Dear Prime member,
We are writing to you today about an upcoming change to your Prime Video experience. Starting January 29, Prime Video movies and TV shows will include limited advertisements. This will allow us to continue investing in compelling content and keep increasing that investment over a long period of time. We aim to have meaningfully fewer ads than linear TV and other streaming TV providers. No action is required from you, and there is no change to the current price of your Prime membership. We will also offer a new ad-free option for an additional $2.99 per month that you can sign up for here.
Heard a reason for this is because they've actually been running a deficit for years, but because investors saw constant growth they didn't care so investment kept coming in.
Now that it's stagnating and new subscribers are hard to come by, they now need to lower that deficit to not lose investors. What's funny is that streaming was seen as the new golden goose by your Hollywood exec types but now that growth is stagnating (probably down to over saturation of services and shitty products) they're trying to turn it into cable again.
It'd be cheaper not to make leftist programs since the smaller neutral/right leaning teams can effectively cost manage and produce a product the general audience likes.
Streaming at this point is worse than cable because every major producer/TV network wants their own streaming service, versus just selling the rights to Comcast/Dish and the end customer just dealing with one distributer.
Now everyone is basically doing the job that Comcast/Dish used to do for them, and paying even more money for the "privilege" of doing so.
Though I suppose in a certain "monkey's paw" sense all the people who back in the day wanted a la carte cable channel pricing got what they wished for, though they probably didn't expect to have to pay more to get it.
I don't know anybody who pays more between sharing passwords etc.
I pay like.... $20 a month between services, steal the rest, and have more video entertainment than I could possibly watch.
The stuff I pay for is litteraly because it's easier for my wife to navigate, but once I have plex up and running even that goes away.
If you're looking for a home media server application, I'd go with Jellyfin over Plex. That's what I use. It's open source, completely free, entirely self-hosted, and operates perfectly without any connection to the outside internet.
Another benefit of Jellyfin is that it supports hardware transcoding out of the box, unlike Plex where you have to pay for the Plex Pass sub to enable it. Furthermore, Plex is trying to hard to be a "social platform" and has tons of bloatware.
A cheap $120 dlls Intel N100 MiniPC can transcode multiple streams with ease. Shit I am transcoding 60-70gb 4K REMUXes down to my 1080p clients easily using GPU HW Transcoding. Best part is the power consumption - it pulls around 8-10 watts at 100%. Just 4-5 watts idle.
Still enough power left to setup a Wireguard VPN server, a dedicated web UI torrent client, etc.
Second Jellyfin media server. Very functional and I haven't had to fuck with it for awhile. Mine also uses yt-dlp to download and secure videos from youtubers that I like, because that shit disappears too often.
I'm gonna shill for snapraid for data protection here. It isn't real raid, but for this use case of a media server it is arguably better. You can string an arbitrary number of disks together as one virtual drive, and content you add will be entirely contained on one disk. All disks together are protected by as many redundant disks as you like, with the requirement that the parity disks be the largest ones. In the event of a failure, you can recover entire drives worth of data with the parity info, and if you fail even harder than that you can do normal data recovery measures on the individual data disks as nothing is being striped across the array. New data is unsecured until you run a sync command, which you can set up as a nightly job or just run manually after each major data push.
Been running a snapraid array of shitty drives for about a decade now. Have had four drive failures and zero data loss. Current array is 10 data disks with 2 parity disks, running from 1 to 8 tb each.
Not "free", but Amex platinum will refund your 20 dollars a month if you pay their 700 a year fee. Among other benefits.
Amazon video's interface change up a few months back didn't do them any favors either. I've gone back to sailing the high seas rather than even bothering to check if any given movie's available for free on Prime just because the UX design is so god awful.
These megalithic companies are not untouchable and we would all do well to remember that. If they fuck up hard enough people will look elsewhere for what they need.
It's almost as if a successful business venture requires steady profit rather than INFINITE GROWTH.
Zero-percent interest rates and inflation conditioned investors to where "number go up" is the only metric that matters. Bonds aren't worth shit, and dividends are double taxed.
It's GROWTH GROWTH GROWTH. If you're not busying growing, you're busy dying.
How in the hell does Amazon require investment? They own functionally all of online retail.
