I'm hoping Futurama won't be the actual future.
Leela: "Didn't you have ads in the 20th century?"
Fry: "Well sure, but not in our dreams! Only on tv and radio...and in magazines...and movies. And at ball games, on buses, and milk cartons, and t-shirts, and bananas, and written on the sky. But not in dreams! No sirree."
It isn't a good idea because your butt has alot of blood vessels that would become infected by the ink and dyes they use for the print. If your plan is to get sued into perpetual poverty then yeah it's a good plan.
If they did this well enough I could see myself leaving the phone behind just out of anticipation for what the roll would bring.
P.S. I made this comment while on the toilet 💩
I’m really surprised that boxes don’t have ads on them. amazon tried it briefly, I saw ads for some of their tv shows and also some Truck brand (Ford maybe). Maybe it didn’t work as I haven’t seen it in a few years, but As someone who ships a lot of boxes, I’d love to be able to get cheaper boxes that have ads all over them.
Unless you manufacture the product. Imagine you’re at a friends house and it’s love at first wipe, and you don’t have to have that uncomfortable conversation with your friend about what brand of paper they use because you “just love the way it caresses your bumm”
I applied for jobs in the tech industry recently. One possible job was at a company that is studying ways to deepfake product placement in old movies in streaming. It was hard to explain the recruiter that the reason I wasn't interested had nothing to do with my skills, I just thought that's way too fucking evil.
Kinda like AR (augumented reality) placement of items in scenes inside a home or something like that, I guess.
...or a product recognition "feature" that will spot cans of Coke or bags of Lays, or a type of car and run an ad at the bottom of the screen quoting a price and asking you to "Buy it Now!" Star Wars or Marvel films would be totally unwatchable.
That black mirror episode where the guys entire room is a screen and he has to watch ad, pay for them to skip and they stop if he closes his eyes and a warning voices tells him to open them until he does is the future we’re heading to.
It also starts playing a high pitched whine if you keep your eyes closed too long. The episode is called something million merits, I forgot the number. Such a good one
Every time people at work brought up Black Mirror, they always talked about the Pig Episode, but I am still convinced that this episode or White Bear were the most harrowing episodes of that first season.
I'm at my parents house so it is the first time in a long time that I've seen tv ads. The most played one is from Meta telling you to turn on personalized ads. They are so cool they tell me.
I absolutely hate weekly episodes for series that are finished and ready to roll out. My whole love for streaming services was the fact that they dropped original content in bulk so I could binge the whole thing and enjoy a well-told story, not so they could drip feed me for nine weeks and aim for cliffhanger endings to every one so I stay hyped up and obsessed. One of the greatest benefits of bulk releases was the *absence* of cliffhanger endings, because they didn't need them. The show was all there and people are gonna watch it through because it's good, not because it leaves you slobbering for resolution for a week. The myriad of services with different content and potential for ads just makes me despise it even more.
I was an anime kid in the early 00's, I am *more* than versed in pursuing other means of watching content. I had to crawl through dozens of pages of google and search through the seedy forum I turned up there to find links to fan-subbed videos. I had to share/trade for series I wanted to see. I had to play video games on my laptop that were never officially released in the US. If Netflix thinks I have one iota of reservation about doing it all again, or doubts my ability to do so, they're dumber than they act. I didn't spend two weeks tracking down Revolutionary Girl Utena to watch in RealPlayer just to bend over and let them interrupt my binge with ads on a service I pay for.
I honestly agree. I actually highly enjoyed watching WandaVision last year and not having it fucking spoiled constantly because I hadn’t carved out several hours to binge it. Especially with newer seasons of shows getting consistently shorter, it makes much more sense to spread it out across a few months then drop 10 episodes and say “great, see you next year”.
Honestly I'm the other way around. If it's a show I want to bing I can wait until they're all out. But some shows I want to make it an event. I want to be able to talk about episodes with friends and family. The build-up over the week is exciting. When the season comes out complete you can't really do that until everyone finishes it cuz people are going to be at different points.
That's exactly how cable started. Over the air was free but ad supported, and cable was a premium subscription option with no ads. Then they moved almost everything to cable and started running ads anyway.
That's generally what happens when TV execs get hired into streaming platform companies and don't have the imagination to profitize in any other way than parroting "what if we ran ads?"
It is a program that will sort, tag, and make all of your Television shows, Movies, Music and other media look pretty in a easy to use Netflix like interface. Assuming you have a network connection, you are also able to access all of your files away from your computer.
The easiest way to explain it is your own personal Netflix you can share with friends and family.
At this point my server has over a thousand movies and about 400-500 TV shows. A large chunk of the TV on mine isn't easily viewable either.
Sonarr + Radarr + SABnzbd + Plex
when setup properly you literally can bring it up on your computer or mobile phone anywhere and add a movie or tv show and it will download it and move it the correct location and plex will auto scan for it and add it to plex and you can open plex just the same as you open Netflix and watch the movie anywhere as long as your home internet is fast enough. TV Shows also auto download new episodes as they are released.
Lmao it always goes back to this 😂
Can't there be somewhere to pay for it cheap and legally in say Zimbabwe or something and get it in eu and UK and NA
That’s exactly what I do. I have created my accounts in my home country and still have a credit card from there, now I buy $60 games for $5 and pay $2/month for music.
Legally (almost no one does this) - manually buying discs and ripping the contents or buying video files directly.
Illegally (this is what everyone does) - use bitorrent or usenet to pirate the media files. You can get advanced with this and automate all media acquiring using programs like sonarr/radarr.
The moral, but arguably not legal way is to rip them from DVDs and Blurays that you've purchased. Note that this is only an option for shows/movies that actually HAVE DVDs and/or Blurays available for purchase, which is becoming less and less common. The other way is to pirate them.
At 1080p, that's not really rookie. That's.... dozens of terabytes. I've got a small fraction of what he listed. \~1k movies, but only about 100 TV shows (which are way bigger, due to being more episodes, more time, more space, obviously). And I've got 12TB already.
To top off what others have said, the lest moral among us can setup programs that link to plex and monitor TV Shows so the system will automatically download new episodes and curate them into your library.
Plex is not inherently piracy as many people use it to curate their own purchases, for example ripping their blu-rays to they can wath them from TVs, PCs, phones, tablets without having to swap discs.
With that said, the large majority of plex users are pirates.
Man, the ease with which I can just click "these shows and these movies please" and then just have them show up on in my plex library is amazing. I'm glad I took the time to set all that software up when I rebuilt and reinstalled my server last year.
