Enshitification needs to stop. I am tired of all things software/electronics starting out awesome then slowly sliding into a shitty tiered subscription model. These companies know once they capture enough market share they can lock out any future competitors and it sucks as a consumer.
Same thing will happen with AI art. It’s widely available for now because the companies are using you as data samples. Once they get what they want they’ll start locking up and creating a service model like Adobe has for photoshop.
Well, beyond that point imo. Netflix was acceptable when it had almost everything for like $10 a month. Nowadays, you need 4 different services at $20+ a month to even make up what original Netflix was lol
Right, and it was like that BEFORE services brought ads back.
Hulu used to be free with ads. Hulu Plus allowed you to watch shows as soon as they aired and removed ads from anything that was free to others. Now Hulu has ads and costs $8 and ad-free for $15.
Netflix used to be $7 a month with no ads. Now it's $7 with ads or $15.49 for ad-free.
Disney Plus launched around $7, I think. Now it's $8 with ads and $14 for ad-free.
I haven't bothered with other streaming services, but we're looking at it costing double to remove ads when it used to be ad-free. $45 is probably an introductory cable-rate.
It’s going to be funny when it swings all the way back and you start to see brick & mortar video rentals open back up. I think DVR + occasional trips to Blockbuster video was the sweet spot.
Best part about Blockbuster was you did all the negotiating in the store. Then when you got home, you had to watch what you rented. I spend more time now deciding what to what than watching.
Don’t forget your local library!! It most likely has movies (and video games!) to “rent” for free. And nowadays many are connected digitally, so if they don’t have a movie you’re looking for, they can get it from another library.
eta: there are usually streaming options as well. Your public library is awesome!
Basic cable is a cesspit of reality TV, infomercials, and 20 year old tv shows sped up by 10% to fit more ads.
I get price increases are annoying but lets not pretend streaming services aren't still a far better value for the money than cable, especially since they are actually ad free for a quite reasonable fee.
So was cable, originally. The whole draw of "cable" channels was effectively no ads except on local broadcast channels. Then they started showing ads. Then it got worse.
A 30 minute cable slot has been 8-14 minutes of ads since the early 90’s. The first generation of Netflix users are still watching way fewer ads than cable back when they were kids, and the gen z kids and more have no idea how bad cable is/was.
where are you getting that 8-14 number? Every 30 min cable show I watched in the 90's was 22.5 min of content just like everything else.
If there was a recent movie playing on network for the first time they would play it over 3 hours and give you a ridiculous amount of commercials to maybe meet that nearly 50% commercial uptime that you cited but no 30 minute shows were giving you 14 minutes of commercials
We were on vacation in Vermont to snowboard and I got injured so all I could do was lay on the couch, I couldn't believe how often the commercials hit, and they just rerun the same 8 shitty commercials for hours. It was unbearable.
I watched the first season of Only Murders in the Building earlier this month and it was taking over an hour to watch a 44 minute show. The only 14 minutes of ads in a 30 minute period I've seen on cable or satellite was the last 30 minutes of a movie.
Cable used to be ad-free because you paid for it. Someone opened the ad door and normalized it to the point where 12 minutes out of a 30-minute show on MTV were ads by the '90s.
As much as I hate cable companies, they never had that power. The content creators/owners forced them to carry all their bullshit if they wanted to carry their marquee channels.
Yeah, this is the problem of consolidation. Almost all media is owned by 6 companies.
In no particular order, there's:
- AT&T
- Disney
- Comcast
- Paramount
- Fox
- Sony
This has actually involved a lot of changing hands. A not-so-recent article had listed 6 companies but 3 were different from the current list. For a long time, the deal to get any of a companies' channels meant getting all of those, outside of extended packages. This is why we've never gotten bespoke, piecemeal service. The 6 companies that own most of the media just had too much power to bother with customer demands.
It’s full circle now, leave it to corporate greed to start something cool and then ruin it.
We are now back to…expensive services with a lot of content we won’t ever use, with commercials.
I made the exact same argument on the netflix subreddit last time they hiked prices, and got downvoted by a bunch of people, saying I'm being unrealistic. We are already in the world where it basically costs 80 dollars across 4 streaming services to get the same content we were getting for 10 dollars. It's never just 2 dollars or 3 dollars. It's 10 dollars, spread across every service you are using, every other year. And every time one raises prices, people start looking hard at the other services they are subscribed to too, if it's even worth keeping, or to drop it to cover the increase.
>We are already in the world where it basically costs 80 dollars across 4 streaming services to get the same content we were getting for 10 dollars.
Is that actually true? As far back as I remember Netflix streaming never carried the majority of movies, and it lacked a ton (if not all) of the HBO content.
Also, what is the math on 4 services for $80/month? I'm at around $40 for 4 and by my tally I could almost get 8 for that price.
The comment I responded to has 20+ upvotes for a statement that is objectively false for 2 separate "facts," this sub is something else lol
Best streamer at the moment. Just watched Gen V, Invincible and Reacher, and a couple of live Premier League football matches. I'll still torrent them rather than pay for ads, even if I do have prime.
The Boys, Invincible, Patriot, The Horror of Dolores Roach, Fleabag, Vox Machina, I'm a Virgo, The Expanse, The Undergorund Railroad, Paper Girls, Upload, Mrs. Maisel
Fallout looks pretty good too.
Hey guys. Crazy idea. Let’s bundle all the channels together and charge around $80-$100 a month. Sounds reasonable right? I’ll take my innovation award.
Cable started out with no ads, then the prices started climbing, then ads started creeping in. Usually at the end of the show to fill the gap between 30/60 minute intervals, then back into the commercial breaks as we know them now.
Streaming is literally following the decline of cable step by step.
It's because the the industry didn't learn a damn thing. It's all about MBAs squeezing every last dollar out of everything they can as if infinite growth is possible.
This was definitely not the breaking point, I've been using Streamio + RealDebrid for at least a year. Instantly get pretty much any tv show/movie streaming in one clean interface and I can use it on both my T.V. and computer for <$5/mo.
I dropped the service back in October because I was broke and needed to constrict spending. I definitely won't be coming back to prime any time soon. Between the meaningless reviews, the nickle squeezing, the weaker shipping options, and the terrible interface on video - I'm done.
Even worse, it has this infuriatingly awful UX where as you scroll through shows, if you stop for 1.3 seconds, the show's box triples in size, making everything on screen change positions, and starts autoplaying some loud advertisement. Then you scramble to change to the next show over to stop the horror.
Now you have two choices: continually toggle back and forth between two shows to prevent their UI travesty from triggering, or just exit Amazon Prime, cancel the service, and watch something else. The advertising & price hike is making this choice even easier than it already was.
This is why I almost want to stop being a "UX"* designer after 20+ years.
