Apple is quietly pushing a TV ad product with media agencies | Hacker News Reader

Apple is quietly pushing a TV ad product with media agencies

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I know it's morally dubious, but I'm completely back in pirateland because of all the changes/price hikes/partitioning in the streaming space. My interests make it so I only watch 1-2 shows per platform so I'd be approaching ~100$/month.

And even if I was swimming in money, it's often easier to just download the shows I want and watch them on Plex/Jellyfin than trying to navigate the (often ad-riddled) interfaces of the various platforms and finding where the content I want is.

One example is Rick and Morty, it's made by Adult Swim, but they don't have a streaming service in Canada. It seems to be on Primevideo but under a different system than their regular content. The other way to watch it is to buy it from my cable provider (I don't have cable). So to watch a 20-minutes animated show I'd have to take a +40$ subscription.

I don't find this particularly morally dubious. These companies are approaching monopoly powers and using it to squeeze consumers. Disney owns about 1/3 of all box office revenue. The government has shown they're unwilling to break up monopolies, or even really limit them in any meaningful way.

Also, I don't quite know my feelings on this yet, but there is something real about some shows and movies being part of the milieu. Something doesn't sit quite right about repeatedly increasing the pricing via anti-consumer acquisitions on products that are contributing a substantial part of how the society collectively feels and thinks. It feels like you have to make more money to live in the same society.

Nobody has the right to obtain copyrighted entertainment products. Unlike, say, having access to food or water, or even education, there's no coherent moral framework that says that you are obligated to the latest TV shows or movies under your own terms.

> that are contributing a substantial part of how the society collectively feels and thinks

First of all, I straight-up don't believe this. I had very little exposure to TV/movies/books/the internet growing up, and yet I feel virtually no disconnect with my friends and co-workers - even when I don't understand a particular cultural reference they make, they either explain it and we engage in a fun tangent about it, or we just laugh and move on.

Second, even if that were true - then the problem is that culture is being built off of copyrighted works in the first place. Solve that. Doing otherwise shows that this is just a convenient excuse to secure access to personal entertainment.

> there's no coherent moral framework that says that you are obligated to the latest TV shows or movies under your own terms.

I have a magnet link. It brings me information. You don't want me to have that information? Up yours.

Oh you made it did you? Should've thought about my BATNA before deciding how to put it on the market.

For the record, I'm quite a bit more moderate than this would imply. But copyright is a weird wrinkle to "encourage the useful arts and sciences", it's has no basis in natural rights, the opposite in fact: the State intervenes in my natural right to do things with my own computer and the Internet connection I pay for, in order to encourage the making of more cinema and so on.

> Second, even if that were true - then the problem is that culture is being built off of copyrighted works in the first place. Solve that.

I mean - the natural state of these works has ALREADY solved that, they are easily copied and distributed. The only prevention is arbitrary law/policy that says we (the royal one) shouldn't.

So you're essentially arguing that no one has the right to a product, but they do - in a natural state, copying and sharing those items IS THE DEFAULT.

In fact - copyright law is insanely new, as far as laws go - dating back only about 300 years (1710 - Statute of Anne).

Personally - I think the whole thing was a mistake, and we've seen complete erosion of public access to works of all sort (not to mention education) under these new laws. That said - they're wildly successful if the goal is to subvert culture for private gains.

> Nobody has the right to obtain copyrighted entertainment products. Unlike, say, having access to food or water, or even education, there's no coherent moral framework that says that you are obligated to the latest TV shows or movies under your own terms.

Yet educational books are copyrighted all the same, and scientific journals fight tooth and claw from preventing open access even if morally they should (eg. when publishing results of research paid for by public months).

You just drew an imaginary line (entertainment products) to defend an artificial law (copyright). Prior to 1710 there was no copyright, yet culture, art and civilization flourished. People were entertained, and entertainment products were certainly produced.

Copyright creates an artificial scarcity (literally, in the 21st century, where copying is costless). Compare that with natural laws, such as against killing, stealing, etc, known for thousands of years, with obvious reasons for existence.

We can argue to what extent copyright promotes creation, and we can agree to respect it because of its positive effects (if any).

But we should never mistake the "nobody has the right to obtain copyrighted works" dogma for a law of nature.

> culture is being built off of copyrighted works in the first place. Solve that. Doing otherwise shows that this is just a convenient excuse to secure access to personal entertainment.

What is culture if not total sum of all art, science, and other human accomplishments? And as we now stand, all modern art (and much of science) is being locked up behind copyright for decades.

Solve that.

> Nobody has the right to obtain copyrighted entertainment products.

what about all the things that should have been out-of-copyright had large companies not purchased favourable laws? How many years after death are we up to now? Is this what people originally agreed to when copyright laws were created? Did they agree to the extensions or did the government do this for the "lobbying"?

What about public domain which was taken by for-profit companies and then copyrighted so you cant do the same?

> Nobody has the right to obtain copyrighted entertainment products. Unlike, say, having access to food or water, or even education, there's no coherent moral framework that says that you are obligated to the latest TV shows or movies under your own terms.

The only coherent moral framework for the existence of copyright at all is that it is a societal level intervention to maintain financial incentives for the production of creative arts and livelihoods for creators. If the lion's share of the returns to the production of IP is being soaked up by gatekeepers like streaming services and publishers then the alignment of the principle to its aim starts to attenuate.

If the laws are flawed a citizen should resist.

I think, corporations gatekeeping huge parts of human culture is something that we can resist once in a while.

