No. Merch has direct profit that has a much larger margin than streaming. It’s just a new cash flow for them. Same reason patreon was offering merch and discord too.
You have an asset in land and physical goods to sell for money. It’s not complicated why they are pivoting to it.
Good riddance. I had a first gen watch, and it was awful. Trying to navigate apps would take minutes. And forget about trying to use Siri with it. Even gen 2 was night and day in terms of performance, but I think gen 3 was when it really became a viable product.
I still miss my Pebble though. Really, if Apple would let people make faces for the damned thing and create a rich face ecosystem, that would remedy like 90% of my issues with the watch. And just putting the time on a pic isn’t an answer. I miss things like the old LCARS face I had on my Pebble that incorporated all the other data into it (time, date, battery, now playing, weather, etc.). They need to let us do that with custom faces.
Your comment sent me digging. I had no idea that they could still function. I thought they were lost to time (lol), but apparently Google gave an update to the official app so the Rebble project could keep supporting all the functionality of the watch. Looks like it’s Android only, though tbf Pebble always did have significantly more functionality on Android than iOS. But if it would work on iOS, I’d dig out my Pebble right now.
More realistic outcome - some game loving tweenage hacker does something fantastically destructive in whatever part of their infrastructure they can get into.
It does feel like antiquated tech but what streaming service uses even 50+mbps streaming? The services I know of (apple, Netflix, Disney) all max out around 30mbps.
But could the decoder keep up? Decoders come in a variety of sizes and I doubt they’d pay the extra cost to put a 120Mbps decoder in the device when no streaming services require it.
It’s appropriate for the device’s functionality. 4K HDR is at most 40Mbps. If the device supported large local storage and offline playback, you’d have a point. But given the device’s use case as a streaming client, I doubt you’d be able to find any workload that gets close to saturating the network. Even if you could find a content source that was higher than 100Mbps, it’s unlikely the decoder would be able to keep up.
Bluray rips can be 80mbps+ but I’ve never had trouble streaming them on any device including roku. Important to remember that the bitrate is an average so some scenes will be well above the advertised bitrate.
Yes but that’s why the network and decoder are buffered. It’s also why most content is constrained at encode time to target both an average bitrate and a peak bitrate. A 200% constraint is typical, so you shouldn’t find 4K HDR in the wild at over 80Mbps peak bitrate.
The buffers on streaming devices are much smaller on these devices because of how cost reduced they are. You’re way overselling how large they are.
Also, 80mbps is actually a pretty common avg bitrate on 4kuhd blurays. You have 100gb of disk to play with and they generally want to use it as much as possible.
I was a Google Play Music person and loved it, and then they changed to YouTube. I got mad and tried Apple Music, but as a classical music lover it’s vastly less than ideal for several reasons, so I went to Spotify and realized they liked to shuffle Britney Spears into me listening to lieder, so I went back to YouTube because at least they didn’t do that. But it’s just so basic compared to the absolute perfection that was GPM, and difficult to navigate. I don’t know where to go next. I’ve been buying records on Bandcamp but I also like the streaming service to discover music with.
Just to let you know, Tidal is not that great either.
Frequently having issues with downloaded albums, where I go into offline mode, pull up an album, and it says “can’t connect” despite being in offline mode and the album taking up storage space on my phone.
Also, the discovery and new releases sections aren’t very well made.
High chance they’re all on Slsk as lossless files. That and foobar2000 and you’ll be back in control of your music listening habits. Then buy physical from the artists if you want to support them and they offer a way to obtain it.
You could check out deezer. It’s European and they have a classical music section. Not sure how good it is. It’s like $110 for a yearly subscription and they offer hi-fi streaming. Just another option for you to check out. 🤷
The app won’t let you without signing in, I don’t think, but i think the website does. Try this link or you can go to deezer.com and if you go to the hamburger menu at the bottom it has an “explore channels” option.
Edit: It’s odd they don’t let people browse I’m a more friendly way. And just so you know, once you sign up, you can search, make playlists, download for offline etc, the mostly same as spotify. When u first sign up, it also give you the option to migrate all your spotify plsylists over. Out of my thousands of songs saved, it did have 2 or 3 that didn’t transfer over due to just not having it.
You should get back to apple music, they launched an app dedicated to classical music, and it’s by far the best for this type of music. Also it’s lossless 24 bits
I was also a Google music enjoyer and also find the other streaming options pretty crappy. I’ve actually moved over to more curated options like internet radio for when I’m not in the mood for anything specific. Shout-out to NTS, I love you.
If you like to upload your own music (like Google music), iBroadcast is the tippy tops. You can still use bandcamp (with or without yt-dlp) for discovery, and then upload what you like to iBroadcast.
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