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.
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 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 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.
Speaking as someone who worked at a public library: do it. You paid for the movies and they're provided as a public good. I can guarantee that every single piece of media on the shelf has been ripped multiple times. People do it very frequently.
Back when I could only get barely serviceable dial up I had a large chunk of the local library's and the local rent-a-movie/game 's catalog ripped. If I still had to do that now I doubt I would be missing out enough on anything to really care anbd stop. Stacks of CD-Rs and DVD-Rs of movies or for modded consoles. I never had any complaints about that format so media companies really should get their heads out of their asses.
They are deliberately choosing to stay on the “morally correct” side of the line.
Once you’re talking about ripping library materials, why not just skip the library and download the same items without touching the physical. How is that worse?
For some of the same reasons you might buy something from a local store instead of buying online - you can see actual faces in your community on the way, your library gets usage metrics that help it keep funding and stay around, you might be there already for something else, less time digging around in a screen ui and more time moving in 3d. I also like that the rip itself is totally offlime and not traceable. And it is just stressful wondering if something pirated has something nasty snuck in, however unlikely it is much less likely from a library dvd. Don't if you don't want to, but there are perfectly good reasons.
Exactly this. I could easily just torrent as much as anyone, but I don't necessarily want to meet the low bar. Also, my career path is one such that if I were to ever receive a letter from an ISP suggesting my sailing of the high seas was a bit much, I'd be fired and blacklisted while being forced into a new career path.
I like to do something this with little free libraries. One of the libraries in my city has a volunteer group that does a book sale every week, frequently has a ton of really good comic books and such. I’ll buy them for pretty cheap, enjoy whatever I find, and then put them in little free libraries. They always get picked up quickly, especially comics!
Why not? Your taxes pay for the library, so you own a share of their media. If you really want to be honest, check their online catalog and make sure the title is available for checkout before you play it.
I frequently take advantage of the tax payer funded ownership of NASA imagery. I have a nice collection of ISS timelapse footage well before Apple provided them as screensavers.
However, "own a share of their media" means what, that I can have a legit claim to 30s worth of the content? How is that calculated? Divide the number of tax payers in the city by the number of seconds of each bit of content to see how much of it I "own"? You're really bending the concept of tax payer funding here. If that's how you want to go through life, then you do you
You have a right to check out and play the media if it's available. I'm just proposing that you skip the physical "check out" part of that. It's possible to do that honestly: most libraries have an online catalog system and you can see if the title is already checked out or currently available. In fact I'd wonder if some libraries don't already handle their media catalog that way. It would eliminate the risk of damaging the physical media if you could just check out the movie and stream it right from the library's website.
He’s not missing the point IMO. He’s giving a way - a little convoluted but it almost works - to honor the spirit of the law.
My only major critique of it is the library doesn’t know you wanted to borrow then, and usage metrics are very important for them when it comes to deciding what to purchase. But I get what he’s suggesting, it makes sense even if it’s imperfect (I personally wouldn’t do it).
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.
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 have a little "dance" I have to do to change my store back to the UK (I'm British) and you need a valid british credit/debit card and address to switch stores to the UK store...
I live in Sweden now and I got a bit bent out of shape when I moved and discovered this was the case.
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.
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
> 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.
agreed : have been doing that since 15ish years ago, works fine, no time squandered on stupid ass "ask your doctor about ___" ads, and that time saved is hugely valuable.
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. I guess the law was never really their greatest concern. 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.
Yes and on top of that governments don't care enough about my personal information, so until this is fixed I'm not going to care about any IP or copyright laws either.
Further, big AI companies don't care about copyright laws, so I assume this is the current reality.
Laws only make sense if they are fair and applied equally.
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.
Unless they beam it into our brains we will find ways to rip it. Even if it means recording it with a camera. Then cameras will have content id. But you can't stop the signal.
By that point there will be enough digitized entertainment already produced to last a lifetime. We’re just on the long tail of diminishing returns now.
If we're going just off of the total runtime of all films ever produced, that point was probably already reached before WW2. But that's not entirely relevant, because an average person won't be equally interested in watching everything. There could still be increasingly small niches to fill.
The bad news is the camera sees the same thing the eye does (at least to a reasonable approximation), so that means you will still see ads in the output.
I already hear your wheels turning, thinking machine learning will provide a way to remove the ads from the content, but as the AI labs start to control all the compute they will assuredly insert their own ads into what you tried to remove.
Why would anyone need machine learning to edit a video? There are dozens or hundreds of free open source video editing programs. Only one person needs to edit the ads out.
Okay, I'll grant you that there are some talented artists who are able to convincingly remove ads from images using traditional Photoshop tools, assuming you can find a dusty old computer kicking around that no AI lab wants to bother with. But doing that over many frames, as required for video, is a time sink nobody is going to realistically commit to.
Or maybe you still think we're in the 1950s when there were explicit ad breaks? In modern works ads are injected into the storyline. You can't just start dropping frames at random if you want to preserve the performance in its entirety.
I literally have no idea what you’re talking about. You’re saying we can’t splice ads out?
There are absolutely hard breaks before and after ads. Sounds like you might be talking about product placement, which to be clear, no one anywhere else in this thread is talking about.
It takes 2 seconds for a human to remove an ad from media. It happens so fast there are even browser plugins (sponsorblock) which crowdsource removing sponsorship plugs from youtube videos.
You can do it with ffmpeg losslessly with pretty much any media.
The only thing that's hard to remove is sponsorships built into the script (brought to you by snapple), but people don't tend to like that sort of thing in a show.
> The only thing that's hard to remove is sponsorships built into the script (brought to you by snapple), but people don't tend to like that sort of thing in a show.
2. I was using hyperbole, which I think was pretty obvious. It does take some time to isolate frames for advertisements. It's not, however, terribly hard to do and is something people would do if the way ripping in the future is pulling video directly from HDMI output.
3. Who are you to setup a game with rules and requirements for me to fulfill?
So my followup reply is you did not read my comment charitably or fully before issuing a challenge.
AI labs controlling all the compute is not realistic. You don't need a frontier video model to remove ads in a movie.
Take any open multimodal LLM, set it up with a scriptable video editor, uncensored Qwen-Image then tell it where the ads are and what to replace them with. That's it.
You can do all of it locally on a 5 year old gaming PC with pretty good results. Of course it works better if you have Opus driving it but that's not a hard requirement.
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.
I think we'll end up seeing legislation against the license version of all of this content. Instead, you'll get to own it and move it around as necessary. This hasn't been necessary yet, but if that becomes the only option, then ownership becomes a more important question.
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.
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.)
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.
I have a feeling the next step will be media megacorps pressuring nations to create legislation to clamp down on software/hardware enabling anonymous Linux ISO downloads and the viewing of said Linux ISOs via Plex/Jellyfin.
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.
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.
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. It's still hundreds or thousands of items for a year of subscription cost; more than you could reasonably watch. Even going full 8 TB SSDs at $150/TB is still thrift store cost per movie when you amortize it ($2.25 at 15GB, or $0.30 at 2GB).
Of course then as another comment here said, you're more likely to realize you don't actually want any of it. And then when you realize it's not worth pennies to store, you also realize it's not worth your time to watch.
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
You might want to check your math again. 1 GB/h is 2.3 mbit/s, if we're being generous. That would be absolutely riddled with compression artifacts unless you're encoding a screensaver.
2 Mb/s is awful for anything with movement, 8 Mb/s is decent enough, 20 Mb/s is very good to my eyes, and 80 Mb/s is nice, clearly better especially in scenes with significant movement, but it's not revolutionary. I don't watch webrips unless there's no other option, it's mostly WEB-DL or bluray rips.
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.
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.
Yes I am aware, it is why you don’t buy new, there are thousands of used computers out there that I made a side hustle out of buying them and reselling them after some cleaning and fixing, so many I found that’s beyond to list here, but for example I got asus zenbook 14 for $12 because it didn’t boot (which was just a loose connection inside), a macmini m1 for $50, and many other parts and finds. I even have a thinkpad with proxmox and run as a server, uptime now is more than a year.
I'm curious where are you going to find these used machines (EBay, govt auction, Facebook Marketplace, etc...)? I have been wanting to setup a home NAS and home server but am not paying these prices.
Seriously I can’t even get my refurb enterprise drives for reasonable prices anymore. Used to pay like $150 for 14TB ultrastars now it’s like $300 for 12TB exos
Last night I found a 3TB external USB 3.0 drive at the bottom of my "computer junk" drawer that I had completely forgotten I owned. It felt like winning the lottery.
Got some old gtechs I used for production work years ago, lots of 2-4TB that worked for 6-12mo then were moved to a closet and powered off for the last 8-10 years. Thinking of shucking them and checking them. Can’t imagine they’re bad yet.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Agreed! When they make you start paying for ads, it’s time to do something else. I haven’t had a subscription to any TV service in years because of the ads.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/whatever.
Yeah, I've done more to it than that (I'm on HN after all), but for people used to torrenting there's nothing here that would present much of a challenge.
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.
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.
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?
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.
>"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 a 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 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. Also, the physical discs 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+ ...
EDIT to add an update of a previous comment about my friend's defiance against ads added to Amazon Prime Videos by borrowing DVDs from the public library. She lost that battle because she finished all the DVDs she wanted to watch so had to go back to Amazon Videos for new content. She now endures the Amazon's ads. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42388626
She really tried to fight ads by avoiding the platform but couldn't sustain it because she ran out of free DVDs to checkout from the library. This means buying DVDs to get something new to watch if trying to stick with physical media and unfortunately, that costs more than streaming platforms. She deals with the ad interruptions by multitasking on an iPad when they come on.
>We still have public libraries. They usually have a pretty sizable collection
The public libraries in major cities like the New York Public Library have sizable collections. The smaller libraries in the outer suburbs have a much smaller selection. Yes, there's also inter-library loan system for the suburbs to pull from the big city library but there are restrictions such as only having 3 items at a time.
The neighborhood public libraries are wonderful resources but there can be limitations (quantity of titles) that prevent it from being a sustainable substitute for streaming for someone that wants to watch ~2 hours of content every day. My friend tried the public library and it was only a temporary reprieve from the ads on streaming platforms. The library simply didn't have enough content for her to watch.
