Corporatism is running rampant. It's almost a full-blown punishment model. Soon the entertainment platforms will be demanding a fee for NOT subscribing to their service.
No, it IS a full-blown punishment model. Remember, everyone else is bundling this garbage with their service, too, so the price raises Disney does is an excuse that forces everyone downstream that bundles to raise prices too.
I'm not even sure which Disney+ susbription I apparently am a part of at this point - my cable company provides it, my wireless provider provides it, hell, even shopping platforms are now shoving this crap into it as a 'perk'. I didn't want it in the first place but I'm forced to have it like a bundled set of cable channels I didn't want to subscribe to.
... dear God, it's just cable TV package cramming all over again just across every single service industry now.
Never did refer to it as punishment myself. Perhaps it's fitting. My favorite term is "enemy". The interfaces, lack of meaningful configuration, enshittified search. They ALL do it. It's mind boggling to treat paying customers like this. Like enemies.
In the end, it all leads to advertising. This is just the basic business model in the US/World right now. Get enough eyeballs on your product, whether it's TV, social media, AI, the ditch on the side of the highway; then monetize it with ads. I don't understand why at this point anyone is surprised that a company like Disney would put ads every possible place, even their highest tier of streaming.
"But I specifically chose the highest option so I wouldn't see ads!" well, now you have the option to pay the highest tier to see less ads. For now. By paying for the highest tier, Disney knows you are a higher quality consumer with the most disposable income of all the users on that platform; that's exactly the users Disney can charge the most for advertising spend. From an exec's standpoint, why wouldn't you? sure, they'll lose some paying customers, but will probably make more in the short term at least, which is all that matters.
It's unclear why you're arguing for this. We already know about the downsides of low-regulation capitalism. They're still downsides, and we may reasonably continue to talk about them as such.
There's a whole genre of comment like this where the implication is that if some effect is either predictable or inevitable by the nature of large in-place systems, then individuals are somehow not allowed to criticize the people choosing to enact the effects.
We all have free will. Just because you can legally make money being annoying or otherwise shitty, and if you didn't do it then somebody else would, that carries absolutely no implication that nobody is allowed to judge you for making that choice.
In theory you’re right it’s an often repeated talking point but I just don’t understand why am I worth advertising to but not worth creating products for?
The products I see advertised are either stupid or so overpriced that it means buying them is stupid.
I am entirely willing to spend money and I have decent savings. I just expect the products put on offer to be worth buying.
Why doesnt disney just play their own ads? I think its because most of the companies paying to advertise never recover their money, and their sales attribution is so bad they can't even tell they are wasting money.
It's funny because it's such a treadmill situation! Yes, I guess I'm valuable to advertisers because I'm a high-value target because I paid to not see ads. But surely there's a dollar amount there! A dollar amount of how much I am worth to advertisers, and presumably I can pay them that directly.
But then if I pay them for really no ads, like for realzies, then ... I'm an even more valuable target! And there's a dollar value for that.
So I pay them for really no ads, pinkie swear this time, then ... I'm an even more valuable target! And there's a dollar value for that.
I cannot possibly be of infinite value to these companies.
But will they? We've been trained to accept slop at every turn. Food tastes worse and we just accept it (society as a whole - not saying you or I personally). I'm sure Disney has competent product people watching over this. They'll A/B test their way into "maximum amount of ads they can show before losing a critical mass of users". They'll optimize. Folks will get used to that as "the new normal". Disney will adjust from time to time to show more ads as people allow.
I do agree though. It seems like pretty bad behavior to charge 20 dollars AND insisting on showering us with ads.
> Calling it a deficiency in service, the Hyderabad consumer commission ordered an OTT platform to refund Rs 1,499 and pay compensation to a subscriber after it introduced advertisements midway into his paid ad-free subscription.
Well, if you want the root cause: this is what happens when your society is predicated on perpetual growth. Everything would collapse if we just left good things alone, so instead we’re stuck either innovating and creating new good things or squeezing the juice out of what already exists.
This has nothing with perpetual growth and everything with training your population to defend these practices with "oh, they're just companies, don't use it if you don't like it!" instead of fighting back.
Vigilante justice, you say? Now you are talking!! We certainly are not going to see things get better on their own, and the government definitely isn’t going to take the side of consumers.
I'm not sure consumer rights protections would deliver better experiences.
Government is predictably slow, inefficient, and does just about everything at a service level that is only accepted because there is no other choice.
We are seeing an increasingly exaggerated cycle that goes like this:
1. Innovation takes huge investment to launch
2. Early adopters enjoy amazing new product(s) while companies bear losses
3. Companies eventually must face debt so quality of products decrease and price increases
OpenAI and Anthropic have perhaps set the record for going from 1 to 2 in the biggest (financially) and fastest manner ever, and we are all hurtling towards step 3 with a possible too-big-to-fail scenario.
Back to Disney Plus: I don't have a sagely answer. Free markets do sometimes need government to curb monopoly power, and Disney is certainly has a sort of monopolistic power due to their huge portfolio of franchises and content.
Government is predictably slow, inefficient, and does just about everything at a service level that is only accepted because there is no other choice.
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Generally true but there have been a lot of examples demonstrating the opposite.
The NPS (and Reacreation.gov) does an amazing job considering their resource level, NASA arguably delivered innovation at an unprecedented scale for decades, and up until it was purposefully fucked with the US Postal Service offered a fantastic dependable, affordable and pretty innovative product. The Hold Mail is simple and elegant as just one minor example.
Given how ridiculously inefficient (i.e. extractive) private companies are in areas which were previously government run... yea I think at this point there might be stronger evidence that private companies are MUCH slower and less efficient. They can move faster at times, but they often do so with outrageously clear malicious intent, so that isn't exactly something to congratulate them for.
What's the confusion? The company was ordered to refund the Rs. 1499 that he had paid for the subscription plus pay an additional fine of Rs. 8000 (as compensation and litigation costs), all totalling to Rs. 9500.
This is not an option for everyone, but as someone who gave up TV several years ago (not entirely, just mostly), not feeling the draw of these platforms or having to put up with their costs and changes is really nice.
TV is sort of like caffeine (another thing I gave up - though that one wasn't by choice, but required by my doctors) in that you cannot imagine yourself living without it and wouldn't want to. And the first few months of abstinence are genuinely very difficult.
But eventually it gets easier, and then it gets completely easy, and then you actually feel as good or better than before. And once you finally become accustomed to it, you can't imagine going back to the old way.
After setting up a nas + sonarr setup, it's amazing how much my tv usage went down, simply due to having to actually choose what to view before it appears on my tv.
And it's also apparent how little content is currently worth a conscious watch. Every year or so I make a quick check for what great things appeared in the period, and not much has popped up.
I feel back in the day you still saw ads that were kind of creative and there was a certain glamour around being the one brand with the best ads.
Current ones are outright unpleasant, the "make the viewer feel bad about something" kind or directly spam folder level of scammy. Nobody takes pride anymore on their advertising.
I found that YT Shorts became absolutely terrible around the time they removed the dislike button. This could be because the recommendation algorithm is lacking adequate signals, or they could be intentionally pushing profitable bad content and removing any signal of possible backlash.
Short form video inherently has fundamental differences to what it will support and optimize towards. Just the selection effect of who prefers to watch shorts over long form content produces a different optimum that IMO is far worse.
Take a population, and then remove anyone who is willing to invest more than 60 seconds on a idea, and then sample the "preferences" of that population.
What did you expect to end up with?
Creators who I really like still end up producing trash on shorts because that's what gets traction, because the problem is what is actually liked by someone who wants to just mindlessly scroll 30 seconds at a time is really bad
The idiom "idiot box" has been used in Canada and the USA as well; it features in Heinlein's 1961 novel "Stranger in a Strange Land", and is generally cited as having come into being in 1955.
TV sort of means different things to different people. To some it means cable, so giving TV means switching to subscription channels. To others giving up TV means dropping subscription channels (Prime, HBO etc) but maybe watching youtube videos on the TV. But then but watching the same youtube videos on your phone count as watching "TV"? It sucks just as much time and attention, and it's even worse because now it always in your pocket. I, for example, watch Amazon prime videos on my laptop while I do other stuff and I still feel like I am watching "TV" even though it's not on the actual TV
I find I live in seasonal cycles with and without it. Basically the only time I watch any TV is the dark depths of winter. It's definitely like going without caffeine or alcohol for long stretches of time.
There are really quality TV shows, and films on streaming, out there.
Giving up TV is no different from giving up reading literature, or listening to music, or whatever artistic experience you want to have.
Watching a TV show like Adolescence is no different from reading great literature. And fortunately, there's so much great TV from the past couple of decades, you don't ever have to watch bad or brainrot TV if you don't want to.
There's nothing noble about trying to abstain from that.
It’s less noble than reading, since that exercises the mind and lets it wander and fill in details, etc. But I agree with a watered down version of your statement that compares television to something like watching a play, etc. which certainly has value
I just want a company to tell me truly what it is worth to them from me to not show me ads. Maybe the cost is truly so much higher than I expect that I wouldn't pay it, but for fuck's sake give me the option! Is it $15/month extra instead of $5? $30/month extra? Somewhere, that line exists where the company would financially benefit, I just wish they'd actually define it.
When I was getting married, I engaged a baker to make pies for our wedding. Two weeks before the wedding they cancelled, saying very apologetically they had not catered many weddings with only pies and couldn't do it at the price they quoted. I had to practically beg them to just give me a price that was profitable for them (20% higher, in the end), and then let me decide. This feels just like that.
I understand the rationale here, but I just don't believe I'm worth more to Disney (in this instance) as a recipient of these shitty ads than if they let me pay $2000/year to not have them; of course, that is more than I'm willing to pay.
I am receptive to the idea repeated across responses that Disney (or any other internet media company) cannot do this as a tier for all because it degrades the value of the advertising audience they sell to ad buyers by removing high earners. But it is still difficult for me to buy that there is truly no line at which it is worth it for them.
It's not easy to calculate how much you are worth because it depends on so many factors. And it wouldn't be nice to charge you 10x more than what they charge someone else.
This information is available in the annual reports of all these companies. It's the advertising revenue per user per year. For Meta it's like $100 a year for U.S. users.
