This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
What I want to know is how much money could insurance companies (cough, Liberty Mutual, cough) POSSIBLY be saving people when they are buying ads on every video on Youtube.
I always wondered what if someone started an insurance business that didn’t spend billions on advertisements, it just offered genuinely lower rates. When you sign up you have to sign something promising you’ll tell 2 other people.
"We can't lower prices! Look at how much we have to spend!!"
Points at billions in ad slots being watched by mostly AI now
There are plenty of insurance companies that are like this. They're significantly cheaper than the nationally advertised insurance options.
That’s what you’re seeing. Not what I’m seeing. Welcome to the wonderful world of targeted ads.
I only get Doctor Drew telling me stuff is a metabolism killer.
Yo-ho, all together, hoist the coooolors high...
Yup, streaming has just become cable v2. I dusted off the VPN and went back to that. As a famous someone once said:
Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem
If the experience with piracy is FAR superior to streaming you can guess which way I'm going to go....
Because they HAVE to increase their share values year after year; just making billions isn't good enough, they have to make more billions compared to the last year.
It's truly pure greed, as streaming was amazing when it first started, and Netflix was making a killing even back then. But now, nope, fuck you all, we want more and more until we can't squeeze anything more out from you.
It's why I've increased my kodi/real debrid usage over the past few years
I've tried to argue a company that made $800k profit this year even tho they made $900k last year is still a profitable business and people unironically argue that company is dying and bad...
Big number = good Smaller number = bad
It works for them when dealing with shareholders
I dropped prime after the announcement... Who's next?
What pisses me off is that I signed up for a year last summer. This change should not have happened for people who already paid for Prime.
With shipping getting worse, yeah ... I'm cancelling that.
Guess Bezos doesn't have enough money.
We weren’t watching it anyway and we can handle waiting a few days for shipping. We dropped it too.
Paid services with ads are unconscionable and should not be supported, but I do watch Tubi or Pluto sometimes, and it's not nearly as bad as the amount of ads I see on my parents' screen with cable
Agreed, in my experience Tubi and Pluto both have very reasonable length, good quality ads. I declined to re-up on YouTube TV for NCAA football season this year specifically because I can stand their ads. At that price tier, they honestly expect me to sit through My Pillow ads??
Even if the creators weren’t pissed, the entire selling point of streaming was on demand, ad free, and a large library to choose from. Every single streaming service that subdivided Netflix and Hulu’s content shares have reneged on that entire concept by creating smaller libraries, making them unaffordable, and now they’re shoehorning in ads if we won’t cough up more money.
It’s almost like a moral imperative to pirate from these fuckers.
Don't forget that on-demand is being reduced as well now that many platforms are trickling out episodes for their marquee shows at a weekly rate. Looking at you Apple.
The entire selling point of cable was no signal loss and ad free... Then the point of satellite was more options and ad free. Those sneaky ads keep finding their way in.
Ads is basically free money for broadcasters. And since greed is the main motivation - the dissension seems to be rather easy for them.
I'm amazed that they have any customers paying to listen to ads. I wont stand for it and I find it surprising others would.
In one year Amazon made it impossible to listen to albums on Prime Music, and shoved ads into everything on Prime Video.
Easy cancel for me. I can go without your next day shipping.
Better still I can buy from someone else.
The alternative is either:
I agree it's unacceptable for me, but I also get why so many people just put up with it.
🏴☠️
I haven't used streaming services in a couple of years. Now I'm just doing all piracy and watching it through my Jellyfin server
Just here to remind everyone while piracy is important, it's also very important to teach the less tech savy among your acquaintances how to pirate too. Conglomerates only learn when their bottom line is effected after all, so teach all your friends how to hoist that black flag.
It is worse than broadcast.
If you learn anything about screenwriting, there are certain patterns and structures you follow (like acts in a play) to accommodate commercials, like to build suspense and keep the viewer interested and not changing the channel.
Streaming never had this, if you look at shows written for these platforms. The writers either ignored or didn’t even know about these conventions.
Now adding commercials later, it is even more annoying to the viewer as the original material was not meant to accommodate them.
Streaming just keeps fucking up. I already canceled my netflix. I’m on basic cable for network tv and I just pirate everything else.
Wait... They add advertising in the middle of shows? I thought it would be at the beginning, between episodes, on the UI, etc.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
After a swift click on “not now,” this viewer cued up one of the more successful titles currently gracing Amazon’s roster — the second season of beefcake vigilante drama Reacher.
Interruptions, which included a spot for another series (Hudson & Rex, starring a German Shepherd detective) and a reminder from the folks at Intuit Turbotax that filling season has commenced, were indeed limited.
“We fought so hard to get rid of commercials,” says Alan Poul, executive producer and director of Max original Tokyo Vice which returns for a second season on Feb. 8.
Paramount expands its own ad-supported tier internationally later in 2024 — and though no official plans have been announced, recent hires at Apple TV+ suggest the tech behemoth will eventually introduce ads as well.
David E. Kelley, the one-time broadcast golden boy who gave audiences Picket Fences, Chicago Hope and Ally McBeal before pivoting to premiere outlets like HBO (Big Little Lies) and Netflix (The Lincoln Lawyer), seems similarly disenchanted.
Netflix, which recently cited that 40 percent of all new sign-ups opt for ads, announced the “retirement” of its least expensive commercial-free tier in the coming second quarter.
The original article contains 1,205 words, the summary contains 191 words. Saved 84%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
So are commercial randomly placed, or are the shows paced to have commercial breaks like the old tv days?
Content providers can probably include chapter markers in their content. I also suspect it's not hard to detect a scene transition. Failing these, randomly placed.
Went to check out the "Mr and Mrs Smith" series on Prime (with Donald Glover), and was notified that there would be ads now unless I upgraded. I almost never watch anything on Prime, but figured "why not, I already have it"... and then immediately closed it when I saw that message. Switched back over to Stremio, cause why the fuck would I watch ads when I already pay for the service? Gotta convince the wife to cancel Prime, but it's next on the chopping block. Only ones left will be youtube music (family still uses it) and Debrid (which will stay for as long as it's good). Netflix, Hulu, Disney, ESPN, HBO... all of them gone
Okay, I need to say it: having an ad for your own programming is still an ad.
Paramount. I'm looking at you, Paramount. I don't want to watch your shitty movie/TV show/whatever about the shitty mom from the His Dark Materials series losing another kid. Stop playing the same goddamn ad for it before every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Especially since you feel the need to double whatever goddamn volume I have set in the opening to the ad. I pay for the subscription, I already bought your product. Fuck off with your shitty ad.
I mean, others do it too and it pisses me off, but I'm on Season 2 of TNG and I may just have to get it some other way and canceling Paramount because that ad has started really getting to me.