That sizable collection is often scratched so you watch half the movie and then it skips or fails completely. Just like what used to happen constantly with DVDs from Netflix.
Not in my experience. My library's DVDs and Blu-rays work great. I check one out every week or two.
I'd encourage anyone reading to go to your local library if you haven't been in a while. Check out a book. See if they have a makerspace. Do some remote work there. They're wonderful places. They become more and more important with every passing year.
Not many of those left in my local libraries. They downsized to popular fiction and a rack of magazines to introduce more sofas and space for charity cake stalls. And "mindful colouring-in" if you're around for the 4.5 days of the week that they're open.
Libraries threw away the one thing that made them unique, curated knowledge, in order to compete with Starbucks as a "third space".
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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'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.
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.
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.
Ground News presents you a "balanced" news diet by presenting you with two sides that are implied to be equally valid. Except one of the sides is just (relatively accurate) plain old news and the other side largely consists of institutions who publish a lot of nonsense and paid Ground News to be there, or have ownership in common with Ground News. Their target audience is people who were mostly consuming the first group before (not a single Ground News ad was ever run to an audience aligned with the second group) and the purpose is to make them gradually accept the second group as equals to the first group.
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.
The product ads definitely purport to show you news.
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. It exists to change the categorisation you buy into.
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?
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.
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'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.
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.
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!).
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
TV sort of means different things to different people. To some it means cable, so giving up 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 would 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 is 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
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
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 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 now, 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
No, there was an extremely quick and obvious drop-off in quality that is not excused by "vertical short video has different dynamics"
Before the change my shorts feed roughly aligned with my main homepage feed (which has also gotten worse since they made the dislike button a placebo there). After, it's mostly AI voiceovers reading out Reddit or Twitter comments about life situations, placed over Minecraft gameplay. This is probably a convergent point in the algorithm as you said but it's also extremely relevant that I have no way to tell it "stop that"
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.
I haven't had a functional TV in my home for over 5 years now. I will sometimes watch shows on my laptop but that's about it.
In place of a TV I have a high res audio transport and speakers that are used for music. Spotify isn't exactly a saint but it would be challenging for them to do what Disney is doing without losing all their customers.
I try Qobuz out every year but my dumb niche music tastes aren't as available there.I hope they continue to grow because I love the idea of leaving Spotify.
I've given up on all streaming services because none of them offer a model where my money goes to the artists I listen to and not to Taylor Swift and other top-40 nonsense. Switching completely to Plex + PlexAmp + Bandcamp + iTunes purchased music (it's DRM free). It helps that I have ~300 CDs to kick start my library.
Can attest that Tidal is basically completely satisfying as a Spotify replacement for me. I use a dedicated podcast app and buy any audiobooks I want from Libro.fm Haven’t looked back.
Still continue to slowly build my CD + mp3 collection in case this wonderful era of “cheap subscription for almost all the world’s music ad-free” doesn’t last forever.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
--------
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.
This is pedantic. Disney is clarifying that live content will have ads. They are not Disney's ads they are network ads from that live channel, usually a 3rd party to Disney. This is seemingly because all of Hulu's features will be ported to the Disney+ app, including live TV and replays of live TV and so whatever ads are in that live content and playback will be there for everyone.
Also, Hulu include content from other companies which require ads to be played and only offer the ad free experience on their own platform.
It is not. The exact wording, as it sits in my inbox:
> We’ve clarified that all Service Plans may include: (i) promotional content, (ii) sponsorships, and (iii) advertisements before/after playback of Content and in channels, live/as-live, special events, and any third-party services content.
Emphasis on "before/after playback of Content" and live etc. So they are opening the door for ads everywhere, not just on live TV or Hulu.
I just did a diff of the previous terms to the current (as of 10/22/26) terms and found nothing really related to the article's claims at all. Also this is not in the US terms at all -> "We’ve clarified that all Service Plans may include: (i) promotional content, (ii) sponsorships, and (iii) advertisements before/after playback of Content and in channels, live/as-live, special events, and any third-party services content."
It seems it is only in the UK and European subscribers TOS from 06/18/26.
What I want is a streaming service that operates as a consumer cooperative.
Subscribers vote, elect a slate of directors who each get a fraction of the content-budget to spend as per their campaign promises. Licensing content, buying it in perpetuity, producing it themselves or funding some group of creators -- none of this "how can we milk customers more", and no more fruitless community campaigns to save a beloved series, you just need some critical mass of subscribers to vote for the guy whose platform is "I will keep making more seasons as fast as possible until the sun boils the ocean".
isn't this essentially a state broadcaster? You might get one decent show but the committee and bike shedding mostly gives you terrible niche programming that's unsustainable without massive subsidies - and most still show adverts.
No, I don't that a cooperatively run streaming service needs to have a monopoly on the legitimate use of force in a given territory. There could easily be multiple competing cooperatives.
State broadcaster are usually funded from state funds (taxes) not voluntary memberships. Furthermore, taxpayers don't usually get to vote directly on what content should be produced. With cooperatives, there could be multiple coops that focus on different groups. They could even join together on productions across coops. Sounds like a good plan to me.
NFLX is publicly owned with only one share class and it only does video streaming so it does that.
Anyone motivated to do this for a smaller group would rather just run a private tracker. The overheads are enormous when you’re not negotiating in bulk.
Netflix has "optimized" their app to the point where you're cycling between the same 30-40 recommendations on every screen, just grouped a little different. The catalog shrinks every year. And they invest large amounts into producing their own algorithm-based content instead of acquiring more.
Yeah that’s what it will look like if you have this kind of structure. No one is selling a perpetual license for a movie for anything less than top dollar. The proposed plan inevitably tends to this outcome.
Netflix isn't owned by its subscribers is the critical difference. You don't buy shares of NFLX to gain access to the service, and subscribing does not come with any shares/voting rights.
You're not getting high budget shows without like a hundred million subscribers, sure, but there are bootstrapping options.
Dropout does their original content on around 1 million subscribers @ $6/mo.
There's also licensing existing content -- the mega corps building walled gardens aren't likely to play ball, but if you make it painless and have non-exploitative terms, there's countless smaller content producers who would happily upload their catalogue to another service.
I think if the right group of founders (experience in streaming,v experience in content production, good professional network with existing smaller production companies) was able to kickstart it with a million subscribers, give or take, they'd have decent odds of providing enough value to start a more subscribers -> more content spiral instead of the reverse.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm trying to understand what this actually means. Here's Disney's page on the matter[0].
I understand that sports will tend to have ads displayed in the stadium and so on, and that some show may feature characters drinking Pepsi rather than Coke because of an agreement. And I guess movies may have trailers. Is that the extent of it? If I get what feels like an obvious "ad" then we'll probably be canceling, but I guess I'm okay with those things that I mentioned.
> Disney+ provides some plans for watching movies and series without commercial interruption – Disney+ Standard and Disney+ Premium. However, those tiers may include ... ads/promos before or after playback of content ...
This implies that "Disney+ Standard With Ads" DOES have ad breaks. The other plans could force you to watch ads before your movie starts.
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.
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 cancelled my Peacock subscription the day Curious George got taken off. It was the only thing my daughter watched.
I went to best buy, bought their Sony blu-ray player and a 128GB USB stick, went to Walmart and raided their $5 DVD bin, downloaded a bunch of old children's content from archive.org onto the jump drive, put it in the blu-ray player, and now my children have more quality content than they could ever want to watch. I recommend any parent do this instead of paying for streaming, the experience is 1,000x better.
No more streaming subscriptions. I'm done with the corporate greed.
The language in the EU or UK agreement must be a lot different than the US agreement. When this was announced last month, I never saw the new subscriber agreement and have not seen ads outside of live TV. Our subscriber agreement was updated yesterday, and says:
---
k. Service Tiers With or Without Ads. We offer different Service Tiers, some with advertisements and some predominantly without. Service Tiers described as "no ads" or "ad-free" are generally free of commercial interruptions, with certain exceptions that may change from time to time, including where: (i) streaming rights or other limitations require certain Content to play with ads; or (ii) ads are served in certain live or linear Content or special events (and replays thereof). Additionally, "no ads" or "ad-free" Service Tiers may contain limited promotional content, such as brief clips about the Bundles (including messages promoting an upgrade thereto) and other content available on any services associated with the Bundles, and branded content, product integrations, or sponsorship messaging.
Please note that if you subscribe to multiple (or a bundle of) Service Tiers, Content from any ad-supported Service Tier will play with ads, while Content from any "no ads" or "ad-free" Service Tier will not (except as described above).
---
So it's not quite as awful as what's reported here. This article is a month old and I haven't seen what it says was going to happen.
Andor really was an outlier, wasn't it? It's up there with the Sopranos and the Wire as one of the best TV shows in my lifetime, and everything else they make is lukewarm garbage soup.
I haven't seen it yet. Serious question - Does it have any Jedis or Siths? (If there are no Jedis / Siths, it isn't "Star Wars" for me and I will not watch it).
Andor does not prominently feature any Jedi, Sith, or other Force-users as main characters. The show does feature at least one unambiguous use of on-screen Force powers, but it's not the focus.
The setting of the show is influenced by their actions, but during the time period the show is set, the two most visibly active Sith - Palpatine and Vader - are high-ranking members of the government, and are entirely off-screen, and all Jedi are assumed dead or in hiding. The main character considers The Force to be superstition.
For my own taste, at least, I thought the show was very good, and it felt more "Star Wars" to me than most of the other spinoffs, sequels, prequels, and extended universe of the past decades. It really nails an overall sense of "how the universe works", in the setting. The aesthetics, the capabilities and limitations of technology, the social organization, and the sense of a wide and exotic universe, all match what seems "Star Wars" to me.
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 qualify 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.
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.
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!
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 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.
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.
> two sources at Disney familiar with the change said the updated terms was intended to give Disney greater leeway to incorporate promotional spots for its other movies, TV shows and live events before and after content streams on Disney Plus, not traditional commercial spots.
> The use of the word “advertising” was intended to help its terms of service remain consistent across regions where the streaming platform is available, including countries where promotional spots for its own shows and other content might be legally considered an advertisement, even if the spots are not promoting third-party products or services.