The C-suite resent the shareholders as much as they do the customers. That's why many of these geriatric corporations pretend they're scrappy tech growth companies; FOMO retail investors, perform corporate stock buybacks, and cash out at the top. Classic pump and dump behavior.
I'm having a hard time thinking of a product the West makes that isn't some form of financial grift.
I know another way they could make themselves more profitable:
Not spending billions of dollars on the rights to the Lord of the Rings franchise, so that they could then spend hundreds of millions more dollars on an utterly shit 'adaptation'.
Woah there. You are making sense, that is not allowed in 🤡 🌎 (honk honk). Everyone knows logic is white supremacy and patriarchal.
Have you ever considered piracy? You'd make a wonderful Dread Pirate Roberts.
Most of what I watch these days is ripped DVDs/Blu rays I buy used from Goodwill that I watch with Kodi.
Yeah, same here. Garage sales, swap meets, and goodwill finds for movies and TV shows. It's almost fun collecting the last few remaining ones I really want this way.
Did the calculations on the "free" two day shipping with Prime and decided to cancel.
I'll watch streaming content with ads if it's free. I'll pay to watch streaming content without ads. I'm not going to pay for streaming content and have ads shoved at me.
If you need to save money stop throwing away almost a billion dollars on woke remakes.
True once they started playing fast and loose with what "2 day shipping" meant it stopped truly being worth the price. At that point it became a matter of inertia and "at least I still get kinda netflix for 'free'".
Now I'm not convinced it's worth it. As it is there's a bunch of other sites where I can watch stuff for actual free with ads, if I want to watch them with ads (I don't).
Something like this was inevitable because Prime for Shipping and Prime for Videos are separate businesses. Having Prime give you both was eventually not going to make sense. This is their compromise. If you've got Amazing Prime Shipping then Video is $2.99 more.
I guess wasting billions of dollars on woke feminist trash like Rings of Power didn't get as much ESG funding as it once did?
And this is a clear demonstration why I think people paying for Youtube Premium(or whatever the fuck it's called) are absolute water-brained retards.
I'm not giving my money to a company for a service I can get for free, that can take away said 'advantage' of no-ads the moment they decide they need to up their revenue stream.
I've never paid for a streaming service, and I doubt I ever will. I'll either buy solid hardcopy or just sail the seven seas for my fix.
I saw that the other day. I generally take the ad tier to save a few bucks. The free ones like Tubi and Pluto have ads and I watch this a ton since they have a massive library of older shows
I have amazon prime, mostly for deliveries. Occasionally I'll watch a show, but if there's something I really want to see, I'll pirate it even if it's on amazon. Even if the pirated copy is just a webrip of the amazon version. Local files are just better.
The disruption of TV was good, but the amount made was less. So, they became cable again.
Cable would be preferable at this point.
At least with cable you wouldn't have to subscribe to a dozen different cable companies to get all the channels you want.
I like how Taskmaster has their own streaming service. I wonder if that's the future. You get hooked to it by a bland service like YouTube and then use the single show streaming service for fairly cheap.
"Compelling" - I do not think that means what you think it means.
Ever since they shut the IMDb message boards they've lost all credibility with people who like cinema and TV.
Nowhere to discuss that side of culture now outside of Reddit jannies censoring any original and creative thought.
Amazon
Step one: operate at a loss, claim you deliver more value to customers based on your “more better” business cost model.
Step two: drive competitor business cost structure out of business
Step three: discover your business model doesn’t and never will make money
Step four: recreate competitor business model and pretend said competitor never existed.
Step five: go back to DoD overlords and ask for next bidding.
My mother ended up just moving to Paramount Plus because Amazon Prime video has turned into such garbage. Combined with the storefront turning into a glorified flea market of fly-by-night bugmen selling complete garbage and I don't know how much longer Amazon will survive.
Prime Shipping is only really worth it if you live in a leftist hive city with warehouses out the wazoo, where they'll send your shit out next day.
And it is mostly shit on Amazon: Chink shit. Trying to find reputable brands and electronics that won't start a house fire has been a massive pain, and the biggest reason why I've stopped paying for Prime.
If I can't find it local, I'll just buy 35 dollars' worth and deal with the free economy shipping.