I’d seen rumours online but got the email this morning.
Would drop prime but I use it mainly for the shipping advantages and dont watch anything on it except 2 shows
You do you. But I would like to point out that prime encourages excessive consumption of crap we all don’t need. Maybe this bullshit will let you consider dumping prime altogether and perhaps you will find that it isn’t missed.
Personally I do buy stuff from amazon on occasion. Like windshield wipers of odd sizes. But the lack of two day shipping is a good moderator to help me curb my american programmed buy-fucking-everything-to-fill-that-hole-inside mentality.
If you live in an urban area it’s often cheaper for grocery essentials you would totally buy anyway, I have prime for shipping purposes and can’t remember the last time I bought a non-grocery/drug item… maybe an SD card? But I like, needed an SD card for a specific task I wasn’t just buying SD cards because they look sexy.
Won’t help with live events, but over time, a NAS & a VPN is cheaper than streaming.
You mean the lip sync concerts?
Or the sports which can easily cost over 100 to watch some sweaty guys make millions while you scream at your tv?
And I just cancelled. Fuck them. This is 1990’s pay TV repeating itself. I’m not playing that part of history again.
that looks to be almost all steaming services adding an ad-supported option, you now pay to not have ads.
Back to the high sea’s to watch anything then
Edit: ignore this. They actually do offer an adfree sub
But Amazon is not doing this. They show ads on the one subscription they have, that they already recently have raised the price for. This is higher price for lower quality and no option to upgrade or downgrade. They leave you the option to stay or leave
It says in the email that you can pay extra for ad free.
Sorry. I missed that
Yo ho ho, shiver me timbers, what a crew the Jolly Roger is getting
Well guess what, I’ll retain my “access” to such content on Amazon, but if I’m arsed to watch one of their stupid shows I’ll do that elsewhere anyway.
You don’t actually have to pay Amazon anything. I suggest you consider this.
Exactly.
I canceled my sub when I got the email. I’m going to pirate anything I want to see from them from now on.
Consider: Pirate everything. It’s just a race to the bottom. The average you can charge for an ad tiered service will just continue shifting up as each streaming service gently increases their ad-free prices. If it was ~$15/mo avg before this, now Netflix sees the avg price go to $15.57/mo. If you’re going to increase the price by 57¢ you might as well make it a nice round $1…Then Hulu sees the average go to $16.13 so then they need to increase their prices. So on and so forth until we’re back to paying $60/mo like we did for cable TV.
And here’s the kicker. They’re legally obligated to do this because they could be sued by shareholders for not trying to make more money. And that’s without mentioning that they actually prefer people to watch the ads because they generate more revenue from sponsored advertising. Pirating is ethical and cool. Paying subscription fees to trillion dollar corporations is cringe.
Profit margins are the concern of people who actually respect capitalism, which I do not.
Steal, motherfucking, everything.
To be fair, coupling free shipment with video was strange to begin with. So, they are decoupling it a bit. I do not care about Amazon video, why should I pay for it at all?
when they do fully separate the two unrelated services and people have separate charges for each, they’ll soon realize how many people only watched it because it was tacked-on in the first place.
I only have Netflix left, for the kids. Everything else I obtain “elsewhere”.
Same but Disney+ because they’re young but since they’re not ours and we only babysit then on weekends, if we decide to move I’ll be able to also cancel that…
I have Disney+ until Jun when my annual subscription renews.
As they’ve decide to hike the price I won’t be renewing, for the little it’s used they can pull from other sources.
I’ll keep Netflix for the others in the house.
That’s unfortunate. Prime video had some shows that were good and it had a really cool feature where you got information about the actors on your phone while you were chromecasting. Everyone with lines got a card with their name, characters name (if it’s revealed) and what they are known for. Video was the only part of the company that I am not actively boycotting but I guess its piracy all the way now.
I dropped Prime before any of this happened. I was paying mostly for the two-day shipping, which became increasingly longer than two days.
What made me quit it was when I ordered two of the same item from the same seller, but one shipped from the seller and one direct from Amazon. Both were listed in stock. The one shipped by the seller arrived in three days. The one shipped by Amazon had not yet shipped after the first week. I even contacted the seller, who suggested I cancel, but Amazon wouldn’t accept my cancelation, so I had to wait more than two weeks for it to ship.
Turns out I was a fool to be paying Amazon all that time for a sub-optimal service. And I’ve saved so much money ever since when I can’t just buy things with free shipping. In fact, I rarely buy anything from Amazon at all anymore.
So this? This tracks with the direction they’ve been heading for a long time, and it doesn’t surprise me one bit.