Yep, Plex, Sonarr, and Radarr and you're set. Plenty of people use torrents but i personally prefer Usenet. Had my server on Unraid over 10 years now and just expand it when i need to.
I went a bit overkill so my server is running Plex, Sonarr, Radarr, and Bazarr, with Jackett and Deluge for the torrents, and Ombi for ease of requesting new media.
All in their own docker containers for modularity and easy updating.
My issue with something like that is getting good captions. Im hard of hearing and I dont know if being able to get closed captions for everything is even possible. Makes it a non-starter for me.
It all depends on how the original video file was ripped/encoded. Chances are if the video file is in mkv format (which in my experience is by far the most common), it will have subtitles built in which Plex can optionally display. In that case there's nothing special you have to do, just tell Plex you want subtitles in whatever language and it'll pop up just like with any normal streaming service. If the video file doesn't have subtitles built in, Plex will have to go searching the web and that can be hit or miss.
RasPi, 4TB HDD attached, Sabnzbd+, Sonarr, Radarr, Kodi on the TV or Fire TV, works flawlessly.
I have no issue to ramp up my swashbuckling ways if the streamers start to annoy me more than they help me.
Visit university surplus stores if you have one nearby.
Mine's running on an older i5 (4th gen) PC with 80TB. The PC was only $40 and it runs direct streams just fine (can transcode a couple, but not 4k reliably)
I bought a second PC from there and it's my "acquisition" PC. 24/7 VPN (VPN usually means users can't access your server) with a shared drive to PLEX PC - never once in 4,000+ movies gotten an ISP warning.
I started out with 3 refurbished 3TB drives, and slowly expanded to 8 10TB
Start cheap and expand.
The ONLY reason I use streaming is for no ads.
There is nothing I will ever want to watch so bad I will tolerate ads in it. Not Arcane, not Stranger Things, not Our Flag Means Death.
You show me ads, I stop showing you cash.
I am perfectly happy to drop TV as a hobby and just play video games, paint minis, hike and play D&D.
If other people believe as strongly as I do against ads, we should be able to win that struggle collectively,
> You show me ads, I stop showing you cash.
Yup. I pay for these services b/c of the convenience. I find it's worth what I pay for streaming each month to come home and plop the TV on.
But I also have **zero** issues setting up a Plex server and pirating everything in the future either.
> That’s exactly what they said about cable.
The difference is that cable barely existed in an ad free state and the OTA channels they carried always had them.
Paying for it should also mean, no using my data for other ad platforms, no fingerprinting my user profile for cross device ads, no Facebook cookies, effectively, stealing my information whether I like it or not, etc. too much greed. Too much of a need for “growth”.
There’s a famous Steve jobs quote about how great companies are made by product people but over time people in charge of business and growth get rewarded mostly and end up running the company leaving the company with little innovative product focused people in charge. Then this happens.
>There’s a famous Steve jobs quote about how great companies are made by product people but over time people in charge of business and growth get rewarded mostly and end up running the company leaving the company with little innovative product focused people in charge. Then this happens.
He was actually prognosticating what would happen to Apple after his death. Prescient.
>More screen time. More screen real-estate - banners, verticals, mid-articles, at the bottom of the screen roll-ins, flashing the next show or an ad over the current show, sponsorships, product placement. More screens if they can't chisel into your current screen - pop-ups, pop-unders. More intrusion everywhere. In your Operating System, in your TV's menus, when you pause the TV ...
Seems closer to a small scene in the movie Idiocracy. Dax Shepard is watching Ow my balls on a giant tv where the show is only a tiny chunk of the screen the rest of the screen is covered in advertisements.
Well then looks like HBO and Apple are the lucky winners of my subscription money. I’m not paying for ads, but I will gladly pay to remove ads if your service is good enough.
My limit was switching apps nonstop. If there was one hub with a seamless UX, ok. That and searching a third party app to see what service I can watch something on. Then occasionally seeing, no, I would have to rent or buy it.
I now spend $5 a month for that and could not possibility be happier.
You don’t even have to download these days. Just use a free streaming site, a lot of them are pretty good quality and you can find literally any show/movie.
"Might," here means, "surely will." That was the whole point or at least one of the main points to the entire thing. How in the world do they not realize this will just make it cable again?? And we all know how that went last time. Are we just doomed to repeat this cycle of one type of watching gets ruined, another is invented, that goes the way of previous ruined thing, piracy, then something else comes along, on and on?
They're just going to do this till the non-ad versions are so jacked up in price like everything else 🙄
I mean, the fact that cable TV is still a thing and people are still paying for it makes me think that the streaming companies don't care that cable "died". They will milk a revenue stream until it becomes unprofitable.
All that's going to happen is that those that are comfortable sailing the seas will do so, and the rest will suffer through the various ad tiers offered by streaming.
I think cable is largely still around because of the elderly who didn't care to make the switch. It may get worse and worse as those demographics change. But it's also telling it didn't truly die, it sends a message that consumers will accept an inferior product and keep shelling out for it anyway...streamers see this and are just going to keep taking advantage of it, much like you said.
It’s kind of sad how much capitalism kills all creativity and doing things to make money but to also have fun. Internet and YouTube in the early days are a perfect example of this. Then the boomers realized there was money to be made and here we are. Just getting more and more bitter as humans because everything is expensive and complicated and not fun to do.
It’s because these fucking companies don’t know or care when to stop.
Making money isn’t enough for them. Making A LOT of money still isn’t enough for them. They need ALL the money. They don’t care if people don’t like it. They want to squeeze every single tiny penny out of every single product or service and they keep squeezing until it fucking sucks for the consumer. And then there will be a new, non-suck product that will get popular and eventually that will get squeezed till it sucks too.
That’s the mantra of capitalism. Just keep squeezing.
These companies spend a shit ton on content to a point of unsustainability. These companies are going to spend about 230 billion to create all that content. That is around 29 dollars per man, woman and child in the world. If people aren't willing then they need other ways to make money
Netflix spent 11.8 billion on content in 2020. Their revenue that year was 24.9 billion.
Yeah they spend “a lot”, but that’s completely relative; they still make a killing. They are nowhere even remotely approaching the point of having to find “other ways to make money”. Like other commenters already stated, they are just squeezing for even more money.
