Starting from January 29, 2024, Amazon Prime Video will begin showing ads alongside content unless customers pay an additional fee of $2.99 per month. This change is aimed at allowing Amazon to continue investing in compelling content and increasing its investment over a long period of time. Customers can avoid ads by paying the additional fee on top of their monthly or yearly Amazon Prime subscription.
If I want to watch an old film, a bad film, or an old bad film, I pay for it or I don’t watch it.
I’ve bought films on Amazon rather than get off my butt to put the DVD in the player. So you can guess that if I don’t have access to it at the moment that I’ll pay for it. I bought the DVD, I didn’t buy the right to download the movie (unless it was one of those DVDs with a download code included).
Thanks for taking the time to reply and satisfy my mostly aimless curiosity.
As mentioned in a sibling, I probably should have gone with "cartoons" or "drivel" or similar for that category, but "anime" is my particular bias for that category of time waster
What about things that aren't even available anymore any way but 'pirating'? I can think of two movies in recent times that just don't exist to rent or buy from any service, likely due to disputes of some nature.
So you let some corpo decide what you're allowed to watch or read?
I used to take the "this content is not available in your region" when trying to buy a kindle book as an excuse to pirate. If they don't want my money, they clearly don't care.
> I know there are things that people expect me to pay money for and I feel bad about taking things that I know I shouldn’t.
I used to think kind of like this, but came to the realization that it doesn't matter, at least for movies. First, it's not "people" that expect you to pay for it, it's corporations, and they don't really make money from you directly; if you pirated a movie instead of buying it, it really makes no difference, because either they came out in the cinema and the companies expect to make as much money as possible from the cinema ticket sales, or it came out on streaming which has a really muddy economic calculation. It's much different than, for example, a band's album on Bandcamp or a short film on Vimeo. Second, you're not even really "taking" something in the sense that you're not depriving someone else of the thing you have now, because it's digital, unlike if you stole a Blu-ray from someone's home or off of a shelf. Thirdly, sometimes it's legitimately not possible to get certain media other than pirating. There are multiple movies that I've wanted to watch and pay for but couldn't because of rights issues, and in those situations I'd have no option but to pirate or ask a friend to "get" me a copy.
Essentially, if it's a small artist or filmmaker, support them directly, and if you want to see a movie, go to the cinema to watch it if you can. Shows might be a different matter, but I also think they fall under the same "streaming economics" model where the pirate makes little/no difference in reality and you often can't even pay for the show individually if you wanted to.
> I know there are things that people expect me to pay money for
If the deal is I give the seller money and get the product, that's fine. But if next month the seller says actually now even though you're paying me I'm going to show you ads anyways, or yeah you gave me money but I've decided to take back the product without refunding you[0]... it is easy to become sympathetic to pirates.
So by this logic if the supermarket increased the price of bananas beyond a certain arbitrary threshold you set it becomes okay to steal them? As opposed to, shopping elsewhere, or not eating bananas.
No. Because pirating media is no where equivalent to stealing bananas.
Stealing a banana deprives the store of the banana and the revenue from the sale of the banana.
Pirating media does not deprive anyone of anything. And no, pirated media does not equal lost sale. It does not remove the media from the streaming site nor does it prevent the streaming site from profiting from the piece of media.
People need to stop making this analogy as is does not work for digital media.
Your taxes fund the library and the expenses necessary to loan you the book. You need a library card before they'll loan you the book which is given out only to people who pay taxes in that district. The card is your authorization just like a license for software or other copyrighted works.
If I, a stranger, took your car out of your driveway without permission, is it stealing if I promised to return it?
I'm not really sure where you're going with the "is it stealing if I take your car without permission" line, I don't think it really works here (or maybe I'm missing what you're meaning here).
A good example of where the lines of "stealing" are blurry could be this: A friend of yours has a login to Amazon Prime, and gives you the login credentials, which let you watch a show you would have otherwise had to pay for or somehow acquire. Is this stealing? Similarly, if you go to a public library in a city you don't live in, with a card of a friend's, and check out a book, is it stealing?
It is wild how many things I have discovered through piracy but eventually spent a boatload of money on. Music piracy in particular has been like free advertising ime.
It's like an evil for an evil. Robbing a rich man to buy your kids the latest shoes. It is tending towards robin hood but it's not yet in the "to buy foods to survive" category where the moral argument is better defined.
Amazon prime became worthless to me around 2018. I'm surprised anyone still gets value out of it. For those that do, maybe this isn't a big deal. I care much more about how bad and confusing their selection is, dodgy marketplace sellers, and almost everything cheap being not eligible for prime than I do about this.
Amazon of the "prime" example of a new-er tech company that bought their way into a monopoly and they used it to gouge people while providing bad service. Uber being the other obvious one.
My XP has been very different. I rarely find an item I want to buy that is not covered by prime.
As for video specifically, I mostly watch older shows from the 80s and 90s. Do they have everything I'd like to watch? No, but there is enough to watch an episode a few times a week.
However, I won't pay this additional fee and I'll cancel after they show me the 1st ad.
What does the market cap of the company or the founders net worth have anything to do with the unit economics of operating a streaming business? Netflix, Hulu and others are all exploring charging more or introducing ads. Does that not factor into your analysis at all??
> What does the market cap of the company or the founders net worth have anything to do with the unit economics of operating a streaming business?
For being a sub-product when compared to other streaming platforms, I, the naive me, would expect that Prime wouldn’t be in such a rush to milk money from users and instead they would focus on making the best product they can given that their mother company is wealthy as fuck.
Not that I even agree, but I guess the point is that someone so highly paid should be able to find solutions that don't at least feel unfair. I mean most people pay for cable and there's not even a way to not have ads and they increase prices regularly - then again most people do hate the cable companies.
If the company is already huge and makes a tonne of profit, there's little/no need to double-dip on an accessory service that already makes a good case for pushing people into their main service (i.e prime video is free if you use amazon prime -> using amazon's main website/service).
It's not about the market cap specifically, it's stating that prime video doesn't need to operate at a profit in order to benefit amazon's core business.
> (1) You pay for Prime. (2) You pay extra for Prime Video. (3) You now pay even more extra for Prime Video to not show you ads.
There is no triple dipping occurring here. Prime Video is included with the normal Prime membership under (1). So, (1) and (3) are true, but (2) isn't. I believe you can buy Prime Video (2) separately from Prime (1), if you don't want to pay the full price required for an Amazon Prime membership (1), but if you have (1), you don't pay extra for (2).
I've googled this just now, and I'm pretty sure about what I wrote above.
I would definitely complain about (3) too, but I think it's important to be accurate in the complaint.
What does Bezos' worth have to do with this? If you're suggesting he cover the cost for everyone, why would he do that? To prevent subscription loss maybe, but the whole point is that the increased prices make up for the lost subscriptions, so the move makes financial sense without a Bezos intervention.
Or is the idea that Bezos should subsidize Amazon with his billions out of the kindness of his heart? At that point, aren't there better, more worthy causes than this for Bezos to give his money to?
I tend to wince when people suggest that, because a CEO is wealthy, therefore the company ought to operate in some specific way. Those two things are unconnected, as it's rarely a direct compensation that causes the CEO to be as wealthy as he is.
I got Dark Patterned into prime a few years ago. I was a low volume purchaser anyway and only used prime video for a handful of shows, I never used the music service since access to it was just another flagrant lock-in. I left Prime in Aug.
I was surprised with the things I bought since then, despite the quoted delivery being wose, they all actually arrived next day anyway. And I did not miss prime video at all.