I’ve had free prime for years, I signed up for a free trial on an empty visa gift card. Every time I log in, it complains that they couldn’t collect payment, but it keeps giving me prime benefits, I’m coming up on 2 years like this.
That’s honestly great! I’ve gotta start enrolling for things with those types of cards.
I received one of these as well. I pay for Prime for other reasons and pirate any shows I want to watch cuz fuck watching ads.
I’m in the same boat. I have noticed that delivery services have been getting worse and worse though, and paying for returns is painful.
Maybe I should try getting rid of it… I tried that with Netflix a few months back and have had no desire to resubscribe.
I cancelled Prime as soon as I got this email. It was set to renew in February so perfect timing. I also sent them an email to provide some feedback about the change:
I cancelled my membership as soon as I received notification that you would be including ads to a PAID streaming service. I cannot believe that you think asking for more money per month to have an ad free experience is ok. The world is going to shit because of greedy corporations like you. I hope you go bankrupt and Jeff Bezos goes looking for the Titanic in a poorly made submarine.
Exactly what I did too! Sadly, most Americans would gladly continue paying for their lessened experience. When faced with potentially losing a tiny bit of content, most Americans will gladly pull down their pants.
100% agree. The reason we are in this situation is because people are so fucking complacent. They downplay/justify these shitty practices repeatedly and corporations just get away with worse and worse shit.
Funny that it’s 2.99 no matter what currency you’re using… I’m saving money by living in Canada!
But Prime is $99 in Canada vs $140 in the US, so it’s a bigger increase percentage-wise
Just means it’s all bullshit.
I’ve had prime since almost day one. Lately I’ve been trying to reduce my dependency on Amazon which isn’t easy when you’re already paying them in advance for shipping just to keep prime video and a few free games and ebooks. This was the push I needed to finally sever that tie add release myself from their trap. Good riddance Amazon.
Yeah, had it for years. They ruined their default Music sub earlier in the year so I got Spotify out of spite instead of upgrading it.
When I heard about this change a few months back I cancelled on the spot.
Options:
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Pay no extra and suffer annoying adverts in all movies and shows.
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Pay an extra £35.88 a year to get the same awful experience you had before.
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Save £95 a year and cancel it. Spend your savings on a VPN, and look into Jellyfin, Radarr and Sonarr. BEST VALUE
How does a VPN give you access to shows on Amazon that require Prime? Or do you mean it’ll just give you access to more shows than you’d have otherwise?
The VPN is to shield yourself from DMCA (in the US, of course) while you sail the high seas.
Probably meant in the context of hiding your piracy activities.
like the other poster said it doesnt give you access to amazon’s shows on amazon’s site. Helpful pirates all over the world tirelessly upload “amazon’s” content to the grand line. When I tell people about a show I’m loving it’s always an interesting conversation when they ask me ‘what service is it on?’ and i straight up have no idea.
perhaps you already know this, but if you don’t, MOST pirate streaming sites have everything from every service right there in a searchable webpage that looks like (usually a discount version but sometimes superior) a paid streaming site.
It’s not even cope to say they are generally easier to navigate and search than the services you have to PAY for. All you need is ublock origin <—(non-negotiable) and you have access to a superior service IMMEDIATELY.
Is there a guide for dummies you’d recommend. PVR and etc are unknown terms for me. I used to torrent under vpn but that was in the Limewire days… hoping for some help in the safest ways to return to the seas.
There’s plenty of guides for Linux, but with Windows you’re a bit more reliant on installers and reading some of the guides about setting all the bits up.
Off the top of my head, you need:
qBittorrent (for downloading, turn on the web interface, and you can configure it to do nothing if not connected to your VPN)
Prowlarr (this scrapes torrent data from websites and collates it all together for the other parts of this system, add some sources once you install that)
Radarr (browse movies and pick which ones you want, link it to Prowlarr and qBittorrent, give it a folder e.g. D:\Movies to download into)
Sonarr (same as Radarr but for TV, again link it to Prowlarr and qBittorrent, give it a different folder e.g. D:\TV to download into)
Jellyfin (an open source Netflix, allows you to play the stuff you downloaded in a pretty web UI, or through a client program you can get for a couple of platforms, add the folders you told Radarr and Sonarr to download to)
Then you tweak everything that annoys you. By default it’s quite happy to grab full 60GB+ Blu-ray releases, which is fine if you’re on a fast connection and have lots of storage, but if a movie is over 10GB or so, it all looks the same to me. Depending on how you watch, you might have to mess with Jellyfin clients to figure out why certain videos won’t play. It’s pretty good but it’s not perfect.
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