And ads. Lots of ads.
Did they say ads?
If it weren’t for those pesky content breaks every now and then, they could serve even more ads. Won’t somebody think of the shareholders?
Those damn consumers are so entitled! Why can’t we just serve ads continually instead of having to produce expensive content?
it’s implied
Is it? If they’re going to make this available for a free/ad priced tier I could see showing ads. But not for the ad free tier.
it was mostly a joke but I wouldn’t be too suprised if they actually start showing ads too
I’m old enough to remember the promise that cable TV was paid so you wouldn’t have commercials…it lasted what, 6 months? The channels without commercials cost extra…le sigh
Yep. It was pretty clear streaming services were always going to end up the same way from the start. Even YouTube has, although that was harder to predict when it was mostly 30s cat videos.
Pretty wild to want to add channel when:
- their interface is garbage
- their content is pretty lacking
If they play any “pay for that channel”, it’s insta unsub
I’m already thinking about it. I can’t watch new content outside the service, so if I’m torrenting for long term storage regardless, why am I paying in the first place?
only reason I still have disney+ is because my cousin used to borrow it from me. then I stopped paying for it and he was too lazy to make his own account to he just started paying mine. I’ve had free disney+ for year and a half now
Wow that kinda took an unexpected turn. Sound something nice does come back around sometimes huh?
for real. it still baffles me that he just didn’t make his own :D but sometimes nice things do happen
Same thing happened w my mom and Netflix. Except I still don’t use it
The most frustrating thing about their interface is that if you’ve already watched an episode of something, then try to watch it again, it’ll immediately minimize it to start the “next episode” countdown.
It’s been ongoing.
And Disney+ is so crowded with garbage now that they’ve integrated Hulu’s content into it.
The ads are coming! the ads are coming! -Modern Paul Revere
Let me guess: which channels you have access to depend on your subscription level? Fuck these jerks.
And they make sure that you have to buy the full package to get what you want.
New movie releases only costs $10 per streaming on the platinum-full-extended-live-ultra-package.
its so tiresome to have all these services constantly made worse. these days it feels whenever a new thing comes out, it has about two or three years before it’s run into the ground in pursuit of the almighty dollar.
and this kind of thing is also happening to movies/tv shows/video game franchises. it feels like no matter how good it starts, you only get (at most) 2 or 3 sequels before the executives get their hands on it and run it into the ground. sure there are exceptions to this, but they are few and far between. and its becoming even more common for shows/video games to simply disappear if the parent company decides to remove them from online stores/streaming platforms.
all around, it just feels like things are becoming less and less permanent
You’re describing capitalism. That’s literally what happens to everything when capitalism is unchecked.
“Hey, we’re getting pretty good at producing food. Let’s put corn syrup in everything and make cheap food addictive.”
“Hey, we just noticed that frightened people buy more guns. Let’s make sure criminals can always buy guns so that we are arming everyone!”
“Land is the one thing they aren’t making more of. Let’s drive prices up while interest rates are low so that people have to spend all of their income on rent or die in the streets!”
When profits are the only motivation, then products and services will only get so good before the investor class starts looking for ways to take advantage of leverage instead of innovation. Unregulated markets create opportunities for unbalanced relationships between producers and consumers, and it is always built on the lie that you can influence the markets by “voting with your dollars,” as though enshittification is what we want, what we deserve.
🏴☠️🏴☠️ argh, matey
I’ve kinda wished services would do something a bit like this for a while:
One channel for new stuff, based on your recommendations—just gives you a load of random tastes of shows without you actively picking through things
One for stuff you rewatch. For example, if you’ve watched always sunny or peep show through a couple of times, put random episodes on this channel for when you just want something in the background
Gonna need some machine learning for this. How much AI in your streaming service are you comfortable with?
As someone very hesitant about AI I’m comfortable with it. It’s a streaming service, not my email inbox.
One step further: ai “enhanced” TV shows and movies
We still good, or you ready to start pitching a fit?
