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croobat ,
@croobat@lemmy.world avatar

There is no change to the current price of your Prime membership. We will also offer a new ad-free option for an additional $2.99 per month* that you can sign up for here.

Then there is a price change you damn dimwit, you just gave the shitty tier the same pricing as the old normal tier, and amped up the normal tier by $3.00. I absolutely hate the wording for this, you just know it was to be able to not release the ad membership at a lower price.

_number8_ ,

streaming has absolutely no future. if they keep pulling shit like this it’s going to decline even faster. i suppose it’s more about sucking off advertisers than it is pleasing customers, too…if you’re going to fail anyway why can’t you at least make a positive difference in the world?

HiddenLychee ,

Are their profits going down?

wagoner ,

It will be like the Netflix exodus, the reddit exodus, etc. They’ll make more money. The best you can do is be true to yourself and not participate if you don’t want to.

whofearsthenight ,

streaming has absolutely no future.

Streaming isn’t going anywhere, and if anything will likely continue to grow for as cable dies off. It’s just going to consolidate and get shittier (ads) as basically things move back to a model more cable-like. Piracy will probably ramp back to like levels for music in the early 2000’s, but it will remain a niche. Amazon specifically will see blowback for this, but it’s unlikely to move many off of Prime since it’s sort of a tertiary benefit to having a Prime membership, and even if it’s all you got for your Prime membership, it’s still one of the cheapest streaming services.

Zevlen ,

We need open source streaming or something… Ya kno?

Ppl should make their own YouTube Amazon / Google companies or else we shall all perish do to advertisements

Tetcher ,

Start? In the UK here and it has always had ads. Even on paid

mongo ,

No it doesn’t, it runs a trailer for something else before but I’ve never had ads mid program

Clbull , (edited )

This may be a shocker to many of you but it costs money to produce TV shows.

Cable was lucrative because of the subscription fees and the fact that channels could still run ads. People are now expecting to pay $10 a month for access to everything ad-free when previously they’d have to pay multiple times this amount to watch shows at scheduled times, and still sit through ad breaks. There was no such thing as an online on-demand catalogue just fifteen years ago.

Now imagine that networks are making far less money per viewer, have to pump out shitloads of original content to keep people subscribed (and in the case of Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and others, mitigate the risk of copyright holders jacking up fees for third party content), can’t run ads to supplement their income and have to deal with huge levels of inflation because governments had to print a fucktonne of money to bail us out of a financial crisis and a global pandemic.

Piracy has raised a generation of entitled cheapskates that refuse to pay for content, and these are the people who are most likely going to break a lot of studios and publishers.

The only real saving grace here is that this could be the downfall of Disney, which would be a net boon for copyright reform. Disney are the core reason why US copyright law is so fucked and why we’re only now close to seeing Steamboat Willie (first Mickey Mouse cartoon from 1924) enter the public domain.

KevonLooney ,

Speaking of entitled cheapskates, most of the good content is older shows not new ones. Most of these streaming providers are coasting on shows and movies made before they existed.

I don’t care about the “cost of new shows” because most of them suck. Just because you have a big CGI budget doesn’t mean you made a good show. Not only that, but good new shows are all cancelled after one or two seasons.

The reason for this is obvious: creating a new show adds another “square” on the Netflix screen. Adding more seasons to an old show doesn’t. Plus you can advertise “new show” and people will just watch to see what it is. Viewers need to stop watching things just because they’re “new”.

Hadriscus ,

Capitalism is fucking the world raw every minute of every day. People will get what they can to mitigate the existentiel crisis they got plunged into. I gladly pay for concerts, cinéma and music CDs, always have. These companies make profits and fatten multimillionnaire executives while providing a poor service. I agree that we’ve gotten used to plentiful content and it’s spoiled us. What’s called for, imho, is a reimagination of distribution schemes and redistribution of wealth. I want actors paid a normal wage, more public funding of cinéma (or at all, depending on the country) and semi-public platforms that don’t seek profit. To give an example of what I mean, there is madelen.ina.fr which is an archive of french tv and cinéma, accessible for 3€ a month, existing under the umbrella of the INA (national institute of tv)

whofearsthenight , (edited )

Piracy is not even close to the reason any of the streamers are struggling, and even then I’d be surprised to see if Amazon was actually struggling. Piracy itself is a rounding error, and is more of a function of the shitty way that most of the streamers run their business.