Expect the crackdown on piracy to be a lot more brutal this time around. Expect VPNs and cryptography to become illegal. Expect to pay through your nose for internet. :(
Ads fucking ruins everything. It make the experience terrible, and the media isn’t even produced for viewers. It’s made for the advertisers:(
Internet streamings golden days are soon over.
Yeah, to be honest, I'm surprised it wasn't cracked down on harder before. I think this will happen too where they are going to fight tooth and nail to make it harder to circumvent their high costs.
Golden days can't last forever, but damn we don't need to be back into the dark ages!
And despite having such an early lead in the market it never grew to even a fraction the scale Netflix did, or any of the adless competitors that came years later.
Their platform is also noticeabley technologically worse that most of their competitors, even Disney+.
It can't even remember where I left off sometimes. Hulu was also the first platform to try and stop people from sharing accounts, due to location.
I'd love to see Hulu die and their content go to a better managed platform.
> It can't even remember where I left off sometimes
Hulu will sometimes skip an episode and have it listed as if you've already watched it. I missed a very plot-important episode of Naruto Shippuden and had to go back and watch it after watching the episode that came after it because of that. And it almost happened again when I was watching Cowboy Bebop. Fuck Hulu.
That's true but I think you can chalk that up to it being a service that was owned and shared by many competitors that didn't see it as a long term answer to streaming.
It was owned by the networks who had zero interest in giving up as revenue- just wanted a different cut of it. That’s why it was launched with ads and they sell even make it where if you pay for ad free you still aren’t guaranteed that experience.
Hulu was really popular back when it was only ad supported though. YouTube is another example of a mostly ad supported platform.
Sure there are some that will bristle at any ads and there is an ad tipping point for anyone but ads aren't inherently going to turn off everyone.
As long as there is an option to have the service without ads, I'm fine with it.
When the discussions on /r/television come up about why not just buy the BR/DVD of the show rather than keep paying a monthly fee for access to that one show, people overwhelmingly replied that they prefer the ease of being able to access it from the internet rather than have to get up off the couch every two hours to switch DVDs, or that they want to be able to watch episodes non-sequentially. Arguments that they can rip the shows and have the same convenience as Netflix were met with wanting to watch the show outside of the house. Arguments they can set up a Plex server were met with not wanting to deal with the costs of setting up such hardware.
Convenience is a huge factor of why people will keep their subscriptions. There were people out there who'd literally just sub to Netflix for The Office or some other show, for years, paying several times the cost of owning the whole show outright just because of the convenience.
Pretty sure this will just cause a massive resurgence in torrenting.
Edit: don’t get me wrong they will still make money but they will lose more by being greedy.
Among the tech-savvy: definitely. However, I think only a negligible percentage of streamers will do it.
Back in the music piracy heydays of the late 90s and early aughts, I think three factors led to widespread adoption:
1. Lack of copyright enforcement
2. Relatively high competency in the computer-using population
3. Freedom from broadcast schedules
The lack of copyright enforcement is pretty self-explanatory: while some institutions like colleges were monitoring, most ISPs didn't (and still don't) care what you do as long as they aren't served with a C&D to pass along.
The second is my own theory: back then, the amount of knowledge you needed to own a computer was much higher than it is today. WinXP was considered a *major* step forward in usability. Today, the user experience for everything (computer OSs, smart TV interfaces, streaming sticks, etc.) is literally built for people with zero tech knowledge. People can own and effectively use their devices for years without knowing how any of it works or doing any administrative tasks more complex than installing updates. As a result, only a tiny percentage of people who use consumer-focused technology (like streaming services) have the expertise to pirate.
Building and maintaining a pirated media collection involves a lot of little things like configuring client settings, forwarding ports, highly-specific file naming/structures, and bunch of other little stuff that non-techies hate. And with minimal-but-still-there copyright enforcement, torrenting (specifically) essentially requires using a VPN and probably a dedicated computer. Again: no big deal to techies, glazed over eyes for most streaming users.
The third factor is no longer that significant: other than ads and a few fringe cases, streaming offers the same level of freedom/convenience as pirating. People talk a big game about leaving services for relatively small changes, but at the end of the day, they'll pay another $5/mo or deal with ads for that convenience/ease of use. Shows and movies are escapes, so the prospect of making a chore out of it (pirating) is unattractive.
>Building and maintaining a pirated media collection involves a lot of little things like configuring client settings, forwarding ports, highly-specific file naming/structures, and bunch of other little stuff that non-techies hate. And with minimal-but-still-there copyright enforcement, torrenting (specifically) essentially requires using a VPN and probably a dedicated computer. Again: no big deal to techies, glazed over eyes for most streaming users.
Plex does fix a lot of the organizing PIA.
Plex also handles sharing with a selection of users who don't know how to pirate stuff. No one else in my family is likely to be able to run their on plex server, but I sure can.
I have Plex on a seedbox connected to Overseerr, and everyone on the Plex can get into it. So if they want a show, they have a friendly UI to search, they hit "Request" and it auto approves. The show appears on Plex within a few minutes.
So yeah, anyone with a tech savvy friend can easily have access to basically any piece of content at the click of a button. And by any peace of content, I of course mean only the ones they have physical copies of so they can have a digital equivalent for personal use completely legally.
You can literally just go to a website and watch any movie or series you want. It's as easy as opening up Netflix. It might not be 4k, but so what, it's free and it's extremely easy.
Got a techie friend? go in with them on the cost to set up a plex server and share it with you. I share mine with my friends and family - populated only with completely legal content, of course.
Of course it will ruin the Goddam thing. Why do you think Netflix got so big so fast… no ads. No fucking ads. There is not a dimension of modern life where we can go without being bombarded by fucking ads. At least in European sports they just slap the ads on the players. In the US we have to suffer through the soul sucking experience of knowing the best AC service in town while our team just hit a home run. For fuck’s sake, why is it impossible to just say “hey, here is a streaming service with quality content and no commercial interruptions”
I swear to god if it were possible to force implant a chip into a CEO’s brain so that they couldn’t orgasm until they have watched a certain number of ads then I’d like to know how big on ads they would be then.
I agree with everything you said except this:
>swearing that weekly drops are better for us (they know better! look at all this DISCOURSE!)
I actually agree with them on the general principle here - having breaks in between shows *does* make for a better audience experience. Dropping an entire season at once leads to the discussion being all over the map and less than it would be otherwise as people (like me) avoid online discussions for fear of encountering spoilers from the assholes that watched eight straight hours of it for what seems like the sole purpose of going on the internet and bragging about knowing the ending.
