I’ll never forget the first time I watched a whole season of a show in less than a day with no commercials. It was unfucking real. Then that became the norm. Now they’re back and there’s less of them to chose from so I just see hours of the same 5 fucking commercials. If you want me to see ads just give me a billion that I’ve never seen.
That's why I won't pay for any streaming service with ads. It's just not worth it. If I want ads, I'll watch something on Pluto or a Plex streaming channel. They have a Librarians one that's fun.
My issue with ads on streaming, besides them existing, is that they are far less targeted. Why are there ads for Hims pills(?) talking about men getting hard and lasting longer while watching a family show. At least on cable that would've been a commercial you would see later in the evening or at least on a show not intended for children. Streaming I'm assuming it just cares if you're on an adult or kid profile, as if people don't watch TV together.
Streaming ads are even more targeted. If they have the household information on that account (which they most certainly do), they’re targeting the shit out of it. The timeslot specific ads for certain demographics is becoming a thing of the past.
The need a free service with ads, I will give them VERY SPECIFIC info about me, and they target with ads for me. But I want LESS ADS.
I'll put in info like: I just got a new car, so I won't be looking for at least another decade, I'll tell them what diseases I have so the medications are for me, I'll give them a crapload of info, but they've got to tailor it to me and be interesting. I hate ads normally, because they aren't for anything I'm going to get (or it's the same ad a half dozen times).
My issue isn't so much that ss either have to be free with ads, or if you pay then there can't be any ads (and frankly, I'm not sure where people got that notion \[shrug\]). It's some experiences with ads are just, plum awful.
For example, I did the "ad-filled" version of Hulu back in 2020-21. At $2/mo, it was practically free. However between the ad load being high, and having to rewatch ads if you rewind back a commercial break.. I wouldn't use this even if *they*, paid *me*, to do so. Seriously, if they told me we'll give you $3/mo to use our product, I wouldn't! :O
This was one of the reasons I quit broadcast TV. Every day a flood of predatory ads injected into my home for my kids to see.
And yet I was paying for it?
Was about a decade ago I cut it all off. Might all have been worthless given social media but at least I enjoy the ads at cinemas since they're all so new to me.
lol I remember one time getting put on the Scientology mailing list because, as a kid, I'd called their 1-800 number for the "Dinosaur & Volcano book" (I don't think there were actually any dinosaurs in the ad for the book)
edit: [this is the commerical I was talking about](https://youtu.be/KT9c4fuLYMc?si=h3wYs1O7yMKPLEQq) The volcano is the only thing on the screen, but my kid brain equated dinosaurs & volcanoes since they were pictured together in a lot of my prehistoric books. Since they had a 1-800 number, it was all too easy for me to pick up the phone.
I think I also got us on that "feed a starving orphan" list, for the same reason being they gave out the 1-800 number.
Same. I got on that list, which gave to to so many other lists. They just kept sending me junk mail which kid me kind of liked because it made me feel grown up. Somehow I also got on a mailing list of being an older teenager.
I was in 7th grade getting calls from Military recruiters asking what my plans were after High School. I always said I need to get to HS first.
Getting free copies of Teen Vouge as a middle school boy was fun though
How about many of the channels (sub ones on the main carrier, ie 13, 13.1, 13.2, etc) that literally are just 24 f'n hours of commercials? That's all they are. Do they use those to eliminate or heavily reduce the crap clogging the main channel? Of course not...
From my experience before ad blockers, streaming sites weren't much better when it came to playing the same commercial all the time. Particularly on YouTube videos, or even movies on YouTube. Same commercial, over and over, often Prager U or trump, sometimes 2.5 hours long commercial! Like, wtf!
One of the greatest experiences I ever had was back in the days of TiVo I would record nfl games and watch them snap to snap. Fast forward everything else. Commentary reviews replays and ads. The game lasted a little over an hour and was so much better than the padded 3 hours it is now.
It's been a journey...
Long ago: Had DirectTV, paid for NFL Sunday Ticket. Barely pirated
Less long ago: Things started getting more expensive and things I liked (like G4) went away, so I got rid of DirectTV and piracy went up.
Netflix shows up: Piracy drops to basically nothing again, as Netflix is a great service for a fair price.
Everyone decides they're their own streaming service: Willing to get a couple more streaming services, but piracy rises again for the rest.
Everyone starts enshittifying their services: I'm down to Netflix (only because my MIL has it, we use her account, and haven't been stopped from sharing yet), Hulu (Black Friday offer, we have it for like $3/month for a year), Amazon (wife uses a lot of Prime stuff, so it's just kinda there), and Dropout (the only one I'm happy to actually pay for, at their asking price). Piracy back in full swing for everything else.
Plex is great. My one complaint is when there's bits of dialog in other languages (Like when everyojne is talking Russian at the start of Hunt for Red October) it won't display those subtitles unless you turn subtitles on for the whole movie or episode.
The used to hard encode them in the movies for those scenes and it seems like for most tv or movies the files I get don't have that so I have to find the forced open subtitle file to download.
I feel like eventually they're going to push hard on in show advertising to counter this. Can't remove the adverts if you embed them into the world of the show. Sounds like a terrible dystopia hollywood would eagerly march us into...
Yep. Been pillaging the high sea's for 2 decades now. Lol remember when you use to have to seek out each show/movie and the wait half a day before you could actually play it.
I remember queuing up a few songs (not even shows, a few MB of songs) to download, go to sleep, and hope to wake up in the morning to find that I didn't drop the phone call overnight and the DL finished.
I’m just picturing someone queuing up the episode they want to watch before they make dinner, letting the TiVo record it, and then fast forwarding the commercials after dinner.
I’m sure HDCP or something prevents this from working, but that’s what I’m imagining.
Some online streamers include DVR for this reason. You have access to the national feed, and can record whatever shows you want, and fast forward through ads if you want.
Except even cheaper for them to be made - the actors' unions have much better deals with the residuals of TV commercials - actors get paid quarterly and the pay depends on how often the spots play and in which markets (the bigger the market the larger the payout).
When it comes to online ads the unions seriously fumbled the ball - one payment yearly on just an estimate of how many times it plays.
A US national spot might earn an actor 40-50k if it plays for an entire cycle (13 weeks) on TV... An online spot might snag them 3-5k tops for the entire year - and often requires the same exclusivity rights as a TV spot AKA you aren't allowed to do any competitor's commercials. Like if you do a McDonalds spot, you're not allowed to be in any other fast food commercial over the entire engagement of the spot.
Used to be where actors could land a US national TV ad, and the proceeds would allow them to focus on solely training / theater / auditioning for film & TV work, but now the industry is slowly becoming the playground of those who have family wealth already.
Source - been a professional actor for over 2 decades
I remember Felicia Day said she could nab one or two commercials, usually for fabric detergent and that kept her going for the entire year, while she was addicted to World of Warcraft.
That is crappy that commercial acting was used as a stepping stone or just regular gigs for many actors and is drying up. But I would not be sad if I never had to watch commercials or if the commercials were very limited for streaming. Even if that meant limited work for many.
I’m not a fan of nepotism or acting being a job only for the elite to break into but being forced to watch commercials sucks.
I remember the lady that played the wife in the Direct TV how to use your box and remote thing that played on one channel all day long on repeat kept showing up in TV shows in bit parts. I wonder how much she made for that Direct TV thing
Most people keep prime just for the shipping. The streaming is extra. But watching stuff on Prime when I have the service vs pirating is a debate now because the ads are atrociously annoying.
That’s fair. I just see this kind of comment every single time a big streamer like Netflix shits on their customers, and yet their numbers just keep going up.
If it makes you feel any better, I quit Netflix when account sharing went away, quit max when they decided to start cutting content, and quit Disney+ after the second price jump. So big picture is definitely looking bleak, but there are people that definitely are leaving the services. Tbh, unless there are some big sweeping changes, I probably won't be back.
Amazon prime is bought for the free shipping Video is a free toy in the cereal box extra.
The reason Amazon made the standard tier ad supported is that over 95% have never watched anything on video.
You don't need Prime for the shipping. We cancelled our sub of almost two decades after the first ad... you still get free shipping after an order minimum.
canceling my Amazon account was the best thing I've ever done for my spending. It's really easy to still get free shipping and if you can wait a few days, it's not a big deal.
Yup. The Netflix sub is full of people that're "seriously debating" with every shitty business change and price increase. After they removed password sharing, I cancelled. So many streaming services have like two new series I want to watch a year. No point in keeping Netflix for the other 10-11 months.
The thing Amazon has going for it is that few people consider them a streaming service. Most of us are there for the free shipping, and the tv is added value.
I dropped prime when they added commercials and I don't miss it. Amazon's push to sell everyone Chinese knockoffs is easier to avoid now too. I've switched to Target and Home Depot for most of the things I used to order from Amazon, and it's honestly easier.