Since I'm not paying to make my eyeballs available you're not even going to make the ad money off me. The ads are just punishing the people still giving them money for prime.
My understanding is Super Saver Shipping is more or less "when convenient for us". So if, like me, you live somewhere Prime trucks are on your street every day anyways, Prime doesn't offer any real speed improvement. Maybe if something is only available at a distant warehouse they won't spend anything extra getting it to you quickly but in most cases... yeah, it's still in two days.
I also find Super Saver helps me spend less: I won't order something unless my order is big enough for free shipping, and half the time by the time it is, I decide I didn't really need something or other anyways.
During a recent stretch of non-Prime membership, I found that Ebay sellers often were equivalent or 5% above Amazon prices, so if I was in a hurry, go to Ebay. Otherwise, just add to Amzn cart.
The Amazon video experience has gotten bad. You use to be able to do a 'free for me'. Now it is a mix of 'free', ads, and rentals - combined with the netflix style of showing categories of content, highlighting the same shows, obscuring how much content is actually there.
I cancelled Prime when they removed the "free to me" option. They basically turned half of the video catalog pages into ads, the same as their shopping search result pages.
This is such a bummer. Why does everything get worse? I actually really enjoy prime for movies and specifically for foreign movies.
I can’t stand all the freevee crap they have been forcing down our throats too. They pack a record amount of commercials into those movies and it’s all clunky when you pause and go back, or need to fast forward or rewind. Just wish there was better ways to get rid of the freevee crap, but if 2.99 gets rid of those ads too, I might be inclined to upgrade. I know it wil just be the stuff that has no ads now tho.
Everything gets worse because it starts off amazingly good, so there’s no where left to go but down.
In this case, most ppl had Prime for the shipping, and just got a free video service on top. It gave us a few great shows like, the Boys, Maisel, expanse, and probably a few others I’m forgetting.
I for one thank the VCs for all of the subsidized stuff. But now that era is over.
I’m definitely not buying this new thing or watching more Amazon shows (obv unless they put out a new show that is worth the ticket price).
"enshittification" happens because wall street demands revenue growth, and eventually companies run out of innovations and optimizations, and have to resort to raising prices.
I don't understand the premise of your comment. Having a promotional motive is not something that falls under the umbrella of 'enshittification'. So even if your first sentence is right in a strong way, it doesn't support your second sentence.
We came of age in streaming at a time when Netflix was a de facto monopoly and, importantly, monopsony. Its monopoly/psony was based on a technical moat: streaming was very challenging to pull off, and only Netflix had the technical talent necessary to make it happen.
Whether through the goodness of the hearts of those in charge or through fear of regulation, Netflix didn't do much to extract monopoly rents. But monopsony is generally treated much more lightly by regulators than monopoly, and Netflix extracted monopsony rents on those who made movies -- if they wanted to get money after theatrical distribution, they had to make a deal with Netflix, the end. Netflix extracted a monopsony rent and distributed it partly to themselves and partly to the end users.
Then the technical moat eroded as it became technically easier and easier to build the infrastructure necessary to stream movies. Movie makers (studios etc) were eager to end their dealings with a monopsonist, and they all jumped head-first into the bandwagon of making their own streaming service (Disney+, Paramount+, HBOMax being the Warner Brothers streaming service, etc.). They also saw that Netflix had a great business and wanted in on that money.
But the Netflix business was built on the monopoly/psony. The monopsony surplus being driven to consumers meant that prices were low for consumers and they stayed subscribed to Netflix, delivering Netflix an enormous audience. Post-technical moat, the audience fragmented, and it turns out that there are in fact fixed costs (mostly tax liabilities related to writing off the costs of making a movie) associated with maintaining a big library. Without the big audience and the monopsony surplus, the economics of streaming haven't actually been attractive at all, so now the streaming providers are all aggressively increasing prices/including ads to jack up the revenue stream.
Obviously, the end of free capital/rise of interest rates was also a factor in all this, but I think the monopsony story is the big one.
I don’t think microecon 101 is an accurate model for IP licensing. Netflix just bought up unwanted licenses off distributors in the early days IIRC. It’s an arb play.
For those unaware, you can spin up your own direct-to-consumer streaming subscription business in a box (assuming, of course, you have sufficient content to entice viewers) with https://vimeo.com/ott . Perhaps the best known brand using them is Dropout TV (formerly CollegeHumor) - see https://www.dropout.tv/copyright .
At a lower level, Cloudflare, mux.com, and others provide streaming and transcoding APIs that a small team of developers can easily weave together for a custom experience.
There is literally zero barrier to entry for a media company to have all the capabilities of Netflix, if they can bring their own customers and marketing. Which, of course, is no small feat, and requires playing in social media sandboxes. But it's increasingly hard to understand how Netflix has the staying power of the rest of FAANG.
Everything everybody spent on cable + all ad revenue = cost of delivering cable + cost of producing all TV shows + profit
New equation:
Everything everybody spent on subscriptions + all ad revenue = cost of delivering subscriptions + cost of producing all TV shows + profit
So, "ad revenue" went from a big number to 0. "Cost of delivering" went from a big number to a small number. But the revenue went way down as well.
One solution would be to make less TV, but the industry obviously isn't a fan of that idea, so they are increasing your spend. If everybody gets on an average of 5 services and watches ads too the revenue will be similar-ish to the good old days of cable!
The only reason these services got market share in the first place is by using other money (other division's income, or vc funding) as loans to undercut the competition, such as by offering prices cheaper than probably sustainable in the long term. Eventually, the loans must be repaid, which means the undercutting ends if it's not sustainable. In "real" businesses, that initial capital is used to develop something that'll be sustainable (knowledge, new technology, new products). In these industries with well established economies, there's often not something actually sustainable to develop, so eventually they have to fall back to the original economics of the industry (or shift the economics to something else that may or may not be better).
I've become a lot more really leery of "free" services, and a bit more okay with spending money when I think it makes sense. For example, I'm anti-Amazon Prime because I realize it's basically a huge loss just to get you into ordering more items from Amazon to keep their total revenue and usage high as they've diversified into even less savory business practices due to their market share. Tech companies over index too much on convenience because consumers want convenience. We should be okay with less convenience for a greater good.
Because profits tend to fall over time [1] so to keep profits the same (let alone increasing) revenue have to go up and/or costs have to go down. More evenue can be higher prices, more subscribers, etc. Lowering costs can mean paying less in licensing, paying people less, employing less people, etc.
This was one of Marx's key observations of the inherent contradictions in capitalism.
Wait. The Marx's theory explains how things get commoditized, and the margins go to the smallest possible required to fund the actual production. If anything, it explains how prices drop in a price competition, and with them, profits drop, too.
What we see here is prices rising, in a landscape which is becoming more competitive.
Commoditization is profits tending to fall. Which is why all the secompanies have to fight to maintain their profits. In this case by raising prices.
As for the streaming space, it honestly isn't that competitive. There aren't that many players. If anything, what we're seeing here is price leadership (which is price fixing and collusion but, you know, legal) Netflix raises their prices $2/month and weirdly Hulu, Disney and Max all follow suit. Strange how that works.
We saw the exact same thing with cable: bundling channels to maintain profits, channels charging more, increasing prices to counter losing customers, etc. And why were the channel prices going up to the cable TV providers? The exact same set of reasons relating to falling profits.
Entertainment is also not fungible. Each show is basically a mini monopoly granted by the existence of copyright law. So anyone who wants a specific show has to follow where it goes...and what we've seen is rights holders withdrawing from a market (third party distributors) that was fairly setting the price to vertically integrate distribution and command a higher price.
There's something to be said about the idea of not allowing content companies to own distribution...
