Yo ho yo ho.
I don’t understand how people paying for prime can stand that crappy prime video UI anyway.
- it’s basically fine and unoffensive ui to 99.9% of people
- people see it as functionally free because they bought prime for free delivery
- People don’t know how to pirate
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.
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.
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.
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
Still a better UI than Disney+ too
I didn’t realize just how good the Netflix UI was until using Paramount+
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
Thanks! Helpful for me, I’m really not into trailers blasting from my speakers when I browse (on my 360 lol).
No problem; glad to be of assistance. :-)
Oh that’s great thank you!
Welcome!
Happy new year!
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.
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.
Yes, X-ray is a fantastic feature. I have to give them that. The rest of it is trash.
Yeah if you hate immersion it’s great.
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
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.
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.
Not to mention the shockingly bad picture quality.
The 4k stuff isn’t terrible, but anything that’s in HD is bloody awful.
I hit the high seas when they wouldn’t let me watch the shit i paid for in high def. Fuck that.
The UI had a “recent” glow up, it was way worse before.
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.
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. 
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.
The moment each show got a pre-reel for another Amazon show this was clearly the path they where taking.
Already cancelled a good 6 months ago.
Yeah I thought that was a pretty obvious attempt to ease people into it. So this news doesn’t come as a shock. If anything I’m surprised it took this long.
At least they give you a slip button, unlike Paramount+
Yeah, Prime Video already has commercials.
“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.
The enshittification will continue until profit margins improve
Enshitification won’t stop until the frogs realize that they are being boiled to death and jump out of the pot.
The enshittification will continue until the demand for profit is removed*
…demand for constant growth is removed.*
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Hey, I want free money, too.
until profit margins improve
Lol
What is this mythical profit margin/amount that companies would be willing to accept? There is no limit to corporate greed…
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.
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.
I have better things to do than sit in front of the TV for hours on end.
I hear that. I watch way less than I used to. I’ve also made it a point to stay out of other people’s algorithms as much as I can. I only pull exactly what I want from youtube then go do something else. You can’t doom scroll Lemmy because you run out of doom after 30-40 minutes.
My guilty pleasure is still binging certain series, but I try to wait to watch stuff until it’s canceled or at the very least until the season is over and I can just catch up in a weekend.
And bring that keg of mead on board with ya, ya dastardly scallywags 🏴☠️
Thanks for reminding me to cancel my prime.
You’re welcome.
Amazon Prime Podcasts wants you to know that ads are bad and they offer them as free*. But here they are talking out the other side of their bean counters saying that ads aren’t a problem.
- The fast talking at the end of the ad says “some podcasts may contain ads.”
USENET is my happy place.
Taking notes right now
This is the way
I looked into usenet but I first tried RealDebrid and it’s been great. I personally have went with Alldebrid
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.
I wish delivery / video was separate because I’d cancel immediately.
You can use Amazon to buy things without subscribing. $35+ order gets free shipping
this is one reason why i have never had prime. not that i order much from amazon anyway (very rarely, in fact).
i think people think amazon is a lot more indispensable than it actually is.
It’s like a second golden age of internet piracy, and it’s happening because streaming over saturated itself just like cable lmao
The cancelled Coyote vs ACME movie might only be available on the high seas, matey. It be my current white whale, yarr.
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Bummer. Not because of the extra $3, honestly I’ll probably just pay it. But because until now Prime programming has been able to operate with a certain freedom. I know 0 people with prime for the video (as opposed to the free delivery) so they were willing to take risks with the shows.
Solos and Tales from the Loop are both amazing works of art that would never have shown up on network TV, or Netflix which would much rather make cheap mass appeal shows with little depth. Even more shows with wider appeal (e.g. The Expanse) might not survive the TV Executive mindset now that they have a reason to care about the number of views as a primary metric, over user happiness.
And honestly, it all baffles me, I will gladly subscribe to a streaming service for one great show. Produce 3 or 4 a year and I’m subscribed for good. If I wanted an endless string of medicore baking reality shows, I’d get cable again.
Ugh yes. I canceled my Amazon Prime like 5 years ago, and swore off Amazon completely until they started streaming Vox Machina. Sucks that’s the service Critical Role went with, but it is what it is.
I should check out Tales from the Loop too… and cancel AppleTV now that Ted Lasso is over.
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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?
Are their profits going down?
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.
Sadly, this. Average consumer, and I don’t mean it as an insult, will not look for an alternative to streaming. All these giant streaming companies are gauging how far they can go to increase the profit margins.
I’m a technically savvy average consumer. I’ve just been accepting the enshitification. It feels like every month a different company is raising prices.
I’m about ready to put on an eye patch and fly the Jolly Roger at this point.
Yarr
Clever
My prediction is that it all goes back to Netflix when they decide it’s not worth the time and expense to run their own services. They had a nice passive income thing going on there for many years and can have it again if they just license their IP again.
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.
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
No point in paying for Prime Video when other services like Tubi or even Pluto TV offer free movies/shows with ads built-in. When I realized that it was easy to cancel.
If there are commercials, why should someone need an Amazon Prime membership at all? It becomes just like broadcast TV then, and they should just allow anyone to watch to maximize revenue. They have all this AWS infrastructure to deliver video, why not maximize the use of it?
👨🏻🦲🫳🏻💰
But wouldn’t they make more money by not requiring a subscription and having many more viewers? They will get paid for showing ads, not collecting Prime subscriptions.
If you don’t have prime you might not buy things from Amazon which would probably be a net loss compared to the potential ad revenue increase.
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.
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.
So you absorbed a bunch of alien conspiracy stuff while you were sleeping?
Worse. It went off into other conspiracy subjects like 9/11 and all sorts of crap. Theres frankly a lot of weird stuff on amazon prime for free that i would have never seen had i not dozed off.
Most of the other apps (netflix, plex, etc) and even the streaming platform (roku) have measures to combat falling asleep. Whether its disabling auto-play (which amazon didnt have) or bandwidth saver features that will periodically ask if you are still there (which amazon appears to somehow bypass or disable, or did).
These days though i set a sleep timer to shut off the lights and TV at midnight.
That’s actually kind of hilarious
Yeah it is in a way. Thankfully it doesn’t leech into my main Amazon shopping reccomendations.
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. This was on an Nvidia Shield Pro, too, so not some scrappy TV vendor’s implementation of the app on some underpowered SoC.
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.
