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.
Stock market has been the only place to invest that beats inflation for more than a decade (since 2007,) which causes every investment fund to push their money into stocks for growth. Executives see this, and realize they can get rich quick by pumping their stock price over everything, so now every large corporation is structured to pump up and maintain their stock price via near zero interest leverage.
Well, now inflation is running near 30% annually, and the Fed has to jack rates up to control that.
The market took off this week over news that the Fed might lower rates in 2024.
NOT
GOING
TO
HAPPEN
The days of low interest rate financing are now over, and nearly every major corporation is a zombie company.
I'm having a hard time thinking of a product the West makes that isn't some form of financial grift.
How in the hell does Amazon require investment? They own functionally all of online retail.
Yes but that would mean executives would have to stop being ideological retards and act like real business owners that care about making money. Something I am constantly baffled by is the total underutilisation of 3D animation in general, it isn't just about pixar style kids' movies and could be so much more. Plus it would be way easier to churn out episodes and you could get away with re-using scenes depending on the type of show it was. Again though, these people are morons with no imagination or they simply don't want to.
By the way I've been very much on the anti-amazon train ever since I clicked on a cancel button for their stupid prime service pop up and it signed me up to the free trial anyway. I've seriously resented them as a business for pulling that shit and it wasn't my imagination.
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.