This is the one of the oddest things I've read all day. you should feel a certain disconnect during these conversations, and it's odd to think of media as something that people don't relate over and use to bond. People will obviously accommodate people who aren't in the in group (and know about insert thing) to not be complete assholes, but you will absolutely be treated differently in life for not being into insert thing for better or worse.

You forgot genes. Why on earth is society oblivious of laws that allow copyrighting of human genes?

"Unlike, say, having access to food or water, or even education"

This is YOUR take. MY take is NOTHING should be copyrightable. People will still go to concerts and movie theathers. If anything, copyright stiffles production and innovation.

EDIT: I forgot to remind you that copyright is different from trademark. I think trademark is constructive, but copyright is not.

> Nobody has the right to obtain copyrighted entertainment products.

Depends on the country, actually. In Poland, as in some other European countries, it's legal to download copyrighted content without paying for it. It's only illegal to distribute it without the copyright owner's permission.

> then the problem is that culture is being built off of copyrighted works in the first place. Solve that.

How about you solve your business model that relies on the generosity and goodwill of people not to take an infinitely distributable good.

Maybe it isn't morally coherent but I am all for resisting the US government's pro monopoly positions by pirating from said monopolies. True resistance will never be legal in a framework where the rules are dictated by authoritarian governments or in this case corporations.

There is IMO a coherent moral framework that says "this is harming no one"

> Nobody has the right to obtain copyrighted entertainment products

People do still have the right to use libraries, though that is being threatened by digital restrictions in ebooks and other media.

In the US we seem to forget that copyrights and patents exist to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" - not to ensure a perpetual revenue stream.

Putting paywalls on culture puts culture out of reach to the lower classes.

I think poor kids growing up with parents living paycheck to paycheck should have equal opportunity to become a great filmmaker as trust fund kids.

That should be where we start this conversation, not hand wringing over making sure billion dollar media companies don't have their business models disrupted.

What about libraries. Isn't that effectively what libraries do?

> These companies are approaching monopoly powers and using it to squeeze consumers.

This doesn’t compute. Firstly, multiple companies cannot simultaneously have monopoly power of the same resource. Secondly, there is by just one company who controls the majority or all content. In fact, having to subscribe to multiple services proves that there are multiple companies who provide tv shows and movies.

> Firstly, multiple companies cannot simultaneously have monopoly power of the same resource.

Sure they can; it's called a cartel when that happens.

The major content publishers have acted in concert to kneecap Netflix; pulling licensed content, no longer licensing popular new content, etc.

What your missing is that this is not (generally) the same resource. The resource is individual shows, which are copyrighted and therefore a monopoly. Back when copyright holders didn't recognize the online streaming market and sold off their licenses cheaply, Netflix was awesome. Now that publishers have found out they can charge consumers directly and be the only place to watch a given show, consumers are being squeezed.

People often say monopoly when talking about general anti-competitive behavior/abusing market position. If you want to nitpick on that point, that's up to you I guess, but you must know that changing how people talk about this is completely hopeless at this point, right?

  monopoly power of the same resource

they can because it's not a resource in first place, it's infinite.

That's because the word he meant to use was cartel

> approaching monopoly powers and using it to squeeze consumers

“There are too many streaming services to choose from and I don’t like having to pay for competing services therefore there is a monopoly”

So it wouldn’t be a monopoly if there was one company that had all of the content you wanted?

> Disney owns about 1/3 of all box office revenue

A third of one channel of distribution is not a “monopoly”

> Something doesn't sit quite right about repeatedly increasing the pricing via anti-consumer acquisitions on products that are contributing a substantial part of how the society collectively feels and thinks

Yes the government must step in for the good of society because having a team of superheroes including a man who turns green when he gets mad is influencing society.

Good points. It seems that arguing or challenging free loaders is considered morally reprehensible here!

> The government has shown they're unwilling to

Have they? Or perhaps trash media is the bottom of their list of priorities? Maybe they are overloaded with cases and need more support? There are many more possible explanations than "shown they are unwilling"

You can take a look at some recent current and pending antitrust cases on the DOJ's website:

https://www.justice.gov/atr/antitrust-case-filings?search_ap...

In fact there was just recently action taken against Disney, which forced it to sell of major parts of 21st century before it was allowed to proceed with the merger.

https://www.justice.gov/atr/antitrust-case-filings?search_ap...

They are approaching monopoly by ... competing with each other and taking down Netflix's near 100% streaming market share?

>Disney owns about 1/3 of all box office revenue.

In what way does Disney "own" box office revenue. It spends the most and gets the highest return? I know there are some anti-competitive theatre negotiations at the margins, but at the end of the day anyone could invest in their own business and produce good movies - if they had the talent.

John Locke said that what makes something yours, in a natural setting, is your having invested effort into making it what it is. A wild berry bush might be anyone's, but once you have picked the fruit, that fruit is yours. Whether or not you buy this theory of ownership -- there are competing theories -- there is something about it I find intuitively appealing.

Some time ago, I saw one friend kick another off of his minecraft server -- and when I objected, he said it was his server, which he paid for, and he could do what he liked. As indisputible as this was, I couldn't escape the impression that the other friend, having invested months of time into building things in that world, in some sense owned those things, and that this was a moral consideration that changed the circumstances and made them different from someone who had spent five minutes in the server.