> To that end, Disney’s plan is similar to what other streamers, including Paramount Plus, do with their platforms now. Paramount Plus has long streamed promotional spots for its own shows, movies and live events before content on its ad-free tier.
Now I'll let you decide if you trust more what the PR person says or what is written in T&C.
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.
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.
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.
The only reason I have Disney is because I have a young child and there are a couple of shows that they enjoy. We recently got rid of Netflix because there is literally nothing of interest to anyone in the household and the only reason we currently have Hulu is because of Jeopardy.
They keep seeking the price to where consumers are finally pushed to the limit and I think they are almost there, finally
How is this a good decision? Curious what the C-suite discussion looked like. When customers lose every option they thought they were paying for, why would they stay on your platform instead of going back to free YouTube. I understand the argument of Marvel/Pixar/Star Wars, but I can only afford so much :) Thanks, HN I just cancelled.
The most charitable interpretation: The new wording includes all forms of covert advertisement (say embedded in the content itself). All their plans always had that.
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.
Disney is primed up for some regulatory action and customer punishment.
Enough cancellations will trigger price raises to protect their quarter reports until the whole revenue model collapses, and they price themselves out of the streaming subscription business.
We can talk about TV all we want -- but the answer is youtube (and no not youtubeTV or whatever). We're seeing entirely free shows better than what you'd get on netflix (e.g. The Amazing digital circus) and a few orders of magnitude more content.
It's TV "2.0" (meaning decentralized creators no gatekeepers) and the younger generations are watching it far more than anything else (and producing impressive content)
The real answer here is regulation around advertising, as well as regulation around appropriate size of media companies.
Scale is not required anymore to launch streaming platforms - white label works fine - and for the most part these major services sell property rights back and forth anyway every few months to keep you subscribed.
It’s pure cartel / oligopoly behavior. Can’t imagine this gets better since Ellison owns HBO and Paramount services.
When they change plans like this, they should have to turn off auto-renewals for impacted accounts. It is fundamentally a new contract, and they likely cannot guarantee the new terms have been read.
Do we need more “content”, most of the shows and movies they make are pretty bad and only content for content sake. It doesn’t tell a real story, it just puts some action and conflict wrapped around IP characters with no real substance
lol, I pre-paid for an annual subscription when Disney+ first launched: Marvel, Star Wars, and Pixar together was a compelling offering. I canceled after year 2, and rejoined when I got an offer to pay $5/month for the ads tier this past November. I'll be canceling in a couple weeks when that deal expires.
My four year old hates ads ("too many commercials," he says), and with the continuous price increases and his...mercurial media diet, it's actually easier and cheaper for me to just buy DVDs or Blu Ray discs.
So, farewell Disney+. I'm perfectly happy to go back to discs—they're actually a better user experience than anything you choose to offer.
I lived abroad for a while in a country I didn’t initially speak the language in. One thing I clearly remember is feeling quite different because advertising literally had no effect on me since I couldn’t understand it.
Yep, I've been living in Sweden for 10+ years and have (embarrassingly) not learned Swedish to a native level yet.
The more I learn Swedish, the less ignorant I become to the advertising and "gotcha" headlines on newspapers and stickers and such; and I'm noticing its outsized (negative) effect.
Swedes are excellent at speaking English (better than some British people from deprived areas).. and I work in international companies where English is the lingua franca...
My partner actively prevented it also, she was ethnically Russian (Estonian) and wanted me to learn Russian before Swedish.
I have been in a country and I understand the language, not natively but decently. But the ads all are overly cheery, fake smiles, super weird corporate loving language that I can't take it seriously at all.
I know those elements are super common in English, but it seems dialed up to 11 in the other language. I wonder if it's basically the same in English, I'm just so used to it that it doesn't seem as fake.
When you pay $22 a month for an ad-free tier you expect it to be free from promotional content or trailers as well. Disney is going to be hurtin' big time in the coming year as subscribers leave in droves.
Why exactly does making a show or a movie cost millions of dollars where is that money going? Youtubers have been able to pull off insane full length documentary and movies and stuff with very little capital.
It boggles my mind that people pay for streaming when there are ample amounts of pirated sites that you can just stream from, you don't even have to download anything anymore.
If you know of safe pirating sites that have good bandwidth and uptime, that's great! But lots of consumers aren't willing to go through ones with quetsionable ads, or fight the need to new ones bimonthly as the streaming sites churn like a game of whackamole.
So if you've got that hookup and know where to find them, the convenience exists for you, its easy and useful. For someone wanting to get into it, it might not be so convenient.
Convenience is king -- unfortunately if I'm paying for something that has ads, doesn't have the movie I want for x months (or at all), rotates out something I had planned to watch, has a clunky UI, etc then actually jellyfin becomes the path of least resistance, aside from potentially being cheaper.
They’re just going to keep changing the terms, injecting more ads, and raising prices until their revenue falls. As long as the number keeps going up, they’ll keep doing it.
Star Wars is a complete write-off AFAIC. I'm done with Star Wars after the last trilogy and the illogical return of Darth Maul in The Clone Wars.
They've now even made a TV show about Darth Maul (Star Wars: Maul - Shadow Lord) during the Galactic Empire period. This is just beyond ridiculous. This is just rubbing salt into the wound and saying: "We can do anything we want, no matter how stupid or illogical. You'll eat shit and you'll like it!"
I'll never get over Darth Maul's return. I'll detest Star Wars for the rest of my life just because of this. The person that came up with it (Dave Filoni?) should be fired.
It really does amaze me how much people are willing to put up with from streaming apps.
Like I get it if your kid wants to watch Disney shows and it buys you some peace and quiet. Otherwise, it's a firehose of content, everything's ultimately just a part of a franchise structure that's built more as a business plan than a piece of art, and there's no way to consume it all.
No they are not. There are plenty of websites where you can download Disney content for free. They think they are a monopoly because they've won the legal right to keep these websites off Google.
Monopolies exist when adding more variables in categorizing business that are perceived to be competing against others. When removing these variables, the false argument that monopolies don't exit can be propagated.
When I think of streaming services being owned by content producers, I think of the 1940s push to bar content producers from owning movie theaters. Unfortunately that anti-trust decree was removed in 2020 in support of big businesses. [0]
This is why content producers, like Disney, should not be able to run streaming services. They are no different then the movie theater owners before digital access.
USA keeps repealing anti-trust laws and allowing business to get bigger and more corrupt. This allows them to maximize their wealth by reducing competition. USA has become a Corporatocracy through the actions of putting big business ahead of their citizens.
I'm okay with paying but I really hate ads with a passion and especially for kids this is not okay. I was a customer of Disney and I guess I'll never be one again.
This enshittification and degradation of language (“ad-free”) is not surprising — it’s the same path cable TV followed.
But I struggle to understand the economics of the streaming sites listed in the article. They receive an all-you-can-eat monthly payment but have to keep acquiring (including, it seems, making) new content. The linkage between the two is very loose (monthly vs daily) and most videos etc show up as new and then fade down the rankings. Seems like a pretty crappy business, and Netflix being independent, points towards that in its financial statements.
Also, the existence of this sentence in the article surprised me: “ It doesn’t help that Disney+ doesn’t make the kind of original content that wins at the Emmys.” Winning a major one can have a small boost on a film’s lifetime revenue, but overall the correlation between the two is weak. To paraphrase (ugh) Pournelle: Disney would rather have a lucrative film with no awards than a lauded film with no revenue.
I cancelled a shared Disney subscription when they started cracking down on accounts shared between different households. Same with Netflix and HBO. Now I torrent everything using Transmission, Sonarr and Plex stack and couldn't be happier. UX is on par with paid services and don't have to deal with this ads bullshit. Paid streaming was nice while it lasted, but now torrents seem like a much better alternative.
The news is a front for the wealthy to control the political narrative so they can pass laws to benefit themselves. Home improvement networks are fronts for real estate developers. Sports channels are fronts for bookies and merchandisers. And so on and so forth.
Web-based services like streaming are now a front for oligopolies. Or more accurately, maybe they always have been, at least since the Dot Bomb around 2000. But who are we kidding, the 1950s were literally a false narrative about the nuclear family vs the rabble, used to create the Cold War and skim trillions of dollars from the working poor on both sides of the conflict.
This stuff used to be the cynical conspiratorial view. But now I don't see how kids will be able to navigate the modern world without someone admitting what they already know: that it's all a lie.
this ascribes a level of premeditated intent that does not exist. humans are just selfish and bad to each other. This is the current emergent behavior.
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.
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.
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.
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!).
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
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.
Not only you'll be paying for low quality Disney slop, but you'll also be paying to be advertised to. I now think even less of people that keep paying for subscriptions like Disney+.
I have YouTube premium and it now shoves a "products" panel in my face that I have to swipe down before a video starts if the video references a product.
Meanwhile YouTube Morphe on Android gives you no ads at all and improves the app a lot.
I know that they are probably going to roll out remote attestation at some point, but I cancelled YouTube Premium the last time they did an insane price raise.
what do people with these subscriptions even watch? why can these services make any money at all when there's youtube and tiktok with infinite content for every niche interest in existence? what compels people to still consume mass produced slop?
YouTube and TikTok are also mass produced slop. I assume Disney at least had longer form content and high quality production WITHOUT ads. YouTube and TikTok are, by default, two of the most advertisement-ridden services I've ever seen.
It's (presumably) pronounced like "awfium" when seems like a word for next-level awful. But maybe that's just me. I'm a consistently poor judge of other people's preferences.
And I'm just some arse on the internet. Ask some people you trust. If they don't like the name change it and keep going. Don't be disheartened.
- Watching your own films away from home isn't paywalled, and never will be.
- Hardware encoding is free, and always will be.
- No cloud account required unless you want my convenient discovery service.
- If you don't want to use a cloud account at all, you can set up your own discovery server on your own VPS for watching away from home even through routers and shit (also free).
- No ads, no storefront, no telemetry.
- Watch Together with voice. Multiple people can watch a synced video, and talk to each other (I've tested this with me in Germany and the other person in Australia, and it worked beautifully).
- Hardened against corrupt video files and issues like NFS failures (getting stuck forever in a syscall). Everything vulnerable is separated and isolated.
- Open source. The server is AGPL and the web clients are MPL.