AI and ML based recommendation engines in streaming services have been a thing for as long as there have been steaming services
Ok, how about ai enhanced TV shows and movies. Still comfortable?
This sounds like a bit of a slippery slope fallacy, if you’re implying that a steaming service using a recommendation algorithm obviously concludes with sinister personalised AI brainwashing injected into my watching, I think you maybe should watch less black mirror.
If you didn’t mean that, we’ve been using AI in film and TV for ages now, the latest batch of Star wars films made extensive use of it. Hell, the huge battles in lord of the rings used a rudimentary AI system for governing all the entities in it.
I’m just working my way to asking if you’d watch personalized AI TV bruh, not purposely attempting a fallacy. I’d give it a look, maybe once or twice. Just to see 😂
There was a chrome extension a few years ago called ottoplay that did something like this, would take your Netflix Hulu and YouTube accounts and set up channels like comedy movies and shit like that, would play random episode non stop.
For the rewatch, on Plex you can build playlists and shuffle them. I do this for my kids, one wants Bluey and the other wants Peppa pig. I let the random gods decide what comes on next.
Minus ad breaks, I missed this aspect of content consumption. Choosing to watch a random episode of a random show just doesn’t happen and I missed being able to just “see what’s on”. I spent a fair amount of time setting up random “channels” I can tune into that play random episodes from tv shows on my media server and it’s great.
A lot of newer shows cannot be watched randomly though because the episodes actually build upon each other.
If you take older shows like TNG or X files: you could easily jump back in after missing half a season. The episodes were written to be mostly self-contained, because missing an episode or two because of life was very very common. Season finales were often a major exception, and were therefore also majority advertised so people knew to plan around them.
If you write a show for streaming, however, there is no concept of “missing an episode”. So the writers are freed from that constraint, and subsequently write shows that are only meant to be watched in their entirety, in order.
Interesting to see it as being freed from a constraint rather than a crutch that viewers can be relied upon to watch all episodes. IMO writing satisfying one episode arc that also makes up part of a wider arc is much more difficult, and many shows now really have just a single arc that only gets good in the last third, making it essentially a 6-8 hour movie rather than an episodic show.
Yeah, you can definitely see a trend towards more HBO style shows as streaming took off.
I remember watching an episode of The Wire, and somebody else watched it with me and didn’t like it because they didn’t know what was going on and the story wasn’t resolved in an hour. I’m like 10 episodes in, and this ain’t Columbo.
This has been the plan for decades.
Telecom companies existed before the internet and have made every effort their television fiefdoms would have the right to own it as well.
Then again the only bastion of defense against this has been a parade of old ass people who don’t own computers and were handed a smartphone 15 years ago but only want campaign donations in exchange for not understanding the problem.
So it really wasn’t much effort at all to turn the internet into TV 2.0.
They’re really gonna make people start pirating out of spite lol
Started a while ago, matey.
Only for $300/month, with a 2 year contract
With ads!
If they do it like Paramount I’m all for it. I like just throwing on the Star Trek channel rather than deciding what episode of which series I want to watch. That’s part of why I get so much use out of Plex’s Live TV channels. Only difference is paramount doesn’t have ads on their channels
Live TV is handy for sports, but sort of out of date for the modern habit of binge streaming a series.
I don’t really want to watch TV starting from the middle of an episode in the middle of a series. I’d much rather just jump to where I was in my Dropout queue and start watching whatever show is next in the list.
Lol all this time these media companies have had to change their models to align with market forces, we’ve watched them hem and haw, drag their feet, etc. this step shows they never wanted things to change at all, and they have the power and the money to keep change from happening. finally we see them at their end game, harnessing the Internets power for something so tiny. To them, the only benefit to this technology is cutting out the middleman and b bringing able packages to you without negotiations with a cable service.
Their minds are so small, but this and worse is their greatest dream. It’s a terrible, venal world that small minds lead us to isn’t it?
VPN, random port, docker, and jellyfin.
The golden age of streaming has passed.
I don’t mind this sort of setup on Pluto TV but it’s free so… Yeah.
Pluto is good but I wish they had an API
