Anf it’s a heave-ho-hi-ho, comin’ down the Bay
Stealin’ films and movies and all the other games
And it’s a ho-hey-hi-hey, corpos bar your doors
When you see the Jolly Roger on Francisco’s mighty shores!
Well, you’d think the local corpos would know that I’m at large
But just the other day I found an unprotected RAR
I snuck up right behind them and they were none the wiser
I grabbed the film and “stole” it, and screwed the advertiser
Beautiful take on the Arrogant Worms classic! <3
Thanks! It’s one of my favourite songs, though I usually prefer the Captain Tractor version, heh
As I ironically, read the article, ads kept appearing over text.
Stop supporting greedy bastards that are trying to push hard psychological manipulation down you throat, only for you to buy so shit no-one needs.
It’s so weird that everybody knows how bad propaganda is and yet we let corporations do it to us hundreds of times per day every single day.
I let all my streaming subscriptions die off when my debit card expired this year and I haven’t looked back. Gaming is cheaper and more entertaining. All the new movies I would want to watch never make it to streaming services anyway (without an additional rental fee)
Just wait until games start injecting ads…
That’s all fine and good but I want to point out so everyone can watch out for this - sometimes if you have a subscription and your card expires or gets lost/stolen and replaced, companies can somehow get your new card info without you giving it to them and keep your shit active. So you can’t assume that a new card will take care of old subscriptions that you totally forgot about. You have to check your statements.
That sounds an awful lot like credit card fraud to me!
That’s some bullshit. I hate that they can do that. They spin it as a convenience but I’d rather update all my accounts with the new card manually.
I had to deal with rhis with Doordash. Someone was making purchases on there with a card. I called an cancelled the card and get a replacement. Charges start coming in on the new card. Cancel and replace again. Charges still keep coming. I finally had to yalk to Doordash for hours to get them to remove the original card.
What an absolute anti-feature.
I think you might be able to call your bank and ask them to turn off this “service”
Yeah if you buy good games they have a much better cost to entertainment ratios than having a bunch of streaming services do. It’s the games I end up not liking that ruin it.
Because they HAVE to increase their share values year after year; just making billions isn’t good enough, they have to make more billions compared to the last year.
It’s truly pure greed, as streaming was amazing when it first started, and Netflix was making a killing even back then. But now, nope, fuck you all, we want more and more until we can’t squeeze anything more out from you.
It’s why I’ve increased my kodi/real debrid usage over the past few years
I’ve tried to argue a company that made $800k profit this year even tho they made $900k last year is still a profitable business and people unironically argue that company is dying and bad…
Big number = good Smaller number = bad
It works for them when dealing with shareholders
I’m amazed that they have any customers paying to listen to ads. I wont stand for it and I find it surprising others would.
The alternative is either:
- Don’t watch the show / movie you wanted to - unacceptable sacrifice for a lot of people.
- Break the law / pirate - some people really dislike this, or else are scared, or are not technically savvy enough to know how to or that it’s even an option.
- Sometimes it’s too much trouble, like if you pirate a show you need to get subtitles in your own language and hope the times line up.
I agree it’s unacceptable for me, but I also get why so many people just put up with it.
Do these services not offer a more expensive ad-free plan?
I’m sure they do, but I issue is they already were / should have been making a profit on the existing, bottom tier ad free plan. Now it’s just price gouging by adding ads to existing tier instead of adding new cheaper tier with ads.
In one year Amazon made it impossible to listen to albums on Prime Music, and shoved ads into everything on Prime Video.
Easy cancel for me. I can go without your next day shipping.
Better still I can buy from someone else.
Qobuz
I haven’t used streaming services in a couple of years. Now I’m just doing all piracy and watching it through my Jellyfin server
I just recently stopped as well… Have to still cancel prime though
It just requires so much more foresight in planning what you’re going to watch.
Not with enough server space.
It’s a fair criticism but I find the drawbacks to be quite tolerable compared to the benefits. Each person must do their own calculus. As the user above alluded to, there are apps which make the experience almost seamless. My two favourite apps ever are Radarr and Sonarr.