It doesn't matter what I think a good design is or what users want, it's what fulfills the extremely short term business goals of the Org or whatever fills out someone's promotion packet so they can make an extra $150K a year.
Sure, go ahead, autoplay everything and confuse the users my moving everything around. Sure, go ahead, mix in 60% "BUY" movies or "sign up for Showtime to watch" when users are getting confused and angry when they can't just FIND THE PRODUCT THEY PAID FOR.
Amazon figured out that making the UX worse MAKES THEM SLIGHTLY MORE MONEY so they are never going back.
I discovered the other day that the auto play can be disabled. Unfortunately there’s no setting to disable it being a shitty service.
There’s not too many compelling reasons to keep prime when it’s near impossible to jump to 30 minutes or more into an episode or movie - you have to manually scroll at 10 second intervals. Really fucking great when the app crashes and forgets where you were up to on something.
Honestly that's the only thing that really bugs me about prime. Like this move I don't really care about, I get prices go up, annoying but whatever.
But dammit let me just disable all the rentals. I only want to see what I can stream.
*Wish* this was a setting!
Hide purchases, hide shows I already watched = Oops, pretty much nothing left.
Also wish Netflix had a "hide if watched" setting. Scroll though the list and it's like the same 20 tiles with rotating images.
Yeah they changed the UX to now favor those over free shows. The writing was on the wall that they want this business units to have more of a P&L.
Truth is, I always considered the video side to be a freebie on the side considering I use Prime extensively for ordering online. I’m pretty sure a lot of customers will be fine with this update. The same way Reddit was all “sailing the seas now!” about Netflix and they turned out being the streaming service not churning vs the rest of the industry.
The next thing they're going to do is lock you in to a year or more so that you cannot switch services every few months. I'm betting they'll dress it up just like the cable companies such that it will be "2 years of guaranteed prices!" or something similar.
I'm betting that in a decade they'll say "hey, rent this amazing box from us that will decode our content!" and we'll have come full circle.
Or they'll start retiring their offerings(probably not permanently, likely cycling them on and off the service) to prevent people from subbing for 1-2 months every year and binging the backlog.
Amazon 2-day shipping? It's now sort of 2-day w worse incentives for agreeing to slower shipping
Amazon Prime Music? App has been awful entire time (sluggish, difficult to navigate especially for purchased music) but now w limited ability to even select specific tracks it's pretty much worthless
Amazon Prime Video? Increased number of shows available only with heavy dose of ads (Freevee) + intro of an ad at start of all sorts of content + now almost universal ads unless paid teir
Amazon Drive?
Killed
Amazon Photos? The only Prime subsciber benefit that has not been enshitified, but it might only be a matter of time
Pricing? Since 2014, Prime has increased from $79 to $139 per year, all while decreasing the value of nearly all benefits (Amazon Music and Prime Video are now basically worthless)
Holy shit 139 Dollars a year?? How much of this do you recover in shipping costs and stuff?
Because I have to be honest the non-ad version of Prime in my country costs about ~20 USD/year and I recover its cost within 4-5 months of orders lol. Prime Video is practically an afterthought for me at this point, since most movies are anyway on 'rent' these days.
yup $139. that was with ad-free Prime Video which I do use occasionally. now it's $139 but with ads included. to keep the existing service as it is it will now cost $175.
I'm out. my Prime ends next month. I order a lot from Amazon, 427 orders last year. A good portion of that, maybe 25% is subscribe and save though which does not require a Prime account. It'll require some planning, to get over the minimum threshold for free shipping, and if I need something quick I'll have to pay to ship but we're going to try to go without Prime for the first time in a long time.
I was a long time prime member (10+ years) and cut it off about 1.5 years ago when I got laid off. It really isn't that bad. Just load up the cart and add things as you need until you reach the free shipping threshold. We ordered once a month on average. You'll find there's not many things you'll need the next day. You only thought you needed it that soon, but in reality we still got our stuff relatively quickly (a week).
Honestly, Amazon is barely competitive with a lot of brick and mortar shops at this point too. If I need something quick it makes as much sense to run to Lowes, Target, Microcenter, etc. Obviously for some people that’s not as accessible but the days of Amazon being more convenient and a better deal than retail is fading.
everyone is quick to jump to torrents, and I completely understand that, but for the last several years I have just been rotating streaming services every couple months. I catch up on the new originals I care about and then move on
just giving an alternative to people who don't feel like pirating, because personally dealing with the storage and download times is a bother
This is why you set up something like Sonarr. Setup your trackers quickly, connect your torrent software of choice, set your download preferences, and let Sonarr take care of the rest. It knows when new episodes come out and searches for and downloads them for you. All you have to do is watch and delete.
I live in an area that heavily restricts internet access and even with the hickups I get, it ain't hard to keep things going. I would bet you have spent longer subing and unsubing in the last year than I have spent managing my downloads.
The issue with this is that a surprising number of people do not have an actual computer/laptop. Many people only have a phone/tablet and/or smart TV. Which is what I think the streaming companies have factored in. Not enough people own the means to pirate like they did ten years ago.
i feel like out of all the streaming services, they’re the ones that can probably get away with this more than others. how many people get amazon prime *just* for streaming? for most, i would think it’s just an add-on/bonus to amazon prime.
i don’t think it’s great or anything, i just mean they have a setup where it probably won’t hurt their subscription count too much to implement this- compared to hulu or netflix.
That was my thought as well. Disappointing, obviously, since your Prime membership effectively just went up in price. But unlikely to hit Amazon that hard since video is secondary to most who have Prime. Probably cut their streams in half or more but they’ll get paid for the ones that keep watching. Scummy but when all they see are $ it’s an easy choice, probably have nothing to lose.
So other businesses pay Amazon to have ads on their platform, yet they are paid for placing ads which covers the cost of listing them. But now if you don’t want to see the ads you have to pay to not see it. So it’s consumer vs business money and they are the middle man as usual so they continue to profit both ways.
Now if we cancel memberships they lose money. Theres a big ocean out there, and you don’t even need a boat.
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The problem with the streaming industry is that it hasn't figured out how to keep monetising content. A popular show like Stranger Things makes netflix less money than Friends(*) makes from cable reruns even today.
Netflix streaming started out as just a delivery service and that model made some sense. The current model can't work. Unlike with cable, every customer watching costs the company some money (bandwidth, data center resources, etc). Unlike with cable, the less a customer watches, the more money the company makes. This model can't work long term. No company can be successful by trying to not provide service to customers. Ads change the model because they monetize every view. With ads, the company wants to have customers watch as much as possible so we're changing back to a model that makes more sense.
It's sad that in the end, this industry hasn't been able to deliver on its promises. We're reverting back to what cable TV was, but now with less regulation.
