I'm part of an FB (yes, I know) group named "Did Silicon Valley reinvent the bus again?", and it's hilarious and sometimes frightening the things the technology sector comes up with.
If you pay for ad free, you still get ads.
Source: Me. I am mad.
Oh fuck off with this. Don't victimize cable companies. They charged an insane amount and offered no innovation. $100+ a month for live TV that had more commercials than actual content is still a shit deal.
Streaming was great until everyone decided they wanted a piece of it. Fragmentation of the market drove enshitification.
Fragmentation is certainly accelerating things. One company tries something like price hikes, ad tiers, password sharing prevention, bundling, etc and sees no consumer pushback, then they all do it.
I don't think the OP is victimizing cable. They are just saying that these companies swooped in with something better that was cheaper to disrupt the industry only to end up rebuilding said shitty industry. Different players, same game.
They aren’t victimizing them, they are saying streaming companies are turning into them
Stream is still way better than old TV, specifically streaming from your local jellyfin or Plex server ;)
This is the way.
Reinventing cable and reinvigorating piracy.
Just gotta ride the blitzscaling wave. Take advantage of all cheap shit and move when it isnt a good deal anymore.
It's just gentrification for services.
When this announcement was made, I canceled prime. I don't even use Prime video. It's the principle.
I did use it, and the music service. They destroyed both in less than a year, so I cancelled it the same day they announced ads in video. They already had an ad tier, called FreeVee and it was insufferable.
As a bonus, I now don't buy anything off Amazon, since I no longer get the delivery benefits. Fuck that company.
At least 20% of my orders end up being fucked up anyway. It's either counterfeit products an entirely wrong product with the UPC of what I ordered taped onto the box.
I ordered a Spyder Color calibrator last year (about 200 bucks), and got an iPhone 4 screen protector with the barcide of a Spyder printed on the box.
I ordered a laptop and it arrived gutted.
Amazon died for me when they changed from a retailer to a drop-shipper.
Similar experiences. I dropped Amazon at renewal in January after the ad announcement. The items I ordered went from two days to four days to several weeks to never existing and the products were more and more "fell off a truck" crappy knockoffs - the same reason I stopped using eBay in the 2000s.
Bonus, like you, I find myself making next to no impulse purchases anymore since I can't just fire up Amazon on a whim.
This original announcement was the final straw to push me back into piracy and I couldn't be happier a few months later.
Piracy is the only option that won't end this way. 🏴☠️
Don’t stop there. Don’t shop there anymore.
It’s harder to find certain things, but sleep is easier knowing you’re doing what you can by not contributing.