Jellyfin Jellyseerr Radarr Sonarr Jackett Transmission
Rock and roller cola wars, I can’t take it anymore!
I’ve migrated to prowlarr from jackett. It’s far faster in searches.
I’ll do the same
I can request a show, do a load of laundry and have it available. I’ve decent enough Internet where a movie can be available in as little as 5 minutes if it finds a nice little hevc webrip. I get that it’s not instant but a proper setup can have you rocking and rolling in under an hour.
Streaming services aren’t much better, they regularly didn’t have what I wanted to watch and I’m not subscribing to more than one. Now I’m subscribing to none and watch what I want instead of what Netflix has available.
Just here to remind everyone while piracy is important, it’s also very important to teach the less tech savy among your acquaintances how to pirate too. Conglomerates only learn when their bottom line is effected after all, so teach all your friends how to hoist that black flag.
IF you go down that route, there needs to be a warning: Do it properly, use a VPN if you are torrenting, get a usenet account if you want fast speeds that encrypts the connection and so on - basically, teach it correct. Because some countries or rather law agencies WILL hunt you down if they even get some hint of your actual IP-Address…
Or they send a DMCA to your ISP, and then your ISP gives you 3 warnings and a boot. VPN is the way.
Yeah. I’ve only really got one ISP option at my house that isn’t DSL.
I considering piracy after Netflix came out. Does it have ads yet.
That’s a long time to consider
Used DVDs at pawn shops and thrift stores ftw.
This. Just yesterday I bought a batch of films, DVD’s 1$ and Blu-Rays 1,5$ a piece. And they were mostly new films.
DVD’s are perfectly fine for TV and Blu-Rays for my projector.
I never jumped to the streaming bandwagon and my disc collection has grown exponentially in the last few years, since most people gave up on discs. Their loss.
Curious about your movie-buying habits… How do you determine what you buy? Movies that look interesting? That you’ve seen before? A little bit of both?
Any tips to get started?
I think Debrid services are the easiest and safest to get started. They download files for you from various services (share hosters and torrents), and then let you download them from their servers. That means only they know your IP (but don’t log it, like a VPN), and they also download with full speed from sites that require a premium account, for a fraction of the cost. With RDT-Client you can also use some of them with Arr apps, once you get to automating the process.
Another thing would be Usenet. It’s surprisingly easy to set up and get started, just find a provider, some indexers, and a download client. It has a ton of good content, and it doesn’t depend on seeders for file availability and high download speeds.
With those two you can download anonymously and at high speeds from all the popular sources (most share hosters, torrents, Usenet), and you don’t run the risk of leaking your IP because you haven’t set things up correctly.
So are commercial randomly placed, or are the shows paced to have commercial breaks like the old tv days?
Content providers can probably include chapter markers in their content. I also suspect it’s not hard to detect a scene transition. Failing these, randomly placed.
This was my problem with hulu back in the day. Short episodes like Futurama would have a commercial shoved in at like 3 minutes and then again at 10 or whatever, it was obnoxious and shittily implemented.
The thing I always noticed when a service places their own ads, is even when there are “ad breaks” on the timeline, the ads don’t always show up there. Or the screen blacks out for a few seconds, then the show plays, THEN the ad would play.
Granted, this was a while ago when I actually put up with that bullshit, so maybe it’s changed by now. But it was done very, very sloppily and is almost certainly a creator’s worst nightmare for the story.
This is why I’m sailing the high seas again.
Because the underlying conditions are the same as last time.
Hoist the colors
Hoist up the thing! Batten down the whatsit!
What’s that thing spinning? Somebody should stop it!
Turn hard to port! (That’s not port) Now I’ve got it!
Trust me, I’m in control!
Okay, I need to say it: having an ad for your own programming is still an ad.