- Your files are left alone. Media is read-only by default. The server reads the .nfo metadata files you already have, from Kodi for example.
What's not there yet:
- Native apps. I'm only doing a web client for the time being until all the features are in place. It's pretty fast, though.
Jellyfin can only be used from remote if you can expose its ports somehow. Lots of routers block that, or your ISP is set up such that you need NAT tricks, and have to use STUN and TURN and such to work around it. Jellyfin doesn't handle any of that. Tailscale helps here, but then if you want family members to use it, you have to set them up on tailscale as well. Or you set up a service on a VPS.
I wrote this because I'm unhappy with the offerings out there, including Emby, Plex, and Jellyfin. Also too many bugs that have been sitting for years with no solution. For Jellyfin in particular:
- SyncPlay is buggy, doesn't support voice, and seems to be unmaintained now.
- Way too many CVEs, mostly FFmpeg injections (CVE-2026-35033, CVE-2026-35032, CVE-2026-48793, CVE-2025-31499).
- The session key leaking in URLs.
- Upgrades breaking the database.
- Needless transcodes and wrong "can play this" guesses.
- Subtitles that load late or drift after resuming.
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.
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 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.
Don't forget your local library. They've often got decent selection especially if you're in a denser area.
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.
Speaking as someone who worked at a public library: do it. You paid for the movies and they're provided as a public good. I can guarantee that every single piece of media on the shelf has been ripped multiple times. People do it very frequently.
Back when I could only get barely serviceable dial up I had a large chunk of the local library's and the local rent-a-movie/game 's catalog ripped. If I still had to do that now I doubt I would be missing out enough on anything to really care anbd stop. Stacks of CD-Rs and DVD-Rs of movies or for modded consoles. I never had any complaints about that format so media companies really should get their heads out of their asses.
They are deliberately choosing to stay on the “morally correct” side of the line.
Once you’re talking about ripping library materials, why not just skip the library and download the same items without touching the physical. How is that worse?
For some of the same reasons you might buy something from a local store instead of buying online - you can see actual faces in your community on the way, your library gets usage metrics that help it keep funding and stay around, you might be there already for something else, less time digging around in a screen ui and more time moving in 3d. I also like that the rip itself is totally offlime and not traceable. And it is just stressful wondering if something pirated has something nasty snuck in, however unlikely it is much less likely from a library dvd. Don't if you don't want to, but there are perfectly good reasons.
Exactly this. I could easily just torrent as much as anyone, but I don't necessarily want to meet the low bar. Also, my career path is one such that if I were to ever receive a letter from an ISP suggesting my sailing of the high seas was a bit much, I'd be fired and blacklisted while being forced into a new career path.
What career path dies from an ISP letter
Someone working with studio content
Someone who works in an ISP - or one of the media companies which own the IP.
(Or both... here in Canada, Rogers is a "wonderful" mix of both...)
ISPs don’t give a fuck if their employees are casual pirates. It’d only be an issue if they think you’re going to run a seedbox or something.
Well if you are not downloading anything in work how would they got that information?
Pro move, buy it, rip it and then donate it to the library.
I like to do something this with little free libraries. One of the libraries in my city has a volunteer group that does a book sale every week, frequently has a ton of really good comic books and such. I’ll buy them for pretty cheap, enjoy whatever I find, and then put them in little free libraries. They always get picked up quickly, especially comics!
Why not? Your taxes pay for the library, so you own a share of their media. If you really want to be honest, check their online catalog and make sure the title is available for checkout before you play it.
I frequently take advantage of the tax payer funded ownership of NASA imagery. I have a nice collection of ISS timelapse footage well before Apple provided them as screensavers.
However, "own a share of their media" means what, that I can have a legit claim to 30s worth of the content? How is that calculated? Divide the number of tax payers in the city by the number of seconds of each bit of content to see how much of it I "own"? You're really bending the concept of tax payer funding here. If that's how you want to go through life, then you do you
You have a right to check out and play the media if it's available. I'm just proposing that you skip the physical "check out" part of that. It's possible to do that honestly: most libraries have an online catalog system and you can see if the title is already checked out or currently available. In fact I'd wonder if some libraries don't already handle their media catalog that way. It would eliminate the risk of damaging the physical media if you could just check out the movie and stream it right from the library's website.
You are clearly missing the point, which at this point I'm taking as intentional and no longer worthy of my time
He’s not missing the point IMO. He’s giving a way - a little convoluted but it almost works - to honor the spirit of the law.
My only major critique of it is the library doesn’t know you wanted to borrow then, and usage metrics are very important for them when it comes to deciding what to purchase. But I get what he’s suggesting, it makes sense even if it’s imperfect (I personally wouldn’t do it).
Public libraries also offer a wide variety of content that can be legally borrowed or streamed at no cost.
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.
Eat your heart out Disney, Netflix, etc...
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.
Perfect example of why I haven't bought media for many years and won't be buying any media from BigCo.
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.
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?
Yes they do.
I have a little "dance" I have to do to change my store back to the UK (I'm British) and you need a valid british credit/debit card and address to switch stores to the UK store...
I live in Sweden now and I got a bit bent out of shape when I moved and discovered this was the case.
Btw, buying things doesn't mean they won't remove it: https://blog.dijit.sh/importance-of-self-hosted-backups/
I wasn’t aware of that. Good to know, thanks.
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.
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..
And I spend nothing on streaming.
The issue is when they censor the version they host
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
> 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.
agreed : have been doing that since 15ish years ago, works fine, no time squandered on stupid ass "ask your doctor about ___" ads, and that time saved is hugely valuable.
> Assuming you even care about legality, of course.
If buying isn't owning, then piracy isn't stealing.
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. I guess the law was never really their greatest concern. 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.
Yes and on top of that governments don't care enough about my personal information, so until this is fixed I'm not going to care about any IP or copyright laws either.
Further, big AI companies don't care about copyright laws, so I assume this is the current reality.
Laws only make sense if they are fair and applied equally.
> From this point on, every year "physical media & a Jellyfin install" is going to be more sensible.
Which of course is why physical media will increasingly rarely be offered as an option going forward
Yarrr! The high seas are full of physical disks and have very few ads!
For now.
What does this even mean?
Discs are increasingly rare for newer media. Therefore rips from them will be rarer on the high seas.
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
Physical releases are having a Renaissance at the moment actually. See Vinegar Syndrome, for example.
I'm not so sure.
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.
Unless they beam it into our brains we will find ways to rip it. Even if it means recording it with a camera. Then cameras will have content id. But you can't stop the signal.
By that point there will be enough digitized entertainment already produced to last a lifetime. We’re just on the long tail of diminishing returns now.
There’ll always be community theater!
By that point? There already is and has been for years. Many more life times worth of movies and shows than any one person could ever hope to watch.
If we're going just off of the total runtime of all films ever produced, that point was probably already reached before WW2. But that's not entirely relevant, because an average person won't be equally interested in watching everything. There could still be increasingly small niches to fill.
[dead]
The bad news is the camera sees the same thing the eye does (at least to a reasonable approximation), so that means you will still see ads in the output.
I already hear your wheels turning, thinking machine learning will provide a way to remove the ads from the content, but as the AI labs start to control all the compute they will assuredly insert their own ads into what you tried to remove.
Why would anyone need machine learning to edit a video? There are dozens or hundreds of free open source video editing programs. Only one person needs to edit the ads out.
There's ffmpeg, you can do the editing from the commandline (I have done it that way :) )
Okay, I'll grant you that there are some talented artists who are able to convincingly remove ads from images using traditional Photoshop tools, assuming you can find a dusty old computer kicking around that no AI lab wants to bother with. But doing that over many frames, as required for video, is a time sink nobody is going to realistically commit to.
Or maybe you still think we're in the 1950s when there were explicit ad breaks? In modern works ads are injected into the storyline. You can't just start dropping frames at random if you want to preserve the performance in its entirety.
I literally have no idea what you’re talking about. You’re saying we can’t splice ads out?
There are absolutely hard breaks before and after ads. Sounds like you might be talking about product placement, which to be clear, no one anywhere else in this thread is talking about.
> I literally have no idea what you’re talking about.
That's fine. We can't all know everything. But why are you trying to participate in a discussion, by your own admission, you don't understand?
Based on your interpretation of the conversation, it’s clearly you who doesn’t understand what is being discussed.
It takes 2 seconds for a human to remove an ad from media. It happens so fast there are even browser plugins (sponsorblock) which crowdsource removing sponsorship plugs from youtube videos.
You can do it with ffmpeg losslessly with pretty much any media.
The only thing that's hard to remove is sponsorships built into the script (brought to you by snapple), but people don't tend to like that sort of thing in a show.
> It takes 2 seconds for a human to remove an ad from media.
Okay. I'll be extremely generous and let you prove that with just a single frame. https://www.dexerto.com/cdn-image/wp-content/uploads/2024/02...
Rules:
- You have 2 seconds.
- No machine learning (e.g. content-aware fill) allowed.
- Result must remove the distraction of the ad, not replace it with something equally distracting. Blurs, black squares, etc. not accepted.
- Video recording of the process provided in a follow up reply.
Go!
1. I addressed this in my comment
> The only thing that's hard to remove is sponsorships built into the script (brought to you by snapple), but people don't tend to like that sort of thing in a show.
2. I was using hyperbole, which I think was pretty obvious. It does take some time to isolate frames for advertisements. It's not, however, terribly hard to do and is something people would do if the way ripping in the future is pulling video directly from HDMI output.
3. Who are you to setup a game with rules and requirements for me to fulfill?
So my followup reply is you did not read my comment charitably or fully before issuing a challenge.
AI labs controlling all the compute is not realistic. You don't need a frontier video model to remove ads in a movie.
Take any open multimodal LLM, set it up with a scriptable video editor, uncensored Qwen-Image then tell it where the ads are and what to replace them with. That's it.
You can do all of it locally on a 5 year old gaming PC with pretty good results. Of course it works better if you have Opus driving it but that's not a hard requirement.
No? The various sites are chock full of web rips of streaming-only media. There is literally no way to prevent ripping.
While that may be true, none of the major DRM schemes seem to get in the way of a scene release
Piracy sites also have webrips that never seem to be poor quality.
go to any thrift store anywhere, mon ami.
as many disks and vhs as you can handle. check the disks for scratches just in case, but otherwise you can find oodles
Whatever you want it to mean. Embrace your autonomy.