At one time I ran a gaming ladder for a small community. And while it was undoubtably mine -- I developed it and paid for it and was central in running it -- as the accumulated history of the community on the ladder grew, as the ladder became central in the life of that community, I couldn't escape the impression that all of that data and history was theirs, maybe even more than it was mine. And indeed, a previous ladder in the same community had been run by someone who saw it (very rightly) as his and ran it how he liked -- and after some unpopular decisions, the community reacted by perceiving him as a tyrant. Is this an odd intuition? I think it's one we've all voiced at some point in this era, even if we couldn't defend the idea logically.

I think this philosophical tension is at the center of a lot of struggles in our age. Facebook was certainly made by certain individuals -- they can certainly do what they like with it. And yet I can't escape the impression that the platform wasn't made by them alone -- that what it has become, both in the larger society, and in my personal circles, is what we made it by use. I don't know exactly what that implies from a moral standpoint, only that the intuition of ownership Locke desribes seems to me somehow to apply, and to be describing something real.

I think the same applies to this issue. George Lucas made Star Wars. Without a doubt. But what Star Wars was in 1977, and what it was in 1997, and what it was in 2017, are entirely different things. Some of that change was wrought by Lucas himself, but a lot of it was wrought by us -- the culture that watched it, and talked about it, and adopted it into the milleu. In 1977 it was cool, but in 1997 it was something much closer to literature, to required reading. (And in 2017 it is something else -- one of the niche kingdoms again, and perhaps yet different rules apply.) Can one person own that? The community seems to have generally rejected Lucas' rightful ownership over the series, which I take as a general consensus that, even if we can't philosophically defend why we think this, even if it's happening on an intuitive moral level, people broadly agree that at this point the world owns Star Wars more than the creator does. That people are looking at its maintenance less like a private estate, where the owner can do what he likes, and more like a public government, where the citizens are right to regard bad behavior as equating to illegitimacy. (And Disney owning it seems like a legal quirk that has nothing at all to do with moral intuition.)

Cultural works in general seem to follow this path, from private to public, from entirely owned by the creator to entirely owned by the community. But the ability of that community to actually guarantee access is different than it used to be. Decades ago, Lego was part of the universal landscape of childhood. At one point it was owned by The Lego Group, but at some point it seemed to be owned by everyone, taken for granted in the cultural landscape -- and no one had the power to tell a kid who was interested that he couldn't play with Legos. But Minecraft fills that niche now, and a hundred other things fill a hundred similar niches, and it is absolutely easy for a corporation to stop a kid from playing -- a power so obscenely socially costly as to chill the behavior of parents. Does that seem intuitively like a tyrannical, if not an evil, change in the world? It does to me. But I don't think the pirates are right, either -- I do think ownership means something. We don't have good rules for this. We have moral intuitions, but no ethical heritage.

I don't know where the line is. I don't know what models apply. I don't know what all this means morally, let alone legally. We need a Locke to tell us. But I cannot escape the impression that Locke has a point here, and that consumption may be its own form of creation, and that figuring out how to deal with all of this in a fair way remains one of the most novel and interesting questions of our age.

It's morally dubious to pick and choose what laws you follow. It doesn't matter if you think they are monopolies, that's not your judgment to make

Practicing civil disobedience against laws you believe unethical is not morally dubious, it's legally dubious. If anything, I'd consider it a display of moral fortitude to prize one's ethics above the potential consequences.

You need to fundamentally rethink your philosophy if you think law and morals are the same. Rosa Parks would like to have a word with you.

It’s morally dubious to practice blind adherence to the law for the sake of it being the law

Unless there are people who literally never broke any law (and there aren't), picking and choosing laws is exactly what every human does.

How on earth is not our right to engage our own brains and decide if we agree with any aspect of the world that hold sway on us????!!

I completely disagree. To think otherwise is to be entirely passive and compliant in a world that quite possibly could be (edit: is) corrupt on many levels.

> that's not your judgment to make

It certainly is.

Morally, would it not be better to just rotate subscriptions? One month with Netflix, one month with Prime, one with Paramount etc? Or maybe rotate every quarter?

You could claim that by pirating you’re instead protesting about the fragmentation of the streaming landscape and are holding out for an everything-in-one-place service like Spotify/Apple Music but I’m not sure you’ll get far with it due to the nature of the movie industry.

Personally I think you’re probably better off with the rotation approach - after a few economic cycles, the streaming services that aren’t pulling in enough subscribers will end up getting bought by bigger competitors and we’ll probably end up with just a few big ones standing. I don’t think Apple or Prime are going anywhere because they‘re supported by other aspects of the company. Marvel, Star Wars and just general franchise fatigue is kicking in for Disney but they’re always going to have the kid stuff to fall back on so I think they’re safe as well. Which leaves Netflix, Paramount, HBO, Hulu etc scrapping each other for anyone without kids or who don’t mind the extra subscription.

Would you consider it morally dubious to subscribe to a streaming service for a month, record content during that month, then watch it after cancelling your subscription?

There's no question of morals here. These streaming companies murdered Blockbuster, whose death must be avenged.

This is what I used to do and is definitely the best part about cable to streaming.

People now complain that the services resemble what cable used to be - but there were entire movies and countless sitcom plots about people tryng to cancel service. It was terrible for customers. Free trials of streamers have mostly dried up but rotating can still provide value - and probably better for your own time.

Morality gets grey with growing anti-consumer practices and shrinking regulation. Legally protected doesn't equate to moral. Sure it's good for the content creators to get paid, but by and large, they aren't the ones getting paid.

How dare they spend money to create content and expect people to pay for it!

This is the only correct approach.