Being back in Canada over the holidays, I was shocked to see how much better their streaming catalogues are.
I remember historically, some countries have had much better catalogs than others. Incidentally, I think the catalog quality is proportional to the amount of piracy. more lucrative markets have worse catalogues, despite making more money.
As a bystander, could someone tell me how many of these video platforms get basic usability wrong? Do the programmers not eat their own dog food?
If I watch show X to the end, a little prompt will display saying, "Start Next Episode", I then close the viewer. Next day when I click resume series, it will bring me back to the episode that is 99% complete so that I can watch the credits roll. Why is the algorithm to detect end of show so poor? They have already identified I could advance to the next episode.
Even better is when I want to re-watch a previously seen episode, and it will return me to the end of the show where I last stopped. I think it is HBO(?) who lacks a "Restart from Beginning" option, forcing you to manually rewind.
Or that some platforms do not maintain a, "Continue Watching" video bar in the same consistent location, forcing you to bounce around to locate your show. This one at least seems like an obvious dark pattern to remind you there is other content, so I can at least attribute some thoughtful design to that annoyance.
I assume these design decisions are all driven by teams juicing business metrics, at the expense of usability. Need to increase the “number of streams initiated” KPI? Trick people into resuming videos they already watched 99% of. The alternative, that teams simply don’t care or know how to design good user experiences, is too depressing.
Another example: both Netflix and Amazon make finding your saved watchlist difficult probably because they want you to watch random other content instead of watching your finite watchlist (and then unsubscribing when you finish everything on your watchlist).
Maybe it’s because I use OpenBSD, or something, but I’ve never once gotten Prime Video to work. Every year or so I try it, it doesn’t work, then I remember most shows and movies are garbage and forget streaming video even exists for another year.
I hope you read the contract and confirmed the “I’ll get my money back” part - because others have done the “sorry, you no longer have access to your purchases and you’re also not getting a refund” trick. I don’t think Apple is beneath that if they can get away with it.
We are writing to you today about an upcoming change to your Prime Video experience. Starting January 29, Prime Video movies and TV shows will include limited advertisements. This will allow us to continue investing in compelling content and keep increasing that investment over a long period of time. We aim to have meaningfully fewer ads than linear TV and other streaming TV providers. No action is required from you, and there is no change to the current price of your Prime membership. We will also offer a new ad-free option for an additional $2.99 per month* that you can sign up for here.
Prime is a very compelling value. Prime members enjoy a wide range of shopping, savings, and entertainment benefits, including:
More than 300 million items are available with free Prime shipping and tens of millions of the most popular items are available with free Same-Day or One-Day Delivery.
Access to exclusive and broad streaming video content (including Prime Video exclusives like The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, The Boys, Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan, Citadel, The Wheel of Time, Reacher, and The Summer I Turned Pretty, as well as blockbuster movies such as Air, Creed III, Dungeons & Dragons, Candy Cane Lane with Eddie Murphy, and exclusive live sports including NFL Thursday Night Football).
Access to Prime Video Channels, which provides an unmatched selection of subscription channels like Max, Paramount+ with SHOWTIME, BET+, MGM+, ViX+, Crunchyroll, PBS KIDS, NBA League Pass, MLB.TV, and STARZ—with no extra apps to download, and no cable required. Customers only pay for the ones they want, and can cancel anytime.
The ability to use your Prime shopping benefits—like fast, free delivery, a seamless checkout experience, 24/7 live chat support, and hassle-free returns—on online stores beyond Amazon.com with Buy with Prime.
Exclusive deals and shopping events like Prime Day.
Ad-free listening of 100 million songs and millions of podcast episodes with Amazon Music.
Prescription medications as low as $1 per month and fast, free shipping from Amazon Pharmacy.
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High-quality health care from One Medical for only $9 per month (or $99 annually), with the option to add up to five additional memberships for the family for only $6 per month (or $66 annually) each.
Free two-hour Fresh grocery delivery on orders over $100 (and delivery charges between $6.95 to $9.95 for orders less than $100), and in-store savings on select groceries at Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods Market stores across the U.S.
Unlimited photo storage with Amazon Photos.
Gaming benefits with Prime Gaming.
More than 3,000 books and magazines with Prime Reading.
A free, one-year Grubhub+ membership trial valued at $120 per year, offering unlimited $0 delivery fees on orders over $12.
And, you can expect additional features and programs added in the future for our Prime members.
As mentioned above, no action is required from you. If you wish to sign up for the ad-free option, you can click here. And, as always, if you have questions about your Prime membership, you can manage your account here.
Thank you for being a valued member of Amazon Prime.
I love how they have to tell me that prime is a very compelling value. I haven't used prime video too much lately but I think it's time to cancel prime completely. Prime used to get you 2 day delivery. Now it's anywhere from 2-7 day. Prime's value has continued to be eroded the last few years. Sometimes I order from Walmart.com because the pricing is as good, the quality better vetted (sold by Walmart items), and WILL be delivered faster than Amazon.
Hopefully they don't make the dogs breakfast that is Hulu -- there you can have a subscription "without ads" but then they show you adds on some content. There's no logic to determine which content gets ads and which doesn't, nor can you tell if you would be just as well off not subscribing to the no-ads level since you can't tell how many (if any) additional adds that would generate.
With prices of all streaming crawling upwards, and often multiple services being required to cover the catalog of what you want to watch, purchasing† has become a compelling option again. Realistically, if you're paying for Netflix, Prime, and Disney+, you're looking at a $45/mo bill. With seasons of shows costing around $10-15 to buy, are you better off with streaming? I personally don't watch more than a full season of a show in any given month, and I've just started considering this. One notable benefit - most streaming providers have a larger digital catalog for purchasing than for streaming, meaning you can centralize more.
The obvious downside though is at some point the show may just magically disappear from your purchased library, if negotiations between the platform and the creator go south††. I'd love to see some laws in this area where "a purchase is a purchase" to prevent this, but for now it's a risk (albeit one with maritime workarounds).
I’m back to buying physical media for exactly these reasons. It’s unfortunate that a lot of things aren’t getting physical media releases these days, or are still only getting dvd releases, but even for Blu-ray the quality is far superior to streaming in most cases, and 4K is even better. Since we’ve started migrating to physical media we no longer have to worry about streaming ability, losing our license to a show, or even network outages.
Disney announced they were going to stop selling physical media in Australia. Media companies are salivating at the thought of forever controlling distribution.
A bit of consolation may be that It's fairly easy to get ahold of region free players these days. 4k discs aren't even region locked at all. Unfortunately I can imagine shipping might be cost prohibited for individual discs.
I hope they reverse course, but as you say, I'm sure the temptation for control is irresistible.
It seems that it's going to end up as it ended up with music and books.
Buy a season of a show (an album, a book) digitally to indicate your support and help keep it running. Then pirate and keep a local copy of the same to ensure against future unavailability, and for more convenience.
I bet enough people in the media industry understand this mechanics, and sort of turn a blind eye at it, because it's not affecting their bottom line materially.
Yeah, but they’re focused on the wrong stuff, now, and evading their detection is easier than ever.
Pirate all the things.
The relationship between publishers and consumers has been almost 100% adversarial for a while, now. It started with payola for radio DJs in the 1950s, and it has only escalated since then.
PIRATE ALL THE THINGS! It is almost our duty, at this point. Publishers are closer than ever to being able to take your money and provide nothing in return if they choose. They keep inching closer and closer to that reality.
Again, this relationship is adversarial. Fight back or lose the fight forever.