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.
I think we'll end up seeing legislation against the license version of all of this content. Instead, you'll get to own it and move it around as necessary. This hasn't been necessary yet, but if that becomes the only option, then ownership becomes a more important question.
Which donors will support that legislation?
which ever ones you visit with torches and pitchforks, mon ami
a whole lot of people had to die for an 8 hour work day.
if you're not willing to exert pressure, sometimes aggressively, then your way of life is already dead.
None. The donors are the ones profiting off of these licenses.
Ideally, the same ones that supported the Right to Repair for farmers, against John Deere
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.
Fewer companies are making the players as well.
I have several Blu-ray players from thrift stores. All they needed were cheap compatible remotes.
See SONY pulling out of the Blu-ray player market.
Just a reminder to folks, check your libraries, they likely have a ton of movies you can check out for free.
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.
Be sure to check the catalog on the library's website, because there is probably much more available through interlibrary loaning.
And if you want Library Streaming, check out Kanopy. Also has an AppleTV app.
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.)
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.
I have a feeling the next step will be media megacorps pressuring nations to create legislation to clamp down on software/hardware enabling anonymous Linux ISO downloads and the viewing of said Linux ISOs via Plex/Jellyfin.
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.
They already did that in the 2000s, it didn’t work.
It's 2026 though.
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.
It is amazing the number of variations of Linux distros that people are willing to try for such a short amount of time before switching to the next.
The cost of hardware may be what kills my local Jellyfin install.
Physical media is being done away with, both discs and players.
Seems like streaming is the future we are going to be fed.
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.
A terabyte is no longer $20, unfortunately.
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. It's still hundreds or thousands of items for a year of subscription cost; more than you could reasonably watch. Even going full 8 TB SSDs at $150/TB is still thrift store cost per movie when you amortize it ($2.25 at 15GB, or $0.30 at 2GB).
Of course then as another comment here said, you're more likely to realize you don't actually want any of it. And then when you realize it's not worth pennies to store, you also realize it's not worth your time to watch.
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.
Don't get an SSD, far too expensive.
no it's not 15Gb/movie
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 disc.
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
That's a bluray rip. AFAIK every streaming service is way lower bitrate than that, even at maximum quality.
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
You might want to check your math again. 1 GB/h is 2.3 mbit/s, if we're being generous. That would be absolutely riddled with compression artifacts unless you're encoding a screensaver.
2 Mb/s is awful for anything with movement, 8 Mb/s is decent enough, 20 Mb/s is very good to my eyes, and 80 Mb/s is nice, clearly better especially in scenes with significant movement, but it's not revolutionary. I don't watch webrips unless there's no other option, it's mostly WEB-DL or bluray rips.
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.
What cost?! I have jelly installed on an old optiplex I got for around $20, i7 16ram (it’s actually proxmox, that would be too much for jelly alone)
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.
Have you looked at storage prices recently?
Yes I am aware, it is why you don’t buy new, there are thousands of used computers out there that I made a side hustle out of buying them and reselling them after some cleaning and fixing, so many I found that’s beyond to list here, but for example I got asus zenbook 14 for $12 because it didn’t boot (which was just a loose connection inside), a macmini m1 for $50, and many other parts and finds. I even have a thinkpad with proxmox and run as a server, uptime now is more than a year.
I'm curious where are you going to find these used machines (EBay, govt auction, Facebook Marketplace, etc...)? I have been wanting to setup a home NAS and home server but am not paying these prices.
Seriously I can’t even get my refurb enterprise drives for reasonable prices anymore. Used to pay like $150 for 14TB ultrastars now it’s like $300 for 12TB exos
Last night I found a 3TB external USB 3.0 drive at the bottom of my "computer junk" drawer that I had completely forgotten I owned. It felt like winning the lottery.
Got some old gtechs I used for production work years ago, lots of 2-4TB that worked for 6-12mo then were moved to a closet and powered off for the last 8-10 years. Thinking of shucking them and checking them. Can’t imagine they’re bad yet.
It's ok to delete things.
You have no idea what I’m doing with my drives. Suffice to say no, I can’t delete 99% of what’s on them.
Please tell that to OpenAI & friends.
Which is $25 per TB
4TB HDD is now close to 200 Euros. What do you mean "what cost"?
How many streaming platforms do you pay for each month? The cost of that drive is probably 2-3 months worth of streaming rental payments.
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.
You don't have to store the media indefinitely
Transcoding is always the bottleneck with these, right?
720p is good enough for me so... can we all just use that and give up on transcoding?
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.
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 can also pre-transcode your own media and even delete the originals if you want.
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.
Even cheap old desktop intel i5's are likely to have QuickSync, which can be pretty effective at transcoding video.
Also, if you're willing to buy them out, they're going to rais the coat until you're no longer willing.
You can only win by unsubscribing.
>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.
My TV doesn't have a camera?
(but yes... https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTlYlSF... )
You are only screwing yourself by doing this, it trains your brain to have a shorter attention span due to the constant context switching.
McDonald's!
[flagged]
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.
> 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.
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.
Stealing means another was deprived of their property, so if they are still in possession of their property then nothing was stolen
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.
Only possible if you are fine missing an arbitrary 1/3 of live sports events.
Believe it or not, some people live fulfilling lives without viewing any sporting events.
You can live without watching whatever the latest show is.
Believe it or not, some people live fulfilling lives without viewing any television.
You can live without watching whatever the latest show is.
Agreed! When they make you start paying for ads, it’s time to do something else. I haven’t had a subscription to any TV service in years because of the ads.
I don’t care about whatever shows I’m missing.
I am fine missing all live sports events. I think many other people are as well.
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
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.
The longer people stay, presumably the more they spend. Seems like a good match for a bar.
My brother said that watching professional sport is watching other people live their dreams.
Don’t spend your time watching, spend your time making your own dreams come true.
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.
Isn't that even more true of watching movies and tv?
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.
watching other people fuck their dreams up
I’m sure they will let you buy ESPN separately.
Yes, so far that is possible.
That’s a bonus.
What's popular with kids and toddlers that's not Disney right now?
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.
What's PBS showing now? I grew up on PBS and not Disney, and I think I turned out alright.
No lion king or toy story?
PBS looks like it has some ok stuff
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.
Who cares? Why should kids watch things that are popular?
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.
Popular is way to determine good and captivating
Paw patrol is one
Paw patrol is literally government propaganda, not the best example.
Explained here in a 1-hour video: https://youtu.be/rwhUpu9MfZ0
A customer segment that can afford to buy out ads is the customer segment advertisers want most.
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.
Do you get a perpetual use license when you buy this way? Are they DRM locked so you’ll lose access if someone shuts down their server?
I have a multi platform jellyfin emby plex silo app I'm working on and looking for feedback.
www.hanaplay.tv
Is it vibe coded? I don't see a link to the source code anywhere.
It's still straightforward.
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/whatever.
Yeah, I've done more to it than that (I'm on HN after all), but for people used to torrenting there's nothing here that would present much of a challenge.
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.
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.
yeah getting the folder pointed at the other folder is the simple part.
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.
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?
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.
>"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 a 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 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. Also, the physical discs 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+ ...
EDIT to add an update of a previous comment about my friend's defiance against ads added to Amazon Prime Videos by borrowing DVDs from the public library. She lost that battle because she finished all the DVDs she wanted to watch so had to go back to Amazon Videos for new content. She now endures the Amazon's ads. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42388626
She really tried to fight ads by avoiding the platform but couldn't sustain it because she ran out of free DVDs to checkout from the library. This means buying DVDs to get something new to watch if trying to stick with physical media and unfortunately, that costs more than streaming platforms. She deals with the ad interruptions by multitasking on an iPad when they come on.
This is why we used to have blockbuster!
We still have public libraries. They usually have a pretty sizable collection
>We still have public libraries. They usually have a pretty sizable collection
The public libraries in major cities like the New York Public Library have sizable collections. The smaller libraries in the outer suburbs have a much smaller selection. Yes, there's also inter-library loan system for the suburbs to pull from the big city library but there are restrictions such as only having 3 items at a time.
The neighborhood public libraries are wonderful resources but there can be limitations (quantity of titles) that prevent it from being a sustainable substitute for streaming for someone that wants to watch ~2 hours of content every day. My friend tried the public library and it was only a temporary reprieve from the ads on streaming platforms. The library simply didn't have enough content for her to watch.
That sizable collection is often scratched so you watch half the movie and then it skips or fails completely. Just like what used to happen constantly with DVDs from Netflix.
Not in my experience. My library's DVDs and Blu-rays work great. I check one out every week or two.
I'd encourage anyone reading to go to your local library if you haven't been in a while. Check out a book. See if they have a makerspace. Do some remote work there. They're wonderful places. They become more and more important with every passing year.
> Check out a book
Not many of those left in my local libraries. They downsized to popular fiction and a rack of magazines to introduce more sofas and space for charity cake stalls. And "mindful colouring-in" if you're around for the 4.5 days of the week that they're open.
Libraries threw away the one thing that made them unique, curated knowledge, in order to compete with Starbucks as a "third space".
The libraries near me have disc resurfacing machines. I've never had an issue playing a DVD or CD from the library.
Here you tell them that it was scratched/failed to play properly and it gets resurfaced or replaced (if still available from vendors).
In general library stuff is of relatively high quality and they have budgets for taking care of the collection.
Tell me you never borrowed movies from a library without telling me you never borrowed movies from a library.
I have borrowed movies from local libraries. It's hit or miss.
We still do
https://bendblockbuster.com/
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Blockbuster
> 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.
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.
Steps to enlightenment:
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
> 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.
With an LLM setting this up is nearly a one shot prompt now too.
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.
You seem to imply current day Disney has some sort of ownership over prior art.
Because they legally do?
Time = money
Wasting time is not theft. If it was there’d be a massive class action lawsuit on the DMV.
Where do you get wasted from?
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'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.
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.
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.
yeah my rule of thumb is never buy anything advertised on youtube unless it's independently trustworthy or otherwise notable
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"
What happened with ground news?