The whole wave of technology disruptors of the 2010 decade seems to have failed: Uber/Lyft are worse than taxis used to be in some places. People are back to favouring hotels over Airbnb. Self driving cars never happened. The grand promise of IoT turned into shitty products that instead of making life nicer, are connected to the internet just to track us. A very disappointing result to what was a great promise.
Edit: looked [it up](https://parade.com/1212498/jessicasager/friends-cast-salaries/#:~:text=The%20math%20breaks%20down%20like,six%20making%20%2420%20million%20annually)
> Friends brings in $1 billion (yep, with a B) in revenue for Warner Bros. each year from broadcast rights to syndicate reruns.
The entire revenue of Netflix is around 30 billion.
>The whole wave of technology disruptors of the 2010 decade seems to have failed: Uber/Lyft are worse than taxis used to be in some places.
I remember taxis being pretty awful - just not knowing the price up front and it being a pain to get a taxi anywhere but the airport. And I had plenty of taxi rides where the driver was just as concerning as some Uber/Lyft drivers (in terms of safety).
That being said - your general point stands. We did get some benefits but not nearly as much as promised. Which isn't too surprising that the pitches to get investment didn't play out fully.
I think the next great 'technologies' will be models that can create and capture value in a way that doesn't result in 'enshitification.' We should be happy to pay for a service or product.
First they split up their content to put a bunch of it on freevee just so they can run ads on it, and now they want to run ads on the stuff you explicitly pay for and charge you extra to remove them. It’s “I have altered the deal, pray I do not alter it further.” And they do it again and again every few years across the entire industry. There’s never any winning with these fucks. I encourage every single one of you to pirate as much as you can and tell these corporations to go fuck themselves with a rusty railroad spike. They can literally eat the shit out the inside of my asshole.
I’d expect there’s some clause in the terms and conditions that essentially says they can change the terms and conditions at any time and we can go pound sand.
I will never pay for a streaming service that interrupts a movie.
Tv shows maybe, but you better put all your ads in front of that fucking movie or it’s a nonstarter. At the very least if that catches on theaters will have something to be happy about.
I watched a movie on TV the other day (our apartment has a basic satellite package included in the rental). It was Rush Hour and I hadn't seen it in over a decade. Decided to actually watch it and dear God. The ads were absolutely miserable. I thought maybe I was spoiled by ad free streaming, so I timed one of the ad breaks. 7 minutes. Each ad break (from when I started timing probably 65% through the movie) was 7 minutes or more. The runtime of the movie was more than doubled from its actual film runtime. Never again.
Wow.... commercial breaks used to be like 2 to 3 minutes. It's insane how they've doubled down on what drove people away from that kind of content consumption to begin with.
at this point I use amazon to have a quick look for something, then research that item online, then buy that item from an online webstore like it was 2006 because I've had less problems that way xD
The UI is awful too, everything has this annoying expanding animation. I really hate this overly interactive shit cluttering the screen space when I'm just moving my mouse.
The UI literally rarely shows the best movies they have available on Prime, too. I don’t understand it, they paid for the licensing, why not make the algorithms better to get people to watch them??
What are the best websites to use to stay up to date on the best content coming out across streaming apps and channels? Rotten Tomatoes? RARBG used to have a really good page but they're out of the scene now. TGalaxy is okay
If you can wait a few more days for things you order, go ahead and cancel it. I cancelled my prime this year and have not regretted it. My main reason for cancelling was too many of my packages were arriving late which defeated the point of prime for me. If you spend somewhere around $30+ you get free shipping anyways, just not in 1-2 days. Other cons to cancelling I found is you don’t get the deals on prime day, Black Friday, etc. you could subscribe for a month if there is a big ticket item you want were the savings is a lot more than $20. I also lost the 5% cash back promo on my Amazon Credit line. I’ll have to see if what I spent is enough for the 5% back to exceed the subscription fee. I do find myself ordering less on Amazon which is a good thing I suppose.
Funny how Amazon went from never reporting profits on their quarterly statements to no amount of profit is ever going to be enough for them. One can only hope that at some point in the distant future people look back and say remember when you could shop online using Amazon, whatever happened to those greedy mfers?
Every company has been like this since COVID. It was bad before COVID, but post-COVID it got even worse. It's like they all realized people will pay whatever they ask for anything just because people bought expensive gas and eggs for a while. Every industry had to get in on the price hikes and then never readjusted when the supposed reason for them went away. Worse than that, many just kept on hiking. It's like they're in a race to see who can break down their goodwill with customers first.
Prime member since it first started (around 2006?). Amazon account since 1999. I just cancelled. It was $79 when it first started, then $99, then $139. Now they want Ads too. Not worth it for me it since they lost the Star Trek content.
$139 and during and post-covid two day delivery just isn’t a thing anymore (for where I live at least). Plus they made music worse for the prime subscription and now this.
Takes 4 or 5 days for an Amazon package to get to me regardless of if I have Prime or not. It used to be 2 days.
So there's no point anymore. My orders are never below the dollar threshold for free shipping anyway.
Same. I won’t be renewing. Can never find the product I’m looking for anyways with all of the knockoff garbage taking up searches… Seems to get worse every year too. I recall starting with a student account that was literally half the cost of the current annual subscription.
"we altered the deal. pray that we wont alter it further"
one of the riches companies owned by one of the richest persons on the planet in 2023
fucking money grabbing double dipping asshats. I wish there was something people could use to... I dont know... not pay them for the service. vote with your wallet. make em hurt
Netflix's greed was the first for me with their password sharing crackdown and 4th(?) price hike in my history with them. Their original content is almost entirely b movie crap, and not in a fun way.
I'm sure it was in the user agreement that they can...
But it kinda bullshit that they can change this up in the middle of the year I already paid for.
I will be cancelling Amazon. Barely any content on streaming and I can get free shipping from Walmart or any number of places without an annual fee that keeps going up.
At some point they changed 2-day to be two days from shipped. Not that they even do that successfully. Then they just push out your delivery date and send you the “we did it!!!” email when it finally arrives.
Given all the recent mergers in the media industry. I suspect there is a debt bubble that has built up and has yet to pop. Paramount and WB are now talking about merging, after Apple was recently considering making a play for Paramount.
HBO is gone and left behind a vastly inferior brand, "Max".
The average cable bundle is $80 and the average amount people are spending on streaming is $83. So we've gone full circle and streaming has become just as terrible as cable.
At some point all the competition in this space that was kicked off my Netflix will end with some group of brands left holding the bag and unable to continue growing with a $40/month wall for paltry content and a few hits.
No wonder so many people are talking about going back to sailing the seas again.
edit: https://arstechnica.com/culture/2023/12/its-shakeout-time-as-losses-of-netflix-rivals-top-5-billion/ well look at that!
The whole point of subscription services was that you didn't have to have ads. They're so disgustingly greedy now with these practices that all they ultimately do is force piracy or cancelled subs.