It takes barely any time to rotate services (ten minutes per month max, and you could probably even automate it - I'd pay for that automation, ironically), and it provides an extremely strong feedback signal to studios/services that you're not putting up with the fragmentation.

Piracy is a tragedy of the commons situation that provides the wrong feedback signal (industry will just assume it's because people don't want to pay for things), so it actively makes the situation worse.

Good idea, except a lot of people including me do not have time to do this every month.

Personally I pay annualy for peacock (at a promotional discount price of $20, to watch premier league), prime (also annually because shopping) and Disney (because kids). I also have access to Netflix, Paramount and HBO etc. subscriptions for free- via fnf or promotions. If I badly want to watch something, I either check on Justwatch if it is available on a service I subscribe to, or I just pirate it.

It’s also not convenient for me to go to work everyday. But yet I do because I have an insatiable addiction to food and shelter. It would be much more convenient if people gave me food and shelter for free. But for some reason they expect me to pay for it.

This is what we do also. I have many streaming subscriptions. If a show is not available or is only available with ads (Prime Video does this a lot), then I feel zero remorse torrenting the show.

Additionally, if a show was ever on a streaming service while I had a subscription, I feel zero remorse for downloading that show once it is removed from that streaming service.

These license holders are getting more greedy by the year. If they don't want to provide the content for a reasonable fee through a streaming service, then they don't get my money. Simple as that.

> a lot of people including me do not have time to do this every month

This is ridiculous. If you don't have ten minutes of time every month, you certainly don't have time to be watching any television.

I pay for a bunch of streaming services, for semi-moral reasons, but I still pirate 99% of content.

Pirating is the only way to get accurate high-quality subtitles. I’ll automatically download them from Opensubtitles and then strip out the very distracting non-dialogue parts like “[ominous music]”. Also streaming services often have out-of-sync subtitles, like DS9 on prime video. With pirated content I automatically get perfectly synced dialogue-only subs in the exact font, size, and styling of my choosing.

Other benefits of pirating include:

- knowing exactly what bitrate/resolution you’re getting. Streaming services love to stealthily downgrade Chrome users to 720p. Pirated content often uses more computationally complex encoding letting you get more quality in fewer bits.

- easy playback of 4K content on the desktop. Often streaming services restrict 4K to certain hardware devices only. (where they can do L1 DRM protection)

- general playback flexibility. Instead of relying on each streaming service's bespoke interface, I can use my preferred media player (IINA/mpv) with all my favourite keybindings. Also, I can try out things like vapoursynth motion interpolation to get pseudo-60fps, or real-time upscaling of cartoons with Anime4K.

Meh, maintaining the fully automated TV show downloader I used to use was a pain in the butt and it was always having some issue or another. I'll gladly pay the $100 or w/e per month to avoid it, and I haven't had a problem like yours where something I wanted to watch wasn't available.

As I get older, I find myself more willing than before to trade cash for time, and this is exactly one of those scenarios.

Rick and Morty came close, but Youtube TV taped the episodes for me so I watch them there.

https://showrss.info/ + https://put.io/ is easy as hell

What were you using? Nzb / sonarr / radarr / Plex is quite an amazing setup. Very low maint.

Yep, all of those things, with a Synology NAS for storage running in docker containers on a laptop in my office. When it worked, it was seamless. When it worked.

I think for some folks, maintenance is part of the "hobby" so they may not think of it as a chore, but I'm at a point where I don't really enjoy the sysops stuff as much anymore.

Plex Metadata Manager also allows you to import tmdb/imdb/tvdb/trakt lists which makes discovery a solved problem. You can have it import the top TV shows and movies currently playing which means it always has the latest releases.

The whole process is absurdly low maintenance once set up, as long as you have the storage space for it.

I assume you run these behind a VPN? Or is traffic obfuscation part of these packages?

I'm in a similar mindset, but I often buy physical media copies of such things instead of pirating them or even if I pirate them. I want to support the art, because I'd like more of it in the future.

Actually a recent trend is to not release DVD’s / blue rays because it keeps people on streaming services. I would love to buy a blu-ray of Hamilton the musical but Disney hasn’t made that available yet, despite being able to stream it on Disney+ since 2020.

Disney has never had a history of really being any good at physical media releases, but at this point it's starting to become a bit of a joke.

Even their 'higher end' 4k UHD media releases are missing features that Disney+ has, like Dolby Vision. https://www.flatpanelshd.com/focus.php?subaction=showfull&id...

Even when they do release physical media, they often don’t have the best version of a show available. For example, Disney 4k UHD physical discs offer HDR10 but Dolby Vision is limited to Disney+ for the same films as are the IMAX enhanced cuts (expanded aspect ratios).

A small exception to this is the newly announced Criterion edition of Wall-E, which includes Dolby Vision.

This is a moral question, but the answer doesn't really matter because there's a more important issue that preempts it, which is that you're ignoring a signal that if these these things aren't worth your money they're probably not worth your time either.

I'm no fan of the companies involved, or their policies, or even copyright law as it stands, but I've gotten to a point where if something entertaining isn't worth the price, I just don't buy it. I have no "right" to watch a TV show that some monopoly is infringing upon.

We all have so many things competing for our time and money, take advantage of that. If Rick & Morty isn't worth $40 to you, spend that $40 and those 20 minutes on something of better value.

And yes, I still watch TV, though far less (2-4 hours/week) than I did before I adopted this thought process. And yes, I do watch, and pay for, Rick and Morty :D

This is exactly what I'm currently working towards at home. Buying a few more hard drives and a new case for my current desktop to turn it into a local media server and cancelling all streaming services.

