For the first time I was contemplating cancelling my prime subscription,but now I believe the contemplation is over.
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I was contemplating to subscribe to Prime as they have some interesting (for me) exclusive stuff, but was hesitating to add just another subscription.
Thank you, Amazon, to make the decision so easy - if even a paid subscription is riddled with ads, it is a 100% no-buy for me.
I refuse to pay for ads to be delivered to me. Seeing them unpaid is bad enough and I avoid it at all costs. But I will not pay for ads.
Even as a child, when we had cable, I would ask my dad why we still had to watch commercials even though we pay for the service. I understood why stations like CBS, NBC, or ABC may have needed ads as they were free over-the-air, but surely paying for cable should mean no ads, right?
Never had a good answer. It’s pretty fucked up that we collectively allowed them to pull that shit on us and put up with it for like 3 decades.
There was a brief and glorious time when Pay Cable was billed as being ad-free. You would still see promos for other shows and channels between shows, but there were no commercial breaks!
Same as BBC in the UK.
Maybe a 5-10 sec “And next on BBC 1 is blah blah and on BBC 2 we have blah blah starting at 7 o’clock”
Of course you “have” to pay for it, though (if you don’t pay nobody would know).
Oh shit, I forgot about that being a thing. Wow, how the fuck did society get so accustomed to dealing with that BS? Granted, we almost broke out of it when streaming became mainstream, but it looks like we’re about to get a screwed right back into it.
I’ve returned to the high seas, eye patch and all.
I found a seedbox provider that is fairly cheap and works well. I have a long standing rss feed for new shows so next step is going to be getting it setup to auto download for me. I can do it locally but spectrum is hard core with the dmca notices and I don’t want to risk losing my account.
Have a look at the **arr range of apps
Sonarr and Radarr with NZBGet, usenet indexer and a cheap unlimited news server provider, and you’re laughing. I have everything downloading automagically as soon as its release, loads right into Jellyfin - all on a copyright notice keen ISP and never have any issues because im not sharing anything up, its all down with usenet
I have been looking into this solution, I am concerned on whether it will need a VPN or not. I have one already, but it does not play nice with my current solution.
I have all my services set up on a docker container that has a VPN Killswitch, so if the VPN ever drops for any reason my “activity” is disabled automatically until I can notice and fix it.
It’s all direct download and https from what I understand, so all anyone can see is that you went to the sites, not what you download.
The majority of countries, and the uk for sure, its not illegal to download content but it is illegal to upload it / share it. Therefore using usenet is fine to do, legally, without the aid of a VPN as you are merely consuming and not providing or uploading. I have been doing this for years with zero problem or letter from any of three isps i have been with the in last decade.
Good to know, thanks.
You’re very welcome. I have a newsletter you can subscribe to if you’d like, though i should probably warn you it costs £5 a month and includes some advertising.
Or classic torrents combined with a VPN.
Just use a vpn, always, and spectrum has no idea what you’re doing
Or, I could pay the $9/month for a server that has a 10gig connection to the rest of the world and do my part by leaving them seeding for longer than I would otherwise.
Would love a seed box recommendation if you have one to share? My new place is off grid so with limited power prefer to offload a 24 hour server elsewhere so I can be a responsible seeder.
I’m using rapidseedbox.com but there are a ton of others out there. I tried them because they take crypto and I don’t have to give them any info whatsoever.
What service offers that and doesn’t mind torrenting? (Legal torrenting ofc, we wouldn’t ever dream of discussing illegal topics here 🏴☠️)
I’m using rapidseedbox.com, they don’t ask for any personal info and I paid with crypto. The lowend plan I’m using is $9/month and doesn’t offer many options aside from sftp access, 3 or 4 torrent apps you can switch between and a couple of other things. The higher end plans offer a shit load more like plex, etc. They will send a dmca notice and then like 12 hours later delete the offending content. I’ve learned that you can just restart the torrent and re-download it and all is well going forward.
There are a ton of other options out there for seedboxes.
I pay about $300 per year for an IPTV service that provides over 3000 channels which means all the news and sports I can think of. Also on demand TV and movies, and recordings of popular live sports. It allows 2 public IPs so I share this service with my brother. It’s amazing. I’ve used a few different IPTV services that got shutdown and this one is the best. It’s been about 2 years now which is about as long as I’ve seen these services last so I hope it doesn’t get shut down anytime soon.
I’d rather just run my own service for my own use. I have a nas and I use vlc on my TV to watch anything I want. I’m currently working on grabbing all of the shows that I want to re-watch and are available in their entirety, homeland, the wire, Dr who, Archer, etc. I’ll also be keeping an eye on the paramount and others for shows that look interesting and add them to my rss feed.
Look up radarr and sonarr. Automate all your downloads. You can torrent with it but usenet is much easier. Additionally set up a server with unraid and add all the apps to docker. You got yourself a media server. Add plex and all the other arr apps in there too.
How do people think paying for a service and still being served ads is acceptable?
People lived with it for years with cable.
Cable wasn’t really a thing here in the UK, we’re not primed for their bullshit.
i see what you did there.
Sky has a shit ton of ads.