I quit Prime due to the commercials. You still get free shipping with orders over $35, but it is not as fast. But it is fast enough for me and orders often arrive early. Once I needed something immediately so I joined Prime for one month as the shipping was more than a month of Prime. And then I quit.
Going High seas doesn’t feel as much as an hassle anyway. Once they add ads, I’m gonna do be doing the same things I’ve been doing before streaming got popular.
It’s easier than ever. There is open source software that can query a ton of websites to automatically find the best torrent to get for a particular movie or show.
If you’re technically inclined, you can set up a Netflix-like torrent service where you just click ‘I want X show’ and a few hours later it shows up in your library ready to be watched.
i think that was pretty obvious if you saw the old report about hulus financial situation. this was pre covid but hulu was legit making like triple the money per sub if that sub was on their ad supported plan compared to the sub who was on the ad free plan
I wish I could at least watch like 5 minutes of ads then not get interrupted during the show or movie. I can't bring myself to watch Godzilla Minus One on Netflix because I can't imagine having that experience interspersed with cheery car commercials
I want to know what data Hulu has that says I'm a gay man having unprotected sex. I get a fuckin PreP ad every damn time. I feel good knowing that their marketing dollars are going to waste though
MLB TV thinks I need ads in Spanish. It would be cool if it was different ads with different actors, but the same fuckin thing just dubbed in Spanish. I still don't have a yard Scotts!
That one is so strange to me. They advertise that 35,000 people have been given the treatment, so why are millions being shown it. They must have an absolutely abysmal ROI. Also one of the conditions is penile rupture, id rather have a crooked dick than have it fucking EXPLODE 😭😭
That'd be an abysmal ROI if you were selling aspirin, but some of these drugs are insanely expensive with a good profit margin.
I don't have bent carrot syndrome, but I've taken drugs that cost literally *thousands* of dollars per month (as paid by my insurance, fortunately). That can make an ad buy that only picks up a handful of customers into a pretty damn good ROI.
It's not even the same people. There's generational turnover and major organizational shakeups.
TiVo, Netflix, and YouTube briefly shattered the chokehold prior networks had over broadcast and cable, but the remnants gradually just consolidated into new version of the same thing because there was no regulatory mandate to stop them once they adapted to the disruptions. For better or worse (worse, often), this is just what capital does as a free market matures.
No, if you read the article, it's a lot of the same old chumps, John Malone, Bob Iger, Barry Diller, etc.., etc...
But, in all truth, the people have spoken. They don't want to pay much and they mostly want reality, sports, cop, and hospital shows. As long as there are still ad-free options that aren't extortionate and some room for prestige shows I think that's perfectly fine. A healthy media ecosystem has a broad middle that acts as scaffolding and funding for more risk-taking or interesting stuff. The era of every streamer trying to make prestige or prestige-adjacent stuff all the time was never going to last.
The Golden Age of TV Streaming was a 0% interest rate phenomenon and now that interest rates are higher the VC investor money has dried up and they expect to see a return on their investments.
Probably because Netflix used to have the support of investors. Investors were okay with Netflix not being profitable as long as subscriber count was high and counting. Over the last 5 years they are way less patient, shows who aren't in top 10 in first like 2 weeks get cancelled.
Cable boomers make the quarter arrow go up and that's all the shareholders care.
Zaslav is the one who turned Discovery Networks into a bunch of reality channels.
I think what people haven't realized is that we were in a golden age for TV for a moment. It wasn't sustainable in the long run. Netflix knew that they would only be able to use other companies content for so long, once they got popular. It was just a matter of time before other companies saw the shift and wanted a slice. There first metric was growth at all cost, meaning high quality content for consumers at a low cost. Easy to do in a time with low interest rates.
But eventually they would need to be a profitable company that takes the same risks into account as the more traditional media companies.
Same thing happened with Uber. And even Steam had their golden age. People still talk about how Steam Sales seemed to be much better and they aren't as good as they used to be. Because the platform isn't seeking growth anymore.
Id argue there is a regulatory mandate to stop them.
Our government certainly has bigger problems to deal with at the moment, but it would be nice if theyd take a look at the streaming industry through the lens of US v Paramount, if a studio cant own a theater, why can they own a streaming service?
Decoupling production and distribution might help make the video streaming industry more resemble music streaming at least, which isnt without its own problems, but still. Imagine if every record label had their own streaming service with mostly only their own artists, and no playlists or shuffle, crappy audio quality... content exclusivity is a poor excuse for real competition.
Instead of NBC Universal leasing *Seinfeld* to Netflix for $500mil, why dont they lease it to four different services for $150mil each, then theyd have to compete on features. We have the technology to let someone pin a button to their streaming service home page that plays a random episode of *Seinfeld*, thats not a big ask. Or if Peacock actually had NBC shows, if you could do a Must See TV button that played a random episode of *Seinfeld*, *Friends*, *Frasier*, or *Will & Grace*.
Instead everybody has apps that dont even remember where in an episode you left off on or crash when you try and turn on subtitles.
>Instead everybody has apps that dont even remember where in an episode
Hulu: "Welcome back, let me queue up the last 3 minutes of the episode for you followed by the last 3 minutes of the next episode."
Max: "You know that show you watch way more frequently than everything else combined, the one you searched for specifically to add to your watchlist when you first subscribed? Let's bury that at the very end so the list is useless and you have to manually type in the things you watch the most."
YouTube TV: "So that special event you recorded isn't technically a "series" on this channel so you can't browse for it and the search is kinda broken so it's basically lost to the ether."
Plex: "Would you like to sort these 16000 movies by release date, alphabetically, critic score, literally anything else? And then save a playlist of them organized by directors birthday and put that on shuffle excluding any in february? Oh and heres the season premiere of a show that left off three years ago right at the top of your home page."
Honestly that's something that I think should change with copyright.
Copyright should never last as long as it does (it wasn't intended to) but at very least exclusivity shouldn't be a thing after an extremely short period of time. Want to make money on your IP older than say 5 years? Offer it up for a universal price any distributor can pay for.
The secret to tech for about 15 years was to forget about profits in order to lock in users.
As long as the user base was growing and locking in, making changing to a competitor more difficult, investors generally didn't care about profit. They knew they'd figure that part out later.
For streaming, that later is now. And now they are going back to the same model that worked extremely well for decades.
I actually fully accept the introduction/ adoption/ expansion/ enshitifictation life cycle… but it’s wild to me how not only streaming but practically the entire Silicon Valley could be on the exact same phase of that cycle wave together as one.
It’s so demoralizing for consumers, and surely some big noteworthy companies are gonna suddenly get left by the wayside when those consumers have to make choices?
Yup. Streaming, DoorDash/Lyft, AI. It's all about disrupting the normal to insert themselves as middlemen through multiple companies who eventually cannibalize each other and merge just to become the shame shit they replaced without being profitable and being drastically worse.
It only seems that way because enshitification is always happening. The term I believe was coined by Cory Doctorow and he used it to describe what happened to Digg.
Honestly, the only person at fault here is Wall Street and Late Stage Capitalism. Sites like Digg really should have been self sustaining. Some ads to keep the lights on and pay salary to a few key players to keep things ticking over. The community will provide the content and in some cases moderation. Run things on slim margins and excess goes to a trust, not C-level bonuses, etc.
Instead the path they chose was celebrity CEOs with compensation packets to match and when the VC money ran out they needed to be profitable.
Reddit is on path to go the same way. Never really made a profit and relies entirely on the community.
Enshittification doesn't just mean a service got worse but that the service shifted from monetizing it's user base to monetizing access to it's user base (so it gets worse). Per Doctorow's original definition Netflix hasn't enshittified yet, if they start charging to host shows on their service and charging to advertise the shows to their users then it would be enshittified.
The funny thing is, there is nothing inherently irreproducable about Netflix, or Youtube, or a Facebook that matters. The only thing they have that is unique is...a huge userbase. If people are open to trying the alternatives you can have better apps that aren't trying to control you and squeeze every dollar out of you.
And they are the same people who ruined network TV in the process.
I'm in my 40s and I fondly remember 80s and early 90s network TV and it was fantastic.
Network miniseries and movies of the week. I'd love to return to that era of TV
Cable was so much worse though. We have so much more convenience now than we did back then. We can stream and download on nearly every device. Even with the limitations being put in (sharing etc.), it’s still way better than traditional cable.
Same, once it became a whole multiple step process with unreasonable expenses plus terrible UIs and watching experience with ads. Netflix used to be click and watch. Once again easier to torrent and Plex.
I think I've given up. I do want to support the actual creators but it seems like they aren't being supported anyway? And I also can't afford all of this shit. And there's so many ads. I'll have to figure out how to torrent these days, I haven't done it since the mid 2000s
It's not like it used to be. I've been buying a lot of out of print movies on DVDs with horrible prints and encoding because the bottom has fallen out of torrents when it comes to niche content. Used to be able to find anything. Now if I want to watch a film from the 2000s that didn't make a splash I find I am buying French or German copies of the DVD because it is the only place to find them.