Someone tells me about a show, I add it to a list and then find it later. Throw it up on Jellyfin and I can watch it anywhere using Tailscale (based on Wireguard).

One of the instances that pushed me was "buying" a movie on NFB (the National Film Board of Canada). I could only watch the movie in their player in a browser. But, I had paid 12~20$ for the movie. Instead, I found a Firefox plugin to download the video file and I used Jellyfin to watch it. Being Canadian, lots of media is region-locked.

> Someone tells me about a show, I add it to a list and then find it later. Throw it up on Jellyfin and I can watch it anywhere using Tailscale (based on Wireguard).

Jellyfin FTW. I spent a half-dozen attempts over a dozen years trying to make XBMC work such that I was spending more time using it than messing with it (including just getting lost in their UI with an accidental button press and having to figure out how to get out of whatever unfortunate mode I'd become stuck in) and that anyone other than me was able and willing to use it. None succeeded. Painful set-up, painful UI (the themes don't help because they don't change the way it behaves), and you have a copy of XBMC on some XBMC-capable device attached to every TV you want to watch on.

Jellyfin solved all those problems.

Edit settings in a browser, leave the TV UI to do TV UI stuff. Clients on every major platform (even if the best ones are paid on some platforms—my paid tvOS app was entirely worth the could-find-it-in-the-couch-cushions amount of money it cost). Roku, Android, tvOS, whatever. Stream to any computer, tablet, or phone without installing anything. It's great.

I always ignore Prime Video because you can’t watch everything you see without subscribing to some channel.

They have a "free to me" toggle, does it work for you?

It does, and what I do is remember/bookmark the things that are in the weird channels, and then subscribe to one and cancel during the free period, and binge watch them all. muahahaha

its legally dubious but not morally ;)

pirated sports are even a better product. they dont have ads. so if i pay for sports on tv, im actually paying to watch ads?? it should be the other way around, and if it were, i would probably sign up. also give me all your money

Yeah, we paid for an extra sports package so my wife could watch her UK football. "WTF? There's huge ads taking up 20% of the screen? And every time we start (or restart) watching, we have to watch a minute of ads? Fuck that" was mostly my wife's response (possibly slightly less salty language, but that's how I remember it now).

She's gotten really good at finding various streams for the games she wants to watch, and just watches those, usually with no ads. To keep the system we had to watch them "legally" was... I think "only" $90/month - $60 something plus more for 'basic sports'. Oh... but you want HD? That's even more. And you need a new satellite dish. That will be an extra $200/installation.

But had we just been a new customer... I'm sure they'd have thrown the world at us for free for the first 3-6 months.

> There's huge ads taking up 20% of the screen?

I don't do sports, but I do remember that sky sports was on in a pub I was in recently with a football game. I don't remember seeing any onscreen adverts (there was the score, the time left, a sky sports logo etc in the corner which seemed fairly unintrusive -- certainly the score and time left are an essential viewing when I do watch England in the finals)

Obviously there's also the adverts around the actual ground, and on the players shirts, most of which seem to be for betting (when I was a kid my grandad put a couple of quid on the pools each week, but this modern stuff seems quite the scourge)

Now at half time sure, they are dripping with adverts -- despite I believe sky sports costing somewhere in the order of £600 a year, and advertising raising just 10% of Sky's revenue from the last annual report I saw.

Were you paying a legitimate provider?

She actually said “sod that” because she’s 103

How would pirated sports work without ads? It’s a live product, so it wouldn’t work in the standard *arr pipeline. Are there live streams with ads blacked out by a host?

Dunno exactly, but there's gotta be some original camera feeds from on the ground that don't have those. The ads we saw years ago were overlayed at the top of the screen, taking up around 20% of the vertical space. And... every time you started a stream, there were 1-2 minutes of the same stupid commercials (trucks, etc).

I have a guy who runs OBS and overlays fun graphics over ads and plays music over commercial audio. And all I need to watch is VLC - so it works on my phones, tablet, laptops, etc without any trouble.

He has a KoFi so you can donate and get a message on-screen too. Fun for rallying your fellow fans :)

You make the case for pay-per-view shows. I'm not an industry insider so I don't know how much revenue they may be leaving on the table from people like us who would have purchased an episode or season of something but not sign up for $14.99 per month. Right now I'm consolidating my streaming services. It's gotten to be too much and I simply don't watch enough to warrant the cost.

This is part of the reason I love Roku Search - you search for whatever show directly on the Roku and it tells you exactly what services you can stream it on for free or buy it on. Makes everything much more seamless

Actually you can get Rick and Morty legally in Canada via StackTV on Amazon channels for $12.99/month if you’re an Amazon Prime member.[1]

You can also watch episodes in the Global TV app, but you do have to have a subscription to Global TV to watch those, though it is often included in basic packages that start at $25/month ($15 for Alt TV) as CRTC mandated that channels be made available a la carte with a cheaper “Starter” package.[2]

That said the cheapest (legal) way to get Rick & Morty is to record it yourself over-the-air for free given that Global is a nationally broadcast TV channel, for now. Edit: Actually, I’m not sure this is still the case.[3]

1. https://www.adultswim.ca/where-to-watch/

2. https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/television/program/alacarte.htm

3. https://blog.fagstein.com/2018/11/13/corus-asks-crtc-to-shut...

I mean... this answer is probably the best illustration of GP's point... Talk about customer hostility...