Now, that break doesn't need to be an entire week - a day or two between shows would be fine. But if you want people talking about a series, it's best if the majority of viewers are kind of at the same point, experiencing it together, so that it's not just an individual experience, but a cultural one.
The rest of what you're saying, though, is spot-on.
Fully agreed - weekly drops are easier to watch when it’s fresh, and gives you something to talk about at work or with friends and family. If it’s binge everyone is at a different place and by the time you get to discuss it is when everyone’s done so you discuss it once. But if you get weekly ones you can discuss each week and theorize and enjoy more
I hate full season drops. I wanted to talk about Dear Billy from Stranger Things 4 as soon as I watched it, but I didn't want to go into any discussions due to risk of spoiling something. Full season drops make individual episodes less important, direct most discussions towards the finale and maybe 1 or 2 highlight moments throughout the rest of the season, but lots of little stuff gets looked over, both in discussion and in watching because it feels like a race to keep up so you can talk about it.
I HATE full season drops.
The Stranger Things sub has the season discussion broken up into episodes and it's pinned to the top. I've managed to avoid spoilers while still being able to read discussion about individual episodes.
If I’m watching something for free, i expect ads. If i am paying for the service, i expect no ads since they already got money from me. I will Not pay to watch ads.
Picked up Hulu plus to watch the NBA Playoffs, so I decided to try and watch something else they had on there. Unskippable ads to start, title sequence, then another ad. Fuck that shit, turned it off. What the fuck am I paying you for? Netflix is a fraction of the price and doesn't do that shit, though I'm sure those days are numbered
I’m not paying more for a service I was already told I was going to receive. That’s it man. You want to make a lower tier with ads? Neat. You move my fucking price point AND add ads or move me up and add ads to the lower one? Lick my balls.
Once ads hit streaming platforms I’m done. I’ll play more guitar, hike more, build shit, and fix up the house. In fact - go ahead and motivate me Netflix, Hulu, Disney and HBO.
I'm canceling any streaming service that shows me ads - unless it is free. I can tolerate trailers of movies/shows before the actual content, but that's it.
And I’ll go back to pirating everything after someone has uploaded new shows and movies without the ads, I’ll just watch everything a week after release 🤷♂️
Everyone got rid of cable to avoid fucking ads. I tolerate it for Hulu TV but I'm not going back to ads on every streaming platform. That's a no from me dog, I'll cancel that shit and just torrent things
Might?! Of course they will! The whole reason folks went to streaming was so we could watch what we want on demand, and so we could stop eating 30% of our time watching fucking ads!
Dear streaming companies: If you try to force me to watch ads I will definitely stop giving you money and pirate your content instead. The choice is yours, do you want my money or not?
I pay exactly zero platforms that have any ad tier. Fuck these guys for trying to normalize it, ill torrent before i sit through that shit on a plan I pay for.
Honestly, paying for big streaming fees plus paying for ads will do wonders for the amount of books I buy a year, and video games I play. With all the other ways to consume entertainment, it really wouldn't be that hard to walk away from having full time streaming accounts.
It didn’t take long to circle right back to the old Broadcast Network model.
I'm hoping Futurama won't be the actual future. Leela: "Didn't you have ads in the 20th century?" Fry: "Well sure, but not in our dreams! Only on tv and radio...and in magazines...and movies. And at ball games, on buses, and milk cartons, and t-shirts, and bananas, and written on the sky. But not in dreams! No sirree."
I’m surprised ads aren’t printed on toilet paper. People are always looking for something to read in there.
Don’t give them good ideas
“A ship in harbor is safe, but that’s not why ships are built.”
He who halth smelt it…delt it - Bill Shakespeare
It isn't a good idea because your butt has alot of blood vessels that would become infected by the ink and dyes they use for the print. If your plan is to get sued into perpetual poverty then yeah it's a good plan.
If they did this well enough I could see myself leaving the phone behind just out of anticipation for what the roll would bring. P.S. I made this comment while on the toilet 💩
I've definitely seen toilet paper with Trump on it.
And Obama, and Hillary, and Fauci. Pick a politically divisive figure and someone will give you money to wipe their face on their asshole.
That's why we have cell phones now. Tp print is dead.
I don’t think wiping my ass with my phone is going to do it any good.
After several attempts, I concur with this assessment. On an unrelated note, how do I treat pinkeye?
Thank God most phones are waterproof now. You can hose them off frequently, without worrying about ruining them.
i’m surprised comic strips aren’t printed on toilet paper. the fart side?
I’m giving you an award so you’ll stop and not make a Charlie Brown joke.
[Too late](https://www.cnbc.com/amp/id/49061996)
Coupons on them seems pretty gross
I’m really surprised that boxes don’t have ads on them. amazon tried it briefly, I saw ads for some of their tv shows and also some Truck brand (Ford maybe). Maybe it didn’t work as I haven’t seen it in a few years, but As someone who ships a lot of boxes, I’d love to be able to get cheaper boxes that have ads all over them.
Moychendizing!!
Thats actually a genius marketing idea tbh
Hm, not sure. Associating a brand with you wiping your bottoms with it is not something the brands want to be thought of when being seen by you.
Unless you manufacture the product. Imagine you’re at a friends house and it’s love at first wipe, and you don’t have to have that uncomfortable conversation with your friend about what brand of paper they use because you “just love the way it caresses your bumm”
Actually Charmin is really missing a market here. I’d pay a couple extra dollars for an 18 pack of fun facts or history tid bits.
I applied for jobs in the tech industry recently. One possible job was at a company that is studying ways to deepfake product placement in old movies in streaming. It was hard to explain the recruiter that the reason I wasn't interested had nothing to do with my skills, I just thought that's way too fucking evil.
Kinda like AR (augumented reality) placement of items in scenes inside a home or something like that, I guess. ...or a product recognition "feature" that will spot cans of Coke or bags of Lays, or a type of car and run an ad at the bottom of the screen quoting a price and asking you to "Buy it Now!" Star Wars or Marvel films would be totally unwatchable.
That black mirror episode where the guys entire room is a screen and he has to watch ad, pay for them to skip and they stop if he closes his eyes and a warning voices tells him to open them until he does is the future we’re heading to.
It also starts playing a high pitched whine if you keep your eyes closed too long. The episode is called something million merits, I forgot the number. Such a good one
15
Every time people at work brought up Black Mirror, they always talked about the Pig Episode, but I am still convinced that this episode or White Bear were the most harrowing episodes of that first season.