Given that a license for private use has been purchased, and given that it's acceptable to make backups for private use by the same person, is it even really piracy if the mechanics of creating your backup involve someone else's original instead of your original? You are licensed to have an original and backups thereof.
Obviously if your original is lower quality (say, DVD) and your pirated backup is higher quality (say, Blu-ray) then I would concede that it's piracy of the difference (i.e., you're only entitled to backups at the quality you originally purchased) which can reasonably be considered piracy in full. For simplicity, let's suppose both originals are identical releases.
If a copyright holder would consider this to be piracy, logically they should also consider it piracy if you download your digital purchase multiple times without using the same CDN point of presence each time. I'm quite certain they'd consider that a non-issue, since it all shares a common ancestor (the master for that particular release) regardless of any meaningless duplication between the master and the licensed consumer.
This is a good line of reasoning, and it would make an interesting legal case.
I suspect it won't stand because the removal of the DRM provisions that potentially allow to retract access to the media is the point of, well, backing it up.
When you buy media DRM-free, you don't have to pirate anything, you can just peacefully make a copy.
If I'm the consumer creating a backup by downloading from sources typically used for piracy, whoever shared it already broke the DRM, so I don't have to myself, and therefore I don't think the questionable legality of my actions would involve penalties for breaking DRM...
That’s my thinking as well. Renting a movie or buying it off AppleTV or other store ends up way cheaper than letting a subscription sit no matter if I need it or not
I rarely ever watch anything twice so I’m fully ok with renting and be done with it
The price range really varies. But just for the sake of giving an example: Mad Men season 1 is just $4.99 on Apple TV. Some newer shows on Prime can easily cost $4-5 per episode.
I just noticed that complete series of shows can be fairly cheap. I was in Best Buy and happened to walk by the DVD section for example and saw the complete "How I Met Your Mother" in a 28 disc boxed set for $32.99.
Unfortunately the world of DVD and Blu-ray seems to be overrun with too many editions. For example besides that particular HIMYM set (here it is at Amazon [1]), there is also this one [2] which is $49.99.
The pictures for the two look identical. But the release date listed for the $32.99 is about 9 months later, and the media format descriptions differ between the two. The $32.99 one says Subtitled, NTSC. The $49.99 one says NTSC, Widescreen, Box set, Subtitles, AC-3, Dolby. The $32.99 lists language as "English (Dolby Surround)" so does apparently have Dolby. The $49.99 one doesn't list language. The $32.99 one says it has English, French, and Spanish subtitles. The $49.99 just says French and Spanish subtitles. Does one of them have better sound? Do either of them have commentary, deleted scenes, or other special features. Does only the $49.99 have widescreen?
Some comments mention that there is commentary, but (1) Amazon considers these two sets to be variations on the same set and so they share comments, so there is no way to tell which set the comment is talking about, and (2) some of those comments are from several years before either set was released--they were definitely commenting about HIMYM so my guess is that they were for early releases of specific seasons or something like that.
If I were interested in buying that complete HIMYM I'd have no idea from those Amazon listings and comments which set to buy.
I've also seen similar things when considering buying movies. There will often be one or more of a DVD, a DVD + digital code, a Blu-ray + DVD + digital code, a 4K UHD Blu-ray, a 4K UHD Blu-ray + digital code, a 4K UHD Blu-ray + DVD + digital code, and probably some that I've forgotten.
Online listings often don't say if the digital code is for 4K, and often don't say much about special features. It is confusing enough that my impulse to buy the movie does not last long enough for me to figure out which to buy.
Personally, I cancelled all my subscriptions (Netflix, Prime, Apple TV+, Hulu, HIDIVE, AMC+) this christmas and reverted to piracy.
Modern piracy (the so called *ARR stack) provide UX that is pretty close to what you get from streaming services. In some cases even better - now I will use just one app on my TV to watch everything, will not be affected by Netflix/Prime/Apple/Hulu or internet provider outages when I am watching a movie or TV show, and will not have to go through 4 or 5 apps when I am searching for something specific to watch.
The UX is slightly worse when I find a movie or TV show via Plex Discovery and want to watch it immediately, since I will have to wait for *ARR to pick it up and download it, but for now I have quite a few TV shows to finish watching before it will become an inconvenience for me, especially given the fact that this stack can subscribe to upcoming shows - I can tell it that I am interested in Fallout for example, and it will monitor releases and download the show once it will become available.
I already had cheaper HD Netflix subscription, and didn't notice difference between it and UHD Prime/Apple TV/Hulu. I only noticed that I didn't have UHD when I was cancelling it, to be honest. Maybe my TV is not big enough or I am too far from the screen for this to be noticeable (65" Sony OLED TV about 3 to 4 meters from my coouch).
Regarding the pirated content - I just started, so my experience have pretty low sample size. Still, majority of shows I downloaded so far are in 4K. The only one in 1080p is older show, for which I think there's no 4K source material.
Now that subscriber growth has slown down at most streaming services, the end of the "golden age of TV" is at hand.
Welcome to the "bean-counting age of TV," in which streaming services try to milk subscribers for as much as possible without pissing them off too much.
Going forward, I'm expecting cheaper content, greater restrictions, higher prices, a proliferation of tiered subscription plans, and pervasive advertisement.
Completely predictable, and yet also very disappointing.
I think reverse will happen. We’re going to get amazing shows in the next couple years because production cost is going to be so much lower thanks to AI assistance. Then there will be a short era when phone is just instantly will generate custom video on demand for you when you raise the phone. And then societal collapse due to non-viability of current economic structures.
> We’re going to get amazing shows in the next couple years because production cost is going to be so much lower thanks to AI assistance. Then there will be a short era when phone is just instantly will generate custom video on demand for you when you raise the phone. And then societal collapse due to non-viability of current economic structures.
Either this is master satire, you communicate with the future, the timeline model you’re running coalesced into the Singularity, or all of these simultaneously.
How comparable is $3 a month to the ad revenue they might make from the shows?
Apparently Amazon Prime accounts get a median of 300 minutes per week of view time. That’s 20 hours of TV a month with (in the order of) a few hundred ad slots I am paying to not have to watch. Amazon are making a penny per unwatched-ad from me.
Contrast with broadcast TV: Good Morning Britain wants £4k for an ad slot in a show that has 500k to 800k viewers so that’s a CPM also in the order of a penny [edit: ahem, £5, not a penny] paid for by the advertiser, for 1000x views.
So, even taking into account Amazon’s targeted ads vs broadcast TV ads, they can indeed make a lot more money from withholding ads than if they show them?
We could call their bluff. Maybe they don’t have any ads to actually show for which advertisers are willing to pay significant fee. But if the business model is to get consumers to pay Amazon to make the pain go away then they’d probably just show 90 seconds of screaming at the start, middle and end of every episode of The Boys.
Good Morning Britain is getting around $6.36-10.18 CPM by your numbers (£5-8 per thousand viewers) which seems reasonable. If Amazon stuffed ads the way most American broadcast channels do, they could get around 720 ads in there which would be $4.58-7.33/mo at the ad rates of Good Morning Britain (American broadcast TV has an egregious number of ads). Assuming fewer ads (Hulu and Netflix show about 5 minutes per hour) that would be 200 ad slots worth $1.27-2.04/mo.
So, it's likely that Amazon is making a little more from those who pay to skip ads, but it's in the ballpark. Plus, the people advertisers want to reach are the people with the disposable income to pay to skip the ads. They don't want the cheap people who are willing to waste nearly two hours of their life a month to save $3.