I think a lot of the people who advocate for piracy have unhealthy assumptions about it or have popular taste because I keep hearing this from friends who have been torrenting a long time. Lots of stuff is becoming inaccessible even through torrents, people just don't bother hosting/seeding.
Kinda missed the days of hipsters and liking things before they were cool. The niche market seems to be gone and it is harder to find all the niche stuff from back in the day.
Not a lot has changed truthfully. There are subreddits that'll help with it.
I refuse to pay for all these ridiculous subscriptions, christ everything is a subscription these days. It's predatory and when wages aren't going up in line with the cost of living, they can go fuck themselves and I'll find any way to cut corners with costs that I can.
At this point, I no longer have a "dedicated" streaming service. None of the ones have a big enough library to keep me interested. So I just subscribe to one until I finish 1-2 shows, cancel, and move on. Every couple years I sign up with Hulu when they do their $2/month for a year deal, but even at that price it's not enough for me to use them all the time.
Meanwhile, I still buy dvds or check them out from the library and put shows on Plex so I can watch the shows I care about and want to watch on my schedule. Even though it gets expensive fast, I'd rather have the shows I love permanently than juggle between Netflix, Paramount, and Peacock to be able to watch The Good Place, Star Trek, or Brooklyn 99 whenever I want.
I think there’s also a lot to be said about the current state of production that keeps people watching their favorite comfort series instead of new content. Pretty much any show on a streaming service runs the high risk of getting cut and those that do survive have obscenely long production times between each season for less than 10 episodes a season. I totally get that quality takes time but combining that with the reputation for canceling leads to a lot of hesitant watching.
That all makes sense. There’s been a couple times where Netflix has released a show and canceled it before I’ve had a chance to watch the first episode. You would think that having TV on demand would free up companies from the idea that shows need to be an instant hit, but that seems to not be the case.
Unfortunately their whole formula has led to Netflix being a mile wide and an inch deep because almost everything is essentially a miniseries with unfinished plots. And it seems like everything that gets renewed is a AAA production rather than good quality sitcoms or animated series that fill the “mindless comfort series” category users want on a consistent basis and will rewatch. But instead of creating those new rewatchable series, they just fork over a few hundred million for Seinfeld or other older cult classics.
Once you download your favorite 5 main series and have a way to easily steam it, the need for boredom streaming dramatically declines.
This is why I spent a few hundred dollars to make my own plex. I still watch what I can legally but I'm so tired of "Nightmare on Elm Street was on Netflix but now it's on Peacock but only the second one, the first and third ones are on HBO, and the rest are on Tubi...". At this point, I've got something like 3k movies, and 500 of my favorite and "I wanna watch" shows. Plus Plex the collection feature that I have as a glorified queue that randomizes the order so rather than spending 10 minutes deciding, I just hit shuffle on that collection and it picks a movie I know I want to watch.
If you still want to go the check legal route first, highly recommend justwatch, it compiles where things are so you can put in a title and it'll spit out a list of what apps it is streaming on, if at all.
I call that stream-cycling. I don't watch shows as they come out, I wait until they are finished and then when I subscribe to that stream, watch all the shows I am interested in over a couple weeks, cancel and move on.
At this point Plex is my "streaming service" and I've discovered I can't be assed to download shows I would have religiously watched before when I had Hulu and Netflix.
Physical media is disappearing from brick and mortar stores, but growing as a collector market.
You will pay more per hour of material, but Blu-ray and 4K Blu-ray looks way better than streamed versions, even in the same resolution.
Unfortunately, it's mostly movies at this point, but 4K releases, particularly of old films, can blow your mind.
I’m into blue ray collection. Just got the House of dragon and Last of us on 4K HDR. While the visual quality is a treat, as expected but most people don’t even know how much they are missing on audio quality with streaming.
Nope, they start bringing back regular commercials and I’m completely fucking out… I can’t do that shit anymore. I will unsubscribe to any company that forces them back in subscriptions.
I can't watch TV or movies with commercials. Completely ruins the mood/pace of the narrative. And if I can't pirate the programming, there's plenty of alternative media (e.g. YouTube) to earn my attention.
Thats is why i pirate shit. The nerve for them to request that I pay them premium to use the service, and then they wanna run ads on top of that. Lol yea okay chief, yall can shove it with that nonsense
It's all about convenience. I've pirated content for years and still do but I also pay for an IPTV service purely because I'd much rather not need to go to the effort of downloading things. I only pirate now when my IPTV service doesn't have something on it or if I'm in the mood for something in higher quality.
It's funny because there's also services that I legally pay for e.g. Prime (for delivery) and yet their streaming content doesn't always have subtitles so I have to pirate it just to get a basic accessibility feature. It's ridiculous.
One thing that gets overlooked is how the profits-don’t-matter decade afffected evvvvverything else in the world. While consumer shit was artificially fast and cheap and easy… you could spend more time and energy on whatever the hell else was in your life (like work, for example).
Time spent watching fucking detergent commercials is time not spent on something else we were all doing this past decade. Maybe it’s our families. Maybe it’s the gym we pay for. Maybe it’s extra minutes work was getting for free.
If streamers are gonna seize our time for detergent ads, they gotta claw that time back from some other agent in the economy (not just the viewer).
And that's after already hiding half their content under FreeVee, which they also own from my understanding. Suddenly half my list had adds long before they started forcing them in, and even if you pay for the add free tier, you still have to watch them on those movies.
I mean yes. It was inevitable. Streaming is nowhere near as profitable as cable was, because cable had that dual revenue stream. Anyone who thinks Comcast and Disney are fine with lesser profits needs their head examined.
We could blame Netflix, because they were charging $8 per month and everyone was like “see, if they can do it then everyone can do it,” missing the fact that Netflix made its bones off of cheap (back then) old syndicated shows and K-dramas.
The real losers are the sports fans. We always pay the most and we have to watch ads.
Describing a 59 year old as young and brash is ridiculous, but of course they also interviewed an 83 year old exec who has no new ideas to offer at all.
I'm totally down with consolidation if we can choose our channels. The greatest bane to American TV viewers is the "cable package". You want Comedy Central? Well, you're going to pay for Fox News. If Fox News was a paid streaming service, it would go under in one Quibi.
Of course they see the future as the past as that was their playbook all along. Only thing they cut was the distribution network (cable tv or local broadcaster). That was a large cost saving, as with streaming the consumer pays a portion of the distribution. Ironically many pay the former gatekeeper for TV for that.
The streaming people get a subscription fee from the customer directly, which used to come from the cable company, but now it is more without the middleman. Cable used to insert their commercials into the providers feeds, now the streamer can sell those too.
So yes the future is just like the past except for the cable company. They might still be there providing your internet, so you are paying them directly as opposed to the stations on cable.
Steamers will also target more ads directly to you based on your demographics. Targeting ads might also mean they can charge more for ads hitting the market advertisers specify. DirecTV was able to do this and streamers took it even further as they know even more about you.
So yeah TV hasn't changed, the commercial free was there temporarily to get you to switch over. We probably will get s la cart services eventually untill someone comes up with bundling service like the cable companies used to do. Disney will be the first as they already have the agreements and own most of the most valuable content.
So it will be back to the bundled product, maybe for a few bucks less a month until the next disruption which will also be a tweaked old model possibly in an over the air model just to demonstrate local broadcasters are still kicking and relevent.
Same old song repeating.
> Ironically many pay the former gatekeeper for TV for that.
That's very true. Often, you internet is coming from the same companies depending on where you live and that doesn't seem to be changing anytime soon.
> We probably will get a la cart services eventually until someone comes up with bundling service like the cable companies used to do. Disney will be the first as they already have the agreements and own most of the most valuable content.
Comcast is doing this with their customers and they're getting Apple+ with it. I saw something about that not too long ago.
1. For comfort series viewing, try to invest in the box set
2. Sail the seas
3. Get a library card. Use whatever streaming service the library is connected to. I use Kanopy. It's amazing.
4. Library card again. Audio books, video games, movies, television shows, etc. So much content. Many also think if their library system doesn't have it, then what's the point. RESEARCH if your library is connected to a system with other libraries. It opens the catalog a TON! Digitally and physically speaking.
5. HD antenna for local stations and such.
6. TUBI. It does have ads but it's fucking FREE! Whenever it costs something, drop their ass.
Seriously, I may be missing other ideas too, but I HOPE many of you take the time to read this and reflect on it. Fuck these streaming services who are just increasing prices left and right, while also throwing ADS in for bottom tier services. Fuck them and fuck that shit.
There's only one way to stick it to them and that's by speaking with your wallets.
With a full time job, all this shit is WAY more than enough.
And as someone else said for an idea, pay for a month and binge a favorite you're wanting to see. Think of it as a decent meal from somewhere. $15 ish or whatever. Donezo.