Paramount. I’m looking at you, Paramount. I don’t want to watch your shitty movie/TV show/whatever about the shitty mom from the His Dark Materials series losing another kid. Stop playing the same goddamn ad for it before every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Especially since you feel the need to double whatever goddamn volume I have set in the opening to the ad. I pay for the subscription, I already bought your product. Fuck off with your shitty ad.
I mean, others do it too and it pisses me off, but I’m on Season 2 of TNG and I may just have to get it some other way and canceling Paramount because that ad has started really getting to me.
When a company gets that hostile in their design to their paying customers is when I start advocating for flying a Jolly Roger.
Prime has been doing this for ages
And it has been nothing but annoying since they started.
Yep, including the removal of “bought” content.
Honestly, a preview for another show on the same service doesn’t bother me AS LONG AS it is skippable. I’ve never used paramount so I’m not sure if that’s the case.
If I’m being honest when I was a kid part of the fun of going to the movies was the previews before, finding out about upcoming movies and what not.
I do agree that you shouldn’t see the same preview every episode cause that’s super annoying. But I’d be totally fine with one per session or something. Again, as long as it’s skippable right from the start.
It’s not skippable as far as I can tell. It also frequently advertises shows I’ve already watched. Sometimes it advertises the show I’m trying to watch.
I’m pretty sure it also has the “ad counter” showing on the screen during this as well.
Here’s what they call it in their docs:
You’ll also see a quick preview only once per day before any show to keep you up-to-date on our original programming.
It’s not an ad, it’s a “preview.” /s
Still annoying, but hit back and restart the episode. So far that’s caused it to start without the ad for me.
Thanks, I’ll try that!
That is the problem. Why should i be doing that? Aren’t I paying them for my convenience? At this rate pirating sites make me do lesser hassle than the legit sites.
Oh I know. Having issues with my plex server, so I’m currently subscribed to Disney/Hulu, Netflix, paramount & max. Paramount is straight trash, so many issues. Max won’t save my play history half of the time, one show it won’t even put in the continue watching section so I have to search for it every time. Shouldn’t have to deal with all this crap when you’re paying for it.
Yes! I pay for an ad free experience on YouTube but support tells me that ads for their own products don’t count. Fuckers.
Paramount definitely seems to be the worst about this … their app in general is really frustrating.
Max does it occasionally but it’s rare enough I don’t notice.
I’m using this streaming service called Sonarr+plex. No ads so far.
Kinda, Plex still changes my homepage with their ads once in a while
One of many reasons to use Jellyfin instead of Plex.
Given that I have a lifetime Plex pass, what are the advantages that jellyfin would give me?
I got the Plex pass years ago when they were on sale, and it’s nice that Plex has apps for mobile devices and smart TVs.
Is there a media server that allows accounts to have groups of profiles?
Even emby, or jellyfin don’t support this. Really wish they did. Then I can give each household a single account for their device and have a netflix like experience
I would pay for someone to have a server that tracked who watched something. Not just assume the “account owner” watched it but the other people sitting next to them too.
Apparently the creators of these apps are all loners.
I’m not really sure what you mean by “groups” of profiles, but you can definitely set up multiple different users on Jellyfin
With different permissions
yes. My kids have an account that can only see kids stuff (and they are not admins either of course). I have admin rights. My wife can see everything but no admin rights. If you mean “I need a KIDS group where I can put all my kids’ accounts so they inherit the same permissions” then no.
You can set up different user accounts and grant them different levels of access and functionality (i.e. disallow CPU-hogging transcodes). Users can also be restricted by MAC and hidden from the login screen unless you know the exact login name.
I have Jellyfin on my NAS and the “TV” user with which the living room TV is logged in only has permission to see certain folders of my movie library.
I wonder if what they’re asking for is some sort of RBAC? All members of house A can all access content A and cannot access content B. But each individual retains distinct viewing history.
Jellyfin allows you to hide any profile from the login screen. If you hide them all, every user would have to manually login (username+password). That’s not quite the Netflix-like experience where you click your profile, but it would at least hide all the users from other households (but also your own).