There is a lot going on:

Lots of these streamers, and especially Amazon, keep green lighting projects with massive budgets but then forgetting to tell a good story or hire people who seem interested in making the show they’re making. Rings of Power and Wheel of Time have insane budgets for what are generously mediocre shows. I can’t even imagine the pitch meeting for WoT. “I want to take a massively beloved cornerstone of the fantasy genre that spans 14 gigantic books and a few novellas, turn it into a TV show with 8 ep seasons, make a ton of changes to the story and lore that is sure to piss off the audience that is most likely to generate word of mouth for us, and for the low, low price of like a billion dollars. You should trust me with this money because I worked on 2 seasons of the hit show (that was on the edge of cancellation basically it’s entire run) Agents of SHIELD and a streaming show on Netflix that was canceled after one season.” By pretty much any measure, this is an insane set of decisions.

This is everywhere - The Witcher, Halo, Star Trek: Discovery (and most of Picard), Secret Invasion, Book of Boba Fett, just about every goddamn “blockbuster” Netflix attempts. It’s either they take a beloved IP and decide to do something entirely different and usually not even good-different (has anyone that worked on Halo even seen an xbox?) or they set up a project with a pitch like “Ryan Reynolds is a big star, Fast and the Furious is a big franchise, make a movie with Ryan and cars or whatever.” Insert meme of the guy getting thrown out of the window for asking “does it need a plot?”

The existence of half of these streamers in general belie the real issues. You can’t tell me that Paramount+ or Peacock should even exist. The whole premise of these goddamn things is “people want to watch 20-40 year old re-runs of Star Trek and Seinfeld, I bet we can charge $15 in perpetuity for that as long as we sprinkle in the occasional new show that makes a point to let our audience know we hate them for liking these shows.”

It’s just a massively, massively mismanaged business on basically every level. Ads is the latest in this fiasco. They should be either small, cheap networks that make a lot of small budget shows, or if they’re going to take some big swings they might want to have a proven strategy of any sort. Quite a lot of the shows that found massive success were made for basically the change you find in the couch cushions. A show like Friends probably cost about $7 for the first season, and didn’t balloon until later seasons when the cast was each making a decent amount and every other episode had a major guest star. Most sci-fi until very recently was extremely cheap. Carter: Sir, we’ve arrived on the planet, looks like the MALP was accurate. O’Neill: It’s really weird how most of the planets we visit look like the woods in Vancouver, BC. Even Game of Thrones which probably started this arms race of spending, didn’t start getting $20+ million budgets until it was a massive, massive hit (worth noting how that show tried to stick closely to the source and didn’t start to suck until they ran out of book) and even then that would be seen as “cheap” compared to a lot of these.

SaltySalamander ,
@SaltySalamander@kbin.social avatar

My Prime membership is up in March. I've already decided to not renew it, since they decided to cancel The Peripheral. Had I not already made that decision, this change would have made it for me anyway.

XanXic ,

And this is how I found out The Peripheral was cancelled 😭

Stay strong

mob ,

Yeah wtf. I was looking forward to season 2

KevonLooney ,

I also cancelled, mainly because “prime” shipping is meaningless now. But the addition of ads is the cherry on top.

ikidd ,
@ikidd@lemmy.world avatar

I have Prime and have never actually used it. I still watch Amazon shows, but I’ll be fucked if I use their shit interface or expose myself to their datamining to do it. Let alone watch fucking ads.

Piracy is a UX issue.