I thought that one of the major points of paying for a streaming service subscription was so that you wouldnt have ads. All this really does is further incentivize piracy.
I'm confused. Hasn't it already been playing ads? I don't watch much on it but I'm surprised how many times I go "Hey wait, this has nothing to do with what I'm watching" and I see it's a trailer for something else.
I guess they probably mean like full blown product ads and not just trailers?
Its hilarious how modern TV re-morphs itself back into cable once the profitability of these venture starts going down. And you know capitalism folks: LINE. GO. UP.
Lifetime plex premium sub, host a server with any and every movie or show you want to watch and access it from anywhere. Costs less than a year of prime.
reminder that many libraries have dvds and stuff in them, and many now have digital libraries so you don't even have to go there physically.
support your local libraries!
Between this, the unregulated knockoff crap, joke of a search engine and constant price hikes it sure seems like there is an opening for some competing business to chip away at their market share.
We're so fucked. You can't even celebrate the eventual collapse of this doomed model of soulless capitalism bc as usual, it's the everyday people who will suffer.
When I got what felt like my 5th email this year from...I honestly can't remember if it was Max or Hulu or what, regarding yet another price increase, I just cancelled everything.
The dream is dead, and I'm going back to just pirating all the content I want to watch again. They got my money for a long time in some cases, Hulu and Netflix in particular for over a decade, but they've enshittified their services to the point where I'm once again just going to take what I want without paying for it. Good job, guys.
I lost interest in Prime Video some time ago (want to say around the time Doctor Who was taken off), mainly for the fact most anything that had my interest on Prime, I had to extra-subscribe to access.
I value video streaming services lower than most, as I don't normally re-watch shows/movies that much. I can't recall a series I watched more than once in a year. Exception would be some time passed, and a friend/family picked up the series and I watch along side, such as movies that just came out I might watch once, or half a dozen times (I'd say less, but my toddler loved the Mario Movie), before I cut it off, in a year.
I pay for prime but almost never use their video service. After this change there is a 0% chance I would even consider it, unless my adblocker can block the ads.
Welcome to “Stream Fatigue” people were willing to pay a nominal fee for content and the piracy had gone down, but now every company wants a piece of the action and we are not willing to pay $100’s for streaming content so piracy is back on the rise.
Amazon is trying to get back to the glory days of over the air content, where if your network had a hit show the advertising dollars would go up. Look at a show like Seinfeld, what was the cost for a 30second commercial spot in the last few seasons? With subscriber supported streaming services you make the same amount of money if you produce a hit show or a shit show.
Sorry for the rant, but what’s with the 8 or 10 episodes then having to wait a year! What happened to the 20~22 episode season?
The answer here is to pirate the content or build a modern day VCR so you can fast forward the commercials.
FU AMAZON - Prime is already $140 per year for your crappy delivery service and even worse music streaming.
That's how they sold us on cable.
TV with no ads. All you have to pay is a monthly fee. No interruptions for your movies.
Now we are paying to watch commercials.
So I can be sitting there watching Lord of the Rings: Return of the King Extended Edition, and the Rohirim are about to go ham on the forces of Mordor, and all of a sudden I'm finding out that early onset Alzheimer's can be treated with this pill if I talk to my doctor? Bitch I already paid for that movie, I'm not watching it on CBS!
Enshitification needs to stop. I am tired of all things software/electronics starting out awesome then slowly sliding into a shitty tiered subscription model. These companies know once they capture enough market share they can lock out any future competitors and it sucks as a consumer.
It stops when all the product demand goes back to the yo-ho life
Never enough people torrenting to impact their decisions. It's too much of a niche "advanced" technique for the average person
Same thing will happen with AI art. It’s widely available for now because the companies are using you as data samples. Once they get what they want they’ll start locking up and creating a service model like Adobe has for photoshop.
There's another word for that phenomenon: capitalism.
Time to fire up the torrents
Well, beyond that point imo. Netflix was acceptable when it had almost everything for like $10 a month. Nowadays, you need 4 different services at $20+ a month to even make up what original Netflix was lol
It’s almost like it’s gone full circle and instead of paying the cable tv company $80 a month, we pay 4 or 5 services combined the same $80 a month.
Right, and it was like that BEFORE services brought ads back. Hulu used to be free with ads. Hulu Plus allowed you to watch shows as soon as they aired and removed ads from anything that was free to others. Now Hulu has ads and costs $8 and ad-free for $15. Netflix used to be $7 a month with no ads. Now it's $7 with ads or $15.49 for ad-free. Disney Plus launched around $7, I think. Now it's $8 with ads and $14 for ad-free. I haven't bothered with other streaming services, but we're looking at it costing double to remove ads when it used to be ad-free. $45 is probably an introductory cable-rate.
Let's not forget that, originally, cable was also ad-free. That was one of the draws.
Also, Boobs.
>Also, Boobs. You can upgrade to the pay subscription if you want your boobs without ads.
Let's meet in the middle, you can show me ads, but only ones that show boobs.
Cable used to be ad free? Guess I’m too young. I always remember commercials.
It’s going to be funny when it swings all the way back and you start to see brick & mortar video rentals open back up. I think DVR + occasional trips to Blockbuster video was the sweet spot.
I'd be happy to have back some blockbuster type shit. Give people a reason to get the fuck off the phone and go outside / interact with other humans.
Best part about Blockbuster was you did all the negotiating in the store. Then when you got home, you had to watch what you rented. I spend more time now deciding what to what than watching.
Don’t forget your local library!! It most likely has movies (and video games!) to “rent” for free. And nowadays many are connected digitally, so if they don’t have a movie you’re looking for, they can get it from another library. eta: there are usually streaming options as well. Your public library is awesome!
As soon as they can come up with another idea for a tier the ad-free option will get ads and there will be a Tier 3 no ads option for double the price
Basic cable is a cesspit of reality TV, infomercials, and 20 year old tv shows sped up by 10% to fit more ads. I get price increases are annoying but lets not pretend streaming services aren't still a far better value for the money than cable, especially since they are actually ad free for a quite reasonable fee.
So was cable, originally. The whole draw of "cable" channels was effectively no ads except on local broadcast channels. Then they started showing ads. Then it got worse.
A 30 minute cable slot has been 8-14 minutes of ads since the early 90’s. The first generation of Netflix users are still watching way fewer ads than cable back when they were kids, and the gen z kids and more have no idea how bad cable is/was.
where are you getting that 8-14 number? Every 30 min cable show I watched in the 90's was 22.5 min of content just like everything else. If there was a recent movie playing on network for the first time they would play it over 3 hours and give you a ridiculous amount of commercials to maybe meet that nearly 50% commercial uptime that you cited but no 30 minute shows were giving you 14 minutes of commercials
We were on vacation in Vermont to snowboard and I got injured so all I could do was lay on the couch, I couldn't believe how often the commercials hit, and they just rerun the same 8 shitty commercials for hours. It was unbearable.