(the companies/pricing being customer hostile, not you of course)

Yup, and this is just for a single show... another show can have a different combination of hoops. For a while it felt like streaming services were seriously competing with the convenience of torrents, but I just can't be bothered with the mess it's become, the dark UX patterns, the anti-linux... the anti-user. I realised that when I started torrenting shows again that i technically had paid for that the streaming services had lost it again.

Oh the hostility is definitely still present despite (perhaps because of) the CRTC’s regulations. For example, Bell successfully lobbied the CRTC to mandate that you can only buy TV from your ISP if watching on a home ISP cable package. This doesn’t apply to Crave/Netflix/OTT, but if you want to a-la-carte buy a Global TV channel you’ll have to buy it via your ISP, often Bell.

There is definitely a need for things to change yet even in the land of the free (USA), there are talks of trying to “bundle” together OTT streaming as the next wave of getting you to pay more to watch the same content.[1]

There is some good news though. Often when you subscribe to internet there are limited two-year promotions that offer streaming TV at no extra cost. Unfortunately, these plans often don’t include PVR function and also don’t include the ability to skip commercials when playing on demand, but luckily a number of on-demand streaming methods can still be tricked by adblock such as Pi Hole, in my experience. Not all of them, of course.

1. https://www.wsj.com/articles/streaming-service-bundle-cable-...

It’s customer hostile for them to expect you to pay for stuff?

> so to watch a 20 minutes animated show I’d have to take a +40$ subscription.

You can buy season 6 on Apple TV and Google play for $19 according to this site: https://www.justwatch.com/ca/tv-show/rick-and-morty/season-6

If there is no way to give money for a service I have no problems with getting it via other means -- when Discovery season 4 came out it wasn't available in the UK, so I downloaded it. A week later after the backlash they put it up for sale, and I spent the £20 or whatever to buy the series.

I have no problems paying for netflix, disney, prime, and now paramount plus. I subscribe to apple TV for for all mankind, then I stop when it's finished.

What I won't do though is pay to watch adverts, that was Cable/Sky TV's market, not interested. Sell me the program and I'll buy it, try to include adverts and I'll get it elsewhere.

+1 - Another pirate user here. I have a Prime & NetFlix account but I purposefully never use it and still prefer to download pirated copies of their show (mainly for better video quality, convenience of offline viewing in any device and most importantly protecting my privacy). I have no doubt that there is no stopping advertisement on streaming platform and it will equal the level on television once it becomes normalised, and will be even worse because it will BE accompanied with more datamining of our personal data and tracking. Many smart TVs are already using the built-in webcam and microphone to determine how you watch ads, and all this intrusive method of monitoring is only going to get worse.

Unless you have an antiquated internet connection, you should be seeing 4k HDR video. A movie in 4k is anywhere from 10-30 gigs and often you can’t find all content at this quality level. So, in theory using the service directly should give you better video quality unless you’re waiting to download 5-15 gigs per hour of content you want the option to watch.

To clarify, it's about quality and file size - I find that some pirates do a better job of offering high quality videos with better compression (and thus smaller file size). Especially if they use more modern codecs like HEVC. (And right now, I don't really care about 4k quality or Dolby vision). The ability to watch it offline (without any nonsensical 24-48 hour limitation) in any device is the real pleasure (I used to be able to connect my iPad to my TV to watch some series on Prime, but they annoyingly disabled support for that).

But as I also mentioned, all the above pales in comparison to their plan to spy and profile us to serve us ads, when the very reason that people have dumped TV and pay a premium for streaming platform is to avoid advertisements.

This. I do have a Netflix Subscription because of family and I just got tired and got back to downloading stuff.

Now I just have a folder where I can find everything fine, and double click stuff.

I'd personally like to see a sort of 'least favoured nation'-type deal where copyright holders are obligated to offer their show at the lowest cost to all streaming services. Streaming services get to compete on value added, producers get their pay, consumers get their fix. Maybe allow a 6 month exclusivity or something similar.

It seems like a pipe dream but it shouldn't, we (the demos) are supposed to be the ones to principally profit from copyright.

Also, there's a LOT of illegal streaming services now that are much more convenient. They offer all shows and movies from any platform, better interface than Netflix and lower subscription cost, if any — often they are completely free and are monetized with ads.

May it's something that is blocked or just not so popular in first world countries, but most of my Russian acquaintances use these services almost exclusively.

> And even if I was swimming in money, it's often easier to just download the shows I want and watch them on Plex/Jellyfin than trying to navigate the (often ad-riddled) interfaces of the various platforms and finding where the content I want is.

I'm not quite there yet, but even when i already pay for the service (for example Amazon) i'm tempted to pirate it. My local Plex server is so much more usable than Amazon's terrible streaming app. Amazon's app freezes frequently for me, gets loading widgets stuck overlaying the movie/show, etc.

I'm debating finding a way to download shows i pay for and then watch them locally. A bit of a grey area between paying and pirating, but i'm done with their crap UXs.

I'll avoid pirating as long as i can because i make plenty to justify not pirating; but i will gladly solve their terrible UX problems myself if i am able. I am paying for it after all. TOS be damned.

I'm also Canadian and recently cancelled prime. It is weird how amazon prime video offers Canadian programming to Americans, but want me to buy an additional subscription to watch a Canadian show in Canada??

I'm with you on this one, between the price hikes, geo-restrictions, etc streaming is rapidly declining.

> don't have a streaming service in Canada

This is all I need to justify my piracy. If you're not going to let me pay for something or force me into bullshit like needing cable to sign up for a streaming service then I'll gladly watch what I want to watch without paying.

and don't even get me started on C-11...