The problem is that such a line doesn’t exist, because they’re always looking for ways to increase profit for shareholders. On day X, they’ll be fine offering you an ad free sub, but on day X+Y there will be a meeting where they discuss what they can do to improve their revenue numbers and someone will suggest adding just a few ads to the ad-free tier.
This is why people go scorched earth with adblockers. There’s a lot of discussion about “good” ad networks being allowlisted, but they are all just one missed earnings report away from implementing dark patterns. None of them are trustworthy.
It seems like there's no limit on that because you're more valuable to them as a potential product for their ad reselling business that whatever price you may bring not to be a product. I'm sure luxury companies would be interested to show you ad if the subscription was 2000$/month
Sounds like you're waiting for somebody to tell you how much money they need. There's no answer, they need all the money. If somebody asked you how much money you needed to do something, and you had no competition and they would not or could not walk away, you wouldn't have an answer either. You'd take all the money.
This is just how not having antitrust, media ownership limitations, or consumer protections works. The actors, crew, and production companies are in the same boat as you when dealing with Disney.
> If somebody asked you how much money you needed to do something, and you had no competition and they would not or could not walk away, you wouldn't have an answer either. You'd take all the money.
I mean I wouldn't because I'm not a moral-free corporate entity whose only goal is to maximize my own gain. Further, the analogy doesn't apply because in the streaming and internet media context I can walk away and have walked away. I do not use any social media except this site and Letterboxd; I've moved largely to physical media and season buys of shows I like, I watch sports on the antenna, NBA TV, or illicit streaming sites with ad blockers running overtime (unless it's on NBA League Pass, which doesn't advertise to me!).
From this point on, every year "physical media & a Jellyfin install" is going to be more sensible.
Assuming you even care about legality, of course.
Yeah, it's harder. But you can get a lot of "harder" things done in the amount of time you otherwise spend watching ads, after all. Because to me one of the worst things about ads is they're stealing dollars from me to make cents, if not fractions of a cent. This makes them on the dumb end of the bandit classification by the Basic Laws of Human Stupidity metric: https://harmful.cat-v.org/people/basic-laws-of-human-stupidi... It's so dumb.
And as long as we keep letting them give us an option to buy out the ads, but then they get to stick ads on that option anyhow, we can never get our way out of ads on these things. I don't mind buying them out because they make so little money anyhow but by simple game theory "buy out ads + put ads on anyhow" is always > "buy out ads". You need to cancel if they do this to you. I can't, because I don't have a Disney+ subscription. But you really need to. You need to turn the option into either "let us buy out the ads" or "lose the subscription" for them.
Yup - my take is this is coming for absolutely everything. (it's already mostly here for tv).
Rent-seeking behavior is too good to give up, so companies will move all content to streaming only services (games, movies, tv, music, books, etc...) in the majority of cases.
Physical media will only be available at very high prices, for a very limited selection of content.
We will go from "doctrine of first sale" around content licensing to the utterly crippled "you own a temporary, non-transferrable, and ephemeral license to stream this content from us on exactly this service using only approved devices until we decide otherwise".
The moral action in this case is to simply stop paying. Period.
Long term - we should be fighting to enshrine a new flavor of "doctrine of first sale" for the digital age.
Ex - maybe purchasing any content license sold with the word "buy" should enshrine your right to use, transfer, sell, or otherwise consume in any reasonable form that content for the duration of the copyright + 7 years. And we will not enforce copyright for items that can't be bought (only rented).
The problem with every "should" idea is that *THE SYSTEM WORKS AS INTENDED*
The system is not there to help you or me. The system is to protect and accelerate the flow of money up to the 0.1% at any and all costs. It does not matter if it will destroy the environment or if the innocent people will die.
People need to wake up to this fact, band together, and fix it by any means necessary. Until that happens "should" ideas are wasted breath.
Then old things shall become new again. And people may get the first taste of a world they have sought all of their young lives, and rejoice in a world recorded in media they may not understand: before default-irony, before default-sarcasm; many will not care for it, but perhaps some will delight that there is many lifetimes of media hiding there, on the bookshelf of humanity, covered in dust and ready to consume
I make a point to own my own books. Even if I first read them as ebooks or audiobooks, if I want to keep it forever I'll pick up a used copy (they're cheap).
I've considered the same for film. The only things I looked up that are just completely unavailable are Streaming Original series. Maybe this has to do with the sort of library I'd want to keep, but I don't think so.
Local stores around here no longer carry blu-ray media since sales have fallen off and few people even own the players. Bought a bunch of clearance discs last year but that might be it.
We can just move on as a society from Disney. It didn't exist in 1900, no reason for it to exist now. It doesn't deserve a permanent place in western culture.
Those people are already not paying for sports. That is a massive market, worth bikkuons and billions annually. People are not going to simply stop watching professional sports. Especially because historically that has always been very expensive
There's probably something to be said for being inspired by people living their dreams. Like it was no doubt inspirational for many to watch Jordan living his dream of being a baseball player no matter what people expected of him.
Honestly, even if your brother is right, who cares? I find it quite enjoyable to watch other folks play sports. So I'm going to continue to watch live sports.
Which sports I watch may change over time, as companies like Disney (ESPN) ruin one sport after another with too many ads and especially too much in-game gambling content, but I'll likely keep watching sports.
I've started going to local sports bars, I almost said pub, to watch events that I'm interested in seeing. After working from home for 8+ years now, it's also a nice bit of social interaction as well. I used to pay for Peacock specifically to watch Premiere League, but stopped since the team I follow kept getting bumped to their USA partner and not streaming on Peacock. Their 10-15 minute extended highlights are still available without a subscription, and they are good in a pinch for things I missed. I've now parlayed that sub over to Paramount+ to follow Champions League this season.
for some reason around here every bar has turned into a sports bar. Cocktail bar? Whisky bar? Brewery? Stripclub? They all have a bunch of screens and play sports now.
I was an adult when Lion King and Toy Story came out. Also, as a kid, we didn't have the concept of put one show on and let it loop all day long. A show came on, we watched it. When the show was over, we did something else. Of course, that was back when kids were allowed to free roam as long as we were back before dark.
I kind of get your point, and to an extent I do agree. We absolutely drew the line at Paw Patrol and tried to hide it from our kids as much as possible along with a few other shows like it. I definitely think that was a good choice.
However, I did notice a number of times where my kids would have a harder time initially connecting with new social groups as there was less shared experience/context. They'd want to have some kind of make believe play where they'd assume a character from a show, but my kids had no context as to the expectations of the rest of the group and would struggle connecting. Its like the other kids were speaking a totally different language. Things would usually eventually work themselves out, but things could have been smoother and less stressful for my kids had they known the context.
Its like, back in the day, you'd be able to strike up a conversation with a someone and reference something from a show on one of the few TV stations, and there was a good chance the other person might have seen it and could get the reference. A shared experience, despite not being together at the time. Now days, good luck.
Daniel Tiger, Elinor Wonders Why, Dinosaur Train, Work it out Wombats on PBS Kids.
Octonauts, Gabby's Dollhouse, Paw Patrol (and spinoffs), Puffin Rock, Peppa Pig, Lucas the Spider on Netflix.
Cocomelon, Helper Cars, Little Angel, Blippi, and many unboxing videos on YouTubeKids. Actually YouTube has a lot of full episodes from other sources as well - it's my go-to for Octonauts, Peppa Pig, and Paw Patrol when I set my kids up on my 11yo Macbook that's too old to run Netflix. I suspect many of the videos I think of as being from YouTube actually have their own sites elsewhere (isn't Cocomelon owned by ABC?).
Disney is a very small part of my kids' viewing habits. Pretty much just use it for the Mickie Mouse and Bluey franchises.
Aren't even the "high quality" 4k streams like 15GB/movie? So at $20/TB that's ~$0.30/movie at streaming quality? And you could still have probably better than DVD quality that people used to pay $20 for for like ~2GB, or $0.04.
There's an 18 TB refurb from serverpartdeals right now. Or there are a bunch of smaller new ones in the $20s on Amazon. The analysis doesn't really change even if you're looking at e.g. $30/TB. Even going full 8 TB SSDs at $150/TB is still thrift store cost per movie when you amortize it. Of course then as another comment here said, you're more likely to realize you don't actually want any of it.
It's $30. It used to be $10, now it's $30. It's tripled in price but it's still cheap enough for pirated movies. If that's still too much, get the 1080p version instead.
This is about $/TB on bigger drives. If you only want a 1TB drive it'll be more like $50.
perfectly reasonable quality 4k 10-bit hdr x265 is around 1gb/hr - the files I see that are 10-20x larger webrips from streaming networks seem to mostly contain noise and all compress back down to ~1gb/hr after denoising
It’s the storage prices that tend to give people sticker shock. Though for just being a media server you can get away with a spinning disc rather than an SSD. But they’re still kind of insane right now.
You still need to add to that the cost of the films/series themselves. (You can choose not to and sail the seas instead, of course, but then it's no longer an equivalent exchange).
Well, yes, but we've already established that entertainment is an ongoing expense. You just have to decide to spend that outgo in a different manner than giving it to the streamers. You start with a storage pool and way to play its contents back, and then you start to populate that storage pool. I have not once suggested getting entertainment for free. I have only suggested there are other ways of being entertained than by the streamers with a large portion of the same content.
If you wanted to skip a step, you could find a copy someone else has already transcoded for the physical media in your possession. I'm not suggesting anything, just pointing out what one could do.
You generally don't need to do any transcoding if you're only streaming to devices on your local network. I have an old 1060 set up for my Jellyfin server but it pretty much never gets used.
Most even remotely modern Intel chips can transcode a few 4K streams without breaking a sweat due to the integrated graphics/QuickSync.
I purchased one of those $150 tiny machines on Amazon specifically for the Intel integrated graphics so my Plex server can transcode easily. All media is another one of my servers, shared via NFS.
I've been buying used DVDs from local charity shops (here in Finland) for the past couple of years.
I've noticed that there are fewer new releases, but apparently people are increasingly buying physical media (that statistic might be squewed by counting vinyl releases).
But that said most of the films/TV I watch is old stuff anyway, and every time I visit a large store I walk away with 5+ disks.
