Went to check out the “Mr and Mrs Smith” series on Prime (with Donald Glover), and was notified that there would be ads now unless I upgraded. I almost never watch anything on Prime, but figured “why not, I already have it”… and then immediately closed it when I saw that message. Switched back over to Stremio, cause why the fuck would I watch ads when I already pay for the service? Gotta convince the wife to cancel Prime, but it’s next on the chopping block. Only ones left will be youtube music (family still uses it) and Debrid (which will stay for as long as it’s good). Netflix, Hulu, Disney, ESPN, HBO… all of them gone
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.
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.
I considering piracy after Netflix came out. Does it have ads yet.
Edit: wow, that’s not what I meant to type. I haven’t considered piracy since Netflix became a thing. And so far, I haven’t seen any ads on that service. Still finding plenty to watch on that in my spare time as well. Currently enjoying Fall of the House of Usher, the live action One-Piece, and a Supertroopers like show called Tacoma FD.
That’s a long time to consider
No doubt :). Please see updated message.
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.
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?
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.
Paid services with ads are unconscionable and should not be supported, but I do watch Tubi or Pluto sometimes, and it’s not nearly as bad as the amount of ads I see on my parents’ screen with cable
The ads are so much less anxiety inducing as well. At least, on Pluto they are
Agreed, in my experience Tubi and Pluto both have very reasonable length, good quality ads. I declined to re-up on YouTube TV for NCAA football season this year specifically because I can stand their ads. At that price tier, they honestly expect me to sit through My Pillow ads??
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.
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.
Prime has been doing this for ages
And it has been nothing but annoying since they started.
Yep, including the removal of “bought” content.
Yes! I pay for an ad free experience on YouTube but support tells me that ads for their own products don’t count. Fuckers.
When a company gets that hostile in their design to their paying customers is when I start advocating for flying a Jolly Roger.
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.
Still annoying, but hit back and restart the episode. So far that’s caused it to start without the ad for me.
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.
Thanks, I’ll try that!
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.
They advertise as extra $ for ad free, but then they put ads in it. That’s dishonest.
What I have to do whenever I watch a show is start the show, get the pre-roll, exit out, then start the show again. It’s annoying and a stupid hoop to jump through just to not have to watch the same pre-roll over and over.
It’s not skippable as far as I can tell. It also frequently advertises shows I’ve already watched. Sometimes it advertises the show I’m trying to watch.
I’m pretty sure it also has the “ad counter” showing on the screen during this as well.
Here’s what they call it in their docs:
You’ll also see a quick preview only once per day before any show to keep you up-to-date on our original programming.
It’s not an ad, it’s a “preview.” /s
If you exit out and then start the show again, it skips the pre-roll. It’s annoying, but slightly faster than waiting and watching the 30 second pre-roll.
🏴☠️
This is the best summary I could come up with:
After a swift click on “not now,” this viewer cued up one of the more successful titles currently gracing Amazon’s roster — the second season of beefcake vigilante drama Reacher.
Interruptions, which included a spot for another series (Hudson & Rex, starring a German Shepherd detective) and a reminder from the folks at Intuit Turbotax that filling season has commenced, were indeed limited.
“We fought so hard to get rid of commercials,” says Alan Poul, executive producer and director of Max original Tokyo Vice which returns for a second season on Feb. 8.
Paramount expands its own ad-supported tier internationally later in 2024 — and though no official plans have been announced, recent hires at Apple TV+ suggest the tech behemoth will eventually introduce ads as well.
David E. Kelley, the one-time broadcast golden boy who gave audiences Picket Fences, Chicago Hope and Ally McBeal before pivoting to premiere outlets like HBO (Big Little Lies) and Netflix (The Lincoln Lawyer), seems similarly disenchanted.
Netflix, which recently cited that 40 percent of all new sign-ups opt for ads, announced the “retirement” of its least expensive commercial-free tier in the coming second quarter.
The original article contains 1,205 words, the summary contains 191 words. Saved 84%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Yo ho ho I took a bite of Gum Gum!
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!
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.
Why are you on basic cable for network tv? It’s broadcast over the air in HD for free.
Some people live in areas with poor service even with beefy antennas.
Get an hdhomerun or equivalent for local TV at home in a streaming format. It even integrates into Plex for DVR.
A cheaper solution (if you’re already running a server) would be TVheadend and a cheap USB-dongle for DVB-T, DVB-C or DVB-S.
Wait… They add advertising in the middle of shows? I thought it would be at the beginning, between episodes, on the UI, etc.
Nope, it’s classic ad breaks, but since the shows weren’t made expecting them the ads just appear suddenly every X minutes instead.
And with streaming, you’re not locked into a 42-47 minute long episode either, so are some episodes going to have more, or is there someone with a stop watch going “this seems like a good place for an ad break”?
That’s a long article - here, put some music on while you read.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
put some music on while you read
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
As I ironically, read the article, ads kept appearing over text.
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…
Start?
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.
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”