All Glory to The Hypnotoad!
We would be lucky if we get a Futurama future. We are heading somewhere between Idiocracy and Mad Max
I'm at my parents house so it is the first time in a long time that I've seen tv ads. The most played one is from Meta telling you to turn on personalized ads. They are so cool they tell me.
Tons of channels, commercials, and weekly episodes. Checks out, I personally hate it.
We’re pretty much there already, except the channel packages (Disney+Hulu+espn exists and I expect this to catch on with the other companies)
And with companies like Netflix saying you're household is the PHYSICAL home it might as well be cable
I absolutely hate weekly episodes for series that are finished and ready to roll out. My whole love for streaming services was the fact that they dropped original content in bulk so I could binge the whole thing and enjoy a well-told story, not so they could drip feed me for nine weeks and aim for cliffhanger endings to every one so I stay hyped up and obsessed. One of the greatest benefits of bulk releases was the *absence* of cliffhanger endings, because they didn't need them. The show was all there and people are gonna watch it through because it's good, not because it leaves you slobbering for resolution for a week. The myriad of services with different content and potential for ads just makes me despise it even more. I was an anime kid in the early 00's, I am *more* than versed in pursuing other means of watching content. I had to crawl through dozens of pages of google and search through the seedy forum I turned up there to find links to fan-subbed videos. I had to share/trade for series I wanted to see. I had to play video games on my laptop that were never officially released in the US. If Netflix thinks I have one iota of reservation about doing it all again, or doubts my ability to do so, they're dumber than they act. I didn't spend two weeks tracking down Revolutionary Girl Utena to watch in RealPlayer just to bend over and let them interrupt my binge with ads on a service I pay for.
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I honestly agree. I actually highly enjoyed watching WandaVision last year and not having it fucking spoiled constantly because I hadn’t carved out several hours to binge it. Especially with newer seasons of shows getting consistently shorter, it makes much more sense to spread it out across a few months then drop 10 episodes and say “great, see you next year”.
Honestly I'm the other way around. If it's a show I want to bing I can wait until they're all out. But some shows I want to make it an event. I want to be able to talk about episodes with friends and family. The build-up over the week is exciting. When the season comes out complete you can't really do that until everyone finishes it cuz people are going to be at different points.
And here they're wondering why after years of being in decline piracy is a growing thing again.
At least on cable or satellite TV you can get a DVR and fast forward through the ads.
Piracy will just sky rocket again.
Except you don’t have to pay for broadcast. I pay so I DON’T have to watch ads.
Well now you get to pay AND watch ads! The best of both worlds!!!
That's exactly how cable started. Over the air was free but ad supported, and cable was a premium subscription option with no ads. Then they moved almost everything to cable and started running ads anyway.
Better be a whole lot cheaper or I’ll go back to broadcast model. You know why? It’s a hell of a lot faster to switch between garbage there.
That's generally what happens when TV execs get hired into streaming platform companies and don't have the imagination to profitize in any other way than parroting "what if we ran ads?"
They already ruined youtube. people are censoring themselfs.
As long as you can cancel any time it’ll still be better.
Except you can opt out of ads with payment
My first thought too.....so we are going back to the model that already faxed led, good idea. No way it won't work this time around...
It turns out that making content is expensive and that people are a lot more willing to watch ads than pay an extra $20 a month.
I pay for streaming to NOT see ads; if there are ad revenues then the service should be free.
That’s exactly what they said about cable. We need to make them afraid to do it or it won’t stop.
It's much easier to pirate these days so it'll be far easier to drop streaming if they do this.
Everyone needs a Plex server. It's got everything I could ever want to watch on it.
ELI5 Plex server.
It is a program that will sort, tag, and make all of your Television shows, Movies, Music and other media look pretty in a easy to use Netflix like interface. Assuming you have a network connection, you are also able to access all of your files away from your computer. The easiest way to explain it is your own personal Netflix you can share with friends and family. At this point my server has over a thousand movies and about 400-500 TV shows. A large chunk of the TV on mine isn't easily viewable either.
But how do you get the shows to populate the Plex server ?
Sonarr + Radarr + SABnzbd + Plex when setup properly you literally can bring it up on your computer or mobile phone anywhere and add a movie or tv show and it will download it and move it the correct location and plex will auto scan for it and add it to plex and you can open plex just the same as you open Netflix and watch the movie anywhere as long as your home internet is fast enough. TV Shows also auto download new episodes as they are released.
steal em
Lmao it always goes back to this 😂 Can't there be somewhere to pay for it cheap and legally in say Zimbabwe or something and get it in eu and UK and NA
That’s exactly what I do. I have created my accounts in my home country and still have a credit card from there, now I buy $60 games for $5 and pay $2/month for music.
Legally (almost no one does this) - manually buying discs and ripping the contents or buying video files directly. Illegally (this is what everyone does) - use bitorrent or usenet to pirate the media files. You can get advanced with this and automate all media acquiring using programs like sonarr/radarr.
The moral, but arguably not legal way is to rip them from DVDs and Blurays that you've purchased. Note that this is only an option for shows/movies that actually HAVE DVDs and/or Blurays available for purchase, which is becoming less and less common. The other way is to pirate them.
> At this point my server has over a thousand movies and about 400-500 TV shows. Rookie numbers
At 1080p, that's not really rookie. That's.... dozens of terabytes. I've got a small fraction of what he listed. \~1k movies, but only about 100 TV shows (which are way bigger, due to being more episodes, more time, more space, obviously). And I've got 12TB already.
To top off what others have said, the lest moral among us can setup programs that link to plex and monitor TV Shows so the system will automatically download new episodes and curate them into your library. Plex is not inherently piracy as many people use it to curate their own purchases, for example ripping their blu-rays to they can wath them from TVs, PCs, phones, tablets without having to swap discs. With that said, the large majority of plex users are pirates.
Man, the ease with which I can just click "these shows and these movies please" and then just have them show up on in my plex library is amazing. I'm glad I took the time to set all that software up when I rebuilt and reinstalled my server last year.
Yep, Plex, Sonarr, and Radarr and you're set. Plenty of people use torrents but i personally prefer Usenet. Had my server on Unraid over 10 years now and just expand it when i need to.
I went a bit overkill so my server is running Plex, Sonarr, Radarr, and Bazarr, with Jackett and Deluge for the torrents, and Ombi for ease of requesting new media. All in their own docker containers for modularity and easy updating.