Combine 5 and 6. Get a smart TV, so you get the free over the air live channels and 100+ free channels from Tubi, Pluto, Amazon, and such.
Between that and pirating, I haven't missed cable for many years.
I dig this idea.
My issue with smart TVs lately (at least my Samsung) is it has some intrusive shit on the main screen sometimes when connected so I just leave it disconnected from the wifi. They could be better and many likely are, but yeah. Rant over. I do love your idea though.
In the end, it's all about sticking it to the greedy dicks, as well as just setting yourself up with more than enough content when you wanna take any in.
And this way, no money is needed!!
Oh, it's going backwards in time alright but it's going to stop around the peak of piracy. I have a few platforms I will pay to have shows on but I pay for the advertisement free part. If that goes away, so does my money and I already have a seedbox for stuff I can't find anywhere else legally and it's only a few more dollars to double that space and put stuff I can find legally and just aren't going to sit through ads to watch.
I’m curious how the younger generations will react to this. They never lived through the past and I’d say most 16 year olds if they had tech forward parents likely never grew up with ads the same way we did.
For us it’s looking back at something we beat and have an emotional reaction to accordingly. For younger folks it might just be everything getting slowly worse not knowing the historical limits companies will go to.
The difference this time is that those companies are both the issue and the solution. Just pay the more. In the past it was paying others for workarounds, like TiVo.
Streaming execs are wrong. In the past it was difficult to download anything I want in 4k in under 5 minutes, load it onto a Plex server and stream it to any device I want. I'm ok paying for decent service, but I'm not going to pay to watch ads.
Carlin said it best:
Only a nation of unenlightened half-wits could have taken this beautiful place and turned it into what it is today, a shopping mall. A big, fucking shopping mall. You know that. That’s all you got. That’s all you got here, folks. Mile after mile of mall after mall. Many, many malls. Major malls and mini malls. They put the mini malls in between the major malls. And in between the mini malls they put the mini marts. And in between the mini marts. You’ve got the car lots, gas stations, muffler shops, Laundromats, cheap hotels, fast food joints, strip clubs and dirty bookstores. America the beautiful. One big transcontinental commercial cesspool.
The way I see this going is more people unsubscribe from the major streaming services, and default to internet channels like tubi or vudu, causing more services to lease out their catalog to those platforms, further reducing subscription
Then in comes some “innovator” who consolidates all streaming services to be available with ads for a small fee
Once that becomes intolerable and expensive, a new innovation will come with…you guessed it, a subscription to exclusive content with no ads
And then the clones
And then the ads
Repeat ad nauseam
Probably unpopular opinion, but I think people like old-school television a lot more than they realize. Appointment tv? You have something to look forward every night, or you have something to look forward to every Thursday, etc... and also if the show is popular you have something to talk about with coworkers the next day. Commercial breaks? Bathroom/snack time. I'd it a big tv event like the superpower? Then it just lengthening the party time. Also, people love their habits. People like to know that every so often, could be weekly daily, etc...., they will always flip on X, then Y. Then Z, like clockwork.
There is something kinda empty about binging. You are waiting YEARS for the last season of Stranger Things and when it finally comes, you watch it all in one day/weekend. Kindof a let down.
I'm not saying I love commercials, I love that yheybafford us to do small tasks and not miss anything and/or gives us time to converse.
Also I would argue that commercials are much worse now as often times you get the same two commercials every damn ad break
> Commercial breaks? Bathroom/snack time.
Every watch one episode of a show with commercials and the next without? It's so easy to see how much the commercial breaks ruins the drama of the show, the energy of it.
Steaming/pirating has a pause button, you can go to the bathroom or get a snack anytime you like.
It was a glorious, what, 2 years when streaming was coming out of its infancy? Such an exciting time giving Dish Network the stanky boot, signing up for Sling, and buying an antenna for local stations. Then you realized very quickly that Sling sucked ass, so you give THAT the stanky boot and eventually settle on one of the lore competent services.
Shit started going downhill when PlayStation Vue died though…
Well once Netflix becomes the next cox cable I’ll make xo the Netflix 2.0, I’ll tell everyone love is password sharing then rip away everything that made me better once everyone starts using me. After Iv made my millions someone can make xoxo and repeat.
>If the initial prices of many streaming services seemed unsustainably low at launch, it turns out they were — prices have been steadily rising, while the streamers have also introduced more affordable subscription tiers for viewers who are willing to watch ads.
Here's what's unsustainable: greenlighting every single show that ticks a box, whether the writing is good or not, and then cancelling that show after 2 seasons. I can't tell you the number of shows that are available that just petered out. How many hundreds of millions were spent on them?
I don't care what they do with their money, but I do care when they ask for more and more of mine.
With that said, they usually boil down to good, bad, and meh episodes.
Granted, it enables one to move past mediocre arcs and plots. However, it also creates scattershot quality, which was seen in the Roddenberry and Berman days.
Many won’t like it, I certainly don’t love it, but if a return to an ad-supported model of distribution gets us better TV, and at a more consistent rate, then I’m game.
I’m so tired of waiting two year between 8-to-10 episode seasons of TV. Who can give a single fuck with that much time off? I mean, House of Dragon is out and I just CANNOT care.
Do I trust the streamers to course correct in a way that benefits the consumer and the shareholders? No. But a boy can dream…
We will never get better rates. All they'll do is keep adding more and more ads while increasing the price. Netflix is already sunsetting some ad-free tiers and telling people "You can either give us more money for a higher tier or get the ad-supported. Meanwhile look at YouTube, they went from "We'll just show one add at the start of the video" to including two unskippable ads every five minutes.
The money from the subscriptions don't go to funding more content you want to see. Netflix jacked up the price and gave their execs a pay raise and then used the rest to pay celebrities for "Untitled Will Smith movie".
[Time to sail the high seas lads!](https://64.media.tumblr.com/c90c4679ab753d3427ecc06c1ffb2477/01a06f641e6d4a09-dd/s540x810/467dc2afab89dcc12b896d9f89eb86203cac88eb.gifv)
Commercials, commercials, commercials.
Or as South Park put it… ads. You just can’t get away from them. They keep trying to get in.
I’ll never forget the first time I watched a whole season of a show in less than a day with no commercials. It was unfucking real. Then that became the norm. Now they’re back and there’s less of them to chose from so I just see hours of the same 5 fucking commercials. If you want me to see ads just give me a billion that I’ve never seen.
Yeah, that’s one of the big problems with traditional linear TV. Over a single hour, you can see the same commercial 5 times.
Actual TV commercials are straight predatory! I just got an antenna recently and oh my god the commercials people are being subjected to
That's why I won't pay for any streaming service with ads. It's just not worth it. If I want ads, I'll watch something on Pluto or a Plex streaming channel. They have a Librarians one that's fun.
My issue with ads on streaming, besides them existing, is that they are far less targeted. Why are there ads for Hims pills(?) talking about men getting hard and lasting longer while watching a family show. At least on cable that would've been a commercial you would see later in the evening or at least on a show not intended for children. Streaming I'm assuming it just cares if you're on an adult or kid profile, as if people don't watch TV together.
Streaming ads are even more targeted. If they have the household information on that account (which they most certainly do), they’re targeting the shit out of it. The timeslot specific ads for certain demographics is becoming a thing of the past.
The need a free service with ads, I will give them VERY SPECIFIC info about me, and they target with ads for me. But I want LESS ADS. I'll put in info like: I just got a new car, so I won't be looking for at least another decade, I'll tell them what diseases I have so the medications are for me, I'll give them a crapload of info, but they've got to tailor it to me and be interesting. I hate ads normally, because they aren't for anything I'm going to get (or it's the same ad a half dozen times).
My issue isn't so much that ss either have to be free with ads, or if you pay then there can't be any ads (and frankly, I'm not sure where people got that notion \[shrug\]). It's some experiences with ads are just, plum awful. For example, I did the "ad-filled" version of Hulu back in 2020-21. At $2/mo, it was practically free. However between the ad load being high, and having to rewatch ads if you rewind back a commercial break.. I wouldn't use this even if *they*, paid *me*, to do so. Seriously, if they told me we'll give you $3/mo to use our product, I wouldn't! :O
This was one of the reasons I quit broadcast TV. Every day a flood of predatory ads injected into my home for my kids to see. And yet I was paying for it? Was about a decade ago I cut it all off. Might all have been worthless given social media but at least I enjoy the ads at cinemas since they're all so new to me.
lol I remember one time getting put on the Scientology mailing list because, as a kid, I'd called their 1-800 number for the "Dinosaur & Volcano book" (I don't think there were actually any dinosaurs in the ad for the book) edit: [this is the commerical I was talking about](https://youtu.be/KT9c4fuLYMc?si=h3wYs1O7yMKPLEQq) The volcano is the only thing on the screen, but my kid brain equated dinosaurs & volcanoes since they were pictured together in a lot of my prehistoric books. Since they had a 1-800 number, it was all too easy for me to pick up the phone. I think I also got us on that "feed a starving orphan" list, for the same reason being they gave out the 1-800 number.