Just yesterday I bought a physical copy of Fight Club for €1, alongside Trainspotting, Blade, and a boxed set of black and white St Trinian's movies. Definitely enough media to keep me entertained for the next week or two.
Even less likely to work in 2026. The only reason why the west-aligned world does the bidding of Walt Disney & friends, and doesn't instead shrug at DMCA and other extraterritorial IP laws, is to stay in good trading terms with the US. Now consider how much of that incentive remains when you are on the receiving end of illegal and arbitrary tariffs.
I have about 100TB of Linux ISO's for precisely this reason. I think of it like the doomsday prepping of storing canned goods for the collapse. Instead I store media on hard drives so if the landscape of the internet changes in 10 years at least I can rewatch Frasier for the rest of my life.
I'm mildly short on HDD space right now due to hardware prices, but I want to hoard some local LLM models as well, again not for a current need, but just in case something changes.
>"physical media & a Jellyfin install" is going to be more sensible.
Physical media is only cheaper if the user is ok with re-watching the same videos repeatedly. The higher cost of the DVD/Blu-ray discs can be amortized over multiple repeat viewings. (Good example is a 5-year old kid wanting to re-watch Frozen or Shrek cartoons again for the 100th time. A DVD player is cheaper than Disney+ subscription in that scenario.)
Digital streaming subscriptions are cheaper if the user almost always prefers watching new shows instead of re-runs. That's the the viewing habit of the vast majority of subscribers. Trying to only buy physical media to get a constant diet of new shows -- even buying the cheaper used discs from thrift stores -- will cost more than a subscription. The physical discs also are not immediately playable on an iPad/smartphone so requires extra hassle of ripping/transcoding that most normies don't want to do. Also, buying harddrives for the NAS server to store the rips isn't cheap either.
I'm all too aware of people preferring brand new shows because I've ripped several hundred DVDs to a stack of terabyte harddrives that nobody ever watches. Instead, they'd rather see what's new on Netflix, HBO Max, Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV+ ...
I get most my physical media from the library. It really doesn’t get any cheaper than that.
A smaller portion comes from used bookstores. For TV series in particular it’s still very cost effective on a money per viewing hour basis. Especially for kids’ media because my kids do want to watch the same thing over and over.
I also do some à la carte rentals. Maybe 3-4 movies per year, so the total cost is low.
That said, you’re absolutely right, this only works for me because I don’t particularly care about new shoes and streaming exclusives. If you’re willing to take the view that media doesn’t need to be new to be good then we currently live in a post-scarcity society where video entertainment is concerned. Which isn’t to say that people who prefer new things are wrong, but I am genuinely impressed by the amount of enshittification that people will tolerate (maybe after some grumbling, but still) in the service of that preference.
> The higher cost of the DVD/Blu-ray discs can be amortized over multiple repeat viewings.
For now. Physical media is being phased out. Sony just quitted the blu-ray player business after others also did and Disney already stopped releasing new discs in Australia.
That's why I stopped buying physical media years ago. Once I watch a movie, I've seen it. I don't really want to watch it again. And each viewing is a diminishing return, where I feel more and more like I'm just wasting time by doing it.
Music somehow is different, but movies, sporting events, dramatic series, etc. where the hook is that you don't know what's going to happen I can really only enjoy watching once.
You're technically right, but, as always, convenience and passivity will prevail, Disney's move will be successful, and ads will keep spreading like a contagious disease. I can see the day coming where ads play on our retinal implants and even closing our eyes won't help against them anymore. Yes, in theory the masses could do what's necessary to stop enshittification, but in practice I would be very surprised if they actually did.
>But you can get a lot of "harder" things done in the amount of time you otherwise spend watching ads
I suppose at some point you will have to have your device's camera on to confirm you really are interacting with the ads, but currently I can get stuff done during the ads by being in another window.
> every year "physical media & a Jellyfin install" is going to be more sensible.
Unless you just, you know, don't watch. Which is what I do. I ask myself, is it even worth all this hassle to watch this stuff? Is it that good? And for me, the answer is, no, it isn't. I can find better things to do with my time. So I do.
After spending all day looking at text on a screen, the last thing I want to do is spend time reading text in a book or eReader. I really enjoyed the part of my life where I was an avid reader. Yet another thing to regret about my choice in career.
I hear what you’re saying but let me offer an alternative perspective. Before I started professionally programming I worked in kitchens.
I see way more happy, healthy, financially secure folks past middle age in software than I did in restaurants. I sometimes miss the fun but it’s mostly grueling.
Also, watching what working in the trades did to family and friends.
Take up a physical hobby to stay in balance, and/or learn a musical instrument, if you are able. Hope you hang in there.
And on topic, for some light viewing material for young children, go right now and download all the Mr. Rogers episodes you can get your hands on, while we still can.
I have fond memories of Disney but as an adult there’s not much I appreciate. The oldest stuff is gauche and a lot of the newest stuff is cracked out. There are just a handful I think are really appropriate for my kids, and I’ve retained digital backups of those.
And I spend a lot of time reading to the kids. They constantly beg me for it. It’s hard to do at times but harder to disappoint them.
I canceled my Prime subscription precisely because they continued to keep mixing ad supported content with my ad free content. There were multiple shows where I unknowingly started watching something with ads where I immediately noped out at the first ad break and never watched that show again. I doubt they'll look at it, but it would be interesting to know how many users do the same thing.
I've already been pausing subscriptions left and right as my trends have been focusing on one platform's content that I'm not even using the others that I'm paying for that month. After dumping Prime, I eventually dumped Disney+/Hulu bundle for being the most expensive. I then got yet another notice from Netflix for increase rates which was already paused so I just went ahead and canceled it as well.
I wonder how much physical media I could acquire if I was to spend the same money that is not being spent on streaming platforms. I bet within a year, I could build up a pretty decent back catalog from used and $5 bins.
I should have elaborated. I don't plan on watching the physical media. I plan on watching a digital copy of the physical media where the physical media is just my legit license. Obtaining a digital copy of the library's physical media is not something I'd be willing to do.
> I wonder how much physical media I could acquire if I was to spend the same money that is not being spent on streaming platforms. I bet within a year, I could build up a pretty decent back catalog from used and $5 bins.
This has been the play for a while. I remember when the xbox game pass dropped for the first time. All the younger people were going crazy about how good of a deal it was, and all the tech-weary people could instantly tell that the price will get jacked up again and again and by the time you bail you'll own precisely nothing.
It's not necessarily wrong to take advantage of VC subsidizing you in a bid to gather an audience, but you should always keep in mind that the goal is to have the captive audience so you best have an escape plan, once the prices rise beyond any reasonable point. For movies in particular I struggle how the super-fragmented streaming landscape is worth a damn even if you don't want to sail the seas.
My partner and I started doing this to replicate the blockbuster experience. Show up on a Friday, wander through the racks, see what jumps out. It’s been a lot of fun and I like supporting the local library.
It’s also neat to discover all the other extremely useful things you can check out from the library. Buying a new piece of IKEA furniture? Check out a power drill for a couple days and save your hands from having to screw in 30 screws into slightly misaligned holes. Cooking some dish that requires a pan you’ll only use once in your lifetime, your local library might have that too.
I was gobsmacked when I started browsing the physical stuff that my local library has available to check out for free. YMMV, of course, since every library will have different priorities in how they spend their money, but it’s not hard to learn what resources are available to you and sometimes they are substantial.
Oh, and while we’re on the subject of commercial-free streaming services, Kanopy and Hoopla are awesome and something everyone who complains here about paid streaming options should be using a lot more of.
> Buying a new piece of IKEA furniture? Check out a power drill for a couple days […]
You can buy battery-powered drills for 25 € or less on Amazon, they'll last for years of occasional use, and they're more than adequate for assembling furniture and other light tasks. If you can afford new furniture, there's really no excuse for not owning at least a cheap power drill.
I did the physical media & Jellyfin install earlier this year. It was not that hard. From the moment I searched “create bootable Linux usb drive” to streaming my first movie on the flat screen TV from a Jellyfin server running on an Ubuntu box took a whole 90 minutes.
The hardest part was figuring out the folder where to save the media on the Ubuntu and give Jeyyfin read permissions on that folder via some Linux commands. It was not that hard because Jellyfin tips and tricks are all over the internet (Reddit for example.)
Pretty sure "the hardest part" is populating the downloads dir with quality downloads (including navigating the maze of public and private trackers, dealing with ad spam, trackers that don't actually download anything), finding subtitles that match your download, naming files according to Jellyfin's conventions, using a VPN to cover your tracks (probably one that supports port forwarding if you don't want to be limited in the content you can actually download), etc. It's not insurmountable, but it's not easy. I can find Mac Minis all over Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace.
You absolutely don't need a Mac Mini - Plex/Jellyfin runs great on a cheap Intel N100/N150/N95 Mini PC (with hardware transcoding). Prices are still up from two years ago - but you can find them for $250 if you know where to look.
I'll go ahead and duck now from the tomatoes but there is a middle path as well...
Using CheapCharts and buying Movies and TV on iTunes. Yes you don't "own it" and yes there are the rare occasional license revocations but it's not often enough for me to care about that--They still remain in your library anyways.
I have been diligently collecting quality, fun, and beloved movies over the past 2 years when they go on sale. That or buying bundles when they go on sale. I've amassed a solid collection of quality media, a lot of which is not on any streaming platform. I even have a lot of Disney titles as well!
I can watch it wherever, whenever and I can download it to devices.
Yeah, my iTunes library is over 20 years old and it's more valuable to me now than ever. The iPod halo effect lives on.
Once or twice a year during the holiday sales season I'll buy some new shows/seasons from iTunes. These are always downloaded and backed up, so I never have to worry about license changes, etc.
For old shows (20+ years) I will either rip the old DVDs or torrent guilt free.
When I travel, I load up my iPad or an SD card with my latest queue of shows so I can stick to my weekly TV schedule..
iTunes is more trustworthy for this, but keep in mind not every service where you can buy things will be. Sony did just revoke movies this year and I wouldn't really rely on Google or Amazon for it at least
I have recently started doing this too - I prefer r/iTunesMovieDeals for discovering stuff on sale. What I have been trying to optimize for is a low cost per hour and a high critical rating.