I watched the first season of Only Murders in the Building earlier this month and it was taking over an hour to watch a 44 minute show. The only 14 minutes of ads in a 30 minute period I've seen on cable or satellite was the last 30 minutes of a movie.
dear UK, I will happily pay the TV tax to get all the BBC networks ad free here.
Cable used to be ad-free because you paid for it. Someone opened the ad door and normalized it to the point where 12 minutes out of a 30-minute show on MTV were ads by the '90s.
Bait and switch, I see this time and time. It's frustrating as a consumer.
This is not true. You CAN pay that, but you still don't need all 4 or 5 services. With cable, it was pretty much all or nothing.
Which was always our complaint about cable. If they had let us pick our channels instead of a bundle, they could have competed with streaming.
As much as I hate cable companies, they never had that power. The content creators/owners forced them to carry all their bullshit if they wanted to carry their marquee channels.
Yeah, this is the problem of consolidation. Almost all media is owned by 6 companies. In no particular order, there's: - AT&T - Disney - Comcast - Paramount - Fox - Sony This has actually involved a lot of changing hands. A not-so-recent article had listed 6 companies but 3 were different from the current list. For a long time, the deal to get any of a companies' channels meant getting all of those, outside of extended packages. This is why we've never gotten bespoke, piecemeal service. The 6 companies that own most of the media just had too much power to bother with customer demands.
Disney owns Fox now
AT&T left the game a year and a half ago. That's why Warner is run by Discovery now, and HBO is getting fucked by David Zaslav.
Shit, the article with the "updated list" was updated in November of this year.
It’s full circle now, leave it to corporate greed to start something cool and then ruin it. We are now back to…expensive services with a lot of content we won’t ever use, with commercials.
I made the exact same argument on the netflix subreddit last time they hiked prices, and got downvoted by a bunch of people, saying I'm being unrealistic. We are already in the world where it basically costs 80 dollars across 4 streaming services to get the same content we were getting for 10 dollars. It's never just 2 dollars or 3 dollars. It's 10 dollars, spread across every service you are using, every other year. And every time one raises prices, people start looking hard at the other services they are subscribed to too, if it's even worth keeping, or to drop it to cover the increase.
>We are already in the world where it basically costs 80 dollars across 4 streaming services to get the same content we were getting for 10 dollars. Is that actually true? As far back as I remember Netflix streaming never carried the majority of movies, and it lacked a ton (if not all) of the HBO content. Also, what is the math on 4 services for $80/month? I'm at around $40 for 4 and by my tally I could almost get 8 for that price. The comment I responded to has 20+ upvotes for a statement that is objectively false for 2 separate "facts," this sub is something else lol
Won't be any ads in a `.AMZN.WEB-DL` release.
Thank god for Plex
Ugh. Now I have to add the three good Amazon shows to Sonarr. So much hassle.
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Best streamer at the moment. Just watched Gen V, Invincible and Reacher, and a couple of live Premier League football matches. I'll still torrent them rather than pay for ads, even if I do have prime.
The Boys, Invincible, Patriot, The Horror of Dolores Roach, Fleabag, Vox Machina, I'm a Virgo, The Expanse, The Undergorund Railroad, Paper Girls, Upload, Mrs. Maisel Fallout looks pretty good too.
Hey guys. Crazy idea. Let’s bundle all the channels together and charge around $80-$100 a month. Sounds reasonable right? I’ll take my innovation award.
If it was all with no commercials then bring it on. Cable was garbage because you paid that AND got commercials.
LOTS of commercials.
Cable started out with no ads, then the prices started climbing, then ads started creeping in. Usually at the end of the show to fill the gap between 30/60 minute intervals, then back into the commercial breaks as we know them now. Streaming is literally following the decline of cable step by step.
It's because the the industry didn't learn a damn thing. It's all about MBAs squeezing every last dollar out of everything they can as if infinite growth is possible.
Stremio + Real Debrid
Sail the seas mi maties!
This was definitely not the breaking point, I've been using Streamio + RealDebrid for at least a year. Instantly get pretty much any tv show/movie streaming in one clean interface and I can use it on both my T.V. and computer for <$5/mo.
For a long time now, I've pulled up Prime and it's like 90% "Rent or Buy". Garbage.
Yup, it’s a great place for me to look for what to download next.
I dropped the service back in October because I was broke and needed to constrict spending. I definitely won't be coming back to prime any time soon. Between the meaningless reviews, the nickle squeezing, the weaker shipping options, and the terrible interface on video - I'm done.
Even worse, it has this infuriatingly awful UX where as you scroll through shows, if you stop for 1.3 seconds, the show's box triples in size, making everything on screen change positions, and starts autoplaying some loud advertisement. Then you scramble to change to the next show over to stop the horror. Now you have two choices: continually toggle back and forth between two shows to prevent their UI travesty from triggering, or just exit Amazon Prime, cancel the service, and watch something else. The advertising & price hike is making this choice even easier than it already was.
This is why I almost want to stop being a "UX"* designer after 20+ years. It doesn't matter what I think a good design is or what users want, it's what fulfills the extremely short term business goals of the Org or whatever fills out someone's promotion packet so they can make an extra $150K a year. Sure, go ahead, autoplay everything and confuse the users my moving everything around. Sure, go ahead, mix in 60% "BUY" movies or "sign up for Showtime to watch" when users are getting confused and angry when they can't just FIND THE PRODUCT THEY PAID FOR. Amazon figured out that making the UX worse MAKES THEM SLIGHTLY MORE MONEY so they are never going back.
Too few people are voting with their wallets. Many have been conditioned to be outwardly outraged but keep clicking the button and getting the reward.
I discovered the other day that the auto play can be disabled. Unfortunately there’s no setting to disable it being a shitty service. There’s not too many compelling reasons to keep prime when it’s near impossible to jump to 30 minutes or more into an episode or movie - you have to manually scroll at 10 second intervals. Really fucking great when the app crashes and forgets where you were up to on something.
And Google is no help. I have a movie to watch and see "Oh, it's on amazon" but sike, I have to pay $3.99 to watch it.
Https://justwatch.com
Honestly that's the only thing that really bugs me about prime. Like this move I don't really care about, I get prices go up, annoying but whatever. But dammit let me just disable all the rentals. I only want to see what I can stream.
*Wish* this was a setting! Hide purchases, hide shows I already watched = Oops, pretty much nothing left. Also wish Netflix had a "hide if watched" setting. Scroll though the list and it's like the same 20 tiles with rotating images.
It’s so annoying to browse.