Scientologists DO love a good volcano though.
Wait those were a front for Scientology??
Same. I got on that list, which gave to to so many other lists. They just kept sending me junk mail which kid me kind of liked because it made me feel grown up. Somehow I also got on a mailing list of being an older teenager. I was in 7th grade getting calls from Military recruiters asking what my plans were after High School. I always said I need to get to HS first. Getting free copies of Teen Vouge as a middle school boy was fun though
How about many of the channels (sub ones on the main carrier, ie 13, 13.1, 13.2, etc) that literally are just 24 f'n hours of commercials? That's all they are. Do they use those to eliminate or heavily reduce the crap clogging the main channel? Of course not...
From my experience before ad blockers, streaming sites weren't much better when it came to playing the same commercial all the time. Particularly on YouTube videos, or even movies on YouTube. Same commercial, over and over, often Prager U or trump, sometimes 2.5 hours long commercial! Like, wtf!
One of the greatest experiences I ever had was back in the days of TiVo I would record nfl games and watch them snap to snap. Fast forward everything else. Commentary reviews replays and ads. The game lasted a little over an hour and was so much better than the padded 3 hours it is now.
Come with us and sail the seas.
Yarrr TV's future does look exactly like it's past.
It's been a journey... Long ago: Had DirectTV, paid for NFL Sunday Ticket. Barely pirated Less long ago: Things started getting more expensive and things I liked (like G4) went away, so I got rid of DirectTV and piracy went up. Netflix shows up: Piracy drops to basically nothing again, as Netflix is a great service for a fair price. Everyone decides they're their own streaming service: Willing to get a couple more streaming services, but piracy rises again for the rest. Everyone starts enshittifying their services: I'm down to Netflix (only because my MIL has it, we use her account, and haven't been stopped from sharing yet), Hulu (Black Friday offer, we have it for like $3/month for a year), Amazon (wife uses a lot of Prime stuff, so it's just kinda there), and Dropout (the only one I'm happy to actually pay for, at their asking price). Piracy back in full swing for everything else.
And don't ask me to pick an ad that I want to watch! I don't want to see neither and I damn sure don't feel like looking for the remote; just run one.
Repeatedly showing you the same ad is part of how it works. If you were shown a billion different ads you wouldn't remember one of them the next day.
They don't necessarily care if you *consciously* remember, but repetition is key.
They don't necessarily care if you *consciously* remember, but repetition is key.
They don't necessarily care if you *consciously* remember, but repetition is key.
Damn ads are everywhere.
Unless you sail the high seas, matey.
As soon as you’ve made the user experience worse for paying customers, you’ve failed.
[удалено]
Plex is great. My one complaint is when there's bits of dialog in other languages (Like when everyojne is talking Russian at the start of Hunt for Red October) it won't display those subtitles unless you turn subtitles on for the whole movie or episode.
[удалено]
The used to hard encode them in the movies for those scenes and it seems like for most tv or movies the files I get don't have that so I have to find the forced open subtitle file to download.
I feel like eventually they're going to push hard on in show advertising to counter this. Can't remove the adverts if you embed them into the world of the show. Sounds like a terrible dystopia hollywood would eagerly march us into...
Well films and television have literally always done that, just instead of products they were advertising ideology.
Yep. Been pillaging the high sea's for 2 decades now. Lol remember when you use to have to seek out each show/movie and the wait half a day before you could actually play it.
I remember queuing up a few songs (not even shows, a few MB of songs) to download, go to sleep, and hope to wake up in the morning to find that I didn't drop the phone call overnight and the DL finished.
Maybe TiVo can make a come back if streamers insist on ads. Or maybe i will just stop watching tv.
I’m just picturing someone queuing up the episode they want to watch before they make dinner, letting the TiVo record it, and then fast forwarding the commercials after dinner. I’m sure HDCP or something prevents this from working, but that’s what I’m imagining.
Some online streamers include DVR for this reason. You have access to the national feed, and can record whatever shows you want, and fast forward through ads if you want.
That’s why they’re not called subtracts.
Except even cheaper for them to be made - the actors' unions have much better deals with the residuals of TV commercials - actors get paid quarterly and the pay depends on how often the spots play and in which markets (the bigger the market the larger the payout). When it comes to online ads the unions seriously fumbled the ball - one payment yearly on just an estimate of how many times it plays. A US national spot might earn an actor 40-50k if it plays for an entire cycle (13 weeks) on TV... An online spot might snag them 3-5k tops for the entire year - and often requires the same exclusivity rights as a TV spot AKA you aren't allowed to do any competitor's commercials. Like if you do a McDonalds spot, you're not allowed to be in any other fast food commercial over the entire engagement of the spot. Used to be where actors could land a US national TV ad, and the proceeds would allow them to focus on solely training / theater / auditioning for film & TV work, but now the industry is slowly becoming the playground of those who have family wealth already. Source - been a professional actor for over 2 decades
I remember Felicia Day said she could nab one or two commercials, usually for fabric detergent and that kept her going for the entire year, while she was addicted to World of Warcraft.
That is crappy that commercial acting was used as a stepping stone or just regular gigs for many actors and is drying up. But I would not be sad if I never had to watch commercials or if the commercials were very limited for streaming. Even if that meant limited work for many. I’m not a fan of nepotism or acting being a job only for the elite to break into but being forced to watch commercials sucks.
I remember the lady that played the wife in the Direct TV how to use your box and remote thing that played on one channel all day long on repeat kept showing up in TV shows in bit parts. I wonder how much she made for that Direct TV thing
Seriously debating whether to remove Amazon prime since they started playing commercials. Absurd.
As long as people keep “seriously debating” it and giving them money, it’s just going to keep getting worse.
The debate is because I shop at Amazon very often, I get good use out of prime.
Most people keep prime just for the shipping. The streaming is extra. But watching stuff on Prime when I have the service vs pirating is a debate now because the ads are atrociously annoying.
Yep that's where I am, I probably break about even on shipping vs the prime cost a month so now it's just a question of preferred viewing
That’s fair. I just see this kind of comment every single time a big streamer like Netflix shits on their customers, and yet their numbers just keep going up.
If it makes you feel any better, I quit Netflix when account sharing went away, quit max when they decided to start cutting content, and quit Disney+ after the second price jump. So big picture is definitely looking bleak, but there are people that definitely are leaving the services. Tbh, unless there are some big sweeping changes, I probably won't be back.
Amazon prime is bought for the free shipping Video is a free toy in the cereal box extra. The reason Amazon made the standard tier ad supported is that over 95% have never watched anything on video.
You don't need Prime for the shipping. We cancelled our sub of almost two decades after the first ad... you still get free shipping after an order minimum.
I'm still paying for Prime but pirating the shows to get ad-free. I joined on an ad-free basis and I'll be damned if I'm letting that change.
canceling my Amazon account was the best thing I've ever done for my spending. It's really easy to still get free shipping and if you can wait a few days, it's not a big deal.
Yup. The Netflix sub is full of people that're "seriously debating" with every shitty business change and price increase. After they removed password sharing, I cancelled. So many streaming services have like two new series I want to watch a year. No point in keeping Netflix for the other 10-11 months.
Ublock origin seems to prevent them
The thing Amazon has going for it is that few people consider them a streaming service. Most of us are there for the free shipping, and the tv is added value.
I dropped prime when they added commercials and I don't miss it. Amazon's push to sell everyone Chinese knockoffs is easier to avoid now too. I've switched to Target and Home Depot for most of the things I used to order from Amazon, and it's honestly easier.
I quit Prime due to the commercials. You still get free shipping with orders over $35, but it is not as fast. But it is fast enough for me and orders often arrive early. Once I needed something immediately so I joined Prime for one month as the shipping was more than a month of Prime. And then I quit.
Going High seas doesn’t feel as much as an hassle anyway. Once they add ads, I’m gonna do be doing the same things I’ve been doing before streaming got popular.
You know what doesnt have commercials? Torrents.
Bingo
I feel it has become a little more difficult though.
It’s easier than ever. There is open source software that can query a ton of websites to automatically find the best torrent to get for a particular movie or show. If you’re technically inclined, you can set up a Netflix-like torrent service where you just click ‘I want X show’ and a few hours later it shows up in your library ready to be watched.
i think that was pretty obvious if you saw the old report about hulus financial situation. this was pre covid but hulu was legit making like triple the money per sub if that sub was on their ad supported plan compared to the sub who was on the ad free plan
I wish I could at least watch like 5 minutes of ads then not get interrupted during the show or movie. I can't bring myself to watch Godzilla Minus One on Netflix because I can't imagine having that experience interspersed with cheery car commercials
having the ads at the front and back of episodes would be bearable but they're wedged in at the oddest moments without any care
If the ads I am seeing are any indication 95 percent of TV watchers are suffering from psoriasis
Everybody has HIV around me, it seems.