I think you might have miscalculated the CPM since you've said "that’s a CPM also in the order of a penny." It's on the order of a penny per viewer, but not per thousand viewers. That's probably why you think it's more of a bluff that could be called. It is likely more revenue if you pay to skip ads, but Amazon would probably end up making $2 from you watching ads.
Thanks for checking my math and for doing a second run at it. I’ve edited to point out my mistake. It feels like there’s a mismatch but my numbers are pretty hand wavey so I can imagine it could be a lot closer than that.
Meanwhile, the usability of pirate tools is improving. There's a number of "seed box" providers that put a decent management UI on top of the various pieces you need. And ways to see what's trending (or search the catalog) on Prime, Netflix, Max, etc, and add it to your download queue. A hosted service also trades a fair amount of hassle for a few extra dollars a month.
You don't even need a seed box. You can use a debrid service, like realdebrid or alldebrid to upload the magnet, then download from their site. Costs about $3 per month and you won't get a nastygram from your cable company.
Not so much for the seed box, but the hosted plex (or whatever) server with the various pieces and parts (things like sonarr, radarr, bazaar for subtitles, etc.) The seed box providers tend to offer these also, but I don't know what to call the bundle.
I just recently signed up for their free trial because I wanted to watch Air, and figured over the holidays, maybe I'd watch something else (I'm not a TV/Movie person).
Air was great! I haven't seen a single other thing I'd want to watch. Started a few things, but nothing grabbed my interest.
I know most people don't try life without TV, and I used to LOVE TV and movies. But honestly, give yourself a month without, and you just may find that you are filling your time with more interesting things.
I actually still wish I had more things to do, but just as a few, pick up an instrument (I play guitar), try art (I paint, would like to sculpt), write, read, exercise, make new friends. Even try spending more time cooking, or meditating.
I almost think that staring at a blank wall with your own thoughts can be better than most of what is on TV.
Also, remove the physical TV, and layout your house around socializing rather than watching.
Ha. I was only saying that in jest, hope I didn't come off too strongly.
I have a IRL best friend who is very against all forms of TV and media while I watch quite a bit of it. We argue strongly about this, so I've trodden this path ha.
Sometimes I'm not in the mood or mindset to read. 99% of my YouTube is makers / documentaries / war footage / local history and maps / etc. For mainstream stuff, just biopics or stories loosely based on real life or old war content (recently: Gotti, Edge of the World, Bruno Manser, Founder, Hacksaw Ridge, the Lebron/Lakers TV show, Detroit war production, some others) and I'm a huge sci-fi fan so I'll watch most scifi fiction as well.
To him, its all just mindless consumption. I 100% agree though about being social and desiging around people rather than a screen, but I don't judge others too much. To each their own.
I think there is good stuff out there, and I don't put your youtube watching in the same class as lots of the subscription content. Honestly, I think some of what youtube creators make is more valuable than what studios are spending millions on.
I was just surprised that after signing up for Prime, I thought I'd get a good few nights of viewing, but I seriously struggle to find anything worthwhile.
I still love Ken Burns docos, I really enjoyed Air, but I think most people are sucked into TV, and almost don't consider other options.
I think your friend is right that for most people it is mindless consumption. I think most people treat food as mindless consumption as well, and look where that has left the general population.
I think you've got the right approach of being selective of what you watch.
I gave my old tv away and bought a used 1080p projector, and have an AppleTV hooked up to it. When I turn the projector off, it all goes away/clears the room. The center point of my living room then became the coffee table, and I rearranged seating around that.
It feels so modern, and I love it.
As for content itself, ads and subscribing to multiple services aren’t necessary. You can get almost any title you’re looking for through your local library or inter-library loan. Curation is usually better than what you see on Netflix or any other streaming service.
I can download whatever I want, in a world wide scope, for free, with no DRM shit. And no ads or other onerous garbage bolted on.
And I keep what I download, rather than "stream" (download every time, with no ability to save).
So this 'pay more for less'? Nah, y'all pushing me to piracy. And I have NO problems doing it. And no, I'm not going to pay $150/no for streaming crap that I end up with nothing when I cancel.
The streaming companies need to understand that the user-friendliness of piracy is actually something they need to be competing against. Lots of people I knew pirating stuff stopped when Netflix streaming came out.
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[ 1.2 ms ] story [ 270 ms ] threadAnd I don’t subscribe to the “but my HTTP requests” rationalization that’s so common here on HN.
- an old film (the Maltese Falcon, Wizard of Oz, Wings [1927 silent film])
- a really bad film (Santa Claus Conquers the Martians)
- something you already own but don't have access to at the moment
- anime
- none of the above?
Are you expecting they might have some beef with Japan in particular?
Its gone too fucking long towards extreme copyright and gimmee programs like the DMCA. Piracy is that counteracting force.
Pirate it all. No other lever can make these companies correct.
If I want to watch an old film, a bad film, or an old bad film, I pay for it or I don’t watch it.
I’ve bought films on Amazon rather than get off my butt to put the DVD in the player. So you can guess that if I don’t have access to it at the moment that I’ll pay for it. I bought the DVD, I didn’t buy the right to download the movie (unless it was one of those DVDs with a download code included).
I have 0 interest in anime.
Would you buy the DVD boxset or perhaps the final season?
Or maybe download the last few episodes?
Or Sony just steals it from you.
I would just buy the DVD if I really wanted to see it. I wouldn’t download the last few episodes.
This isn’t as tricky as you think it is!
You don’t watch, read, listen to, play, etc. those things.
I used to take the "this content is not available in your region" when trying to buy a kindle book as an excuse to pirate. If they don't want my money, they clearly don't care.
Now I stopped caring altogether though.
There’s plenty of things to watch and read. If something isn’t available legally to me, I’ll find something else.
I used to think kind of like this, but came to the realization that it doesn't matter, at least for movies. First, it's not "people" that expect you to pay for it, it's corporations, and they don't really make money from you directly; if you pirated a movie instead of buying it, it really makes no difference, because either they came out in the cinema and the companies expect to make as much money as possible from the cinema ticket sales, or it came out on streaming which has a really muddy economic calculation. It's much different than, for example, a band's album on Bandcamp or a short film on Vimeo. Second, you're not even really "taking" something in the sense that you're not depriving someone else of the thing you have now, because it's digital, unlike if you stole a Blu-ray from someone's home or off of a shelf. Thirdly, sometimes it's legitimately not possible to get certain media other than pirating. There are multiple movies that I've wanted to watch and pay for but couldn't because of rights issues, and in those situations I'd have no option but to pirate or ask a friend to "get" me a copy.
Essentially, if it's a small artist or filmmaker, support them directly, and if you want to see a movie, go to the cinema to watch it if you can. Shows might be a different matter, but I also think they fall under the same "streaming economics" model where the pirate makes little/no difference in reality and you often can't even pay for the show individually if you wanted to.
If the deal is I give the seller money and get the product, that's fine. But if next month the seller says actually now even though you're paying me I'm going to show you ads anyways, or yeah you gave me money but I've decided to take back the product without refunding you[0]... it is easy to become sympathetic to pirates.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/12/playstation-is-erasi...
Stealing a banana deprives the store of the banana and the revenue from the sale of the banana.
Pirating media does not deprive anyone of anything. And no, pirated media does not equal lost sale. It does not remove the media from the streaming site nor does it prevent the streaming site from profiting from the piece of media.
People need to stop making this analogy as is does not work for digital media.
Are taxes and parking tickets on the list? I feel like I shouldn't have to pay those.
> Pirating media does not deprive anyone of anything. And no, pirated media does not equal lost sale.
What about software? Should we not have to pay for that either? What about the software you make a living writing? Is that exempt from the list?