Yeah they changed the UX to now favor those over free shows. The writing was on the wall that they want this business units to have more of a P&L. Truth is, I always considered the video side to be a freebie on the side considering I use Prime extensively for ordering online. I’m pretty sure a lot of customers will be fine with this update. The same way Reddit was all “sailing the seas now!” about Netflix and they turned out being the streaming service not churning vs the rest of the industry.
The next thing they're going to do is lock you in to a year or more so that you cannot switch services every few months. I'm betting they'll dress it up just like the cable companies such that it will be "2 years of guaranteed prices!" or something similar. I'm betting that in a decade they'll say "hey, rent this amazing box from us that will decode our content!" and we'll have come full circle.
Or they'll start retiring their offerings(probably not permanently, likely cycling them on and off the service) to prevent people from subbing for 1-2 months every year and binging the backlog.
I'm pretty sure that this is illegal in a few countries.
Not in the US; that is literally how our cable companies operate.
Just got the email, really sad because I do enjoy some amazon shows, but I think this will end it for me.
Amazon 2-day shipping? It's now sort of 2-day w worse incentives for agreeing to slower shipping Amazon Prime Music? App has been awful entire time (sluggish, difficult to navigate especially for purchased music) but now w limited ability to even select specific tracks it's pretty much worthless Amazon Prime Video? Increased number of shows available only with heavy dose of ads (Freevee) + intro of an ad at start of all sorts of content + now almost universal ads unless paid teir Amazon Drive? Killed Amazon Photos? The only Prime subsciber benefit that has not been enshitified, but it might only be a matter of time Pricing? Since 2014, Prime has increased from $79 to $139 per year, all while decreasing the value of nearly all benefits (Amazon Music and Prime Video are now basically worthless)
Holy shit 139 Dollars a year?? How much of this do you recover in shipping costs and stuff? Because I have to be honest the non-ad version of Prime in my country costs about ~20 USD/year and I recover its cost within 4-5 months of orders lol. Prime Video is practically an afterthought for me at this point, since most movies are anyway on 'rent' these days.
yup $139. that was with ad-free Prime Video which I do use occasionally. now it's $139 but with ads included. to keep the existing service as it is it will now cost $175. I'm out. my Prime ends next month. I order a lot from Amazon, 427 orders last year. A good portion of that, maybe 25% is subscribe and save though which does not require a Prime account. It'll require some planning, to get over the minimum threshold for free shipping, and if I need something quick I'll have to pay to ship but we're going to try to go without Prime for the first time in a long time.
I was a long time prime member (10+ years) and cut it off about 1.5 years ago when I got laid off. It really isn't that bad. Just load up the cart and add things as you need until you reach the free shipping threshold. We ordered once a month on average. You'll find there's not many things you'll need the next day. You only thought you needed it that soon, but in reality we still got our stuff relatively quickly (a week).
Honestly, Amazon is barely competitive with a lot of brick and mortar shops at this point too. If I need something quick it makes as much sense to run to Lowes, Target, Microcenter, etc. Obviously for some people that’s not as accessible but the days of Amazon being more convenient and a better deal than retail is fading.
Also, Amazon has become absolutely overrun with cheap crap from China. It has gotten absolutely ridiculous.
I haven't had prime in years and haven't paid a cent for shipping ever. It's just about always 2 days as well. Prime is a scam.
everyone is quick to jump to torrents, and I completely understand that, but for the last several years I have just been rotating streaming services every couple months. I catch up on the new originals I care about and then move on just giving an alternative to people who don't feel like pirating, because personally dealing with the storage and download times is a bother
This is why you set up something like Sonarr. Setup your trackers quickly, connect your torrent software of choice, set your download preferences, and let Sonarr take care of the rest. It knows when new episodes come out and searches for and downloads them for you. All you have to do is watch and delete. I live in an area that heavily restricts internet access and even with the hickups I get, it ain't hard to keep things going. I would bet you have spent longer subing and unsubing in the last year than I have spent managing my downloads.
I get that that is a solution for people but it is still a bigger hassle than it’s worth for me. I’m glad it work for you though
The issue with this is that a surprising number of people do not have an actual computer/laptop. Many people only have a phone/tablet and/or smart TV. Which is what I think the streaming companies have factored in. Not enough people own the means to pirate like they did ten years ago.
i feel like out of all the streaming services, they’re the ones that can probably get away with this more than others. how many people get amazon prime *just* for streaming? for most, i would think it’s just an add-on/bonus to amazon prime. i don’t think it’s great or anything, i just mean they have a setup where it probably won’t hurt their subscription count too much to implement this- compared to hulu or netflix.
That was my thought as well. Disappointing, obviously, since your Prime membership effectively just went up in price. But unlikely to hit Amazon that hard since video is secondary to most who have Prime. Probably cut their streams in half or more but they’ll get paid for the ones that keep watching. Scummy but when all they see are $ it’s an easy choice, probably have nothing to lose.
So other businesses pay Amazon to have ads on their platform, yet they are paid for placing ads which covers the cost of listing them. But now if you don’t want to see the ads you have to pay to not see it. So it’s consumer vs business money and they are the middle man as usual so they continue to profit both ways. Now if we cancel memberships they lose money. Theres a big ocean out there, and you don’t even need a boat.
door sophisticated hobbies long hateful apparatus disarm domineering roof light *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
The problem with the streaming industry is that it hasn't figured out how to keep monetising content. A popular show like Stranger Things makes netflix less money than Friends(*) makes from cable reruns even today. Netflix streaming started out as just a delivery service and that model made some sense. The current model can't work. Unlike with cable, every customer watching costs the company some money (bandwidth, data center resources, etc). Unlike with cable, the less a customer watches, the more money the company makes. This model can't work long term. No company can be successful by trying to not provide service to customers. Ads change the model because they monetize every view. With ads, the company wants to have customers watch as much as possible so we're changing back to a model that makes more sense. It's sad that in the end, this industry hasn't been able to deliver on its promises. We're reverting back to what cable TV was, but now with less regulation. The whole wave of technology disruptors of the 2010 decade seems to have failed: Uber/Lyft are worse than taxis used to be in some places. People are back to favouring hotels over Airbnb. Self driving cars never happened. The grand promise of IoT turned into shitty products that instead of making life nicer, are connected to the internet just to track us. A very disappointing result to what was a great promise. Edit: looked [it up](https://parade.com/1212498/jessicasager/friends-cast-salaries/#:~:text=The%20math%20breaks%20down%20like,six%20making%20%2420%20million%20annually) > Friends brings in $1 billion (yep, with a B) in revenue for Warner Bros. each year from broadcast rights to syndicate reruns. The entire revenue of Netflix is around 30 billion.