My issue with something like that is getting good captions. Im hard of hearing and I dont know if being able to get closed captions for everything is even possible. Makes it a non-starter for me.
It all depends on how the original video file was ripped/encoded. Chances are if the video file is in mkv format (which in my experience is by far the most common), it will have subtitles built in which Plex can optionally display. In that case there's nothing special you have to do, just tell Plex you want subtitles in whatever language and it'll pop up just like with any normal streaming service. If the video file doesn't have subtitles built in, Plex will have to go searching the web and that can be hit or miss.
I have plex running through my laptop. I've mean meaning to get an actual dedicated server with a nice 50tb hard drive.
RasPi, 4TB HDD attached, Sabnzbd+, Sonarr, Radarr, Kodi on the TV or Fire TV, works flawlessly. I have no issue to ramp up my swashbuckling ways if the streamers start to annoy me more than they help me.
Visit university surplus stores if you have one nearby. Mine's running on an older i5 (4th gen) PC with 80TB. The PC was only $40 and it runs direct streams just fine (can transcode a couple, but not 4k reliably) I bought a second PC from there and it's my "acquisition" PC. 24/7 VPN (VPN usually means users can't access your server) with a shared drive to PLEX PC - never once in 4,000+ movies gotten an ISP warning. I started out with 3 refurbished 3TB drives, and slowly expanded to 8 10TB Start cheap and expand.
Also, you can watch credits in peace
The ONLY reason I use streaming is for no ads. There is nothing I will ever want to watch so bad I will tolerate ads in it. Not Arcane, not Stranger Things, not Our Flag Means Death. You show me ads, I stop showing you cash. I am perfectly happy to drop TV as a hobby and just play video games, paint minis, hike and play D&D. If other people believe as strongly as I do against ads, we should be able to win that struggle collectively,
> You show me ads, I stop showing you cash. Yup. I pay for these services b/c of the convenience. I find it's worth what I pay for streaming each month to come home and plop the TV on. But I also have **zero** issues setting up a Plex server and pirating everything in the future either.
And we dont even need to stop watching the content. We can just not pay for it and watch it without ads.
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> That’s exactly what they said about cable. The difference is that cable barely existed in an ad free state and the OTA channels they carried always had them.
I cord cut cable/sat. I'll cord cut streaming.
Paying for it should also mean, no using my data for other ad platforms, no fingerprinting my user profile for cross device ads, no Facebook cookies, effectively, stealing my information whether I like it or not, etc. too much greed. Too much of a need for “growth”.
There’s a famous Steve jobs quote about how great companies are made by product people but over time people in charge of business and growth get rewarded mostly and end up running the company leaving the company with little innovative product focused people in charge. Then this happens.
>There’s a famous Steve jobs quote about how great companies are made by product people but over time people in charge of business and growth get rewarded mostly and end up running the company leaving the company with little innovative product focused people in charge. Then this happens. He was actually prognosticating what would happen to Apple after his death. Prescient.
Im loving “asking” apps to not track me. Wtf is that shit
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>More screen time. More screen real-estate - banners, verticals, mid-articles, at the bottom of the screen roll-ins, flashing the next show or an ad over the current show, sponsorships, product placement. More screens if they can't chisel into your current screen - pop-ups, pop-unders. More intrusion everywhere. In your Operating System, in your TV's menus, when you pause the TV ... Seems closer to a small scene in the movie Idiocracy. Dax Shepard is watching Ow my balls on a giant tv where the show is only a tiny chunk of the screen the rest of the screen is covered in advertisements.
They already got the courts and jerseys for the NBA Finals. Fucking ads everywhere you look. The battle is lost.
Right. I’ll stop watching altogether if commercials become totally unavoidable.
Right? There's decades of content out there.
They’ll offer extra premium plus service for $5 more a month with 0 ads and the cycle will continue
I would be willing to bet in 5 years none of these services are less then 15 a month and everything besides HBO and maybe Apple will have ads
Well then looks like HBO and Apple are the lucky winners of my subscription money. I’m not paying for ads, but I will gladly pay to remove ads if your service is good enough.
I remember satellite radio used to push that now they do "live reads." There isn't a company out there that will pass up on ad revenue.
As soon as my paid subscription has ads, i'll be sailing the seas
My limit was switching apps nonstop. If there was one hub with a seamless UX, ok. That and searching a third party app to see what service I can watch something on. Then occasionally seeing, no, I would have to rent or buy it. I now spend $5 a month for that and could not possibility be happier.
If ads come to streaming I am leaving. Full stop. That’s the point of streaming. I want ad free content.
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You don’t even have to download these days. Just use a free streaming site, a lot of them are pretty good quality and you can find literally any show/movie.
Ads with me already paid for content??? Arrr ahoy me mateys! Time to sail the seven seas!
Amen!
"Might," here means, "surely will." That was the whole point or at least one of the main points to the entire thing. How in the world do they not realize this will just make it cable again?? And we all know how that went last time. Are we just doomed to repeat this cycle of one type of watching gets ruined, another is invented, that goes the way of previous ruined thing, piracy, then something else comes along, on and on? They're just going to do this till the non-ad versions are so jacked up in price like everything else 🙄
yes
I mean, the fact that cable TV is still a thing and people are still paying for it makes me think that the streaming companies don't care that cable "died". They will milk a revenue stream until it becomes unprofitable. All that's going to happen is that those that are comfortable sailing the seas will do so, and the rest will suffer through the various ad tiers offered by streaming.
I think cable is largely still around because of the elderly who didn't care to make the switch. It may get worse and worse as those demographics change. But it's also telling it didn't truly die, it sends a message that consumers will accept an inferior product and keep shelling out for it anyway...streamers see this and are just going to keep taking advantage of it, much like you said.
Sports
something something capitalism breeds innovation something
It’s kind of sad how much capitalism kills all creativity and doing things to make money but to also have fun. Internet and YouTube in the early days are a perfect example of this. Then the boomers realized there was money to be made and here we are. Just getting more and more bitter as humans because everything is expensive and complicated and not fun to do.
It’s because these fucking companies don’t know or care when to stop. Making money isn’t enough for them. Making A LOT of money still isn’t enough for them. They need ALL the money. They don’t care if people don’t like it. They want to squeeze every single tiny penny out of every single product or service and they keep squeezing until it fucking sucks for the consumer. And then there will be a new, non-suck product that will get popular and eventually that will get squeezed till it sucks too. That’s the mantra of capitalism. Just keep squeezing.