Ground News presents you a "balanced" news diet by presenting you with two sides that are implied to be equally valid. Except one of the sides is just (relatively accurate) plain old news and the other side largely consists of institutions who publish a lot of nonsense and paid Ground News to be there, or have ownership in common with Ground News. Their target audience is people who were mostly consuming the first group before (not a single Ground News ad was ever run to an audience aligned with the second group) and the purpose is to make them gradually accept the second group as equals to the first group.
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.
The product ads definitely purport to show you news.
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. It exists to change the categorisation you buy into.
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?
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.
> When I see ads for things on YouTube, I automatically assume it's a scam... Because it almost always is!
Their reporting system is useless, too. Funny thing, though, sometimes Gmail spam-filters legitimate automated emails from YouTube.
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'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.
You’re missing the subconscious part. You make associations you’re unaware of and you choose the product without thinking.
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.
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.
And if good product, they are usually known already by word of mouth.
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!).
> 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.
Sort of. More than a tax, its a memetic pollution of the marketplace. At least a collected tax can be used as funds by a government of some form.
Watching this video about how marketers influenced traditions changed my perspective on just how powerful advertising is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoWjeM5ltv8
What did they say that convinced you?
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 just wanted to give you credit for the choice of username for the throwaway account.
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.
In that sense, isn't it "anti-discovery"?
The goal is to replace your "best hamburgers in X-city" search by just defaulting to McDonalds.
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
The goal of every capitalist is monopolization.
This is absurd, if only because "capitalist" covers far more people than business owners.
And interestingly enough, the last place I would ever want to get a burger nowadays is McDonald's.
Then how come almost none of the advertising I see nowadays is for "the incumbents"?
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 associate McDonalds with Burger. But not the other way around. If i want burger i look on GoogleMaps for the best rated BurgerJoint around me
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.
I don't think it actually works very well at the rate the big companies use it.
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.
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.
I hear this all the time, but my detailed book-keeping says otherwise.
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.
It works in the same way that the mafia prevents your store from being wrecked.
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.
I can relate to this. I run a whole network DNS adblocker and my wife made me whitelist her phone so it's freeeee
are there adblockers for feeds? i dont understand why there are not ways to do that.
Both on android and web.
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...
Ads don't necessarily work through the use of "reason".
They work because you are infinity percent more likely to buy something you know exists vs something you don't know exists.
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.
TV sort of means different things to different people. To some it means cable, so giving up 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 would 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 is 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
Another benefit is you don’t have a permanent black hole on the wall. You no longer have to force the room layout to focus on that space.
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
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.
It's always the feeds themselves that get you.
I recently realised that since giving up TV back in 2003, YouTube kind of became my TV.
I still watch YT Shorts about series and news. That is pretty much TV.
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 now, 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
No, there was an extremely quick and obvious drop-off in quality that is not excused by "vertical short video has different dynamics"
Before the change my shorts feed roughly aligned with my main homepage feed (which has also gotten worse since they made the dislike button a placebo there). After, it's mostly AI voiceovers reading out Reddit or Twitter comments about life situations, placed over Minecraft gameplay. This is probably a convergent point in the algorithm as you said but it's also extremely relevant that I have no way to tell it "stop that"
Interesting. Personally, I hate YT shorts.
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.
For entertainment, I much prefer TV to Youtube. Never liked the latter - even before it became ad-laden.
"When you've got a TV Guide, you don't need a TV!" -grandpa, The Lost Boys
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.
I haven't had a functional TV in my home for over 5 years now. I will sometimes watch shows on my laptop but that's about it.
In place of a TV I have a high res audio transport and speakers that are used for music. Spotify isn't exactly a saint but it would be challenging for them to do what Disney is doing without losing all their customers.
Try Qobuz. We switched off Spotify over a year ago and it's been better in every way.
I try Qobuz out every year but my dumb niche music tastes aren't as available there.I hope they continue to grow because I love the idea of leaving Spotify.
I've given up on all streaming services because none of them offer a model where my money goes to the artists I listen to and not to Taylor Swift and other top-40 nonsense. Switching completely to Plex + PlexAmp + Bandcamp + iTunes purchased music (it's DRM free). It helps that I have ~300 CDs to kick start my library.
Deezer is a great alternative.
Can attest that Tidal is basically completely satisfying as a Spotify replacement for me. I use a dedicated podcast app and buy any audiobooks I want from Libro.fm Haven’t looked back.
Still continue to slowly build my CD + mp3 collection in case this wonderful era of “cheap subscription for almost all the world’s music ad-free” doesn’t last forever.
...what ? TV was always ass, imagine WAITING for show to start and planning your day around it just to get ads every 15 minutes.
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.
It’s called “the idiot box” in Australia for a reason.
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.
This is what happens when you don't have consumer rights protection.
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.
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.
My government does it a lot.
Bring out the guillotines! Mickey Mouse is a human right!
> man wins Rs 9,500
> ordered an OTT platform to refund Rs 1,499
How are these reconciled?
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.
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.
--------
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.
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This is pedantic. Disney is clarifying that live content will have ads. They are not Disney's ads they are network ads from that live channel, usually a 3rd party to Disney. This is seemingly because all of Hulu's features will be ported to the Disney+ app, including live TV and replays of live TV and so whatever ads are in that live content and playback will be there for everyone.
Also, Hulu include content from other companies which require ads to be played and only offer the ad free experience on their own platform.
Here is a more detailed write up on the actual changes. https://rentry.co/tbr2owcq
It is not. The exact wording, as it sits in my inbox:
> We’ve clarified that all Service Plans may include: (i) promotional content, (ii) sponsorships, and (iii) advertisements before/after playback of Content and in channels, live/as-live, special events, and any third-party services content.
Emphasis on "before/after playback of Content" and live etc. So they are opening the door for ads everywhere, not just on live TV or Hulu.
I just did a diff of the previous terms to the current (as of 10/22/26) terms and found nothing really related to the article's claims at all. Also this is not in the US terms at all -> "We’ve clarified that all Service Plans may include: (i) promotional content, (ii) sponsorships, and (iii) advertisements before/after playback of Content and in channels, live/as-live, special events, and any third-party services content."
It seems it is only in the UK and European subscribers TOS from 06/18/26.
>This is pedantic. Disney is clarifying that live content will have ads.
This is pedantic. If folk can't see that this is a slow roll towards rolling out the same thing in the US eventually, I've got a bridge to sell you.
Again nothing of the sort changed in the US.
Justifications don't change the ground reality: more ads are coming.
What I want is a streaming service that operates as a consumer cooperative.
Subscribers vote, elect a slate of directors who each get a fraction of the content-budget to spend as per their campaign promises. Licensing content, buying it in perpetuity, producing it themselves or funding some group of creators -- none of this "how can we milk customers more", and no more fruitless community campaigns to save a beloved series, you just need some critical mass of subscribers to vote for the guy whose platform is "I will keep making more seasons as fast as possible until the sun boils the ocean".
isn't this essentially a state broadcaster? You might get one decent show but the committee and bike shedding mostly gives you terrible niche programming that's unsustainable without massive subsidies - and most still show adverts.
No, I don't that a cooperatively run streaming service needs to have a monopoly on the legitimate use of force in a given territory. There could easily be multiple competing cooperatives.
There are plenty of criticisms to level at the BBC, but I don’t think the Director General has armed forces at his command.
Not directly, but ultimately its funding is non-voluntary and is backed by the state's monopoly on violence.
State broadcaster are usually funded from state funds (taxes) not voluntary memberships. Furthermore, taxpayers don't usually get to vote directly on what content should be produced. With cooperatives, there could be multiple coops that focus on different groups. They could even join together on productions across coops. Sounds like a good plan to me.
NFLX is publicly owned with only one share class and it only does video streaming so it does that.
Anyone motivated to do this for a smaller group would rather just run a private tracker. The overheads are enormous when you’re not negotiating in bulk.
Netflix has "optimized" their app to the point where you're cycling between the same 30-40 recommendations on every screen, just grouped a little different. The catalog shrinks every year. And they invest large amounts into producing their own algorithm-based content instead of acquiring more.
Yeah that’s what it will look like if you have this kind of structure. No one is selling a perpetual license for a movie for anything less than top dollar. The proposed plan inevitably tends to this outcome.
Netflix isn't owned by its subscribers is the critical difference. You don't buy shares of NFLX to gain access to the service, and subscribing does not come with any shares/voting rights.
True, it’s a critical difference but perhaps shows what it’s like to be a minority participant in a shared enterprise.
You would need a lot of subscribers to make that happen. Just to make a single show costs a fortune, let alone a whole catalogue.
You're not getting high budget shows without like a hundred million subscribers, sure, but there are bootstrapping options.
Dropout does their original content on around 1 million subscribers @ $6/mo.
There's also licensing existing content -- the mega corps building walled gardens aren't likely to play ball, but if you make it painless and have non-exploitative terms, there's countless smaller content producers who would happily upload their catalogue to another service.
I think if the right group of founders (experience in streaming,v experience in content production, good professional network with existing smaller production companies) was able to kickstart it with a million subscribers, give or take, they'd have decent odds of providing enough value to start a more subscribers -> more content spiral instead of the reverse.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
I saw a pickup truck ad with a Google ad inside it today.
I'm trying to understand what this actually means. Here's Disney's page on the matter[0].
I understand that sports will tend to have ads displayed in the stadium and so on, and that some show may feature characters drinking Pepsi rather than Coke because of an agreement. And I guess movies may have trailers. Is that the extent of it? If I get what feels like an obvious "ad" then we'll probably be canceling, but I guess I'm okay with those things that I mentioned.
[0] https://help.disneyplus.com/article/disneyplus-ads
> Disney+ provides some plans for watching movies and series without commercial interruption – Disney+ Standard and Disney+ Premium. However, those tiers may include ... ads/promos before or after playback of content ...
This implies that "Disney+ Standard With Ads" DOES have ad breaks. The other plans could force you to watch ads before your movie starts.
I’ll cancel the moment I see the first ad. I’m likely not alone, but under no illusion that there are a lot of people like me, either.
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.
"If buying isn't owning, pirating isn't stealing" -Cory Doctorow
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.
Agreed, good on you for having principles and sticking to them.
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 cancelled my Peacock subscription the day Curious George got taken off. It was the only thing my daughter watched.