Right, but the business model is totally different. You’re paying your cable provider for access, you’re not paying to watch the TV shows. The TV shows were financed by broadcaster advertising revenues among other streams of income. With Amazon, you’re paying for access and to fund their programs. Ads are just greedy and anti-consumer for a vertically integrated platform like Amazon Video.
Cable started out without ads too. That was why you paid for it.
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To be fair, Prime Video has always just been a free perk attached to prime (and with all the other ‘perks’ combined you could basically consider it free). For example I get an extra 3% back on all my Amazon orders by being a prime member. At the current cost of prime and just with the home supplies I order w/ subscribe and save, it pays for itself. That’s not to say I’m happy with this, but in actuality they’re fairly well positioned with the product to make this move and have most of the user base be merely disgruntled.
Hulu has a lower price tear that includes ads. It makes it more affordable for some people. If they had started out with ads I would be less upset, but for a big company like Amazon it just seems like they’re trying to make even more money off of the consumer.
Hulu DID start out with ads. When they launched it was an entirely ad supported service. Hulu+ didn’t come until years later. After several years of running two tiers of service, free ad supported and paid ad free, they dropped the free tier. Now, years later, we’re back to ads with Hulu, but this time you pay for the privilege.
So glad I cancelled Prime a few months ago. Turns out, I’m still getting free shipping even without it and I didn’t find Rings of Power worth pirating.
Prime already has ads and they are obnoxious. They are their own ads. Is outside ads the new development or what? New tiers?
“We aim to provide a meaningfully worse experience than the sailors of the seven seas are getting,” Amazon insisted.
Finally, that’s what everyone has been eagerly waiting for …
Yeah, what we were always missing after fleeing cable, was the ads that really made each show worth it.
Why can’t we just have nice things?
Because of Capitalism.
Well tell it to stop breaking all my stuff. This is bullying 😭
well… this gonna be a bit harder
I believe in you. You can do anything you set your mind to.
Wow, that’s actually really shitty. They should have just raised the prices by $24, and announced a cheaper version of prime with ads. Nobody would have questioned it.
I’ve been planning on cancelling prime at the end of the year. This closes the decision making process for me.
I’ve been sticking to Pluto and Tubi lately. Yes, they have ads, but they are entirely free and have enough content to keep me entertained for the duration of my ever decreasing television watching habits.
(End of year because due to terms and conditions, there is no benefit to cancel early)
I see prime as a freebie. I get it cause I have prime for my package deliveries
Same, I often forget that prime video exists, I pay for prime so my wife’s packages arrive quicker and I get a free twitch sub monthly
I’m in Canada, honestly the only reason prime video gets used in my house, is cause it has Pingu and my kid loves that. Usually there’s really nothing there aside from The Boys that I watch regularly or can’t watch elsewhere. It’s mostly paywalled too, with different channels you have to pay extra for, which is annoying.
My experience with prime delivery in 2023 is that it has gone from two days to four days to two weeks to completely lost fuck you trying to get a refund.
Further, I stopped using eBay in the late 2000s because everything there became “fell off a truck in China” quality. This is what a vast percentage of Amazon product has become.
This is the crux desire to cancel.
I bought a new fire stick from Amazon, it didn’t work so I sent it back as defective. They sent me a refurbished one, and I had to fight them for weeks to accept that I paid for a new one, not a refurb.
This is exactly why I cancelled.
eBay has its uses, especially when you’re trying to find used genuine parts for whatever you’re working on, but other than that both eBay and Amazon seem to be flooded with Chinese crap
I canceled last time they raised the price and started including football. The only thing prime is really good for is if you like making a bunch of little purchases frequently. I honestly don’t miss it at all. When I do buy something, you get free shipping on anything else you buy for the next 24 hours. That ends up covering the little stuff I might have forgotten on the original order and prime shipping was rarely 2 days anymore anyway, so what’s an extra day or two wait.
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yo ho, a pirates life for me
Would help if they still made content worth pirating.
fair point.
The Boys was good, but the Lord of the Rings series was horrible.
Meh. I found it enjoyable overall, despite some annoyances.
And I’ve read the books a fair bit. Even The Silmarillion.
Invincibles was good too.
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The Expanse was amazing.
I’m enjoying Wheel of Time. Even as a fan of the books despite the changes.
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I’ve been avoiding any online talk about it and just enjoying it for what it is.
Kind of glad Marvelous Mrs. Maisel ended when it did, so I don’t need to see ads!
I liked The Boys and Tales From The Loop. Couldn’t tell you anything else they made though
Invincible is pretty good.
Oh yeah! I forgot that was on there. Loved that one, too
Someone else below mentioned The Expanse which I really enjoyed but didn’t finish
This is where I’m stuck honestly. I don’t think this news will affect my life at all 😂
yar har fiddle dee dee
It’s literally a race to the bottom on streaming services before we eventually end up with cable in an app. Or rather multiple apps.
Fuck I hate this timeline.
My ISP already offers a streaming package, you pay monthly for a package of streaming apps. It’s literally cable with extra steps
cable […] in multiple apps
These ppl really reinvented cable, but worse
Seriously, everything that was once good is now either fucked or planning to be fucked.
Wow, first they destroy Prime Music to push you to pay extra for Music Unlimited and now this? I have no idea what the value of Prime even is now unless you order online frequently, which is harder and harder to justify with all the shady and low quality sellers polluting the site.