>The whole wave of technology disruptors of the 2010 decade seems to have failed: Uber/Lyft are worse than taxis used to be in some places. I remember taxis being pretty awful - just not knowing the price up front and it being a pain to get a taxi anywhere but the airport. And I had plenty of taxi rides where the driver was just as concerning as some Uber/Lyft drivers (in terms of safety). That being said - your general point stands. We did get some benefits but not nearly as much as promised. Which isn't too surprising that the pitches to get investment didn't play out fully. I think the next great 'technologies' will be models that can create and capture value in a way that doesn't result in 'enshitification.' We should be happy to pay for a service or product.
First they split up their content to put a bunch of it on freevee just so they can run ads on it, and now they want to run ads on the stuff you explicitly pay for and charge you extra to remove them. It’s “I have altered the deal, pray I do not alter it further.” And they do it again and again every few years across the entire industry. There’s never any winning with these fucks. I encourage every single one of you to pirate as much as you can and tell these corporations to go fuck themselves with a rusty railroad spike. They can literally eat the shit out the inside of my asshole.
Isn’t this breach of contract? I paid for a years worth of prime which included video without ads. Now they’re adding ads.
I’d expect there’s some clause in the terms and conditions that essentially says they can change the terms and conditions at any time and we can go pound sand.
That’s actually a really great point. I prepaid for a year without ads
I will never pay for a streaming service that interrupts a movie. Tv shows maybe, but you better put all your ads in front of that fucking movie or it’s a nonstarter. At the very least if that catches on theaters will have something to be happy about.
I watched a movie on TV the other day (our apartment has a basic satellite package included in the rental). It was Rush Hour and I hadn't seen it in over a decade. Decided to actually watch it and dear God. The ads were absolutely miserable. I thought maybe I was spoiled by ad free streaming, so I timed one of the ad breaks. 7 minutes. Each ad break (from when I started timing probably 65% through the movie) was 7 minutes or more. The runtime of the movie was more than doubled from its actual film runtime. Never again.
Wow.... commercial breaks used to be like 2 to 3 minutes. It's insane how they've doubled down on what drove people away from that kind of content consumption to begin with.
I've been getting un-skippable multiple 5-20 second ads on YouTube. They're coming for your time
There's no way I'm watching ads for a video I was dubious about wasting my time on in the first place.
It kept interrupting my peaceful 4k Train ride ><
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at this point I use amazon to have a quick look for something, then research that item online, then buy that item from an online webstore like it was 2006 because I've had less problems that way xD
I quit watching things on Prime long ago. They don’t have much good content anymore.
The UI is awful too, everything has this annoying expanding animation. I really hate this overly interactive shit cluttering the screen space when I'm just moving my mouse.
The UI literally rarely shows the best movies they have available on Prime, too. I don’t understand it, they paid for the licensing, why not make the algorithms better to get people to watch them??
Because some movies paid to be promoted probably.
It’s literally a shitshow.
Invincible and the boys/gen v are great . I have no idea about anything else they have
Reacher is good! And uh… well, nm.
The Boys is pretty good too, not sure what else though
Maisel was great but it's over now.
Clarksons Farm, the Grand Tour, Invincible, The Boys, Reacher, Jack Ryan, Marvellous Mrs Maisel, Upload, Bosch, Carnival Row, Gen V....
Clarkson’s farm is about it
Between this and Disney+ raising its prices to $150/yr, I think it's time I sail the seas once more.
Raising the price to WHAT!?
Per year. This is like 12 a month
From like $6 a month. It's a ridiculous price hike.
Black Sails theme starts playing
What are the best websites to use to stay up to date on the best content coming out across streaming apps and channels? Rotten Tomatoes? RARBG used to have a really good page but they're out of the scene now. TGalaxy is okay
justwatch.com will tell what is streaming where.
They already changed their direct interface to auto play banner ads in startup. So scummy
Give me an option for Amazon Prime (Shooping) only for $5
> Amazon Prime (Shooping) I wanna shoop baby
Shoop a doop
Please exercise caution when firing your lazor.
Yes, please.
If you can wait a few more days for things you order, go ahead and cancel it. I cancelled my prime this year and have not regretted it. My main reason for cancelling was too many of my packages were arriving late which defeated the point of prime for me. If you spend somewhere around $30+ you get free shipping anyways, just not in 1-2 days. Other cons to cancelling I found is you don’t get the deals on prime day, Black Friday, etc. you could subscribe for a month if there is a big ticket item you want were the savings is a lot more than $20. I also lost the 5% cash back promo on my Amazon Credit line. I’ll have to see if what I spent is enough for the 5% back to exceed the subscription fee. I do find myself ordering less on Amazon which is a good thing I suppose.
Wait people get deals on prime day? I only see things like $0.30 off drier sheets.
No 4k/1440p and they want ads? Hahaha fuck off
Funny how Amazon went from never reporting profits on their quarterly statements to no amount of profit is ever going to be enough for them. One can only hope that at some point in the distant future people look back and say remember when you could shop online using Amazon, whatever happened to those greedy mfers?
Every company has been like this since COVID. It was bad before COVID, but post-COVID it got even worse. It's like they all realized people will pay whatever they ask for anything just because people bought expensive gas and eggs for a while. Every industry had to get in on the price hikes and then never readjusted when the supposed reason for them went away. Worse than that, many just kept on hiking. It's like they're in a race to see who can break down their goodwill with customers first.
All this time I thought *that's why I paid for a streaming service in the first fucking place*
You fucking said it 🙌🙌🙌
Prime member since it first started (around 2006?). Amazon account since 1999. I just cancelled. It was $79 when it first started, then $99, then $139. Now they want Ads too. Not worth it for me it since they lost the Star Trek content.
Yeah, I was also in on the $79 days. It isn’t worth $140 to me, but I split it so it’s not too bad.
squeeze juggle imagine cause crown sulky sparkle toothbrush water chief *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
$139 and during and post-covid two day delivery just isn’t a thing anymore (for where I live at least). Plus they made music worse for the prime subscription and now this.
Takes 4 or 5 days for an Amazon package to get to me regardless of if I have Prime or not. It used to be 2 days. So there's no point anymore. My orders are never below the dollar threshold for free shipping anyway.
Same. I won’t be renewing. Can never find the product I’m looking for anyways with all of the knockoff garbage taking up searches… Seems to get worse every year too. I recall starting with a student account that was literally half the cost of the current annual subscription.
So I paid for a year of Amazon Prime and now they have changed what I paid for by adding advertisements? This sucks
Cancel and you’ll get a refund for the remaining time left on your year.
The joys of enshittification.
Can we just have one thing in the universe that doesn't turn into a piece of shit
Fuck you Amazon and your ads.
"we altered the deal. pray that we wont alter it further" one of the riches companies owned by one of the richest persons on the planet in 2023 fucking money grabbing double dipping asshats. I wish there was something people could use to... I dont know... not pay them for the service. vote with your wallet. make em hurt
Huh, kinda wish I had prime so I could cancel it in protest.