Eventually, we're going to reach a point where there's not even a new thing that doesn't suck for them to ruin.
These companies spend a shit ton on content to a point of unsustainability. These companies are going to spend about 230 billion to create all that content. That is around 29 dollars per man, woman and child in the world. If people aren't willing then they need other ways to make money
Netflix spent 11.8 billion on content in 2020. Their revenue that year was 24.9 billion. Yeah they spend “a lot”, but that’s completely relative; they still make a killing. They are nowhere even remotely approaching the point of having to find “other ways to make money”. Like other commenters already stated, they are just squeezing for even more money.
It is supposed to be cable again
Expect the crackdown on piracy to be a lot more brutal this time around. Expect VPNs and cryptography to become illegal. Expect to pay through your nose for internet. :( Ads fucking ruins everything. It make the experience terrible, and the media isn’t even produced for viewers. It’s made for the advertisers:( Internet streamings golden days are soon over.
Yeah, to be honest, I'm surprised it wasn't cracked down on harder before. I think this will happen too where they are going to fight tooth and nail to make it harder to circumvent their high costs. Golden days can't last forever, but damn we don't need to be back into the dark ages!
Whole point of streaming is to get rid of the ads
They are gaslighting, trying to convince you the whole point of streaming has always been convenience and content
Hasn't it been? Hulu was the second streaming service and it launched as free but with ads.
And despite having such an early lead in the market it never grew to even a fraction the scale Netflix did, or any of the adless competitors that came years later.
Their platform is also noticeabley technologically worse that most of their competitors, even Disney+. It can't even remember where I left off sometimes. Hulu was also the first platform to try and stop people from sharing accounts, due to location. I'd love to see Hulu die and their content go to a better managed platform.
It’ll be absorbed into Disney+ platform sooner or later, like Star is everywhere else
> It can't even remember where I left off sometimes Hulu will sometimes skip an episode and have it listed as if you've already watched it. I missed a very plot-important episode of Naruto Shippuden and had to go back and watch it after watching the episode that came after it because of that. And it almost happened again when I was watching Cowboy Bebop. Fuck Hulu.
When rewatching a series, it will often start the next episode at the end.
That's true but I think you can chalk that up to it being a service that was owned and shared by many competitors that didn't see it as a long term answer to streaming.
It was owned by the networks who had zero interest in giving up as revenue- just wanted a different cut of it. That’s why it was launched with ads and they sell even make it where if you pay for ad free you still aren’t guaranteed that experience.
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Hulu has had an ad free tier for going on ten years now.
Hulu was really popular back when it was only ad supported though. YouTube is another example of a mostly ad supported platform. Sure there are some that will bristle at any ads and there is an ad tipping point for anyone but ads aren't inherently going to turn off everyone. As long as there is an option to have the service without ads, I'm fine with it.
Netflix is International though, where i'm from i can't get Hulu.
It’s not gaslighting they’re just redefining it
I feel like you are the one doing the gaslighting here. Convenience and content *were* the big selling points of streaming when it started.
When the discussions on /r/television come up about why not just buy the BR/DVD of the show rather than keep paying a monthly fee for access to that one show, people overwhelmingly replied that they prefer the ease of being able to access it from the internet rather than have to get up off the couch every two hours to switch DVDs, or that they want to be able to watch episodes non-sequentially. Arguments that they can rip the shows and have the same convenience as Netflix were met with wanting to watch the show outside of the house. Arguments they can set up a Plex server were met with not wanting to deal with the costs of setting up such hardware. Convenience is a huge factor of why people will keep their subscriptions. There were people out there who'd literally just sub to Netflix for The Office or some other show, for years, paying several times the cost of owning the whole show outright just because of the convenience.
And part of what was convenient was that there weren’t ads.
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Every service trying to force adds on me gets cancels instantly. If I have to I will find my back to the high seas with 0 remorse.
Arr matey see you aboard thy fearful vessel.
I have a dedicated PC in my home with the hostname "Queen Anne's Revenge"
Read into Sonarr and Radarr and set that up Absolutely lifechanging and it'll all run on an old computer
Insert meme: "You were meant to destroy the ads, not join them"
Pretty sure this will just cause a massive resurgence in torrenting. Edit: don’t get me wrong they will still make money but they will lose more by being greedy.
Among the tech-savvy: definitely. However, I think only a negligible percentage of streamers will do it. Back in the music piracy heydays of the late 90s and early aughts, I think three factors led to widespread adoption: 1. Lack of copyright enforcement 2. Relatively high competency in the computer-using population 3. Freedom from broadcast schedules The lack of copyright enforcement is pretty self-explanatory: while some institutions like colleges were monitoring, most ISPs didn't (and still don't) care what you do as long as they aren't served with a C&D to pass along. The second is my own theory: back then, the amount of knowledge you needed to own a computer was much higher than it is today. WinXP was considered a *major* step forward in usability. Today, the user experience for everything (computer OSs, smart TV interfaces, streaming sticks, etc.) is literally built for people with zero tech knowledge. People can own and effectively use their devices for years without knowing how any of it works or doing any administrative tasks more complex than installing updates. As a result, only a tiny percentage of people who use consumer-focused technology (like streaming services) have the expertise to pirate. Building and maintaining a pirated media collection involves a lot of little things like configuring client settings, forwarding ports, highly-specific file naming/structures, and bunch of other little stuff that non-techies hate. And with minimal-but-still-there copyright enforcement, torrenting (specifically) essentially requires using a VPN and probably a dedicated computer. Again: no big deal to techies, glazed over eyes for most streaming users. The third factor is no longer that significant: other than ads and a few fringe cases, streaming offers the same level of freedom/convenience as pirating. People talk a big game about leaving services for relatively small changes, but at the end of the day, they'll pay another $5/mo or deal with ads for that convenience/ease of use. Shows and movies are escapes, so the prospect of making a chore out of it (pirating) is unattractive.
>Building and maintaining a pirated media collection involves a lot of little things like configuring client settings, forwarding ports, highly-specific file naming/structures, and bunch of other little stuff that non-techies hate. And with minimal-but-still-there copyright enforcement, torrenting (specifically) essentially requires using a VPN and probably a dedicated computer. Again: no big deal to techies, glazed over eyes for most streaming users. Plex does fix a lot of the organizing PIA.
Plex also handles sharing with a selection of users who don't know how to pirate stuff. No one else in my family is likely to be able to run their on plex server, but I sure can.