UselesslyBrisk ,

I tried to use their UX. Its bad. And the worst is I fell asleep watching something like Project Bluebook once. And the Prime Reccomendations streamed a SHITLOAD of alien conspiracy content while i slept. It ruined the recs etc. And you cant delete the primary account profile…only the sub-profiles.

Frankly i only go on it to see what I should maybe load into Sonarr/Radarr at this point. fuck em.

intensely_human ,

So you absorbed a bunch of alien conspiracy stuff while you were sleeping?

ramjambamalam ,

I was watching Yellowstone on Prime back in 2021, before they moved it to a premium tier, and the audio was always out of sync when using Prime Video, so I had to adjust the audio sync latency, and remember to switch it back when watching other content.

After a while, I gave up and just watched it on my Plex server instead. I could also use the Watch Together feature to watch it synchronously with friends, a feature not supported by Prime Video.

In my case, the piracy (if you call it that, when I was at the time a Prime member) was absolutely a UX issue, not a price issue.

roofuskit , (edited )

Yo ho yo ho.

I don’t understand how people paying for prime can stand that crappy prime video UI anyway.

echo64 ,
  1. it’s basically fine and unoffensive ui to 99.9% of people
  2. people see it as functionally free because they bought prime for free delivery
  3. People don’t know how to pirate
rizoid ,
@rizoid@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

I’m deep into the seven seas but I still use prime because a family member pays for it. Its a decent enough ui and has some live stuff I can throw on to keep kids entertained. However, I’ve already added the shows I watch on prime to my jellyfin server just because this change is going to make me not want to use it anymore.

fluckx ,

Still a better UI than Disney+ too

AbidanYre ,

I didn’t realize just how good the Netflix UI was until using Paramount+

JJROKCZ ,

Netflix’s demand to auto-play a trailer/song on every tile make any tv freeze or crash nearly every time I use the Netflix app on it. It’s gotten to the point I’m about to just cancel netflix because I can’t watch it

AtariDump ,

help.netflix.com/en/node/2102

LazaroFilm ,
@LazaroFilm@lemmy.world avatar

Yep. I don’t consider it as a valuable streaming platform. If they removed it from the general prime I would not buy it separately.

CmdrShepard42 ,

I can’t agree with #1. The interface is that of Amazon’s regular storefront and it often mixes paid media in with the free stuff or has stupid stuff like seasons 2, 4, & 6 being free while 1, 3, & 5 are paid. Maybe it’s different in the TV apps, but the browser version is atrocious.

pineapplelover ,

I can understand 1 and 2, although, for 3, even though, most of my (nontechie) friends don’t know how to pirate, they know how to look up grey streaming sites like 123movies, sflix, fmovies, etc

tacosanonymous ,

I’m a shameless sailor but my wife has it for the free shipping.

Their menus are ass but I really like the actual player ui. Love pausing and seeing who is in the scene.

gregorum ,

I pay for Amazon prime. The only time I watch Prime Video is every once in a while I wonder: is Stargate: Universe as terrible as I remember? And then I try watching it and remember that it is. 

CmdrShepard42 , (edited )

I honestly thought it wasn’t terrible and would have benefitted from fleshing out the rest of the story. It was definitely a huge departure from the styling of SGU and Atlantis but not horrible on its own.

urandom ,

It’s slightly more convenient than sailing, considering it’s attached to my unlimited photo backup

aard ,
@aard@kyu.de avatar

When I still was paying for prime (cancelled it last price increase) I was pirating any prime videos as that was easier than dealing with the shitty prime video UI.

Jackthelad ,

Not to mention the shockingly bad picture quality.

The 4k stuff isn’t terrible, but anything that’s in HD is bloody awful.

kratoz29 ,

The UI had a “recent” glow up, it was way worse before.

ArchAengelus ,

The player interface is excellent. Being able to see who the actors are in each scene is one of my favorite UI features.

I agree that finding a thing you want to watch is meh at best. Especially because they mix in rentals, purchasable content, and prime content all in the home interface window.