Why not just buy the Rick and morty episodes or seasons, for example, on iTunes/appletv?

I don't know how Apple sells media, but if you "buy" content on Amazon, you're still subject to licensing terms that Amazon negotiated, which often means you don't have permanent access to said content. Someone sued Amazon for this: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6882808-Caudel-v-Ama...

Then what? If your disk is full and apple removes it from their collection you can't download it anymore.

It just doesn't make any sense.. Just sell me an NFT and use that to access ANY quality or media of that publication. Then I can also just resell my NFT, just like we would with videos, dvd, and games

So is mine, but I cut the cord 10 years ago, when my Internet + TV bill hit $250. Cable bills basically keep going up until you leave.

Now, because of inflation, $100 is not even what it was 10 years ago, so I am not sure why people are getting torqued about this. It's still a very good deal, considering the quality and amount of entertainment that you get, which is light years better compared to back when Facebook was still cool.

FULL CIRCLE! haha.

People used to have this crazy bundle of streaming services called "cable TV" People started to complain that it was getting too expense to pay $150+(even with commercials) a month when you only watch a dozen of the hundreds of channels at most. Then came streaming services. People were thrilled they could only pay for one channel at a time for 10-15$ per month.... problem solved.

It's contradictory to claim they're monopolies but also complain that you would have to subscribe to multiple services to get what you want.

Most of those are without commitment, why not round-robin between them every month ?

I'm back in pirate land now that Bleach is on Disney plue and not crunchy roll. Beginning of the end for crunchy roll, the last service that really had everything in its market space

I wish Summertime Rendering would get out of Disney Plus jail. I've thought about pirating it multiple times.

Western shows get more formulaic by the day and anecdotally most of my friends that watch anime watch 98% anime and 2% occasional popular show on netflix.

Anime fans will be more likely to drop non-anime streaming services in favor of additional anime streaming services. e.g. trade Hulu for HiDive

I'm in Nicaragua and have a $10/mo. HBO Max subscription which includes Rick and Morty.

hbo max

I like how you use one difficult example (Rick and Morty) to justify a wholesale move back into piracy.

I use a Roku. It has all the apps. Sometimes I forget what show is in which app. JustWatch is helpful. I can legally buy Rick and Morty season 6 from iTunes. I’m laying in bed and could buy it in about 15 seconds.

If there was no such thing as piracy and streaming services were free then dealing with all the different services would be a mild nuisance. IMHO people pirate primarily because of money. Everything else is just a weak attempt to morally justify something they know is wrong.

At the very least pay for most of your content. Don’t pirate everything just because that one anime from Japan you love is hard to legally pay for.

> I like how you use one difficult example (Rick and Morty) to justify a wholesale move back into piracy.

Ah yes, the ol' blame the user.

> streaming services were free then dealing with all the different services would be a mild nuisance

Sure.

> IMHO people pirate primarily because of money

The biggest video games are all free.

> At the very least pay for most of your content.

Because of piracy, all the streaming services operate like free to play games. Disney+ gets $80/yr from payers. Not bad. Compare to Clash of Clans which is closer to $10-15/yr (per payer).

They're doing a good job. I am not 100% sure what the payers are paying for. Lack of technical knowledge to pirate? You're right, nobody who would know how to do this would pay.

You have a Roku and you do not use Roku search? lol. It will tell you exactly where the show is and then let you open the app in one click :-)

Apple moving into Ads is a huge systemic risk for the company.

No one will trust them again if they make one major mistake, and Ads are a minefield for upcoming regulations.

They have so much money and financing available, instead of being greedy, they should focus on hardware.

>No one will trust them again.

As much as I want this to happen. It wont. Just look at the spin given out by either Apple's PR or Apple Apologist:

"Apple were never against Ads. Steve Jobs made iAds." Meanwhile completely forgetting Tim Cook, 2014-2015. "Apple is not in the Ads Business." - In the Context of why you should choose Apple.

"Apple Ads are privacy focused and they do not track you." Cough. They are only personalised.

"Apple is moving away from China." ( No they are not ). "And has been planning to do so for a while." ( No they didn't )

And literally all the Fans reading Appleinsider, Macrumors, 9to5Mac believes in it. As well as all the YouTube repeating "THE SAME" information over and over again.

>And literally all the Fans reading Appleinsider, Macrumors, 9to5Mac believes in it.

It's a common belief even on this site. I see it parroted all the time.

The magic has left the building. No one at the top cares enough about the end user experience and what Apple represents to say "No, we make money selling great products not selling ads".

This company will be completely unrecognizable in 10 years, product people are no longer holding the reigns.

I had a Pixel A-series phone last year. I was ambivalent at first, but was quickly surprised at how much easier it was to use. It also felt less intrusive and gave me more ability to control notifications.

This is coming from someone who hates Google products.

This year, I decided to go back to an iPhone. This has been my experience so far:

- When you disable notifications for an app, expect to be asked inside the app itself to enable notifications. Every. Single. Time.

- Expect some apps to hijack control. Spotify is the worst offender. I plug my phone into the car, will be in the middle of setting my course in Apple Maps, then get rudely interrupted as Spotify forces itself into the foreground after connecting.

- In general, everything takes multiple taps to complete in iOS. It's just such a time suck to have to tap tap tap tap away at something that should be just one or two taps, at most.

- Inability to customize apps. I use a third-party app to browse Reddit. The only way I can open Reddit links from the browser is to hold-tap, share, select 3rd party app. Just more tap swipe tap swipe tap...