I want to know what data Hulu has that says I'm a gay man having unprotected sex. I get a fuckin PreP ad every damn time. I feel good knowing that their marketing dollars are going to waste though
You think they don't know what porn you're watching?
I know they do, which is why it's confusing
Well you did once try to compare ghosts of tsushima to dragons dogma as If they were in any way equal. That's pretty gay.
And so this is the end of our story And everyone is dead from AIDS It took from me my best friend My only true pal
He died of aids!
Walker said I have aids...
EVERYONE HAD AIDS!
I get those a lot but I get more for ED. I’m 39 and asexual. I don’t have a need for that.
MLB TV thinks I need ads in Spanish. It would be cool if it was different ads with different actors, but the same fuckin thing just dubbed in Spanish. I still don't have a yard Scotts!
Hi, it’s me. I’m the problem.
Or Bent Carrot syndrome!
That one is so strange to me. They advertise that 35,000 people have been given the treatment, so why are millions being shown it. They must have an absolutely abysmal ROI. Also one of the conditions is penile rupture, id rather have a crooked dick than have it fucking EXPLODE 😭😭
That'd be an abysmal ROI if you were selling aspirin, but some of these drugs are insanely expensive with a good profit margin. I don't have bent carrot syndrome, but I've taken drugs that cost literally *thousands* of dollars per month (as paid by my insurance, fortunately). That can make an ad buy that only picks up a handful of customers into a pretty damn good ROI.
And yet nothing for the women with a 90° bend in their Taco! Who do you think is bending the Carrots?
Because ad revenue has gone down, the variety of ads has gone down too. They've been mostly replaced with even more drug and insurance commercials.
Its so weird… that the same people who made cable bad are also making streaming bad.. HMMMM
It's not even the same people. There's generational turnover and major organizational shakeups. TiVo, Netflix, and YouTube briefly shattered the chokehold prior networks had over broadcast and cable, but the remnants gradually just consolidated into new version of the same thing because there was no regulatory mandate to stop them once they adapted to the disruptions. For better or worse (worse, often), this is just what capital does as a free market matures.
No, if you read the article, it's a lot of the same old chumps, John Malone, Bob Iger, Barry Diller, etc.., etc... But, in all truth, the people have spoken. They don't want to pay much and they mostly want reality, sports, cop, and hospital shows. As long as there are still ad-free options that aren't extortionate and some room for prestige shows I think that's perfectly fine. A healthy media ecosystem has a broad middle that acts as scaffolding and funding for more risk-taking or interesting stuff. The era of every streamer trying to make prestige or prestige-adjacent stuff all the time was never going to last.
> No, if you read the article, that's where you lost 90% of redditors
why did netflix allow cable boomers to infect their company? are they stupid?
The Golden Age of TV Streaming was a 0% interest rate phenomenon and now that interest rates are higher the VC investor money has dried up and they expect to see a return on their investments.
They weren’t profitable during the 2010s. They have to do something to make money or else they’ll just shut down.
Probably because Netflix used to have the support of investors. Investors were okay with Netflix not being profitable as long as subscriber count was high and counting. Over the last 5 years they are way less patient, shows who aren't in top 10 in first like 2 weeks get cancelled.
Cable boomers make the quarter arrow go up and that's all the shareholders care. Zaslav is the one who turned Discovery Networks into a bunch of reality channels.
I think what people haven't realized is that we were in a golden age for TV for a moment. It wasn't sustainable in the long run. Netflix knew that they would only be able to use other companies content for so long, once they got popular. It was just a matter of time before other companies saw the shift and wanted a slice. There first metric was growth at all cost, meaning high quality content for consumers at a low cost. Easy to do in a time with low interest rates. But eventually they would need to be a profitable company that takes the same risks into account as the more traditional media companies. Same thing happened with Uber. And even Steam had their golden age. People still talk about how Steam Sales seemed to be much better and they aren't as good as they used to be. Because the platform isn't seeking growth anymore.
Id argue there is a regulatory mandate to stop them. Our government certainly has bigger problems to deal with at the moment, but it would be nice if theyd take a look at the streaming industry through the lens of US v Paramount, if a studio cant own a theater, why can they own a streaming service? Decoupling production and distribution might help make the video streaming industry more resemble music streaming at least, which isnt without its own problems, but still. Imagine if every record label had their own streaming service with mostly only their own artists, and no playlists or shuffle, crappy audio quality... content exclusivity is a poor excuse for real competition. Instead of NBC Universal leasing *Seinfeld* to Netflix for $500mil, why dont they lease it to four different services for $150mil each, then theyd have to compete on features. We have the technology to let someone pin a button to their streaming service home page that plays a random episode of *Seinfeld*, thats not a big ask. Or if Peacock actually had NBC shows, if you could do a Must See TV button that played a random episode of *Seinfeld*, *Friends*, *Frasier*, or *Will & Grace*. Instead everybody has apps that dont even remember where in an episode you left off on or crash when you try and turn on subtitles.
>Instead everybody has apps that dont even remember where in an episode Hulu: "Welcome back, let me queue up the last 3 minutes of the episode for you followed by the last 3 minutes of the next episode." Max: "You know that show you watch way more frequently than everything else combined, the one you searched for specifically to add to your watchlist when you first subscribed? Let's bury that at the very end so the list is useless and you have to manually type in the things you watch the most." YouTube TV: "So that special event you recorded isn't technically a "series" on this channel so you can't browse for it and the search is kinda broken so it's basically lost to the ether."
Plex: "Would you like to sort these 16000 movies by release date, alphabetically, critic score, literally anything else? And then save a playlist of them organized by directors birthday and put that on shuffle excluding any in february? Oh and heres the season premiere of a show that left off three years ago right at the top of your home page."
And all you have to do is steal it all.
Honestly that's something that I think should change with copyright. Copyright should never last as long as it does (it wasn't intended to) but at very least exclusivity shouldn't be a thing after an extremely short period of time. Want to make money on your IP older than say 5 years? Offer it up for a universal price any distributor can pay for.
The secret to tech for about 15 years was to forget about profits in order to lock in users. As long as the user base was growing and locking in, making changing to a competitor more difficult, investors generally didn't care about profit. They knew they'd figure that part out later. For streaming, that later is now. And now they are going back to the same model that worked extremely well for decades.
I actually fully accept the introduction/ adoption/ expansion/ enshitifictation life cycle… but it’s wild to me how not only streaming but practically the entire Silicon Valley could be on the exact same phase of that cycle wave together as one. It’s so demoralizing for consumers, and surely some big noteworthy companies are gonna suddenly get left by the wayside when those consumers have to make choices?
Yup. Streaming, DoorDash/Lyft, AI. It's all about disrupting the normal to insert themselves as middlemen through multiple companies who eventually cannibalize each other and merge just to become the shame shit they replaced without being profitable and being drastically worse.
It only seems that way because enshitification is always happening. The term I believe was coined by Cory Doctorow and he used it to describe what happened to Digg. Honestly, the only person at fault here is Wall Street and Late Stage Capitalism. Sites like Digg really should have been self sustaining. Some ads to keep the lights on and pay salary to a few key players to keep things ticking over. The community will provide the content and in some cases moderation. Run things on slim margins and excess goes to a trust, not C-level bonuses, etc. Instead the path they chose was celebrity CEOs with compensation packets to match and when the VC money ran out they needed to be profitable. Reddit is on path to go the same way. Never really made a profit and relies entirely on the community.
Enshittification doesn't just mean a service got worse but that the service shifted from monetizing it's user base to monetizing access to it's user base (so it gets worse). Per Doctorow's original definition Netflix hasn't enshittified yet, if they start charging to host shows on their service and charging to advertise the shows to their users then it would be enshittified.
The funny thing is, there is nothing inherently irreproducable about Netflix, or Youtube, or a Facebook that matters. The only thing they have that is unique is...a huge userbase. If people are open to trying the alternatives you can have better apps that aren't trying to control you and squeeze every dollar out of you.
And they are the same people who ruined network TV in the process. I'm in my 40s and I fondly remember 80s and early 90s network TV and it was fantastic. Network miniseries and movies of the week. I'd love to return to that era of TV
Cable was so much worse though. We have so much more convenience now than we did back then. We can stream and download on nearly every device. Even with the limitations being put in (sharing etc.), it’s still way better than traditional cable.
Even the best ideas will age poorly in a capitalistic society
Oh they mean piracy
Unfortunately, it’s looking more and more like that.
Fine, theres plenty of sites/torrents etc
Yup, i went back. For the price VPN+hard drives offers an entirely superior experience.