That said, yo ho matey.

roofuskit ,

Yes, X-ray is a fantastic feature. I have to give them that. The rest of it is trash.

intensely_human ,

Yeah if you hate immersion it’s great.

JimmyMcGill ,

They also have a ton of subtitles and audio options. Like a shit ton.

Meanwhile Netflix most times doesn’t even have subtitles in one or more of the official languages where I live. And for sure they could have more, considering where they operate, they just choose not to.

However prime UI sucks for splitting shows between seasons so they get recommended multiple times. It just makes no sense

hesdeadjim ,

Poster might be describing how fucking awful Prime arranges shit on a Fire stick. Search taking you to specific episodes rather than to the show. Seasons split up into mini seasons 201, 202, 203, 204. Kids shows are the worst, sometimes the seasons are split into different show listings.

It’s truly impressive how a huge corporation can build the shittiest UI of them all.

Windshear ,

I originally started paying for prime for the free shipping. Prime video is a perk as far as I’m concerned. I haven’t re-evaluated it in a long time though to see if it’s worth it. I do order a ton of stuff on amazon since I live 160km from the nearest city.

seth ,

When they announced this, it was the last straw for me with Amazon that caused me to finally cancel Prime, which I’ve paid for annually since it was first offered. Things I’ve been complacently shrugging off until now:

  • their delivery misses/delays have gotten consistently worse over the past year and a half
  • they screwed up my combined music library when they changed Amazon Music, which was working great before the change
  • Audible keeps pushing up-sale subscriptions I don’t want, and is inconsistently working with Android Auto now (but was fine until about a year ago)
  • Prime Video ads and up-sale “channels”
  • book editions (especially textbook editions): they limit the ability to re-sell old editions of textbooks when newer editions are currently in print. Many classes specify old editions because that’s what the curricula and syllabi have built around and the profs can take responsibility for validating the content. This is a serious issue with the number of errors that manage to get past editors for math and science texts, and they publish new editions for cash grabs when no actual new or useful information has been added.

They really don’t have to do much to keep me complacent tbh - just stop breaking things that already work(ish). Find whatever the deliverable requirements were in like 2015 and just return to those.

Three_word_reply ,

I am in the exact same boat. The removal of “free” rotating streaming video content and limiting it to only Amazon funded shows with “free with prime” videos being hosted by 3rd party apps (fuck off, freevee) was bad enough but to start showing ads was the final straw

I cancelled my prime today. $150/yr. I can wait a few extra days for the things I need to order

FlashMobOfOne ,
@FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world avatar

Same.

Should have done it sooner.

mercator_rejection ,

I went through this a couple years ago. Decided Jeff Bezos does not need any more money, cancelled prime. Funny this was that most things ship the same as always, get them in like 2 or 3 days.

In fact, most other online retailers offer similar free 2 day shipping to stay competitive and I usually find stuff of Amazon first.

intensely_human ,

I can wait a few extra days for the things I need to order

Amazon’s already provided that. Their delivery went from stellar to shit.

RufusFirefly ,
@RufusFirefly@lemmy.world avatar

I don’t stream much but being disabled, I can’t get to the store so I do order stuff from Amazon. What I’ve seen in the last few years is an influx of Chinese sellers with tons and tons of garbage and all of the reviews are completely worthless, of course.

GregorGizeh ,

I don’t use Amazon much anymore anyway, because the products are overwhelmed with cheap, poor quality trash you couldn’t peddle on alibaba and completely worthless, largely faked reviews and ratings. I order once or twice a year some replacement cable or adapter I can’t find anywhere else reasonably quick, but that’s pretty much it, so canceling over this ad bullshit doesn’t really hurt me much.

Next on the list is my Netflix sub, which I largely use just for oldtrek reruns as second screen background noise while I use my computer. I could probably, uh, procure those shows fairly easy, or splurge on a collectors edition and would still save money.

