laundry and have it available. I’ve decent enough Internet where a movie can be available in as little as 5 minutes if it finds a nice little hevc webrip. I get that it’s not instant but a proper setup can have you rocking and rolling in under an hour.
It’s a fair criticism but I find the drawbacks to be quite tolerable compared to the benefits. Each person must do their own calculus. As the user above alluded to, there are apps which make the experience almost seamless. My two favourite apps ever are Radarr and Sonarr.
Not with enough server space.
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
Streaming services aren’t much better, they regularly didn’t have what I wanted to watch and I’m not subscribing to more than one. Now I’m subscribing to none and watch what I want instead of what Netflix has available.
Well I just download more or less everything that comes out lol. It’s like having my own streaming service with thousands if movies and shows available.
And it’s a heave-ho-hi-ho, comin’ down the Bay
Stealin’ films and movies and all the other games
And it’s a ho-hey-hi-hey, corpos bar your doors
When you see the Jolly Roger on Francisco’s mighty shores!
Well, you’d think the local corpos would know that I’m at large
But just the other day I found an unprotected RAR
I snuck up right behind them and they were none the wiser
I copied their film and shared it, and screwed the advertisers
Beautiful take on the Arrogant Worms classic! <3
Thanks! It’s one of my favourite songs, though I usually prefer the Captain Tractor version, heh