If I, a stranger, took your car out of your driveway without permission, is it stealing if I promised to return it?
A good example of where the lines of "stealing" are blurry could be this: A friend of yours has a login to Amazon Prime, and gives you the login credentials, which let you watch a show you would have otherwise had to pay for or somehow acquire. Is this stealing? Similarly, if you go to a public library in a city you don't live in, with a card of a friend's, and check out a book, is it stealing?
Yes. People should pay for both software and media. But piracy is not stealing regardless.
We should. Also The Software should be Free to copy, modify, sell the changes, use it however we like and give the same rights to others!
if you could copy bananas without effort you would get rid of the hunger across the World and then get the Nobel Peace Prize
If someone takes a movie or show episode, there's plenty for anyone who comes after them.
Meanwhile, if the store starts running a scam after ruining the market for bananas, yeah -they fucked me over so fuck them too.
Amazon of the "prime" example of a new-er tech company that bought their way into a monopoly and they used it to gouge people while providing bad service. Uber being the other obvious one.
As for video specifically, I mostly watch older shows from the 80s and 90s. Do they have everything I'd like to watch? No, but there is enough to watch an episode a few times a week.
However, I won't pay this additional fee and I'll cancel after they show me the 1st ad.
This is a company worth $1.5 trillion dollars (with a founder worth $175 billion dollars)....yet they can't help themselves but triple-dip? Yeah, no.
Arr, matey, I hear the high seas calling.
For being a sub-product when compared to other streaming platforms, I, the naive me, would expect that Prime wouldn’t be in such a rush to milk money from users and instead they would focus on making the best product they can given that their mother company is wealthy as fuck.
Like I said, I am naive.
The local "cheap" supermarket (Lidl) to me has plenty of >€70k vehicles in the carpark.
It's not about the market cap specifically, it's stating that prime video doesn't need to operate at a profit in order to benefit amazon's core business.
There is no triple dipping occurring here. Prime Video is included with the normal Prime membership under (1). So, (1) and (3) are true, but (2) isn't. I believe you can buy Prime Video (2) separately from Prime (1), if you don't want to pay the full price required for an Amazon Prime membership (1), but if you have (1), you don't pay extra for (2).
I've googled this just now, and I'm pretty sure about what I wrote above.
I would definitely complain about (3) too, but I think it's important to be accurate in the complaint.
And no, everyone who gets Prime gets bundled Prime Video as a hidden add-on cost.
Nah, I'll source my videos, music, books, and games in more DRM free manners :D Yarr harr harr and a bottle of RUM
Or is the idea that Bezos should subsidize Amazon with his billions out of the kindness of his heart? At that point, aren't there better, more worthy causes than this for Bezos to give his money to?
I tend to wince when people suggest that, because a CEO is wealthy, therefore the company ought to operate in some specific way. Those two things are unconnected, as it's rarely a direct compensation that causes the CEO to be as wealthy as he is.
Something seems off about being able to enter the business of nickle-and-diming while propping up the wealth of a single individual.
I can understand the grievance of GP.
I was surprised with the things I bought since then, despite the quoted delivery being wose, they all actually arrived next day anyway. And I did not miss prime video at all.
Since I'm not paying to make my eyeballs available you're not even going to make the ad money off me. The ads are just punishing the people still giving them money for prime.
I also find Super Saver helps me spend less: I won't order something unless my order is big enough for free shipping, and half the time by the time it is, I decide I didn't really need something or other anyways.
I can’t stand all the freevee crap they have been forcing down our throats too. They pack a record amount of commercials into those movies and it’s all clunky when you pause and go back, or need to fast forward or rewind. Just wish there was better ways to get rid of the freevee crap, but if 2.99 gets rid of those ads too, I might be inclined to upgrade. I know it wil just be the stuff that has no ads now tho.
Everything gets worse because it starts off amazingly good, so there’s no where left to go but down.
In this case, most ppl had Prime for the shipping, and just got a free video service on top. It gave us a few great shows like, the Boys, Maisel, expanse, and probably a few others I’m forgetting.
I for one thank the VCs for all of the subsidized stuff. But now that era is over.
I’m definitely not buying this new thing or watching more Amazon shows (obv unless they put out a new show that is worth the ticket price).
But it was nice while it lasted
Relatedly, see how Uber prices have changed over the past few years. https://slate.com/business/2022/05/uber-subsidy-lyft-cheap-r...
It would be nice of they made a customer focused app for Prime Video (vs their decision to make one that incrementally maximizes revenue).
We came of age in streaming at a time when Netflix was a de facto monopoly and, importantly, monopsony. Its monopoly/psony was based on a technical moat: streaming was very challenging to pull off, and only Netflix had the technical talent necessary to make it happen.
Whether through the goodness of the hearts of those in charge or through fear of regulation, Netflix didn't do much to extract monopoly rents. But monopsony is generally treated much more lightly by regulators than monopoly, and Netflix extracted monopsony rents on those who made movies -- if they wanted to get money after theatrical distribution, they had to make a deal with Netflix, the end. Netflix extracted a monopsony rent and distributed it partly to themselves and partly to the end users.
Then the technical moat eroded as it became technically easier and easier to build the infrastructure necessary to stream movies. Movie makers (studios etc) were eager to end their dealings with a monopsonist, and they all jumped head-first into the bandwagon of making their own streaming service (Disney+, Paramount+, HBOMax being the Warner Brothers streaming service, etc.). They also saw that Netflix had a great business and wanted in on that money.
But the Netflix business was built on the monopoly/psony. The monopsony surplus being driven to consumers meant that prices were low for consumers and they stayed subscribed to Netflix, delivering Netflix an enormous audience. Post-technical moat, the audience fragmented, and it turns out that there are in fact fixed costs (mostly tax liabilities related to writing off the costs of making a movie) associated with maintaining a big library. Without the big audience and the monopsony surplus, the economics of streaming haven't actually been attractive at all, so now the streaming providers are all aggressively increasing prices/including ads to jack up the revenue stream.
Obviously, the end of free capital/rise of interest rates was also a factor in all this, but I think the monopsony story is the big one.
For those unaware, you can spin up your own direct-to-consumer streaming subscription business in a box (assuming, of course, you have sufficient content to entice viewers) with https://vimeo.com/ott . Perhaps the best known brand using them is Dropout TV (formerly CollegeHumor) - see https://www.dropout.tv/copyright .
At a lower level, Cloudflare, mux.com, and others provide streaming and transcoding APIs that a small team of developers can easily weave together for a custom experience.
There is literally zero barrier to entry for a media company to have all the capabilities of Netflix, if they can bring their own customers and marketing. Which, of course, is no small feat, and requires playing in social media sandboxes. But it's increasingly hard to understand how Netflix has the staying power of the rest of FAANG.
Everything everybody spent on cable + all ad revenue = cost of delivering cable + cost of producing all TV shows + profit
New equation:
Everything everybody spent on subscriptions + all ad revenue = cost of delivering subscriptions + cost of producing all TV shows + profit
So, "ad revenue" went from a big number to 0. "Cost of delivering" went from a big number to a small number. But the revenue went way down as well.
One solution would be to make less TV, but the industry obviously isn't a fan of that idea, so they are increasing your spend. If everybody gets on an average of 5 services and watches ads too the revenue will be similar-ish to the good old days of cable!
I've become a lot more really leery of "free" services, and a bit more okay with spending money when I think it makes sense. For example, I'm anti-Amazon Prime because I realize it's basically a huge loss just to get you into ordering more items from Amazon to keep their total revenue and usage high as they've diversified into even less savory business practices due to their market share. Tech companies over index too much on convenience because consumers want convenience. We should be okay with less convenience for a greater good.