TV economics are hard. I think where basic cable and network TV make it work is that the content was filmed in a way to have natural ad breaks to make it less disruptive to the viewing experience. That becomes terrible when you shoehorn ads into places they don’t belong. On the other hand, watching that content without ad breaks that was filmed with ad breaks also plays out weird because you’ll have that commercial cliffhaner music/scene that is quickly followed with resolution before you have time to wonder “what is going to happen?” So shit gets weird when you have a tier model where some people get ad breaks and others don’t because your content isn’t made to satisfy both use cases.
TV is expensive to make and these are businesses that make money. A simple reductive “if user pays any money they deserve no ads” problem. It’s a challenge of things like “The business needs to make X dollars per user and if we have ads we need to charge Y bucks where Y = X - expected ad revenue.” The other challenge is in order to have an ad business you need to convince advertisers you have ad viewers they want to reach. Well, advertisers like rich people with lots of money, and they probably don’t have the cheaper ad supported tiers. So can a TV company really support a completely ad free tier? Or do they still need to serve some, but less ads, to make sure their advertisers know they can get their ads seen by the platforms richest users?
I mean, it’s pretty simple for me in that I won’t pay for a streaming service that has ads. Others might, but I don’t care what others pay for. I left cable for this reason and I’ll leave its next incarnation if that is to be.
It’s an industry that’s earning literal billions every single year…they absolutely don’t need to have ads, they could serve their paying users a good ad-free product, and still make money. They choose to deliberately annoy their paying customers because they’re fucking greedy.
Fake news. Netflix is the only one making a profit. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/17/hollywood-streaming-profits-struggles.html
I don’t know why lemmy users love spreading misinformation that all streaming platforms are taking in profit hand over fist.
I’m not talkong about streaming services in an isolated case, I’m talking about the entire company behind it. It only makes sense to evaluate them as a whole and not their subcategories in isolation from the rest of their company.
Paramount, Disney and HBO are profiting in the billions.
You were talking about the streaming platform specifically as an industry.
it’s an industry that’s earning literal billions every single year…they absolutely don’t need to have ads, they could serve their paying users a good ad-free product, and still make money. They choose to deliberately annoy their paying customers because they’re fucking greedy.
It’s okay to be corrected.
They choose to deliberately annoy their paying customers because…
Capitalism. Must not only make profits, and must not only make the same profits as last time, but must make MORE profits. They must always increase or else you’re declining according to capitalism. The greed is built in to the system.
Fuck the system.
It is worse than broadcast.
If you learn anything about screenwriting, there are certain patterns and structures you follow (like acts in a play) to accommodate commercials, like to build suspense and keep the viewer interested and not changing the channel.
Streaming never had this, if you look at shows written for these platforms. The writers either ignored or didn’t even know about these conventions.
Now adding commercials later, it is even more annoying to the viewer as the original material was not meant to accommodate them.
Streaming just keeps fucking up. I already canceled my netflix. I’m on basic cable for network tv and I just pirate everything else.
By streamers ignoring all the decades of broadcasting experience, and all established what’s fair air-time for both content and commercial. That’s the frustration… they’re rewriting standards… “my company, my content, my timings, my bottom-line”. And doing it poorly. And at top speed.
And with streaming, you’re not locked into a 42-47 minute long episode either, so are some episodes going to have more, or is there someone with a stop watch going “this seems like a good place for an ad break”?
Get an hdhomerun or equivalent for local TV at home in a streaming format. It even integrates into Plex for DVR.
A cheaper solution (if you’re already running a server) would be TVheadend and a cheap USB-dongle for DVB-T, DVB-C or DVB-S.
Wait… They add advertising in the middle of shows? I thought it would be at the beginning, between episodes, on the UI, etc.
Nope, it’s classic ad breaks, but since the shows weren’t made expecting them the ads just appear suddenly every X minutes instead.
Why are you on basic cable for network tv? It’s broadcast over the air in HD for free.
Some people live in areas with poor service even with beefy antennas.