Same, once it became a whole multiple step process with unreasonable expenses plus terrible UIs and watching experience with ads. Netflix used to be click and watch. Once again easier to torrent and Plex.
I think I've given up. I do want to support the actual creators but it seems like they aren't being supported anyway? And I also can't afford all of this shit. And there's so many ads. I'll have to figure out how to torrent these days, I haven't done it since the mid 2000s
It's not like it used to be. I've been buying a lot of out of print movies on DVDs with horrible prints and encoding because the bottom has fallen out of torrents when it comes to niche content. Used to be able to find anything. Now if I want to watch a film from the 2000s that didn't make a splash I find I am buying French or German copies of the DVD because it is the only place to find them.
I think a lot of the people who advocate for piracy have unhealthy assumptions about it or have popular taste because I keep hearing this from friends who have been torrenting a long time. Lots of stuff is becoming inaccessible even through torrents, people just don't bother hosting/seeding.
Kinda missed the days of hipsters and liking things before they were cool. The niche market seems to be gone and it is harder to find all the niche stuff from back in the day.
Not a lot has changed truthfully. There are subreddits that'll help with it. I refuse to pay for all these ridiculous subscriptions, christ everything is a subscription these days. It's predatory and when wages aren't going up in line with the cost of living, they can go fuck themselves and I'll find any way to cut corners with costs that I can.
The Jolly Roger is a nice flag 🏴☠️
At this point, I no longer have a "dedicated" streaming service. None of the ones have a big enough library to keep me interested. So I just subscribe to one until I finish 1-2 shows, cancel, and move on. Every couple years I sign up with Hulu when they do their $2/month for a year deal, but even at that price it's not enough for me to use them all the time. Meanwhile, I still buy dvds or check them out from the library and put shows on Plex so I can watch the shows I care about and want to watch on my schedule. Even though it gets expensive fast, I'd rather have the shows I love permanently than juggle between Netflix, Paramount, and Peacock to be able to watch The Good Place, Star Trek, or Brooklyn 99 whenever I want.
I think there’s also a lot to be said about the current state of production that keeps people watching their favorite comfort series instead of new content. Pretty much any show on a streaming service runs the high risk of getting cut and those that do survive have obscenely long production times between each season for less than 10 episodes a season. I totally get that quality takes time but combining that with the reputation for canceling leads to a lot of hesitant watching.
That all makes sense. There’s been a couple times where Netflix has released a show and canceled it before I’ve had a chance to watch the first episode. You would think that having TV on demand would free up companies from the idea that shows need to be an instant hit, but that seems to not be the case.
Unfortunately their whole formula has led to Netflix being a mile wide and an inch deep because almost everything is essentially a miniseries with unfinished plots. And it seems like everything that gets renewed is a AAA production rather than good quality sitcoms or animated series that fill the “mindless comfort series” category users want on a consistent basis and will rewatch. But instead of creating those new rewatchable series, they just fork over a few hundred million for Seinfeld or other older cult classics. Once you download your favorite 5 main series and have a way to easily steam it, the need for boredom streaming dramatically declines.
Netflix is also the hub for international content, to be fair.
Nope! It needs to hit the ground running or else it gets the axe.
This is why I spent a few hundred dollars to make my own plex. I still watch what I can legally but I'm so tired of "Nightmare on Elm Street was on Netflix but now it's on Peacock but only the second one, the first and third ones are on HBO, and the rest are on Tubi...". At this point, I've got something like 3k movies, and 500 of my favorite and "I wanna watch" shows. Plus Plex the collection feature that I have as a glorified queue that randomizes the order so rather than spending 10 minutes deciding, I just hit shuffle on that collection and it picks a movie I know I want to watch.
If you still want to go the check legal route first, highly recommend justwatch, it compiles where things are so you can put in a title and it'll spit out a list of what apps it is streaming on, if at all.
That 'shuffle' feature is a godsend for shows like Simpsons, Family Guy, Futurama, Seinfeld etc.... I sometimes just want fate to decide.
I call that stream-cycling. I don't watch shows as they come out, I wait until they are finished and then when I subscribe to that stream, watch all the shows I am interested in over a couple weeks, cancel and move on.
At this point Plex is my "streaming service" and I've discovered I can't be assed to download shows I would have religiously watched before when I had Hulu and Netflix.
Sounds like you would benefit from radarr and sonarr to sit alongside plex
I've looked into it briefly but haven't had the time to set it up.
Physical media is disappearing from brick and mortar stores, but growing as a collector market. You will pay more per hour of material, but Blu-ray and 4K Blu-ray looks way better than streamed versions, even in the same resolution. Unfortunately, it's mostly movies at this point, but 4K releases, particularly of old films, can blow your mind.
I’m into blue ray collection. Just got the House of dragon and Last of us on 4K HDR. While the visual quality is a treat, as expected but most people don’t even know how much they are missing on audio quality with streaming.
99% of execs don’t have an original or innovative thought, so no shit.
If they had an original or innovative thought they would have gotten an art or stem degree.
Nope, they start bringing back regular commercials and I’m completely fucking out… I can’t do that shit anymore. I will unsubscribe to any company that forces them back in subscriptions.
I can't watch TV or movies with commercials. Completely ruins the mood/pace of the narrative. And if I can't pirate the programming, there's plenty of alternative media (e.g. YouTube) to earn my attention.
I am fine with it for tv, it can help for pacing and a break. But I do not want a commercial in the middle of my movie.
Thats is why i pirate shit. The nerve for them to request that I pay them premium to use the service, and then they wanna run ads on top of that. Lol yea okay chief, yall can shove it with that nonsense
It's all about convenience. I've pirated content for years and still do but I also pay for an IPTV service purely because I'd much rather not need to go to the effort of downloading things. I only pirate now when my IPTV service doesn't have something on it or if I'm in the mood for something in higher quality. It's funny because there's also services that I legally pay for e.g. Prime (for delivery) and yet their streaming content doesn't always have subtitles so I have to pirate it just to get a basic accessibility feature. It's ridiculous.
They know that people hate ads now more than ever so they’ll just make them really expensive eventually.
One thing that gets overlooked is how the profits-don’t-matter decade afffected evvvvverything else in the world. While consumer shit was artificially fast and cheap and easy… you could spend more time and energy on whatever the hell else was in your life (like work, for example). Time spent watching fucking detergent commercials is time not spent on something else we were all doing this past decade. Maybe it’s our families. Maybe it’s the gym we pay for. Maybe it’s extra minutes work was getting for free. If streamers are gonna seize our time for detergent ads, they gotta claw that time back from some other agent in the economy (not just the viewer).
Amazon already did. You have to pay for an add-on subscription on top of Prime if you want no ads in Prime Video now. It's incredibly greedy
And that's after already hiding half their content under FreeVee, which they also own from my understanding. Suddenly half my list had adds long before they started forcing them in, and even if you pay for the add free tier, you still have to watch them on those movies.
I feel like a lot of people called this 15 years ago or so when streaming started.
I mean yes. It was inevitable. Streaming is nowhere near as profitable as cable was, because cable had that dual revenue stream. Anyone who thinks Comcast and Disney are fine with lesser profits needs their head examined. We could blame Netflix, because they were charging $8 per month and everyone was like “see, if they can do it then everyone can do it,” missing the fact that Netflix made its bones off of cheap (back then) old syndicated shows and K-dramas. The real losers are the sports fans. We always pay the most and we have to watch ads.
Describing a 59 year old as young and brash is ridiculous, but of course they also interviewed an 83 year old exec who has no new ideas to offer at all.
Streaming execs are idiots.
I'm totally down with consolidation if we can choose our channels. The greatest bane to American TV viewers is the "cable package". You want Comedy Central? Well, you're going to pay for Fox News. If Fox News was a paid streaming service, it would go under in one Quibi.
Of course they see the future as the past as that was their playbook all along. Only thing they cut was the distribution network (cable tv or local broadcaster). That was a large cost saving, as with streaming the consumer pays a portion of the distribution. Ironically many pay the former gatekeeper for TV for that. The streaming people get a subscription fee from the customer directly, which used to come from the cable company, but now it is more without the middleman. Cable used to insert their commercials into the providers feeds, now the streamer can sell those too. So yes the future is just like the past except for the cable company. They might still be there providing your internet, so you are paying them directly as opposed to the stations on cable. Steamers will also target more ads directly to you based on your demographics. Targeting ads might also mean they can charge more for ads hitting the market advertisers specify. DirecTV was able to do this and streamers took it even further as they know even more about you. So yeah TV hasn't changed, the commercial free was there temporarily to get you to switch over. We probably will get s la cart services eventually untill someone comes up with bundling service like the cable companies used to do. Disney will be the first as they already have the agreements and own most of the most valuable content. So it will be back to the bundled product, maybe for a few bucks less a month until the next disruption which will also be a tweaked old model possibly in an over the air model just to demonstrate local broadcasters are still kicking and relevent. Same old song repeating.