I went to best buy, bought their Sony blu-ray player and a 128GB USB stick, went to Walmart and raided their $5 DVD bin, downloaded a bunch of old children's content from archive.org onto the jump drive, put it in the blu-ray player, and now my children have more quality content than they could ever want to watch. I recommend any parent do this instead of paying for streaming, the experience is 1,000x better.
No more streaming subscriptions. I'm done with the corporate greed.
The language in the EU or UK agreement must be a lot different than the US agreement. When this was announced last month, I never saw the new subscriber agreement and have not seen ads outside of live TV. Our subscriber agreement was updated yesterday, and says:
---
k. Service Tiers With or Without Ads. We offer different Service Tiers, some with advertisements and some predominantly without. Service Tiers described as "no ads" or "ad-free" are generally free of commercial interruptions, with certain exceptions that may change from time to time, including where: (i) streaming rights or other limitations require certain Content to play with ads; or (ii) ads are served in certain live or linear Content or special events (and replays thereof). Additionally, "no ads" or "ad-free" Service Tiers may contain limited promotional content, such as brief clips about the Bundles (including messages promoting an upgrade thereto) and other content available on any services associated with the Bundles, and branded content, product integrations, or sponsorship messaging.
Please note that if you subscribe to multiple (or a bundle of) Service Tiers, Content from any ad-supported Service Tier will play with ads, while Content from any "no ads" or "ad-free" Service Tier will not (except as described above).
---
So it's not quite as awful as what's reported here. This article is a month old and I haven't seen what it says was going to happen.
Andor really was an outlier, wasn't it? It's up there with the Sopranos and the Wire as one of the best TV shows in my lifetime, and everything else they make is lukewarm garbage soup.
I haven't seen it yet. Serious question - Does it have any Jedis or Siths? (If there are no Jedis / Siths, it isn't "Star Wars" for me and I will not watch it).
Andor does not prominently feature any Jedi, Sith, or other Force-users as main characters. The show does feature at least one unambiguous use of on-screen Force powers, but it's not the focus.
The setting of the show is influenced by their actions, but during the time period the show is set, the two most visibly active Sith - Palpatine and Vader - are high-ranking members of the government, and are entirely off-screen, and all Jedi are assumed dead or in hiding. The main character considers The Force to be superstition.
For my own taste, at least, I thought the show was very good, and it felt more "Star Wars" to me than most of the other spinoffs, sequels, prequels, and extended universe of the past decades. It really nails an overall sense of "how the universe works", in the setting. The aesthetics, the capabilities and limitations of technology, the social organization, and the sense of a wide and exotic universe, all match what seems "Star Wars" to me.
IMO Andor is in no way on par with those shows.
Andor was good, but let's not kid ourselves that it's in that same stratum of television greats.
Truth. And a shame. True piece of art. Doesn’t deserve to be locked down like it is.
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 qualify 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.
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.
The BBC tax is the kind of thing you get if government and corporate media get really friendly.
Old onion headline:
"'Unmissable TV' to be enforced by law"
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.
A famous and well loved Disney Princess once said, "The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."
Seems germane here.
Netflix has done a good job demonstrating customers will complain but won't cancel, so not super surprised by this.
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!
Have you seen their stock lately. They will get the message it is just a bit delayed.
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 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.
How else can we possibly make stock market number go up quarter after quarter?
Thank you Disney!
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.
Note: this article is from last month predates the answer from Disney: https://thedesk.net/2026/09/sources-disney-wont-run-ads-in-a...
> two sources at Disney familiar with the change said the updated terms was intended to give Disney greater leeway to incorporate promotional spots for its other movies, TV shows and live events before and after content streams on Disney Plus, not traditional commercial spots.
> The use of the word “advertising” was intended to help its terms of service remain consistent across regions where the streaming platform is available, including countries where promotional spots for its own shows and other content might be legally considered an advertisement, even if the spots are not promoting third-party products or services.
> To that end, Disney’s plan is similar to what other streamers, including Paramount Plus, do with their platforms now. Paramount Plus has long streamed promotional spots for its own shows, movies and live events before content on its ad-free tier.
Now I'll let you decide if you trust more what the PR person says or what is written in T&C.
The world is so dumb.
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.
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.
> You can buy
No, you cannot. You can license them temporarily.
True, if it were up to me, the button would say “Rent as long we decide to provide this service”.
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.
Ok, that's expensive. Here it is like $60/month, but that also includes broadband internet.
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of RAM.
Story from September OP;
Lots of discussion then:
Disney+: New user agreement allows ads before movies in all subscriptions
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49784336
Disney+ and Hulu raise prices by up to 13 percent after doubling profits
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49831774
The only reason I have Disney is because I have a young child and there are a couple of shows that they enjoy. We recently got rid of Netflix because there is literally nothing of interest to anyone in the household and the only reason we currently have Hulu is because of Jeopardy.
They keep seeking the price to where consumers are finally pushed to the limit and I think they are almost there, finally
downloaded the old warner cartoons and cut the cord.
How is this a good decision? Curious what the C-suite discussion looked like. When customers lose every option they thought they were paying for, why would they stay on your platform instead of going back to free YouTube. I understand the argument of Marvel/Pixar/Star Wars, but I can only afford so much :) Thanks, HN I just cancelled.
The most charitable interpretation: The new wording includes all forms of covert advertisement (say embedded in the content itself). All their plans always had that.
It’s a sign of the universe you should stop wasting your time on these moronic endeavors (and paying for them on top of it).
Good point.. but some times you need to wind down with a stupid show right?
Thats a weird way for Disney+ to go under.
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.
the shifting baseline effect first noticed in fish populations: https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2024/06/how-online-...
Disney is primed up for some regulatory action and customer punishment.
Enough cancellations will trigger price raises to protect their quarter reports until the whole revenue model collapses, and they price themselves out of the streaming subscription business.
I am not an MBA, but it made sense to me.
Given how good illegal alternatives like Stremio are this seems like a very dangerous game to play.
You can squeeze customers quite a bit but once they go back to pirating it's incredible hard to get them to subscribe again.
I set up a server with the radarr/sonarr/requestrr/jellyfin suite and haven't looked back. basically only pay for YouTube premium at the moment.
We can talk about TV all we want -- but the answer is youtube (and no not youtubeTV or whatever). We're seeing entirely free shows better than what you'd get on netflix (e.g. The Amazing digital circus) and a few orders of magnitude more content.
It's TV "2.0" (meaning decentralized creators no gatekeepers) and the younger generations are watching it far more than anything else (and producing impressive content)
The real answer here is regulation around advertising, as well as regulation around appropriate size of media companies.
Scale is not required anymore to launch streaming platforms - white label works fine - and for the most part these major services sell property rights back and forth anyway every few months to keep you subscribed.
It’s pure cartel / oligopoly behavior. Can’t imagine this gets better since Ellison owns HBO and Paramount services.
Teach your kids how to garden, shoot guns and torrent
So, real life Fallout?
Maybe people will eventually catch on? All services will eventually be modified to make things worse for you. Always, 100% of the time.
When they change plans like this, they should have to turn off auto-renewals for impacted accounts. It is fundamentally a new contract, and they likely cannot guarantee the new terms have been read.
Funny that this linked website has shit ton of ads every single paragraph. It’s like the worst kind of cooking website.
Do we need more “content”, most of the shows and movies they make are pretty bad and only content for content sake. It doesn’t tell a real story, it just puts some action and conflict wrapped around IP characters with no real substance
lol, I pre-paid for an annual subscription when Disney+ first launched: Marvel, Star Wars, and Pixar together was a compelling offering. I canceled after year 2, and rejoined when I got an offer to pay $5/month for the ads tier this past November. I'll be canceling in a couple weeks when that deal expires.
My four year old hates ads ("too many commercials," he says), and with the continuous price increases and his...mercurial media diet, it's actually easier and cheaper for me to just buy DVDs or Blu Ray discs.
So, farewell Disney+. I'm perfectly happy to go back to discs—they're actually a better user experience than anything you choose to offer.
Didn't cable TV have ads? And if so, why would anone expect this to not have them?
I lived abroad for a while in a country I didn’t initially speak the language in. One thing I clearly remember is feeling quite different because advertising literally had no effect on me since I couldn’t understand it.
Yep, I've been living in Sweden for 10+ years and have (embarrassingly) not learned Swedish to a native level yet.
The more I learn Swedish, the less ignorant I become to the advertising and "gotcha" headlines on newspapers and stickers and such; and I'm noticing its outsized (negative) effect.
I'm curious as to what prevented you from learning it to a level that doesn't embarass you?
Time goes by quickly and suddenly it's been 10 years is a perfectly fine answer.
Swedes are excellent at speaking English (better than some British people from deprived areas).. and I work in international companies where English is the lingua franca...
My partner actively prevented it also, she was ethnically Russian (Estonian) and wanted me to learn Russian before Swedish.
Right! I forgot Sweden is basically people who speak better English than native speakers, apologizing for their subpar English.
Finns are the same way in my experience.
I have been in a country and I understand the language, not natively but decently. But the ads all are overly cheery, fake smiles, super weird corporate loving language that I can't take it seriously at all.
I know those elements are super common in English, but it seems dialed up to 11 in the other language. I wonder if it's basically the same in English, I'm just so used to it that it doesn't seem as fake.
When you pay $22 a month for an ad-free tier you expect it to be free from promotional content or trailers as well. Disney is going to be hurtin' big time in the coming year as subscribers leave in droves.
Why exactly does making a show or a movie cost millions of dollars where is that money going? Youtubers have been able to pull off insane full length documentary and movies and stuff with very little capital.
This is mostly misleading. Here is a detailed write up on the actual changes and what they mean.
https://rentry.co/tbr2owcq
So glad I cancelled years ago
Weren't they the ones that said they would never have ads when they first released ?
They're already one of the worst with advertisements mid show and one of the worst catalogues.
It boggles my mind that people pay for streaming when there are ample amounts of pirated sites that you can just stream from, you don't even have to download anything anymore.
Convenience is always going to be the answer.
If you know of safe pirating sites that have good bandwidth and uptime, that's great! But lots of consumers aren't willing to go through ones with quetsionable ads, or fight the need to new ones bimonthly as the streaming sites churn like a game of whackamole.