For example, I recently got the entire bundle for HBO's Rome for $9.99. That is ~50 minutes per episode (22 episodes), or $0.54/hour, which is not a bad deal! For a casual viewer like me, who might spend <6 hours each week watching TV, this should last a little more than 3 weeks. Recently, The Sopranos went on sale for $29.99, or $0.38/hour.
For streaming vs. buying to work, you just have to be patient about nabbing ~1-2 purchases per month and not be tempted to buy every single day.
The best part is the reduced cognitive load - you don't have to spend time browsing for content every day, and there are no ads, too.
Not if you move countries. I moved from the UK to Canada, updated my payment method and all UK purchased content was gone from my itunes account
And yes, there is some elaborate workaround to create a brand new account and share the original with the new but fundamentally I could no longer access what I purchased because I moved. And no, I didn't get a refund for the years of purchased content.
Geez, I feel like the default behavior for that move should be to refund the content that is removed, does the content become available if you move back?
I actually think just buying the digital copies is pretty great. I have a big library of movies, and I have muse check for digital discounts, so most movies i have gotten were <$10, often <$5. For kids, this includes basically every animated disney/pixar/illumination movie ever. You can get recurring hits like Gilmore Girls or friends on sale sometimes for like $29, the whole series.
I did cancel Disney+, For the cost of 4 movie purchases or a series a month basically.
I thought about Jellyfin, but it was worth the convenience cost to get them easily viewable.
Movies Anywhere helps because i just buy them wherever they are on sale and watch in 1 place.
How are ads "stealing dollars" from you lol? It's entirely within Disney's rights to put ads on their streaming service. Maybe you don't like ads, but that's pretty far from them stealing money from you.
I feel like if Disney board members were a little more committed to making content people want to watch and a little less committed to subsidizing money-losing boondoggles for purely social engineering purposes, then maybe there would not be a need to do this sort of thing?
I just loaded up the torrents for American Horror Story's latest episodes, some Avatar spinoff, and Dark Matter's latest. Considered grabbing "Yaga", but after looking at it on Wikipedia it seems like one of those dumb quirky millennial shows that I dislike. The first torrent finished downloading before I'd managed to click on the last.
I haven't seen a television ad since before 2001 or so, unless you count the muted ones at the Mexican restaurant out of the corner of my eye. I'm not sure why anyone ever watches those. Subscription services are inferior to self-hosted streaming.
The underlying principle is also more important than ever.
Laws and morals are not the same thing. What is legal may be immoral. What is illegal may be moral.
More and more I'm politically frustrated by government leaders and society just openly ignoring the law--although, I guess I did sort of argue that's sometimes okay in the last paragraph...
I guess it comes down to this. What laws do you elevate above others? What laws do you consider acceptable to ignore, and what laws do you consider morally valid?
There are some who commit moral atrocities because it's the law, we know it's sad but the law is really important and must be enforced, and then in the next breath they start an illegal war of aggression and bomb hundreds of kids. Sorry if I'm being a bit too on the nose.
Yes, somehow moral, ethics and fairness aspects are absent in many laws. In my opinion a constitutional law needs to be there to mandatorily list what each particular law is trying to achieve as its objective. Then people should be allowed to list any unfairness or ethical or moral concerns about each law, which is also recorded as a journal entry.
Democractic laws needs a guiding framework that considers these moral and ethical aspects, as these kind of things can be easily missed or overlooked if not documented as a mandatory tests for legality of law. Otherwise people have to constantly be on the lookout for sneaky laws that takes away the core values that may not be immediately apparent. Laws should be entirely written and modified only be legislature, and courts cannot be allowed to interpret it in any different way or apply it out of context or allowed to edit or delete laws, which is what legislative body is for.
My "honest" solution here is to simply pay the subscription fee and refuse to use the app, opting instead to pirate the same media if have access to through my subscription. I get to decide how I consume and I don't have to feel bad for stealing.
My media server is one of my favourite things in the whole world. Endless content in high bitrate video and audio. I have the editions I like (director's cut of Kingdom of Heaven is INCREDIBLE). No ads, ever. I watch it wherever and whenever I like. It works on all devices, online and offline. I'm never geofenced. Content will never be removed for any and no reason. Best of all, it's all in one place: movies, shows, and music. I can't pay for a service like that - and I probably would have, if I could.
I was paying for Netflix, but through a thousand cuts they pushed me away from streaming platforms entirely. I probably spend more on hard drives now than I would have with streaming subscriptions, but it's an infinitely better service.
My two favourite apps are Sonarr and Radarr. They make the collection process seamless.
> And as long as we keep letting them give us an option to buy out the ads, but then they get to stick ads on that option anyhow, we can never get our way out of ads on these things.
I wonder if we could regulate a requirement that service providers that serve ads must
1. offer "remove ads" as its own standalone/unbundled thing-you-can-pay-for in relation to any given product or service they offer
2. have at least one SKU of "remove ads" that isn't a subscription, but rather a one-time lifetime purchase, costed at at most the fair-market-value-set projected LTV of the profit they'd make from ads being served to an average user across said average user's lifetime use of the product/service
3. and where these "remove ads" payables must use wording that ties them to a very specific and regulatorily-defined contractual-relationship structure, where the contract cannot have a unilateral change-in-terms clause ("the terms of this contract may be changed at any time" etc); cannot have an arbitration clause (so while you might not be able to sue for product performance, you must be empowered to sue if the company ever again shows you an ad during use of said product); must have a successors-and-assigns clause (so buyouts don't void the contract, but rather obligate the buyer to now execute it on the company's behalf); etc.
4. and where the company is not allowed to factor in whether you have an active "no ads" benefit in calculating dynamic pricing for other offerings (i.e. they can't crank up the prices of their "with ads" product plans for "no ads" purchasers, because then they'd just hide the increasing cost of "no ads" inside the plan cost, effectively making "ad plan where you actually watch ads" and "ad plan where you don't watch ads because of your benefit" into two different SKUs, mooting the unbundling of "no ads".)
With such a regulation in place, companies could always increase the costs of their actual product plans and make them more expensive; and could still continue to bundle "remove ads" as a perk of some plans (slowly slipping upward through pricing tiers as it does today); but they'd be stuck serving anyone who buys a "remove ads" one-time purchase, the same way that those airlines that once offered "lifetime flights" as a limited giveaway were then stuck serving those customers.
I remember when I had Amazon Prime ad-free tier. Then they added ads to the ad-free tier, and then I found out to get what I was already paying for, they now want $36 more per year. I mean, that's just blatant bait and switch.
It's some criminal gangster saying "hey that's a nice free ad-tier, shame if something happened to it. Listen, you pay me $36/year for protection, and all this goes away. Capice?"
Remember when the appeal was that streaming was cheaper than cable? So, yeah. Shareholders were not going to just take that lying down when they know what can squeeze their consumers far harder than they anticipated.
Plus, they are now removing movies that you have "bought" or "purchased" while offering NO refunds.
That seems like revisionist history. Amazon started out with Prime Video bundled with Prime as a whole, and didn't raise the price. After 5-6 years they made it an add-on, then they added an ad-supported tier.
But if anything, the racket is bundling free shipping with ad-free video and everything else. Raising prices periodically to keep up with inflation is not a racket. And whether you would prefer to get downgraded to the advertising plan or automatically pay more is a personal choice, and automatically downgrading you rather than renewing you at a higher price is in some ways a more sensible default. (Though I'd prefer to be upgraded to the higher price generally and be notified so I have the option to downgrade or cancel, though downgrade really isn't an option I would consider.)
The primary issue is that many people prepaid for a year of Prime, which included ad-free streaming, and that ad-free service was changed mid-contract. I’d have no problem if the included streaming tier or overall price was changed at renewal.
That's fair, changing mid-year is definitely a problem and arguably illegal under current law, though really if we had functional antitrust I'm not sure that bundling would be legal to begin with.
They rolled out the new ToS to all customers, the original ToS they agreed to when signing up gave Disney permission to do that. There is nothing illegal going on here.
They are assholes that lost my business forever for doing shady shit. I had paid for an annual plan with no-ads. It doesn't have to be illegal to be anti-consumer. I vote with my wallet.
There's obviously a limit to what you can change via ToS. Yes, their ToS says they can alter the deal at their discretion. Adding ads to a premium ad-free tier seems like fundamentally a violation of the presumed contract. (Specifically talking about one-year plans, saying that they can make these kinds of fundamental alterations to the deal mid-year sounds like it ought to be illegal if they're selling one-year plans.)
I'll put up with many things, but paying for the pleasure of viewing ads feels like a moral violation. It's so disturbingly greedy I cannot fully wrap my mind around it.
And I wish I was being dramatic here, but truly anytime I feel I've wrapped my head around the depravity of man I just remember that we have "paid" tiers of TV that show ads and I sleep soundly knowing the bottom remains unfathomed.
I get disney+ with ads via my bank. We use it for my daughter and just blocking *disneyadvertising.com at a DNS level has meant not a single ad is shown.
I find it extremely repugnant how _everything_ gets treated like advertising surface area now. Its disrespectful to everyone and I feel like we're far past the point of diminishing returns.
I've always been frustrated by the intense focus the modern economy has on advertising. If I am interested in a product, I would much rather discover it by searching. Having advertisements forced upon me at every turn is a massive waste of resources (time and attention) given only a fraction of a percent of the products have any relevance to my life. I block every form of advertising I can reasonably block. If a company raises the friction sufficiently, I'll find a way around it. I'm mostly an amoral participant in the economy. I pay for YouTube, Disney, etc. but if they make giving them money an unpleasant experience, I have no qualms employing a usenet subscription and *arr stack to dodge the whole thing.
Modern advertising is not meant for product discovery, but for the incumbents to make sure you associate "burger" with "McDonalds" at a subconscious level.
I think this may work for more specialty products, but burgers are too ubiquitous that this should work on basically anyone, unless they are truly simple
I am working hard to manage my mental model when shopping now to try and minimize this affect knowing it exists. In a sense I've realized my mentality toward the world is less of "what brands are good?" and more of "how is this company trying to fuck me over?" and then moving from that mentality forward.