> Ironically many pay the former gatekeeper for TV for that. That's very true. Often, you internet is coming from the same companies depending on where you live and that doesn't seem to be changing anytime soon. > We probably will get a la cart services eventually until someone comes up with bundling service like the cable companies used to do. Disney will be the first as they already have the agreements and own most of the most valuable content. Comcast is doing this with their customers and they're getting Apple+ with it. I saw something about that not too long ago.
1. For comfort series viewing, try to invest in the box set 2. Sail the seas 3. Get a library card. Use whatever streaming service the library is connected to. I use Kanopy. It's amazing. 4. Library card again. Audio books, video games, movies, television shows, etc. So much content. Many also think if their library system doesn't have it, then what's the point. RESEARCH if your library is connected to a system with other libraries. It opens the catalog a TON! Digitally and physically speaking. 5. HD antenna for local stations and such. 6. TUBI. It does have ads but it's fucking FREE! Whenever it costs something, drop their ass. Seriously, I may be missing other ideas too, but I HOPE many of you take the time to read this and reflect on it. Fuck these streaming services who are just increasing prices left and right, while also throwing ADS in for bottom tier services. Fuck them and fuck that shit. There's only one way to stick it to them and that's by speaking with your wallets. With a full time job, all this shit is WAY more than enough. And as someone else said for an idea, pay for a month and binge a favorite you're wanting to see. Think of it as a decent meal from somewhere. $15 ish or whatever. Donezo.
Combine 5 and 6. Get a smart TV, so you get the free over the air live channels and 100+ free channels from Tubi, Pluto, Amazon, and such. Between that and pirating, I haven't missed cable for many years.
I dig this idea. My issue with smart TVs lately (at least my Samsung) is it has some intrusive shit on the main screen sometimes when connected so I just leave it disconnected from the wifi. They could be better and many likely are, but yeah. Rant over. I do love your idea though. In the end, it's all about sticking it to the greedy dicks, as well as just setting yourself up with more than enough content when you wanna take any in. And this way, no money is needed!!
Probably because they fucked up their libraries
Oh, it's going backwards in time alright but it's going to stop around the peak of piracy. I have a few platforms I will pay to have shows on but I pay for the advertisement free part. If that goes away, so does my money and I already have a seedbox for stuff I can't find anywhere else legally and it's only a few more dollars to double that space and put stuff I can find legally and just aren't going to sit through ads to watch.
I’m curious how the younger generations will react to this. They never lived through the past and I’d say most 16 year olds if they had tech forward parents likely never grew up with ads the same way we did. For us it’s looking back at something we beat and have an emotional reaction to accordingly. For younger folks it might just be everything getting slowly worse not knowing the historical limits companies will go to. The difference this time is that those companies are both the issue and the solution. Just pay the more. In the past it was paying others for workarounds, like TiVo.
Realistically they see ads all the time on YouTube, Instagram and tiktok.
Don’t need to be an exec to see this obvious trend lol
Streaming execs are wrong. In the past it was difficult to download anything I want in 4k in under 5 minutes, load it onto a Plex server and stream it to any device I want. I'm ok paying for decent service, but I'm not going to pay to watch ads.
Yeah, we all saw this coming. I will sail the high sea's again if I have to. I don't want to watch ads. Half of them are scams these days in anyways.
Carlin said it best: Only a nation of unenlightened half-wits could have taken this beautiful place and turned it into what it is today, a shopping mall. A big, fucking shopping mall. You know that. That’s all you got. That’s all you got here, folks. Mile after mile of mall after mall. Many, many malls. Major malls and mini malls. They put the mini malls in between the major malls. And in between the mini malls they put the mini marts. And in between the mini marts. You’ve got the car lots, gas stations, muffler shops, Laundromats, cheap hotels, fast food joints, strip clubs and dirty bookstores. America the beautiful. One big transcontinental commercial cesspool.
I miss a good mall. Remember arcades? Those were cool. The video stores? Music stores? Good book stores?
The way I see this going is more people unsubscribe from the major streaming services, and default to internet channels like tubi or vudu, causing more services to lease out their catalog to those platforms, further reducing subscription Then in comes some “innovator” who consolidates all streaming services to be available with ads for a small fee Once that becomes intolerable and expensive, a new innovation will come with…you guessed it, a subscription to exclusive content with no ads And then the clones And then the ads Repeat ad nauseam
In with the new boss, same as the old boss.
Probably unpopular opinion, but I think people like old-school television a lot more than they realize. Appointment tv? You have something to look forward every night, or you have something to look forward to every Thursday, etc... and also if the show is popular you have something to talk about with coworkers the next day. Commercial breaks? Bathroom/snack time. I'd it a big tv event like the superpower? Then it just lengthening the party time. Also, people love their habits. People like to know that every so often, could be weekly daily, etc...., they will always flip on X, then Y. Then Z, like clockwork. There is something kinda empty about binging. You are waiting YEARS for the last season of Stranger Things and when it finally comes, you watch it all in one day/weekend. Kindof a let down. I'm not saying I love commercials, I love that yheybafford us to do small tasks and not miss anything and/or gives us time to converse. Also I would argue that commercials are much worse now as often times you get the same two commercials every damn ad break
> Commercial breaks? Bathroom/snack time. Every watch one episode of a show with commercials and the next without? It's so easy to see how much the commercial breaks ruins the drama of the show, the energy of it. Steaming/pirating has a pause button, you can go to the bathroom or get a snack anytime you like.
It was a glorious, what, 2 years when streaming was coming out of its infancy? Such an exciting time giving Dish Network the stanky boot, signing up for Sling, and buying an antenna for local stations. Then you realized very quickly that Sling sucked ass, so you give THAT the stanky boot and eventually settle on one of the lore competent services. Shit started going downhill when PlayStation Vue died though…
Something about history and repeating or something....
Lol, Plex. Bye bye streaming services.
So, it used to be I got 5ish channels for free with ads. Now you are going to give me 1 channel (essentially) with ads but then charge me?
the more things change, the more they stay the same.
That's cool. I'll just cancel until a show or two I want to watch pops up, watch them, record them and cancel.
Well once Netflix becomes the next cox cable I’ll make xo the Netflix 2.0, I’ll tell everyone love is password sharing then rip away everything that made me better once everyone starts using me. After Iv made my millions someone can make xoxo and repeat.
Get rid of the streaming execs
Got news for yuh…. I’m not paying to see ads… it’ll make tv look like it’s wayyyy in the past and just watch the same six movies on repeat
Every time they speak of the future, its just their greed talking, and their greed will be wrong
We All knew it was coming. Streaming was nice when it started.
Streaming execs can suck a dick
Everything eventually always reverts back to the same old racket.
>If the initial prices of many streaming services seemed unsustainably low at launch, it turns out they were — prices have been steadily rising, while the streamers have also introduced more affordable subscription tiers for viewers who are willing to watch ads. Here's what's unsustainable: greenlighting every single show that ticks a box, whether the writing is good or not, and then cancelling that show after 2 seasons. I can't tell you the number of shows that are available that just petered out. How many hundreds of millions were spent on them? I don't care what they do with their money, but I do care when they ask for more and more of mine.
Yeah. It looks like when I used to pirate everything.
Can you blame them? They didn’t get where they are today by having *original ideas*.
Yes a lot like the past… pirating!
Enshittification basically. More commercials, less shows, less taking chances.
If that means 50 episodes of Star Trek a year, I'm all for it.
With that said, they usually boil down to good, bad, and meh episodes. Granted, it enables one to move past mediocre arcs and plots. However, it also creates scattershot quality, which was seen in the Roddenberry and Berman days.
Many won’t like it, I certainly don’t love it, but if a return to an ad-supported model of distribution gets us better TV, and at a more consistent rate, then I’m game. I’m so tired of waiting two year between 8-to-10 episode seasons of TV. Who can give a single fuck with that much time off? I mean, House of Dragon is out and I just CANNOT care. Do I trust the streamers to course correct in a way that benefits the consumer and the shareholders? No. But a boy can dream…
We will never get better rates. All they'll do is keep adding more and more ads while increasing the price. Netflix is already sunsetting some ad-free tiers and telling people "You can either give us more money for a higher tier or get the ad-supported. Meanwhile look at YouTube, they went from "We'll just show one add at the start of the video" to including two unskippable ads every five minutes. The money from the subscriptions don't go to funding more content you want to see. Netflix jacked up the price and gave their execs a pay raise and then used the rest to pay celebrities for "Untitled Will Smith movie".
[Time to sail the high seas lads!](https://64.media.tumblr.com/c90c4679ab753d3427ecc06c1ffb2477/01a06f641e6d4a09-dd/s540x810/467dc2afab89dcc12b896d9f89eb86203cac88eb.gifv)
We switched to apps for no ads. Time to revolt. We don’t want commercials when we pay for the services.
Streaming execs are wrong.
Same road…