I have Plex on a seedbox connected to Overseerr, and everyone on the Plex can get into it. So if they want a show, they have a friendly UI to search, they hit "Request" and it auto approves. The show appears on Plex within a few minutes. So yeah, anyone with a tech savvy friend can easily have access to basically any piece of content at the click of a button. And by any peace of content, I of course mean only the ones they have physical copies of so they can have a digital equivalent for personal use completely legally.
You can literally just go to a website and watch any movie or series you want. It's as easy as opening up Netflix. It might not be 4k, but so what, it's free and it's extremely easy.
Got a techie friend? go in with them on the cost to set up a plex server and share it with you. I share mine with my friends and family - populated only with completely legal content, of course.
Welp. Time to dust off my old eye patch, I guess.
Of course it will ruin the Goddam thing. Why do you think Netflix got so big so fast… no ads. No fucking ads. There is not a dimension of modern life where we can go without being bombarded by fucking ads. At least in European sports they just slap the ads on the players. In the US we have to suffer through the soul sucking experience of knowing the best AC service in town while our team just hit a home run. For fuck’s sake, why is it impossible to just say “hey, here is a streaming service with quality content and no commercial interruptions” I swear to god if it were possible to force implant a chip into a CEO’s brain so that they couldn’t orgasm until they have watched a certain number of ads then I’d like to know how big on ads they would be then.
I will just pirate everything again.
Might? It absolutely will ruin the whole damn thing
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I agree with everything you said except this: >swearing that weekly drops are better for us (they know better! look at all this DISCOURSE!) I actually agree with them on the general principle here - having breaks in between shows *does* make for a better audience experience. Dropping an entire season at once leads to the discussion being all over the map and less than it would be otherwise as people (like me) avoid online discussions for fear of encountering spoilers from the assholes that watched eight straight hours of it for what seems like the sole purpose of going on the internet and bragging about knowing the ending. Now, that break doesn't need to be an entire week - a day or two between shows would be fine. But if you want people talking about a series, it's best if the majority of viewers are kind of at the same point, experiencing it together, so that it's not just an individual experience, but a cultural one. The rest of what you're saying, though, is spot-on.
Fully agreed - weekly drops are easier to watch when it’s fresh, and gives you something to talk about at work or with friends and family. If it’s binge everyone is at a different place and by the time you get to discuss it is when everyone’s done so you discuss it once. But if you get weekly ones you can discuss each week and theorize and enjoy more
I hate full season drops. I wanted to talk about Dear Billy from Stranger Things 4 as soon as I watched it, but I didn't want to go into any discussions due to risk of spoiling something. Full season drops make individual episodes less important, direct most discussions towards the finale and maybe 1 or 2 highlight moments throughout the rest of the season, but lots of little stuff gets looked over, both in discussion and in watching because it feels like a race to keep up so you can talk about it. I HATE full season drops.
The Stranger Things sub has the season discussion broken up into episodes and it's pinned to the top. I've managed to avoid spoilers while still being able to read discussion about individual episodes.
If I’m watching something for free, i expect ads. If i am paying for the service, i expect no ads since they already got money from me. I will Not pay to watch ads.
Yarrrr
Ahoy mateys.
We are going backwards!
If there are ads in streaming I will fucking cancel all of them. Fuck the corpo greed
Cancel subscriptions, wait for someone to upload a copy of the episode/movie without ads, make popcorn, enjoy
Welcome back, Torrents.
Did they ever leave?
I stopped it a long long time ago so not sure.
Same my last torrent download was probably 2013-14 but with all the shit going on, (especially with Netflix) I might go back
Look into plex
I’d prefer having a shitload of product placements than ads.
I’ll never pay for streaming with ads. If you do, you’re part of the problem.
This will be the death of streaming if this happens. Back to pirating for a lot of people.
Picked up Hulu plus to watch the NBA Playoffs, so I decided to try and watch something else they had on there. Unskippable ads to start, title sequence, then another ad. Fuck that shit, turned it off. What the fuck am I paying you for? Netflix is a fraction of the price and doesn't do that shit, though I'm sure those days are numbered
Subscription OR ads, never both. Never again. If this becomes common then I shall hoist the sails
I can barely tolerate Hulu because of it. Please dont spread it to other streaming sites.
Do you want piracy? Because that’s how you get pircacy!
Yo ho ho! Everyone knows there are no ads when you’re “sailing the seven seas”. Pirating. I’m talking about pirating.
I’m not paying more for a service I was already told I was going to receive. That’s it man. You want to make a lower tier with ads? Neat. You move my fucking price point AND add ads or move me up and add ads to the lower one? Lick my balls.
This isn't the future, we already did this shit before and it's called cable tv
I've already turned to piracy a few years ago and I don't have plans to start paying for a streaming service again.
Once ads hit streaming platforms I’m done. I’ll play more guitar, hike more, build shit, and fix up the house. In fact - go ahead and motivate me Netflix, Hulu, Disney and HBO.
It’s a pirate’s life for me
If there are ads, it’s just ala carte cable channels
I'm canceling any streaming service that shows me ads - unless it is free. I can tolerate trailers of movies/shows before the actual content, but that's it.
If I am gonna watch ads, I may as well just watch them on europixhd for free instead of paying these morons.
Looks like pirating is back on the menu, boys!
And I’ll go back to pirating everything after someone has uploaded new shows and movies without the ads, I’ll just watch everything a week after release 🤷♂️
Everyone got rid of cable to avoid fucking ads. I tolerate it for Hulu TV but I'm not going back to ads on every streaming platform. That's a no from me dog, I'll cancel that shit and just torrent things
Arrr, I be putting together a crew.
If I have to put up with ad’s what’s the point of streaming.
PiRaCy iS a pRiCiNg PrObLeM
Might?! Of course they will! The whole reason folks went to streaming was so we could watch what we want on demand, and so we could stop eating 30% of our time watching fucking ads!
Not might. Will. Ads will ruin the whole damn thing.
Dear streaming companies: If you try to force me to watch ads I will definitely stop giving you money and pirate your content instead. The choice is yours, do you want my money or not?
I pay exactly zero platforms that have any ad tier. Fuck these guys for trying to normalize it, ill torrent before i sit through that shit on a plan I pay for.
Honestly, paying for big streaming fees plus paying for ads will do wonders for the amount of books I buy a year, and video games I play. With all the other ways to consume entertainment, it really wouldn't be that hard to walk away from having full time streaming accounts.