Because people need bonuses and new boats. And I suppose I need my Amazon stock to appreciate too.
Because profits tend to fall over time [1] so to keep profits the same (let alone increasing) revenue have to go up and/or costs have to go down. More evenue can be higher prices, more subscribers, etc. Lowering costs can mean paying less in licensing, paying people less, employing less people, etc.
This was one of Marx's key observations of the inherent contradictions in capitalism.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit...
What we see here is prices rising, in a landscape which is becoming more competitive.
As for the streaming space, it honestly isn't that competitive. There aren't that many players. If anything, what we're seeing here is price leadership (which is price fixing and collusion but, you know, legal) Netflix raises their prices $2/month and weirdly Hulu, Disney and Max all follow suit. Strange how that works.
We saw the exact same thing with cable: bundling channels to maintain profits, channels charging more, increasing prices to counter losing customers, etc. And why were the channel prices going up to the cable TV providers? The exact same set of reasons relating to falling profits.
There's something to be said about the idea of not allowing content companies to own distribution...
The quarterly earnings must always be increasing.
I remember historically, some countries have had much better catalogs than others. Incidentally, I think the catalog quality is proportional to the amount of piracy. more lucrative markets have worse catalogues, despite making more money.
If I watch show X to the end, a little prompt will display saying, "Start Next Episode", I then close the viewer. Next day when I click resume series, it will bring me back to the episode that is 99% complete so that I can watch the credits roll. Why is the algorithm to detect end of show so poor? They have already identified I could advance to the next episode.
Even better is when I want to re-watch a previously seen episode, and it will return me to the end of the show where I last stopped. I think it is HBO(?) who lacks a "Restart from Beginning" option, forcing you to manually rewind.
Or that some platforms do not maintain a, "Continue Watching" video bar in the same consistent location, forcing you to bounce around to locate your show. This one at least seems like an obvious dark pattern to remind you there is other content, so I can at least attribute some thoughtful design to that annoyance.
Another example: both Netflix and Amazon make finding your saved watchlist difficult probably because they want you to watch random other content instead of watching your finite watchlist (and then unsubscribing when you finish everything on your watchlist).
No ads and I "own" it. I read somewhere that if Apple cut me off, they'd have to refund all those purchases.
But even better is buying a DVD set and ripping it. What a pain, but at least you never have to make a deal with this particular devil.
I hope you read the contract and confirmed the “I’ll get my money back” part - because others have done the “sorry, you no longer have access to your purchases and you’re also not getting a refund” trick. I don’t think Apple is beneath that if they can get away with it.
An update on Prime Video
Dear Prime member,
We are writing to you today about an upcoming change to your Prime Video experience. Starting January 29, Prime Video movies and TV shows will include limited advertisements. This will allow us to continue investing in compelling content and keep increasing that investment over a long period of time. We aim to have meaningfully fewer ads than linear TV and other streaming TV providers. No action is required from you, and there is no change to the current price of your Prime membership. We will also offer a new ad-free option for an additional $2.99 per month* that you can sign up for here.
Prime is a very compelling value. Prime members enjoy a wide range of shopping, savings, and entertainment benefits, including:
More than 300 million items are available with free Prime shipping and tens of millions of the most popular items are available with free Same-Day or One-Day Delivery. Access to exclusive and broad streaming video content (including Prime Video exclusives like The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, The Boys, Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan, Citadel, The Wheel of Time, Reacher, and The Summer I Turned Pretty, as well as blockbuster movies such as Air, Creed III, Dungeons & Dragons, Candy Cane Lane with Eddie Murphy, and exclusive live sports including NFL Thursday Night Football). Access to Prime Video Channels, which provides an unmatched selection of subscription channels like Max, Paramount+ with SHOWTIME, BET+, MGM+, ViX+, Crunchyroll, PBS KIDS, NBA League Pass, MLB.TV, and STARZ—with no extra apps to download, and no cable required. Customers only pay for the ones they want, and can cancel anytime. The ability to use your Prime shopping benefits—like fast, free delivery, a seamless checkout experience, 24/7 live chat support, and hassle-free returns—on online stores beyond Amazon.com with Buy with Prime. Exclusive deals and shopping events like Prime Day. Ad-free listening of 100 million songs and millions of podcast episodes with Amazon Music. Prescription medications as low as $1 per month and fast, free shipping from Amazon Pharmacy. Access to unlimited eligible generic prescription medications for only $5 per month (including free shipping) with RxPass from Amazon Pharmacy. High-quality health care from One Medical for only $9 per month (or $99 annually), with the option to add up to five additional memberships for the family for only $6 per month (or $66 annually) each. Free two-hour Fresh grocery delivery on orders over $100 (and delivery charges between $6.95 to $9.95 for orders less than $100), and in-store savings on select groceries at Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods Market stores across the U.S. Unlimited photo storage with Amazon Photos. Gaming benefits with Prime Gaming. More than 3,000 books and magazines with Prime Reading. A free, one-year Grubhub+ membership trial valued at $120 per year, offering unlimited $0 delivery fees on orders over $12.
And, you can expect additional features and programs added in the future for our Prime members.
As mentioned above, no action is required from you. If you wish to sign up for the ad-free option, you can click here. And, as always, if you have questions about your Prime membership, you can manage your account here.
Thank you for being a valued member of Amazon Prime.
Sincerely, The Amazon Prime team
2014-03-20 $79 to $99 (25% after 9 years)
2018-05-11 $99 to $119 (20% after 4 years)
2022-02-18 $119 to $139 (17% after 4 years)
2024-01-29 $139 to $175 (26% after 2 years)
Better than not being available, no?
If it upsets you, just pretend it doesn't exist.
Solving the world’s problem right here
This is a first world problem if I've ever seen one.
You paid extra for something they haven't provided
The obvious downside though is at some point the show may just magically disappear from your purchased library, if negotiations between the platform and the creator go south††. I'd love to see some laws in this area where "a purchase is a purchase" to prevent this, but for now it's a risk (albeit one with maritime workarounds).
† or license leasing if you're buying digitally
†† ie https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6449826?sortBy=best
I hope they reverse course, but as you say, I'm sure the temptation for control is irresistible.
Buy a season of a show (an album, a book) digitally to indicate your support and help keep it running. Then pirate and keep a local copy of the same to ensure against future unavailability, and for more convenience.
I bet enough people in the media industry understand this mechanics, and sort of turn a blind eye at it, because it's not affecting their bottom line materially.
Pirate all the things.
The relationship between publishers and consumers has been almost 100% adversarial for a while, now. It started with payola for radio DJs in the 1950s, and it has only escalated since then.
PIRATE ALL THE THINGS! It is almost our duty, at this point. Publishers are closer than ever to being able to take your money and provide nothing in return if they choose. They keep inching closer and closer to that reality.
Again, this relationship is adversarial. Fight back or lose the fight forever.
Pirate. Everything.
For ebook the situation is worse but for many technical books there's a way to purchase a DRM version.
Movie/TV series is unique in a way that there's no option to buy a DRM-free version.
Obviously if your original is lower quality (say, DVD) and your pirated backup is higher quality (say, Blu-ray) then I would concede that it's piracy of the difference (i.e., you're only entitled to backups at the quality you originally purchased) which can reasonably be considered piracy in full. For simplicity, let's suppose both originals are identical releases.
If a copyright holder would consider this to be piracy, logically they should also consider it piracy if you download your digital purchase multiple times without using the same CDN point of presence each time. I'm quite certain they'd consider that a non-issue, since it all shares a common ancestor (the master for that particular release) regardless of any meaningless duplication between the master and the licensed consumer.