So when I'm out shopping I see brands that I've found advertised. I see brands I've never heard of. I look at both. But what one is selling products that are fully accessible to me, fully owned by me? Which ones use online features that can/will eventually be stripped and put behind a a subscription model? What ones are using quality manufacturing materials? Which ones are using cheap plastics or vaneers? Which ones have local brick and mortar presence where I can take issues in person? For instance, there's a very heavy Costco effect to my shopping. I've bought products from brands I'm pretty iffy on because I know Costco is going to take that return with no fuss if I get it home and discover there's something about that product I find distasteful.
And I should say that I'm not a very big consumer. Trying to do this a lot, buying for a family (kids, spouse, etc.) could quickly become overwhelming. I know how exhausting it is to need to read labels every time you're buying food because how often they enshittify the recipe, adding thickeners or allergens that weren't there the last time you bought it.
It won't work for everyone but the answer really is the same thing its always been: Be a conscious consumer. Research what you want before you buy. Know what is worth spending extra on, and what is marketing nonsense. Find companies with positive reputation (but still be observant for how you can be fucked when they sell out next year), and try to support local.
Then they have failed miserably. I absolutely do not associate burger/McDonalds. That's disgusting. But continuing your point, I've associated Clydesdale horses with a shitty beer that I'll never drink. I've associated polar bears with a nasty soft drink that I never drink. So maybe advertising is working for me in that I know where not to spend my money.
I've always doubted the veracity here attributed to advertising. There have been few, if any, advertisements that make me think someone's consumable product is best, category defining, or otherwise meaningful.
When you dig into advertising model attribution, there aren't a whole lot of signals that the way we currently jam advertising down people's throats actually sells more things.
> there aren't a whole lot of signals that the way we currently jam advertising down people's throats actually sells more things.
It's a useless tax of human economic activity. It fulfills the same purpose as tree trunks of trees in the forest. And it's similarly expesive for companies and for everyone else around. It should be mostly banned and replaced with state sposored directory of goods and services available at the national market.
No, I am quite aware of the assertion of subliminality and alleged subconscious coercion.
To borrow from Sagan: I could similarly claim that a dragon lived in your garage. You would rightly be doubtful and expect proof of said claims. I'll leave the rest of that gem for you to read if you haven't before (one of my favorites!).
Yes there is a subconscious part but we can also do deliberate shopping, by buying only from whitelisted sources and whitelisted brands who have earned my trust. Before 30 I never used to consider things like this but after a certain age almost everyone is picky and filters with their own biases too. Anti-ad bias or an anti-product bias is not going to be overridden subconsciously by watching an ad for that product, unless the product is actually good product.
I couldn’t begin the hazard to guess how much advertising spend is actually just a way to buy editorial rights over the content, but that number is definitely not zero.
I don’t believe this is an actual goal of brand advertising.
Instead it the goal is to bump up the concept of the brand into your short-term memory, and perhaps as a bonus to associate that with positive emotion or at the very least to normalize the brand.
Later when you are making a purchasing decision, the brand is more present in your mind and makes it a more likely outcome.
Of course this is more complicated and nefarious when the brand’s products are addictive or have addictive-like qualities, which arguably includes McDonald’s.
Always puzzled me how much money can possibly be in trying to optimize sales by some low digit percentage points, versus how much is sacrificed for it.
The problem is that advertising works! I hate that it works!
Marketing and advertising aren't the same thing but I swear both sides of that coin have devolved via some process of carcinization where their claws emerge from the darkness everywhere people gather. Especially places where those claws are inappropriate and unwanted and yet it still works.
Yeah, people in our line of work tend to look down on it and don't understand it because we discover things more manually. But that's not the case with the vast majority of people. Advertising works and it works really, really well.
We do not "discover things more manually", whatever that means. Statistically, the more someone thinks they're not affected by advertising, the more they're actually affected by advertising in reality.
It works only to a point and only if the product has not degraded/enshittified. Retention is often terrible for bad products/service. Humans are not robots. Most people think about what they are purchasing and no amount of ads can fix it if the product/service is bad.
I actively/mentally block products I see in ads now. For example, when I use Amazon's terrible search feature, I'll make a mental note of which listings are "sponsored" and make sure NOT to buy them. Ever, if possible.
When I see ads for things on YouTube, I automatically assume it's a scam... Because it almost always is!
The YouTube sponsor situation is actually crazy, I think 100% of them have turned out to be either scams or just very overpriced. Even ones that sounded reasonable, like Ground News, and VPNs.
What could possibly go wrong with a (I think) VC funded news aggregator that becomes your authority on what "Right" vs "Left" thought is and how to interpret a bunch of news without actually reading any of it?
Where could that possibly end up causing problems?
The purpose of Ground News is to present you with two sides and make you believe they are both equally valid. It was found out to be funded by a bunch of people who also fund, own or benefit from highly inaccurate news sources, from one side in particular, which Ground News presents as peers of more accurate sources. In this sense, Ground News is a misinformation campaign.
Also it doesn't actually show you the news. It just shows you links to news sites that you need to be separately subscribed to if you want to read them, so in that sense you're just not getting the product you probably thought you were getting (access to balanced news), so it's a double scam.
There's video essays about this on YouTube of course since that's where Ground News was mainly advertised.
The product never purports to show you the news directly, and the reaction of "the other side largely… publish[es] a lot of nonsense" is a) not true and b) why the product exists. For that matter, the dichotomy you have in mind is not even valid in the first place.
If what you say about the audience composition and the general background situation were at all true, it would be impossible for them to find sponsors, because it would require YouTubers who depend on appealing to a partisan audience to deliberately seek to betray them. And if what you say about the product were at all true, it would again be impossible for them to find sponsors, because none of the YouTubers would be willing to endorse the product.
If anything, the problem with Ground News is that they buy into the same categorization scheme of the news that you do, perhaps with a different bias but the same clustering and same false impression of a single-dimension spectrum.
You deliberately misunderstand the point about advertising audiences, that is not how advertising audiences work, at all. The point about influencers rejecting shady sponsors is also false, and circular. All evidence suggests they mostly accept sponsors who offer money.
If Ground News "bought into the same categorisation that I do" there would be literally no reason for it to exist, so that's wrong too.
it doesn't give you anything, just links you to paywalled articles
there is the illusion of "balanced" or more in the know but they are no more balanced than any other curator, and in many cases try really, really hard to present a mixed view of something that is otherwise inexcusable.
It's why I don't get viewers getting angry with a creator for taking a specific sponsor. YouTube sponsorships are basically an advisory not to buy a product. It's like an anti-advert in a sense. Something appears in a sponsorship, that thing is definitely bad even if we don't know why yet.
You live in a bubble. There is a huge amount of the population who are happy to get their brain rot (of all ages by the way, even pensioners) interspersed with ads. And it works. I recently saw my mother's facebook feed and it completely explains all the random shit she's bought off sketchy dropshipping sites lately. I tried to hide a bunch of it but the problem is as soon as she interacts with anything ever again it'll pop back up. She doesn't see the harm, doesn't want to stop and enjoys it.
There is nothing for that on iOS at least. And there are extensions for desktop that do stuff like this, but facebook has banned the author and some users of said extension. So make of that what you will...
They were actually doing this already. When you bought the premium plan, they just lied and pretended their in-house ads weren't ads and served you those instead. You still didn't get to just watch the content you wanted.
There's a contradiction in the "higher priced tier is ad-free" model which is that there are two kinds of people: (1) people who can't afford the ad-free tier who can't afford anything else and (2) people who could afford the ad-free tier who are worth advertising to.
It's been the reality of media business models for a long time, like those big thick magazines like Glamour charged a high subscription price to quality subscribers as people who can buy what's advertised. It's also one of the many reasons why I have distaste for The New York Times -- it is packed with low quality ads that discredit the quality of their editorial content. They're so greedy that an expensive subscription isn't enough, but the expensive subscription, in itself, improves the viability of the advertising model.
True, we still have Netflix, despite almost never using it, because "we might want to watch something". Frankly the main reason is because my in-laws also use the account and enjoys it.
The lesson I've learned, the same as I learned from Facebook, is "Never sign up to another service ever again". It's much easier to just never sign up than it is to convince the entire family that you should cancel something.
I had been a Netflix subscriber back from the DVD days and then into when they started streaming. I think the first price increase I continued my subscription, but the second I cancelled. That was probably prior to 2020. Haven't missed it.
I just recently dropped Disney+ and Hulu from my ESPN unlimited subscription because the promo price ended and Disney/ESPN failed to send out a reminder email that the price was increasing. At least SiriusXM has the decency to send out a reminder email for the subscription increasing in price so you can go haggle a lower price.
Kinda funny, I went the opposite way. I've always had their top tier 4k thing but cancelled a year or so ago when it got to $27 or whatever; we never watch it anyway.
Recently my partner was once again interested in watching something on netflix so instead i signed up for the cheapest 1080p ad-supported tier for $8 or thereabouts. I don't really watch it, and she won't miss the quality. If the ads don't bother her, so be it. If they do, we'll just stop watching paying for netflix again!
When I was young, I pirated because I was broke. I could afford a DVD or I could afford to eat that week. Food usually won. Sometimes alcohol.
I got a decent job, and could afford to spend on things, but I still pirated because it was more convenient than going to a store I wouldn't ordinarily go to.
Then netflix started streaming movies/TV to the home and I stopped pirating basically instantly. Netflix was more convenient than pirating. Steam started getting good, so I stopped pirating games as well.
Then streaming service got balkanized. It wasn't enough to pay for Netflix anymore. I am expected to pay for literally half a dozen services, and when I do want to watch something, I would have to flip around between half of them before I find the right service to stream it from. And now they expect me to watch ads?
Fuck that. I still buy games on Steam and GoG because it's convenient. I pirate TV/movies because it's such a fucking pain in the dick to consume that media legally. I just can't be bothered when piracy is so much more convenient.
I think the best move is now to go back to watching TV: more broad access to channels, also has ads which are (to some degree) skippable. I do not get why streaming had to go full way to being worse than TV.
I don't know, if you want a cable tv package, where I live, that's even remotely good you're looking at $1250 a year. We have four streaming services and that's still cheaper and I then also have streaming music include.
