Lol all this time these media companies have had to change their models to align with market forces, we’ve watched them hem and haw, drag their feet, etc. this step shows they never wanted things to change at all, and they have the power and the money to keep change from happening. finally we see them at their end game, harnessing the Internets power for something so tiny. To them, the only benefit to this technology is cutting out the middleman and b bringing able packages to you without negotiations with a cable service.
Their minds are so small, but this and worse is their greatest dream. It’s a terrible, venal world that small minds lead us to isn’t it?
And with channels and continuous running shows comes more potential for commercials which will always be the end goal…
“They’re paying us for the service and advertising is paying us! It’s a win-lose! My favorite kind!”
And ads. Lots of ads.
Did they say ads?
it’s implied
Is it? If they’re going to make this available for a free/ad priced tier I could see showing ads. But not for the ad free tier.
it was mostly a joke but I wouldn’t be too suprised if they actually start showing ads too
If it weren’t for those pesky content breaks every now and then, they could serve even more ads. Won’t somebody think of the shareholders?
The ads are the content.
Those damn consumers are so entitled! Why can’t we just serve ads continually instead of having to produce expensive content?
How are these super low resolution screenshots taken? Is anyone still using phones with a screen resolution that low?
This screenshot is a WEBP file.
I image it started life as JPEG, and then lost pixels every time it was re-uploaded. At some point, it was either converted into a WEBP file and uploaded to Lemmy, or Lemmy converted it into one. Either way, it always uses about 70% compression for WEBP files, so you end up with already compressed file getting compressed again.
I just tested uploading a WEBP file to Lemmy, and the picts-rs backend made it a) bigger and b) worse.
Except WEBP, unlike (most versions of) JPEG, can be compressed without quality loss. This is probably a mix of reuploading a JPEG and a bad encoding by Lemmy’s side. It should be fixed if you uploaded an already webp encoded image, so lemmy doesn’t try to reformat it, but for a sequels meme it’s not worth the time
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There are a lot of movies I’ve seen half of, a million times, or ones I’d never watch but have seen a million times because, I or my mother respectively, put on TBS, TNT, etc
I’m old enough to remember the promise that cable TV was paid so you wouldn’t have commercials…it lasted what, 6 months? The channels without commercials cost extra…le sigh
Yep. It was pretty clear streaming services were always going to end up the same way from the start. Even YouTube has, although that was harder to predict when it was mostly 30s cat videos.
The predictable backstop of subscription plus the nearly limitless potential upside of ad sales is just too tempting in the long run for media companies. They get to have their cake and eat it too. Spotify, Amazon, Netflix and have all eventually given in, despite insisting they never would. Shareholder owned media companies will always gravitate to this model. It’s the only way to maximize quarterly revenue growth.
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The Solution: Stremio+Torrentio
Let me guess: which channels you have access to depend on your subscription level? Fuck these jerks.
And they make sure that you have to buy the full package to get what you want.
New movie releases only costs $10 per streaming on the platinum-full-extended-live-ultra-package.
Pretty wild to want to add channel when:
- their interface is garbage
- their content is pretty lacking
If they play any “pay for that channel”, it’s insta unsub
I’m already thinking about it. I can’t watch new content outside the service, so if I’m torrenting for long term storage regardless, why am I paying in the first place?
I’ve dropped all streaming services, well save for my YouTube Music/Premium subscription I got grandfathered into when Google Play Music was brutally murdered.
At this point, I’ll just find alternatives.
I always have trouble watching Disney streams. Bad quality, buffering, slow loading. I usually just pirate the show and switch to Plex because apparently I can run a better streaming service than Disney.
I like to sail through the 7 seas: No ads, no monthly payments, all content in only one website. Best deal! Aye aye!🏴☠️
The most frustrating thing about their interface is that if you’ve already watched an episode of something, then try to watch it again, it’ll immediately minimize it to start the “next episode” countdown.
It’s been ongoing.
And Disney+ is so crowded with garbage now that they’ve integrated Hulu’s content into it.
only reason I still have disney+ is because my cousin used to borrow it from me. then I stopped paying for it and he was too lazy to make his own account to he just started paying mine. I’ve had free disney+ for year and a half now
Wow that kinda took an unexpected turn. Doing something nice does come back around sometimes huh?
for real. it still baffles me that he just didn’t make his own :D but sometimes nice things do happen
Same thing happened w my mom and Netflix. Except I still don’t use it
The ads are coming! the ads are coming! -Modern Paul Revere
I can’t see this sticking. The only people I know who have cable are my Boomer parents. The model is dead.
Only for $300/month, with a 2 year contract
And endless options for renewal
With ads!
The only good thing about streaming services is theoretically they aren’t region tied.
They usually are though. Most content (excluding their own) is not available in all regions due to licensing issues.
Most content (excluding their own) is not available in all regions due to licensing issues.
Actually, even including their own for some dumb reason. For instance, Paramount holds the rights to Star Trek, but there’s no way for me to stream some of the shows legally, because Paramount+ isn’t available where I live.
Which to me makes no sense. It’s just a freaking website, globally accessible, hosting content they own…
Expanding to other countries can probably be a bit complicated and maybe they don’t feel like it’s worth it.
Personally I barely care about copyright laws, and in cases like these I don’t give a single fuck. I won’t call the piracy justified like the deranged people in r/piracy (and especially it’s Lemmy equivalent) would. It’s not like I deserve to watch the content or anything, I just don’t care
🏴☠️🏴☠️ argh, matey
Minus ad breaks, I missed this aspect of content consumption. Choosing to watch a random episode of a random show just doesn’t happen and I missed being able to just “see what’s on”. I spent a fair amount of time setting up random “channels” I can tune into that play random episodes from tv shows on my media server and it’s great.
A lot of newer shows cannot be watched randomly though because the episodes actually build upon each other.
If you take older shows like TNG or X files: you could easily jump back in after missing half a season. The episodes were written to be mostly self-contained, because missing an episode or two because of life was very very common. Season finales were often a major exception, and were therefore also majority advertised so people knew to plan around them.
If you write a show for streaming, however, there is no concept of “missing an episode”. So the writers are freed from that constraint, and subsequently write shows that are only meant to be watched in their entirety, in order.
Interesting to see it as being freed from a constraint rather than a crutch that viewers can be relied upon to watch all episodes. IMO writing satisfying one episode arc that also makes up part of a wider arc is much more difficult, and many shows now really have just a single arc that only gets good in the last third, making it essentially a 6-8 hour movie rather than an episodic show.
Yeah, you can definitely see a trend towards more HBO style shows as streaming took off.
I remember watching an episode of The Wire, and somebody else watched it with me and didn’t like it because they didn’t know what was going on and the story wasn’t resolved in an hour. I’m like 10 episodes in, and this ain’t Columbo.
This has been the plan for decades.
Telecom companies existed before the internet and have made every effort their television fiefdoms would have the right to own it as well.
Then again the only bastion of defense against this has been a parade of old ass people who don’t own computers and were handed a smartphone 15 years ago but only want campaign donations in exchange for not understanding the problem.
So it really wasn’t much effort at all to turn the internet into TV 2.0.