So if you've got that hookup and know where to find them, the convenience exists for you, its easy and useful. For someone wanting to get into it, it might not be so convenient.
Convenience is king -- unfortunately if I'm paying for something that has ads, doesn't have the movie I want for x months (or at all), rotates out something I had planned to watch, has a clunky UI, etc then actually jellyfin becomes the path of least resistance, aside from potentially being cheaper.
and there's zero incentive and massive costs to run a pirate site open to the public with no ads and good uptime
They’re just going to keep changing the terms, injecting more ads, and raising prices until their revenue falls. As long as the number keeps going up, they’ll keep doing it.
Who even cares let this dumpsterf*k company die of its own greedy accord Disney hasn't been worth a cent of mental energy in a long time. Adieu.
Quite the take given the legion of fans out there.
Star Wars is a complete write-off AFAIC. I'm done with Star Wars after the last trilogy and the illogical return of Darth Maul in The Clone Wars.
They've now even made a TV show about Darth Maul (Star Wars: Maul - Shadow Lord) during the Galactic Empire period. This is just beyond ridiculous. This is just rubbing salt into the wound and saying: "We can do anything we want, no matter how stupid or illogical. You'll eat shit and you'll like it!"
I'll never get over Darth Maul's return. I'll detest Star Wars for the rest of my life just because of this. The person that came up with it (Dave Filoni?) should be fired.
How high can it go? It's already €16/month over here for 4K. This is getting into cable channel territory, except it had a lot more variety.
Looks like I’ll never subscribe to Disney then
I subscribe to Disney when I want to see something specific and then immediately unsubscribe once I'm finished.
Just like I did for Fox One during the World Cup and then 4 months and $120 later I remember to cancel it.
Then I pay for a subscription for a tool to remind me to cancel subscriptions and forget to cancel that one too.
If you live in the UK Lloyds bank give it to you for free.
There isn’t really anything good on there, they don’t have AAA series.
Yep! Posted elsewhere, with LLoyds you get Disney+ With Ads.
If you block a single domain at the DNS level you never see those ads either.
No reason to keep a Disney subscription after you've watched Andor (a few times).
It really does amaze me how much people are willing to put up with from streaming apps.
Like I get it if your kid wants to watch Disney shows and it buys you some peace and quiet. Otherwise, it's a firehose of content, everything's ultimately just a part of a franchise structure that's built more as a business plan than a piece of art, and there's no way to consume it all.
I would be more up in arms if this wasn't mainly for sports events for the premium tier.
there is nothing stopping anyone from canceling. They make an offer, you are free to refuse it
Disney is a monopoly. That's the problem with the offer.
No they are not. There are plenty of websites where you can download Disney content for free. They think they are a monopoly because they've won the legal right to keep these websites off Google.
Monopolies exist when adding more variables in categorizing business that are perceived to be competing against others. When removing these variables, the false argument that monopolies don't exit can be propagated.
When I think of streaming services being owned by content producers, I think of the 1940s push to bar content producers from owning movie theaters. Unfortunately that anti-trust decree was removed in 2020 in support of big businesses. [0]
This is why content producers, like Disney, should not be able to run streaming services. They are no different then the movie theater owners before digital access.
USA keeps repealing anti-trust laws and allowing business to get bigger and more corrupt. This allows them to maximize their wealth by reducing competition. USA has become a Corporatocracy through the actions of putting big business ahead of their citizens.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pic....
A monopoly on their own IP?
I'm okay with paying but I really hate ads with a passion and especially for kids this is not okay. I was a customer of Disney and I guess I'll never be one again.
What alternatives exists for kids? Youtube?
Fund the amazing things they respectfully do to your favourite franchises!
Piracy is morally correct.
I'm just ignoring this sort of mass entertainment media.
This enshittification and degradation of language (“ad-free”) is not surprising — it’s the same path cable TV followed.
But I struggle to understand the economics of the streaming sites listed in the article. They receive an all-you-can-eat monthly payment but have to keep acquiring (including, it seems, making) new content. The linkage between the two is very loose (monthly vs daily) and most videos etc show up as new and then fade down the rankings. Seems like a pretty crappy business, and Netflix being independent, points towards that in its financial statements.
Also, the existence of this sentence in the article surprised me: “ It doesn’t help that Disney+ doesn’t make the kind of original content that wins at the Emmys.” Winning a major one can have a small boost on a film’s lifetime revenue, but overall the correlation between the two is weak. To paraphrase (ugh) Pournelle: Disney would rather have a lucrative film with no awards than a lauded film with no revenue.
back to the pirate bay
^^ this is the way
(September 19, 2026)?
where are all the "just because they put it in their terms doesn't mean they'll do it everywhere" people from the original story
welp time to cancel i guess
i gave up on sailing the seas years ago but at these rates i can pay for decent seedboxen and vpns
mumble mumble usenet mumble mumble
Settings->Cancel
As easy as drinking water.
Time to hit the high seasons
They choose piracy, then. Ok!
I cancelled a shared Disney subscription when they started cracking down on accounts shared between different households. Same with Netflix and HBO. Now I torrent everything using Transmission, Sonarr and Plex stack and couldn't be happier. UX is on par with paid services and don't have to deal with this ads bullshit. Paid streaming was nice while it lasted, but now torrents seem like a much better alternative.
Time to sail the seas.
The US executive branch should look into Disney for their part in bringing back piracy.
Delicious irony that the site this is being reported on pops up a dialog over the content as you scroll down, with the following disclaimer:
> We use your personal data for interest-based advertising, as outlined in our Privacy Notice.
Sigh, this isn't the timeline I was hoping to end up in.
Advertising is money laundering.
The news is a front for the wealthy to control the political narrative so they can pass laws to benefit themselves. Home improvement networks are fronts for real estate developers. Sports channels are fronts for bookies and merchandisers. And so on and so forth.
Web-based services like streaming are now a front for oligopolies. Or more accurately, maybe they always have been, at least since the Dot Bomb around 2000. But who are we kidding, the 1950s were literally a false narrative about the nuclear family vs the rabble, used to create the Cold War and skim trillions of dollars from the working poor on both sides of the conflict.
This stuff used to be the cynical conspiratorial view. But now I don't see how kids will be able to navigate the modern world without someone admitting what they already know: that it's all a lie.
this ascribes a level of premeditated intent that does not exist. humans are just selfish and bad to each other. This is the current emergent behavior.
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.
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.
> Somewhere, that line exists where the company would financially benefit, I just wish they'd actually define it.
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 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.
If you would pay to remove ads you are more valuable, so they can charge more, in a never ending spiral.
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.
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!).
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
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 answer is that you're such a small minority that they'd rather not have you as a customer than maintain another pricing tier and logic fork.
Not only you'll be paying for low quality Disney slop, but you'll also be paying to be advertised to. I now think even less of people that keep paying for subscriptions like Disney+.
...And I still can't buy Andor Season 2 on blu-ray. coincidence?
Let's take a moment to appreciate the approach that GOG has.
I have YouTube premium and it now shoves a "products" panel in my face that I have to swipe down before a video starts if the video references a product.
The enshittification knows no bounds.
Meanwhile YouTube Morphe on Android gives you no ads at all and improves the app a lot.
I know that they are probably going to roll out remote attestation at some point, but I cancelled YouTube Premium the last time they did an insane price raise.
Tubi has ads, but it doesn't BS you about it. I'll take a fair taxman over a boutique swindler any day.
can anyone else see the AI-writing in this article? It's so unpleasant...
what do people with these subscriptions even watch? why can these services make any money at all when there's youtube and tiktok with infinite content for every niche interest in existence? what compels people to still consume mass produced slop?
YouTube and TikTok are also mass produced slop. I assume Disney at least had longer form content and high quality production WITHOUT ads. YouTube and TikTok are, by default, two of the most advertisement-ridden services I've ever seen.
Corporations are yet again making piracy look very appealing.
[flagged]
Please think of a better name… and make sure the UX and UI are both priority concerns. Otherwise don’t even bother.
What's wrong with the name?
It's (presumably) pronounced like "awfium" when seems like a word for next-level awful. But maybe that's just me. I'm a consistently poor judge of other people's preferences.
And I'm just some arse on the internet. Ask some people you trust. If they don't like the name change it and keep going. Don't be disheartened.
What a shit name. Also what's different about your app than Plex?
What's wrong with the name?
Differences from Plex:
- Watching your own films away from home isn't paywalled, and never will be.
- Hardware encoding is free, and always will be.
- No cloud account required unless you want my convenient discovery service.
- If you don't want to use a cloud account at all, you can set up your own discovery server on your own VPS for watching away from home even through routers and shit (also free).
- No ads, no storefront, no telemetry.
- Watch Together with voice. Multiple people can watch a synced video, and talk to each other (I've tested this with me in Germany and the other person in Australia, and it worked beautifully).
- Hardened against corrupt video files and issues like NFS failures (getting stuck forever in a syscall). Everything vulnerable is separated and isolated.
- Open source. The server is AGPL and the web clients are MPL.
- Your files are left alone. Media is read-only by default. The server reads the .nfo metadata files you already have, from Kodi for example.
What's not there yet:
- Native apps. I'm only doing a web client for the time being until all the features are in place. It's pretty fast, though.
- Music. This comes later.
How is this different from Jellyfin?
Jellyfin can only be used from remote if you can expose its ports somehow. Lots of routers block that, or your ISP is set up such that you need NAT tricks, and have to use STUN and TURN and such to work around it. Jellyfin doesn't handle any of that. Tailscale helps here, but then if you want family members to use it, you have to set them up on tailscale as well. Or you set up a service on a VPS.
I wrote this because I'm unhappy with the offerings out there, including Emby, Plex, and Jellyfin. Also too many bugs that have been sitting for years with no solution. For Jellyfin in particular:
- SyncPlay is buggy, doesn't support voice, and seems to be unmaintained now.
- Way too many CVEs, mostly FFmpeg injections (CVE-2026-35033, CVE-2026-35032, CVE-2026-48793, CVE-2025-31499).
- The session key leaking in URLs.
- Upgrades breaking the database.
- Needless transcodes and wrong "can play this" guesses.
- Subtitles that load late or drift after resuming.