You can buy pretty much any show you want to watch, without ad breaks, anytime you want on Apple TV store and Google Play store.
The only one that requires you to subscribe is Netflix, but it's also easy to cancel the subscription, so you can simply pay for 1 month as the price to watch a show.
This was exactly the push I needed to cancel my subscription. We already own all the Disney DVDs that we actually love, and there hasn't been anything good released by Disney in ages.
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[ 0.30 ms ] story [ 107 ms ] threadI'm not even sure which Disney+ susbription I apparently am a part of at this point - my cable company provides it, my wireless provider provides it, hell, even shopping platforms are now shoving this crap into it as a 'perk'. I didn't want it in the first place but I'm forced to have it like a bundled set of cable channels I didn't want to subscribe to.
... dear God, it's just cable TV package cramming all over again just across every single service industry now.
"'Unmissable TV' to be enforced by law"
"But I specifically chose the highest option so I wouldn't see ads!" well, now you have the option to pay the highest tier to see less ads. For now. By paying for the highest tier, Disney knows you are a higher quality consumer with the most disposable income of all the users on that platform; that's exactly the users Disney can charge the most for advertising spend. From an exec's standpoint, why wouldn't you? sure, they'll lose some paying customers, but will probably make more in the short term at least, which is all that matters.
There's a whole genre of comment like this where the implication is that if some effect is either predictable or inevitable by the nature of large in-place systems, then individuals are somehow not allowed to criticize the people choosing to enact the effects.
We all have free will. Just because you can legally make money being annoying or otherwise shitty, and if you didn't do it then somebody else would, that carries absolutely no implication that nobody is allowed to judge you for making that choice.
I am entirely willing to spend money and I have decent savings. I just expect the products put on offer to be worth buying.
But then if I pay them for really no ads, like for realzies, then ... I'm an even more valuable target! And there's a dollar value for that.
So I pay them for really no ads, pinkie swear this time, then ... I'm an even more valuable target! And there's a dollar value for that.
I cannot possibly be of infinite value to these companies.
I do agree though. It seems like pretty bad behavior to charge 20 dollars AND insisting on showering us with ads.
E.g. Paid for ad-free OTT viewing but commercials ‘appeared after a month’, man wins Rs 9,500 ( https://indianexpress.com/article/legal-news/paid-ad-free-ot... ):
> Calling it a deficiency in service, the Hyderabad consumer commission ordered an OTT platform to refund Rs 1,499 and pay compensation to a subscriber after it introduced advertisements midway into his paid ad-free subscription.
Government is predictably slow, inefficient, and does just about everything at a service level that is only accepted because there is no other choice.
We are seeing an increasingly exaggerated cycle that goes like this: 1. Innovation takes huge investment to launch 2. Early adopters enjoy amazing new product(s) while companies bear losses 3. Companies eventually must face debt so quality of products decrease and price increases
OpenAI and Anthropic have perhaps set the record for going from 1 to 2 in the biggest (financially) and fastest manner ever, and we are all hurtling towards step 3 with a possible too-big-to-fail scenario.
Back to Disney Plus: I don't have a sagely answer. Free markets do sometimes need government to curb monopoly power, and Disney is certainly has a sort of monopolistic power due to their huge portfolio of franchises and content.
The US did actually once have effective consumer protections, they were killed by a billionaire because he hated taxes and brown people.
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Generally true but there have been a lot of examples demonstrating the opposite.
The NPS (and Reacreation.gov) does an amazing job considering their resource level, NASA arguably delivered innovation at an unprecedented scale for decades, and up until it was purposefully fucked with the US Postal Service offered a fantastic dependable, affordable and pretty innovative product. The Hold Mail is simple and elegant as just one minor example.
> ordered an OTT platform to refund Rs 1,499
How are these reconciled?
TV is sort of like caffeine (another thing I gave up - though that one wasn't by choice, but required by my doctors) in that you cannot imagine yourself living without it and wouldn't want to. And the first few months of abstinence are genuinely very difficult.
But eventually it gets easier, and then it gets completely easy, and then you actually feel as good or better than before. And once you finally become accustomed to it, you can't imagine going back to the old way.
And it's also apparent how little content is currently worth a conscious watch. Every year or so I make a quick check for what great things appeared in the period, and not much has popped up.
It's always the feeds themselves that get you.
Current ones are outright unpleasant, the "make the viewer feel bad about something" kind or directly spam folder level of scammy. Nobody takes pride anymore on their advertising.
I still watch YT Shorts about series and news. That is pretty much TV.
Take a population, and then remove anyone who is willing to invest more than 60 seconds on a idea, and then sample the "preferences" of that population.
What did you expect to end up with?
Creators who I really like still end up producing trash on shorts because that's what gets traction, because the problem is what is actually liked by someone who wants to just mindlessly scroll 30 seconds at a time is really bad
I only watch YouTube, but I grew tired of the algorithm and wanted traditional TV, but for YT. So created this: https://channelsurfer.tv
I keep shorts out.
Giving up TV is no different from giving up reading literature, or listening to music, or whatever artistic experience you want to have.
Watching a TV show like Adolescence is no different from reading great literature. And fortunately, there's so much great TV from the past couple of decades, you don't ever have to watch bad or brainrot TV if you don't want to.
There's nothing noble about trying to abstain from that.
When I was getting married, I engaged a baker to make pies for our wedding. Two weeks before the wedding they cancelled, saying very apologetically they had not catered many weddings with only pies and couldn't do it at the price they quoted. I had to practically beg them to just give me a price that was profitable for them (20% higher, in the end), and then let me decide. This feels just like that.
The line doesn't exists. It's most profitable for the company to repeatedly:
1. Have an ad-supported tier, and a no-ads tier
2. Wait for most people to move to the no-ads tier
3. Introduce ads into the no-ads tier
4. Wait for people to get sick of ads
5. Introduce a new, higher cost no ads tier
There is no threshold where it's more profitable for the company to never introduce ads at that price point.
I am receptive to the idea repeated across responses that Disney (or any other internet media company) cannot do this as a tier for all because it degrades the value of the advertising audience they sell to ad buyers by removing high earners. But it is still difficult for me to buy that there is truly no line at which it is worth it for them.
This is why people go scorched earth with adblockers. There’s a lot of discussion about “good” ad networks being allowlisted, but they are all just one missed earnings report away from implementing dark patterns. None of them are trustworthy.
This is just how not having antitrust, media ownership limitations, or consumer protections works. The actors, crew, and production companies are in the same boat as you when dealing with Disney.
I mean I wouldn't because I'm not a moral-free corporate entity whose only goal is to maximize my own gain. Further, the analogy doesn't apply because in the streaming and internet media context I can walk away and have walked away. I do not use any social media except this site and Letterboxd; I've moved largely to physical media and season buys of shows I like, I watch sports on the antenna, NBA TV, or illicit streaming sites with ad blockers running overtime (unless it's on NBA League Pass, which doesn't advertise to me!).
You can squeeze customers quite a bit but once they go back to pirating it's incredible hard to get them to subscribe again.
Assuming you even care about legality, of course.
Yeah, it's harder. But you can get a lot of "harder" things done in the amount of time you otherwise spend watching ads, after all. Because to me one of the worst things about ads is they're stealing dollars from me to make cents, if not fractions of a cent. This makes them on the dumb end of the bandit classification by the Basic Laws of Human Stupidity metric: https://harmful.cat-v.org/people/basic-laws-of-human-stupidi... It's so dumb.
And as long as we keep letting them give us an option to buy out the ads, but then they get to stick ads on that option anyhow, we can never get our way out of ads on these things. I don't mind buying them out because they make so little money anyhow but by simple game theory "buy out ads + put ads on anyhow" is always > "buy out ads". You need to cancel if they do this to you. I can't, because I don't have a Disney+ subscription. But you really need to. You need to turn the option into either "let us buy out the ads" or "lose the subscription" for them.
Which of course is why physical media will increasingly rarely be offered as an option going forward
Rent-seeking behavior is too good to give up, so companies will move all content to streaming only services (games, movies, tv, music, books, etc...) in the majority of cases.
Physical media will only be available at very high prices, for a very limited selection of content.
We will go from "doctrine of first sale" around content licensing to the utterly crippled "you own a temporary, non-transferrable, and ephemeral license to stream this content from us on exactly this service using only approved devices until we decide otherwise".
The moral action in this case is to simply stop paying. Period.
Long term - we should be fighting to enshrine a new flavor of "doctrine of first sale" for the digital age.
Ex - maybe purchasing any content license sold with the word "buy" should enshrine your right to use, transfer, sell, or otherwise consume in any reasonable form that content for the duration of the copyright + 7 years. And we will not enforce copyright for items that can't be bought (only rented).
The system is not there to help you or me. The system is to protect and accelerate the flow of money up to the 0.1% at any and all costs. It does not matter if it will destroy the environment or if the innocent people will die.
People need to wake up to this fact, band together, and fix it by any means necessary. Until that happens "should" ideas are wasted breath.
as many disks and vhs as you can handle. check the disks for scratches just in case, but otherwise you can find oodles
I make a point to own my own books. Even if I first read them as ebooks or audiobooks, if I want to keep it forever I'll pick up a used copy (they're cheap).
I've considered the same for film. The only things I looked up that are just completely unavailable are Streaming Original series. Maybe this has to do with the sort of library I'd want to keep, but I don't think so.
You can live without watching whatever the latest show is.
Don’t spend your time watching, spend your time making your own dreams come true.
Which sports I watch may change over time, as companies like Disney (ESPN) ruin one sport after another with too many ads and especially too much in-game gambling content, but I'll likely keep watching sports.
PBS looks like it has some ok stuff
However, I did notice a number of times where my kids would have a harder time initially connecting with new social groups as there was less shared experience/context. They'd want to have some kind of make believe play where they'd assume a character from a show, but my kids had no context as to the expectations of the rest of the group and would struggle connecting. Its like the other kids were speaking a totally different language. Things would usually eventually work themselves out, but things could have been smoother and less stressful for my kids had they known the context.
Its like, back in the day, you'd be able to strike up a conversation with a someone and reference something from a show on one of the few TV stations, and there was a good chance the other person might have seen it and could get the reference. A shared experience, despite not being together at the time. Now days, good luck.
