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.
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.