Hadriscus , (edited )

Go ahead, I did the same and I really don’t miss Netflix. I should also mention I have crappy internet, so it’s much better/easier to just download good quality vidéo files overnight than sit through a constantly-buffering 240p stream

VoilaChihuahua ,

If it’s available where you are PlutoTV is free and has a Star Trek channel. You don’t get to pick the shows and it’s only original and tng, but you can leave it on for days with almost as much Star Trek as the average fan could want…

Rolando ,

Check your local public libary, a lot of them have DVDs you can check out for free.

ReallyActuallyFrankenstein ,

“We aim to have meaningfully fewer ads than linear TV and other streaming TV providers. No action is required from you, and there is no change to the current price of your Prime membership,”

The double-speak is relatively subtle, but it’s always interesting to see how much work they put into gaslighting their customers:

  • “No action is required from you…” - yes, Amazon hopes we do nothing, but Amazon unilaterally changed the assumptions underlying agreement, so “no action” is an acquiescence to a materially worse reality for us and a better one for Amazon.
  • “…there is no change to the current price of your Prime membership” - yes, no additional dollars are required because Amazon is now selling our time and attention, but that is still a new “fee” we are paying.

Pretty gross, Amazon.

trafficnab ,

The enshittification will continue until profit margins improve

geekworking ,

Enshitification won’t stop until the frogs realize that they are being boiled to death and jump out of the pot.

cybersandwich ,

Or until we get back to 0% interest rates that these companies could get for the past 10 years. The free money dried up!

KISSmyOS ,

Hey, I want free money, too.

Plopp ,

The enshittification will continue until the demand for profit is removed*

mjhelto ,

…demand for constant growth is removed.*

oDDmON ,

USENET is my happy place.

7u5k3n ,

This is the way

BynaD ,

I had never heard of usenet, this is eye opening thank you! I have been thinking about reverting back to torrents, might have to try this out first though.

rockerface ,

Taking notes right now

Mythnubb ,

I looked into usenet but I first tried RealDebrid and it’s been great. I personally have went with Alldebrid

linearchaos , (edited )
@linearchaos@lemmy.world avatar

Their catalog is so shit that I don’t even know what plays on Amazon. Back when they refused to make an Android video app I just got all their crap from other means. I’ve had prime for years just for the shipping I’ve never watched a video through their service.

bobs_monkey , (edited )

It seems like every streaming service catalog is deteriorating. Almost every time I’ve looked up a movie to watch on justwatch, they’re only available for rental/“purchase.” I’m done paying my hard earned money for dogshit services.

I’ve also just kind of given up on watching much of anything, I have better things to do than sit in front of the TV for hours on end.

Waluigis_Talking_Buttplug ,

Jellyfin

Lettuceeatlettuce ,
@Lettuceeatlettuce@lemmy.ml avatar

Planning a build with my friend, we are going 50/50 in for a dedicated Jellyfin server + NAS to preserve all our media.

Fuzzy_Dunlop ,

I’ve been trying, but for some reason, it will not recognize my HD. I’be reformatted my drive…tried different drives…I don’t know what else to do.

evatronic ,

I’ve got the next week off, migrating from Plex to Jellyfin is on my todo list, but I really like the pipeline I have set up now for … my sailing habit. arrr

mlg ,
@mlg@lemmy.world avatar

It’s like a second golden age of internet piracy, and it’s happening because streaming over saturated itself just like cable lmao

Ultragramps ,
@Ultragramps@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

The cancelled Coyote vs ACME movie might only be available on the high seas, matey. It be my current white whale, yarr.

notannpc ,

Guess I’ll just start downloading that content too because I’m not paying you more for the same shit. I’d get rid of it altogether if it wasn’t just included as part of prime in general.

gaterush ,

I don’t have prime any longer and I don’t miss it, it’s overrated really. I don’t need stuff within 2 days all the time

KreekyBonez ,

I never use prime, and stuff usually shows up in 2 or 3 days, anyway. They optimized their shipping abilities, and then convinced some people to pay more for it.

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