Octonauts, Gabby's Dollhouse, Paw Patrol (and spinoffs), Puffin Rock, Peppa Pig, Lucas the Spider on Netflix.
Cocomelon, Helper Cars, Little Angel, Blippi, and many unboxing videos on YouTubeKids. Actually YouTube has a lot of full episodes from other sources as well - it's my go-to for Octonauts, Peppa Pig, and Paw Patrol when I set my kids up on my 11yo Macbook that's too old to run Netflix. I suspect many of the videos I think of as being from YouTube actually have their own sites elsewhere (isn't Cocomelon owned by ABC?).
Disney is a very small part of my kids' viewing habits. Pretty much just use it for the Mickie Mouse and Bluey franchises.
Physical media is being done away with, both discs and players.
Seems like streaming is the future we are going to be fed.
This is about $/TB on bigger drives. If you only want a 1TB drive it'll be more like $50.
Don't get an SSD, far too expensive.
A UHD movie with UHD and dolby audio and all that is anywhere from 50 to 70Gb. That's if you rip it straight off the disk.
You can shrink it a little by being pickier about which audio tracks you take, but not much.
You can do other things to it to make it smaller, but then it's not the equivalent of the physical disc
720p is good enough for me so... can we all just use that and give up on transcoding?
I purchased one of those $150 tiny machines on Amazon specifically for the Intel integrated graphics so my Plex server can transcode easily. All media is another one of my servers, shared via NFS.
I've noticed that there are fewer new releases, but apparently people are increasingly buying physical media (that statistic might be squewed by counting vinyl releases).
But that said most of the films/TV I watch is old stuff anyway, and every time I visit a large store I walk away with 5+ disks.
Just yesterday I bought a physical copy of Fight Club for €1, alongside Trainspotting, Blade, and a boxed set of black and white St Trinian's movies. Definitely enough media to keep me entertained for the next week or two.
You can only win by unsubscribing.
I'm mildly short on HDD space right now due to hardware prices, but I want to hoard some local LLM models as well, again not for a current need, but just in case something changes.
Physical media is only cheaper if the user is ok with re-watching the same videos repeatedly. The higher cost of the DVD/Blu-ray discs can be amortized over multiple repeat viewings. (Good example is a 5-year old kid wanting to re-watch Frozen or Shrek cartoons again for the 100th time. A DVD player is cheaper than Disney+ subscription in that scenario.)
Digital streaming subscriptions are cheaper if the user almost always prefers watching new shows instead of re-runs. That's the the viewing habit of the vast majority of subscribers. Trying to only buy physical media to get a constant diet of new shows -- even buying the cheaper used discs from thrift stores -- will cost more than a subscription. The physical discs also are not immediately playable on an iPad/smartphone so requires extra hassle of ripping/transcoding that most normies don't want to do. Also, buying harddrives for the NAS server to store the rips isn't cheap either.
I'm all too aware of people preferring brand new shows because I've ripped several hundred DVDs to a stack of terabyte harddrives that nobody ever watches. Instead, they'd rather see what's new on Netflix, HBO Max, Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV+ ...
A smaller portion comes from used bookstores. For TV series in particular it’s still very cost effective on a money per viewing hour basis. Especially for kids’ media because my kids do want to watch the same thing over and over.
I also do some à la carte rentals. Maybe 3-4 movies per year, so the total cost is low.
That said, you’re absolutely right, this only works for me because I don’t particularly care about new shoes and streaming exclusives. If you’re willing to take the view that media doesn’t need to be new to be good then we currently live in a post-scarcity society where video entertainment is concerned. Which isn’t to say that people who prefer new things are wrong, but I am genuinely impressed by the amount of enshittification that people will tolerate (maybe after some grumbling, but still) in the service of that preference.
For now. Physical media is being phased out. Sony just quitted the blu-ray player business after others also did and Disney already stopped releasing new discs in Australia.
Music somehow is different, but movies, sporting events, dramatic series, etc. where the hook is that you don't know what's going to happen I can really only enjoy watching once.
I suppose at some point you will have to have your device's camera on to confirm you really are interacting with the ads, but currently I can get stuff done during the ads by being in another window.
(but yes... https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTlYlSF... )
Unless you just, you know, don't watch. Which is what I do. I ask myself, is it even worth all this hassle to watch this stuff? Is it that good? And for me, the answer is, no, it isn't. I can find better things to do with my time. So I do.
I see way more happy, healthy, financially secure folks past middle age in software than I did in restaurants. I sometimes miss the fun but it’s mostly grueling.
Also, watching what working in the trades did to family and friends.
Take up a physical hobby to stay in balance, and/or learn a musical instrument, if you are able. Hope you hang in there.
And on topic, for some light viewing material for young children, go right now and download all the Mr. Rogers episodes you can get your hands on, while we still can.
I have fond memories of Disney but as an adult there’s not much I appreciate. The oldest stuff is gauche and a lot of the newest stuff is cracked out. There are just a handful I think are really appropriate for my kids, and I’ve retained digital backups of those.
And I spend a lot of time reading to the kids. They constantly beg me for it. It’s hard to do at times but harder to disappoint them.
I've already been pausing subscriptions left and right as my trends have been focusing on one platform's content that I'm not even using the others that I'm paying for that month. After dumping Prime, I eventually dumped Disney+/Hulu bundle for being the most expensive. I then got yet another notice from Netflix for increase rates which was already paused so I just went ahead and canceled it as well.
I wonder how much physical media I could acquire if I was to spend the same money that is not being spent on streaming platforms. I bet within a year, I could build up a pretty decent back catalog from used and $5 bins.
This has been the play for a while. I remember when the xbox game pass dropped for the first time. All the younger people were going crazy about how good of a deal it was, and all the tech-weary people could instantly tell that the price will get jacked up again and again and by the time you bail you'll own precisely nothing.
It's not necessarily wrong to take advantage of VC subsidizing you in a bid to gather an audience, but you should always keep in mind that the goal is to have the captive audience so you best have an escape plan, once the prices rise beyond any reasonable point. For movies in particular I struggle how the super-fragmented streaming landscape is worth a damn even if you don't want to sail the seas.
I was gobsmacked when I started browsing the physical stuff that my local library has available to check out for free. YMMV, of course, since every library will have different priorities in how they spend their money, but it’s not hard to learn what resources are available to you and sometimes they are substantial.
Oh, and while we’re on the subject of commercial-free streaming services, Kanopy and Hoopla are awesome and something everyone who complains here about paid streaming options should be using a lot more of.
You can buy battery-powered drills for 25 € or less on Amazon, they'll last for years of occasional use, and they're more than adequate for assembling furniture and other light tasks. If you can afford new furniture, there's really no excuse for not owning at least a cheap power drill.
The hardest part was figuring out the folder where to save the media on the Ubuntu and give Jeyyfin read permissions on that folder via some Linux commands. It was not that hard because Jellyfin tips and tricks are all over the internet (Reddit for example.)
1. Buy a Mac Mini (actually the hardest part given shortages).
2. Download Jellyfin. Drag and drop it into your applications dir.
3. Point it at your downloads dir.
4. Install Jellyfin on your Android TV.
Yeah I've done more to it than that (I'm on HN after all) but if you're used to torrenting there's nothing here that would be beyond you.
you gotta get a VPN, get on a good tracker, get good downloads, make sure shit is correctly labelled, and make sure you don't obliterate bandwidth.
mac mini isn't required, an old laptop with linux or a NUC or whatever could do the job. but that's also trivial.
Using CheapCharts and buying Movies and TV on iTunes. Yes you don't "own it" and yes there are the rare occasional license revocations but it's not often enough for me to care about that--They still remain in your library anyways.
I have been diligently collecting quality, fun, and beloved movies over the past 2 years when they go on sale. That or buying bundles when they go on sale. I've amassed a solid collection of quality media, a lot of which is not on any streaming platform. I even have a lot of Disney titles as well!
I can watch it wherever, whenever and I can download it to devices.
Eat your heart out Disney, Netflix, etc...
Once or twice a year during the holiday sales season I'll buy some new shows/seasons from iTunes. These are always downloaded and backed up, so I never have to worry about license changes, etc.
For old shows (20+ years) I will either rip the old DVDs or torrent guilt free.
When I travel, I load up my iPad or an SD card with my latest queue of shows so I can stick to my weekly TV schedule..
And I spend nothing on streaming.
For example, I recently got the entire bundle for HBO's Rome for $9.99. That is ~50 minutes per episode (22 episodes), or $0.54/hour, which is not a bad deal! For a casual viewer like me, who might spend <6 hours each week watching TV, this should last a little more than 3 weeks. Recently, The Sopranos went on sale for $29.99, or $0.38/hour.
For streaming vs. buying to work, you just have to be patient about nabbing ~1-2 purchases per month and not be tempted to buy every single day.
The best part is the reduced cognitive load - you don't have to spend time browsing for content every day, and there are no ads, too.
And yes, there is some elaborate workaround to create a brand new account and share the original with the new but fundamentally I could no longer access what I purchased because I moved. And no, I didn't get a refund for the years of purchased content.
They have been ffffing around for way too long. I can not wait for find out arrive and I hope it's excessive and very harsh.
I did cancel Disney+, For the cost of 4 movie purchases or a series a month basically.
I thought about Jellyfin, but it was worth the convenience cost to get them easily viewable.
Movies Anywhere helps because i just buy them wherever they are on sale and watch in 1 place.
The ad is intentional, they possess the time, and now they've been deprived of it forever making it stolen, lost, or cost them.
I haven't seen a television ad since before 2001 or so, unless you count the muted ones at the Mexican restaurant out of the corner of my eye. I'm not sure why anyone ever watches those. Subscription services are inferior to self-hosted streaming.
If buying isn't owning, then piracy isn't stealing.
Laws and morals are not the same thing. What is legal may be immoral. What is illegal may be moral.
More and more I'm politically frustrated by government leaders and society just openly ignoring the law--although, I guess I did sort of argue that's sometimes okay in the last paragraph...
I guess it comes down to this. What laws do you elevate above others? What laws do you consider acceptable to ignore, and what laws do you consider morally valid?