I suspect it won't stand because the removal of the DRM provisions that potentially allow to retract access to the media is the point of, well, backing it up.
When you buy media DRM-free, you don't have to pirate anything, you can just peacefully make a copy.
I rarely ever watch anything twice so I’m fully ok with renting and be done with it
Unfortunately the world of DVD and Blu-ray seems to be overrun with too many editions. For example besides that particular HIMYM set (here it is at Amazon [1]), there is also this one [2] which is $49.99.
The pictures for the two look identical. But the release date listed for the $32.99 is about 9 months later, and the media format descriptions differ between the two. The $32.99 one says Subtitled, NTSC. The $49.99 one says NTSC, Widescreen, Box set, Subtitles, AC-3, Dolby. The $32.99 lists language as "English (Dolby Surround)" so does apparently have Dolby. The $49.99 one doesn't list language. The $32.99 one says it has English, French, and Spanish subtitles. The $49.99 just says French and Spanish subtitles. Does one of them have better sound? Do either of them have commentary, deleted scenes, or other special features. Does only the $49.99 have widescreen?
Some comments mention that there is commentary, but (1) Amazon considers these two sets to be variations on the same set and so they share comments, so there is no way to tell which set the comment is talking about, and (2) some of those comments are from several years before either set was released--they were definitely commenting about HIMYM so my guess is that they were for early releases of specific seasons or something like that.
If I were interested in buying that complete HIMYM I'd have no idea from those Amazon listings and comments which set to buy.
I've also seen similar things when considering buying movies. There will often be one or more of a DVD, a DVD + digital code, a Blu-ray + DVD + digital code, a 4K UHD Blu-ray, a 4K UHD Blu-ray + digital code, a 4K UHD Blu-ray + DVD + digital code, and probably some that I've forgotten.
Online listings often don't say if the digital code is for 4K, and often don't say much about special features. It is confusing enough that my impulse to buy the movie does not last long enough for me to figure out which to buy.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/How-Met-Your-Mother-Complete/dp/B07GJ...
[2] https://www.amazon.com/How-Met-Your-Mother-Complete/dp/B0747...
Modern piracy (the so called *ARR stack) provide UX that is pretty close to what you get from streaming services. In some cases even better - now I will use just one app on my TV to watch everything, will not be affected by Netflix/Prime/Apple/Hulu or internet provider outages when I am watching a movie or TV show, and will not have to go through 4 or 5 apps when I am searching for something specific to watch.
The UX is slightly worse when I find a movie or TV show via Plex Discovery and want to watch it immediately, since I will have to wait for *ARR to pick it up and download it, but for now I have quite a few TV shows to finish watching before it will become an inconvenience for me, especially given the fact that this stack can subscribe to upcoming shows - I can tell it that I am interested in Fallout for example, and it will monitor releases and download the show once it will become available.
Regarding the pirated content - I just started, so my experience have pretty low sample size. Still, majority of shows I downloaded so far are in 4K. The only one in 1080p is older show, for which I think there's no 4K source material.
It’s not worth keeping anything for as little as we watch now.
Well I guess I'll be saving ~70£ a year once it gets rolled out in UK.
Welcome to the "bean-counting age of TV," in which streaming services try to milk subscribers for as much as possible without pissing them off too much.
Going forward, I'm expecting cheaper content, greater restrictions, higher prices, a proliferation of tiered subscription plans, and pervasive advertisement.
Completely predictable, and yet also very disappointing.
Either this is master satire, you communicate with the future, the timeline model you’re running coalesced into the Singularity, or all of these simultaneously.
Do you by chance have a newsletter?
Apparently Amazon Prime accounts get a median of 300 minutes per week of view time. That’s 20 hours of TV a month with (in the order of) a few hundred ad slots I am paying to not have to watch. Amazon are making a penny per unwatched-ad from me.
Contrast with broadcast TV: Good Morning Britain wants £4k for an ad slot in a show that has 500k to 800k viewers so that’s a CPM also in the order of a penny [edit: ahem, £5, not a penny] paid for by the advertiser, for 1000x views.
So, even taking into account Amazon’s targeted ads vs broadcast TV ads, they can indeed make a lot more money from withholding ads than if they show them?
We could call their bluff. Maybe they don’t have any ads to actually show for which advertisers are willing to pay significant fee. But if the business model is to get consumers to pay Amazon to make the pain go away then they’d probably just show 90 seconds of screaming at the start, middle and end of every episode of The Boys.
So, it's likely that Amazon is making a little more from those who pay to skip ads, but it's in the ballpark. Plus, the people advertisers want to reach are the people with the disposable income to pay to skip the ads. They don't want the cheap people who are willing to waste nearly two hours of their life a month to save $3.
I think you might have miscalculated the CPM since you've said "that’s a CPM also in the order of a penny." It's on the order of a penny per viewer, but not per thousand viewers. That's probably why you think it's more of a bluff that could be called. It is likely more revenue if you pay to skip ads, but Amazon would probably end up making $2 from you watching ads.
Air was great! I haven't seen a single other thing I'd want to watch. Started a few things, but nothing grabbed my interest.
I know most people don't try life without TV, and I used to LOVE TV and movies. But honestly, give yourself a month without, and you just may find that you are filling your time with more interesting things.
I actually still wish I had more things to do, but just as a few, pick up an instrument (I play guitar), try art (I paint, would like to sculpt), write, read, exercise, make new friends. Even try spending more time cooking, or meditating.
I almost think that staring at a blank wall with your own thoughts can be better than most of what is on TV.
Also, remove the physical TV, and layout your house around socializing rather than watching.
Maybe it is, but honestly more people need to just go for a walk to clear their minds
I have a IRL best friend who is very against all forms of TV and media while I watch quite a bit of it. We argue strongly about this, so I've trodden this path ha.
Sometimes I'm not in the mood or mindset to read. 99% of my YouTube is makers / documentaries / war footage / local history and maps / etc. For mainstream stuff, just biopics or stories loosely based on real life or old war content (recently: Gotti, Edge of the World, Bruno Manser, Founder, Hacksaw Ridge, the Lebron/Lakers TV show, Detroit war production, some others) and I'm a huge sci-fi fan so I'll watch most scifi fiction as well.
To him, its all just mindless consumption. I 100% agree though about being social and desiging around people rather than a screen, but I don't judge others too much. To each their own.
I think there is good stuff out there, and I don't put your youtube watching in the same class as lots of the subscription content. Honestly, I think some of what youtube creators make is more valuable than what studios are spending millions on.
I was just surprised that after signing up for Prime, I thought I'd get a good few nights of viewing, but I seriously struggle to find anything worthwhile.
I still love Ken Burns docos, I really enjoyed Air, but I think most people are sucked into TV, and almost don't consider other options.
I think your friend is right that for most people it is mindless consumption. I think most people treat food as mindless consumption as well, and look where that has left the general population.
I think you've got the right approach of being selective of what you watch.
It feels so modern, and I love it.
As for content itself, ads and subscribing to multiple services aren’t necessary. You can get almost any title you’re looking for through your local library or inter-library loan. Curation is usually better than what you see on Netflix or any other streaming service.
I can download whatever I want, in a world wide scope, for free, with no DRM shit. And no ads or other onerous garbage bolted on.
And I keep what I download, rather than "stream" (download every time, with no ability to save).
So this 'pay more for less'? Nah, y'all pushing me to piracy. And I have NO problems doing it. And no, I'm not going to pay $150/no for streaming crap that I end up with nothing when I cancel.
So, yeah. I pirate.