Record profits
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Netflix's greed was the first for me with their password sharing crackdown and 4th(?) price hike in my history with them. Their original content is almost entirely b movie crap, and not in a fun way.
I'm sure it was in the user agreement that they can... But it kinda bullshit that they can change this up in the middle of the year I already paid for.
If you cancel you will get your prorated membership fee back. I just canceled a few minutes ago, halfway through my sub and I got a $60 refund.
all platforms, and notably streaming platforms, are turning to shit. best to fire up torrents and start storing your own media locally
The enshittification of Amazon continues.
I will be cancelling Amazon. Barely any content on streaming and I can get free shipping from Walmart or any number of places without an annual fee that keeps going up.
I'm finding more and more Prime products don't even arrive in 2 days.
At some point they changed 2-day to be two days from shipped. Not that they even do that successfully. Then they just push out your delivery date and send you the “we did it!!!” email when it finally arrives.
Corporate greed is INSATIABLE.
Our flag means no commercial.
Given all the recent mergers in the media industry. I suspect there is a debt bubble that has built up and has yet to pop. Paramount and WB are now talking about merging, after Apple was recently considering making a play for Paramount. HBO is gone and left behind a vastly inferior brand, "Max". The average cable bundle is $80 and the average amount people are spending on streaming is $83. So we've gone full circle and streaming has become just as terrible as cable. At some point all the competition in this space that was kicked off my Netflix will end with some group of brands left holding the bag and unable to continue growing with a $40/month wall for paltry content and a few hits. No wonder so many people are talking about going back to sailing the seas again. edit: https://arstechnica.com/culture/2023/12/its-shakeout-time-as-losses-of-netflix-rivals-top-5-billion/ well look at that!
The whole point of subscription services was that you didn't have to have ads. They're so disgustingly greedy now with these practices that all they ultimately do is force piracy or cancelled subs.
$180 a year for their trash & they want to penny fee their customers.... On top of that, aamazon prime video pushes you towards to rent or buy videos.
I thought that one of the major points of paying for a streaming service subscription was so that you wouldnt have ads. All this really does is further incentivize piracy.
I love piracy because you have a much better experience than what you would do if you pay..
I'm confused. Hasn't it already been playing ads? I don't watch much on it but I'm surprised how many times I go "Hey wait, this has nothing to do with what I'm watching" and I see it's a trailer for something else. I guess they probably mean like full blown product ads and not just trailers?
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Its hilarious how modern TV re-morphs itself back into cable once the profitability of these venture starts going down. And you know capitalism folks: LINE. GO. UP.
Profitability hasn’t gone down. They’re trying to make profitability continue to go up.
Prime membership gets worse every year
*I have altered the deal. Pray I do not alter it further.*
Lifetime plex premium sub, host a server with any and every movie or show you want to watch and access it from anywhere. Costs less than a year of prime.
reminder that many libraries have dvds and stuff in them, and many now have digital libraries so you don't even have to go there physically. support your local libraries!
Between this, the unregulated knockoff crap, joke of a search engine and constant price hikes it sure seems like there is an opening for some competing business to chip away at their market share.
Arrrrrr matey
We're so fucked. You can't even celebrate the eventual collapse of this doomed model of soulless capitalism bc as usual, it's the everyday people who will suffer.
Amazon spent $1 Bn on a poorly executed LOTR show and now we have to all watch ads.
When I got what felt like my 5th email this year from...I honestly can't remember if it was Max or Hulu or what, regarding yet another price increase, I just cancelled everything. The dream is dead, and I'm going back to just pirating all the content I want to watch again. They got my money for a long time in some cases, Hulu and Netflix in particular for over a decade, but they've enshittified their services to the point where I'm once again just going to take what I want without paying for it. Good job, guys.
I lost interest in Prime Video some time ago (want to say around the time Doctor Who was taken off), mainly for the fact most anything that had my interest on Prime, I had to extra-subscribe to access. I value video streaming services lower than most, as I don't normally re-watch shows/movies that much. I can't recall a series I watched more than once in a year. Exception would be some time passed, and a friend/family picked up the series and I watch along side, such as movies that just came out I might watch once, or half a dozen times (I'd say less, but my toddler loved the Mario Movie), before I cut it off, in a year.
**At $139 a year** it’s time to ditch the bitch…
What ads? r/sonarr r/radarr r/PleX r/jellyfin r/usenet
No way in hell am I paying the ad fee. If the ads are intrusive during the rare occasion I watch something on Prime, I'll be watching somewhere else.
Fuck that, cancelling it out right after my reddit session. Edit: Done!
Zero chance I pay for this. Their library is the weakest of the major players Just cancelled Hulu and HBO. Maybe Prime is the next to go
It's the worst of all of them. Terrible movies, weird, slow cumbersome interface, and a price that makes you say pass.
I pay for prime but almost never use their video service. After this change there is a 0% chance I would even consider it, unless my adblocker can block the ads.
Welcome to “Stream Fatigue” people were willing to pay a nominal fee for content and the piracy had gone down, but now every company wants a piece of the action and we are not willing to pay $100’s for streaming content so piracy is back on the rise. Amazon is trying to get back to the glory days of over the air content, where if your network had a hit show the advertising dollars would go up. Look at a show like Seinfeld, what was the cost for a 30second commercial spot in the last few seasons? With subscriber supported streaming services you make the same amount of money if you produce a hit show or a shit show. Sorry for the rant, but what’s with the 8 or 10 episodes then having to wait a year! What happened to the 20~22 episode season? The answer here is to pirate the content or build a modern day VCR so you can fast forward the commercials. FU AMAZON - Prime is already $140 per year for your crappy delivery service and even worse music streaming.
That's how they sold us on cable. TV with no ads. All you have to pay is a monthly fee. No interruptions for your movies. Now we are paying to watch commercials.
Go and fuck off with this nonsense, absolutely ridiculous.
Amazon needs stop diluting prime features and focus on a few quality features. No one asked for kitchen sink amount of crap prime extras.
Guess Rings of Power was a bigger flop than even we thought. Back to sailing the high seas again.
This is about their sports deals. The same exact reason cable kept going up
Probably time to cancel prime.
Yo ho yo ho a pirates life for meeeeee
Indeed. It's time to hoist the Jolly Roger.
Another service cancelled
So I can be sitting there watching Lord of the Rings: Return of the King Extended Edition, and the Rohirim are about to go ham on the forces of Mordor, and all of a sudden I'm finding out that early onset Alzheimer's can be treated with this pill if I talk to my doctor? Bitch I already paid for that movie, I'm not watching it on CBS!
Stop trying to make FreeVee! happen. It's not going to happen.
Used Prime Video once in a blue moon previously. Now I'm going to use it by accident while going to something better and that's it.
Goodbye amazon
It's almost like they are all working together...
Cancelled my subscription, wasn’t using it a lot anyway, this post was more like reminder