There are some who commit moral atrocities because it's the law, we know it's sad but the law is really important and must be enforced, and then in the next breath they start an illegal war of aggression and bomb hundreds of kids. Sorry if I'm being a bit too on the nose.
Democractic laws needs a guiding framework that considers these moral and ethical aspects, as these kind of things can be easily missed or overlooked if not documented as a mandatory tests for legality of law. Otherwise people have to constantly be on the lookout for sneaky laws that takes away the core values that may not be immediately apparent. Laws should be entirely written and modified only be legislature, and courts cannot be allowed to interpret it in any different way or apply it out of context or allowed to edit or delete laws, which is what legislative body is for.
www.hanaplay.tv
1. Rent/stream your MSM
2. Buy hard copies of your MSM and digitize
3. Pirate MSM
4. Realize that MSM is hot garbage and stop ingesting it
I was paying for Netflix, but through a thousand cuts they pushed me away from streaming platforms entirely. I probably spend more on hard drives now than I would have with streaming subscriptions, but it's an infinitely better service.
My two favourite apps are Sonarr and Radarr. They make the collection process seamless.
I wonder if we could regulate a requirement that service providers that serve ads must
1. offer "remove ads" as its own standalone/unbundled thing-you-can-pay-for in relation to any given product or service they offer
2. have at least one SKU of "remove ads" that isn't a subscription, but rather a one-time lifetime purchase, costed at at most the fair-market-value-set projected LTV of the profit they'd make from ads being served to an average user across said average user's lifetime use of the product/service
3. and where these "remove ads" payables must use wording that ties them to a very specific and regulatorily-defined contractual-relationship structure, where the contract cannot have a unilateral change-in-terms clause ("the terms of this contract may be changed at any time" etc); cannot have an arbitration clause (so while you might not be able to sue for product performance, you must be empowered to sue if the company ever again shows you an ad during use of said product); must have a successors-and-assigns clause (so buyouts don't void the contract, but rather obligate the buyer to now execute it on the company's behalf); etc.
4. and where the company is not allowed to factor in whether you have an active "no ads" benefit in calculating dynamic pricing for other offerings (i.e. they can't crank up the prices of their "with ads" product plans for "no ads" purchasers, because then they'd just hide the increasing cost of "no ads" inside the plan cost, effectively making "ad plan where you actually watch ads" and "ad plan where you don't watch ads because of your benefit" into two different SKUs, mooting the unbundling of "no ads".)
With such a regulation in place, companies could always increase the costs of their actual product plans and make them more expensive; and could still continue to bundle "remove ads" as a perk of some plans (slowly slipping upward through pricing tiers as it does today); but they'd be stuck serving anyone who buys a "remove ads" one-time purchase, the same way that those airlines that once offered "lifetime flights" as a limited giveaway were then stuck serving those customers.
It's some criminal gangster saying "hey that's a nice free ad-tier, shame if something happened to it. Listen, you pay me $36/year for protection, and all this goes away. Capice?"
Remember when the appeal was that streaming was cheaper than cable? So, yeah. Shareholders were not going to just take that lying down when they know what can squeeze their consumers far harder than they anticipated.
Plus, they are now removing movies that you have "bought" or "purchased" while offering NO refunds.
"If buying isn't owning, pirating isn't stealing" -Cory Doctorow
But if anything, the racket is bundling free shipping with ad-free video and everything else. Raising prices periodically to keep up with inflation is not a racket. And whether you would prefer to get downgraded to the advertising plan or automatically pay more is a personal choice, and automatically downgrading you rather than renewing you at a higher price is in some ways a more sensible default. (Though I'd prefer to be upgraded to the higher price generally and be notified so I have the option to downgrade or cancel, though downgrade really isn't an option I would consider.)
And I wish I was being dramatic here, but truly anytime I feel I've wrapped my head around the depravity of man I just remember that we have "paid" tiers of TV that show ads and I sleep soundly knowing the bottom remains unfathomed.
The goal is to replace your "best hamburgers in X-city" search by just defaulting to McDonalds.
So when I'm out shopping I see brands that I've found advertised. I see brands I've never heard of. I look at both. But what one is selling products that are fully accessible to me, fully owned by me? Which ones use online features that can/will eventually be stripped and put behind a a subscription model? What ones are using quality manufacturing materials? Which ones are using cheap plastics or vaneers? Which ones have local brick and mortar presence where I can take issues in person? For instance, there's a very heavy Costco effect to my shopping. I've bought products from brands I'm pretty iffy on because I know Costco is going to take that return with no fuss if I get it home and discover there's something about that product I find distasteful.
And I should say that I'm not a very big consumer. Trying to do this a lot, buying for a family (kids, spouse, etc.) could quickly become overwhelming. I know how exhausting it is to need to read labels every time you're buying food because how often they enshittify the recipe, adding thickeners or allergens that weren't there the last time you bought it.
It won't work for everyone but the answer really is the same thing its always been: Be a conscious consumer. Research what you want before you buy. Know what is worth spending extra on, and what is marketing nonsense. Find companies with positive reputation (but still be observant for how you can be fucked when they sell out next year), and try to support local.
When you dig into advertising model attribution, there aren't a whole lot of signals that the way we currently jam advertising down people's throats actually sells more things.
It's a useless tax of human economic activity. It fulfills the same purpose as tree trunks of trees in the forest. And it's similarly expesive for companies and for everyone else around. It should be mostly banned and replaced with state sposored directory of goods and services available at the national market.
If it didn’t work, they wouldn’t do it and it wouldn’t be the cornerstone of the internet economy. No one is immune.
To borrow from Sagan: I could similarly claim that a dragon lived in your garage. You would rightly be doubtful and expect proof of said claims. I'll leave the rest of that gem for you to read if you haven't before (one of my favorites!).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoWjeM5ltv8
Instead it the goal is to bump up the concept of the brand into your short-term memory, and perhaps as a bonus to associate that with positive emotion or at the very least to normalize the brand.
Later when you are making a purchasing decision, the brand is more present in your mind and makes it a more likely outcome.
Of course this is more complicated and nefarious when the brand’s products are addictive or have addictive-like qualities, which arguably includes McDonald’s.
Marketing and advertising aren't the same thing but I swear both sides of that coin have devolved via some process of carcinization where their claws emerge from the darkness everywhere people gather. Especially places where those claws are inappropriate and unwanted and yet it still works.
I think for a Mom & Pop trying to build some form of brand recognition in their small community, it gets people informed.
But persuasive convincing, the mind control target that marketers claim to be able to drive? Nah.
When I see ads for things on YouTube, I automatically assume it's a scam... Because it almost always is!
Where could that possibly end up causing problems?
Also it doesn't actually show you the news. It just shows you links to news sites that you need to be separately subscribed to if you want to read them, so in that sense you're just not getting the product you probably thought you were getting (access to balanced news), so it's a double scam.
There's video essays about this on YouTube of course since that's where Ground News was mainly advertised.
If what you say about the audience composition and the general background situation were at all true, it would be impossible for them to find sponsors, because it would require YouTubers who depend on appealing to a partisan audience to deliberately seek to betray them. And if what you say about the product were at all true, it would again be impossible for them to find sponsors, because none of the YouTubers would be willing to endorse the product.
If anything, the problem with Ground News is that they buy into the same categorization scheme of the news that you do, perhaps with a different bias but the same clustering and same false impression of a single-dimension spectrum.
If Ground News "bought into the same categorisation that I do" there would be literally no reason for it to exist, so that's wrong too.
there is the illusion of "balanced" or more in the know but they are no more balanced than any other curator, and in many cases try really, really hard to present a mixed view of something that is otherwise inexcusable.
like I get ads for Lexus -- I'm in a big city and don't need / want a car, but like Lexus is a real brand, basically Toyota.
Some no-name VPN or idle-game app is an immediate "I will actively avoid this, froever"
Their reporting system is useless, too. Funny thing, though, sometimes Gmail spam-filters legitimate automated emails from YouTube.
Both on android and web.
They work because you are infinity percent more likely to buy something you know exists vs something you don't know exists.
It's been the reality of media business models for a long time, like those big thick magazines like Glamour charged a high subscription price to quality subscribers as people who can buy what's advertised. It's also one of the many reasons why I have distaste for The New York Times -- it is packed with low quality ads that discredit the quality of their editorial content. They're so greedy that an expensive subscription isn't enough, but the expensive subscription, in itself, improves the viability of the advertising model.
The lesson I've learned, the same as I learned from Facebook, is "Never sign up to another service ever again". It's much easier to just never sign up than it is to convince the entire family that you should cancel something.
I just recently dropped Disney+ and Hulu from my ESPN unlimited subscription because the promo price ended and Disney/ESPN failed to send out a reminder email that the price was increasing. At least SiriusXM has the decency to send out a reminder email for the subscription increasing in price so you can go haggle a lower price.
Recently my partner was once again interested in watching something on netflix so instead i signed up for the cheapest 1080p ad-supported tier for $8 or thereabouts. I don't really watch it, and she won't miss the quality. If the ads don't bother her, so be it. If they do, we'll just stop watching paying for netflix again!
When I was young, I pirated because I was broke. I could afford a DVD or I could afford to eat that week. Food usually won. Sometimes alcohol.
I got a decent job, and could afford to spend on things, but I still pirated because it was more convenient than going to a store I wouldn't ordinarily go to.
Then netflix started streaming movies/TV to the home and I stopped pirating basically instantly. Netflix was more convenient than pirating. Steam started getting good, so I stopped pirating games as well.
Then streaming service got balkanized. It wasn't enough to pay for Netflix anymore. I am expected to pay for literally half a dozen services, and when I do want to watch something, I would have to flip around between half of them before I find the right service to stream it from. And now they expect me to watch ads?
Fuck that. I still buy games on Steam and GoG because it's convenient. I pirate TV/movies because it's such a fucking pain in the dick to consume that media legally. I just can't be bothered when piracy is so much more convenient.
The only one that requires you to subscribe is Netflix, but it's also easy to cancel the subscription, so you can simply pay for 1 month as the price to watch a show.
No, you cannot. You can license them temporarily.
This was exactly the push I needed to cancel my subscription. We already own all the Disney DVDs that we actually love, and there hasn't been anything good released by Disney in ages.