- The built-in mail and calendar apps are garbage

- Safari is garbage and can't be replaced with a true 3rd party browser

- A buggy Do Not Disturb functionality that will randomly leave itself on outside scheduled hours

The first two points could arguably be blamed on the third-party apps themselves. But I would counter-argue that it's Apple's responsibility to punish companies that actively diminish the user experience by finding ways to skirt around iOS settings. If I turn off notifications, it should mean that the first time I'm asked. An app should not beg me over and over and over again to turn them on. I said no, don't ask again.

Apps should not be allowed to hijack control, either.

If Apple isn't going to focus on improving the user experience, and if they're going to start down the road of advertising, I guess I wonder what delineates them from anyone else in the mobile space. Now they're just a buggy, expensive interruption machine.

Ironically, I had more control over my Pixel (with stock Android) and the way it behaved than I've ever had with the iPhone.

Not sure that masses of people will no longer trust Apple due to a move into advertising. Many people still use products from companies that have continually done things that are against the interests of their users.

Now, I do agree that it is a systemic risk to the company. Ultimately, businesses/people/organizations respond to incentives, and for businesses that is usually revenue. If your revenue comes from your customers, you're more likely to be aligned to the needs of your customers and try to meet their needs.

However, with advertising, your customer is the advertiser, not the end-user. Additionally, your end user probably doesn't want advertising, so your incentives are now significantly misaligned with your end-user. Maybe that is fine for the near term, but each small decision that's pro-advertiser and anti-user compounds over time and eventually, creates a more user-hostile product.

Also, as an aside, I expect the stock price drives decisions way more than how much money Apple has in reserve.

I wish I could upvote this 100 times. Seems short-sighted to the point of company malpractice.

Introducing a massive conflict of interest into their business model cannot possibly work out well in the long-term.

They already had an ad product before https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAd

Ads make any product shittier. So it is systemic risk - because degrading the experience means that they are turning into more expensive android.

Many people are locked into the eco-system with all their devices. You can't just "stop" using iPhone / iPad / Macbook / iCloud / loose all your AppStore purchases, etc. etc..

>No one will trust them again if they make one major mistake

They have the advantage that all other competitors at that scale (FB, Google, etc.) are worse and even more desperate for ad revenue...

Apple lets you pay for so called premium content. So this is some sort of black mailing: ad free, if you pay more.

They took a look at YouTube premium, that’s all.

There is a single point of failure in their hardware stack (TSMC). It makes business sense to try to diversify their revenue a bit.

I don't think consumers will care or notice who is serving their ads. Google and Facebook have absorbed all the worst that regulators can throw at them, paid their fines and are still swimming in cash. Apple can navigate all the precedent they've set and utilize their dominating vertical integration to sell ads in the markets they own: AppleTV, iTunes/Podcasts, mobile apps. They'll add $10B to their revenue without breaking a sweat.

Out of curiosity, what upcoming regulations?

I’ve wondered recently if we’re going to see in the next 10 or 20 years a split generation of people who are susceptible to ads. I heard anecdotally someone talking about his kids who weren’t exposed to ads much because they (as a family) buy the ad free experiences - when they did see an ad, it was extremely effective and they were explaining to their father how much they needed this thing.

Alternatively, are the poorer kids going to be the ones inoculated against advertising because they are exposed to it constantly?

Do you really think it works that way? People might develop banner blindness, but subconsciously they are being bombarded with messages anyway. They are being trained to consume, to associate the sites they like to visit with certain brands, pushed products by influencers...

If ads didn't work, companies wouldn't be paying billions of dollars per year. The only way to fight it is by being vigilant and block them at the source and become truly allergic to them.

In a way, becoming allergic to the ads is the cure -- you need to immediately recognize the toxicity that stems from the emotional (rather than logical) appeals and the manipulative tactics companies use to undermine your own happiness and convince you to buy their products.

At this point I can't even go to a sports bar for a drink because being bombarded by that many ads is a legitimately stressful experience. If I'm visiting a family member who leaves the TV on in their living room, I ask if we can turn it off -- or mute it and leave the room. But I don't view these as problems: I'm recognizing a negative thing in my reality and trying to cut it out. I imagine it like a bug problem: I won't go to a bar where cockroaches are crawling all over the walls, or hang out in a room where a bunch of cockroaches are nesting in the corner. Ads are the same thing, but you have to be much vigilant to keep them out of your life because so many people have gotten used to them.

I hope folks start educating their kids at an early age to loathe ads. Middle schools and high schools ought to dissect ads in a dedicated (health?) class that showcases the manipulation tactics companies use to control viewers. But parents can do the same thing, knowing that school systems take literal centuries to adapt to new technology.

I do think it kind of works that way. Take a look at who is affected by blatantly fake news. It’s the people that grew up in an era where there were just a few “legitimate” news sources. People who grew up with misinformation just laugh it off.

Not saying fake news has no effect on young people but it’s definitely a huge difference.

Perhaps not. my kids are ad-free (8 and 11), and when we visit family with a tv, at first they laugh at the ads and wonder why people fall for them, or what the ad is even for. They just turn the tv off and do something else when the ad interrupts what they were watching at a critical moment (dad, get this show later ok? I can't stand seeing that ad again).

Also, many ads now are like insider jokes, trying to poke a certain market.

I notice people who are used to it can just stare at the tv during the ads, even during a conversation. They go to the bathroom at the recap part of the show. I think TV ads are crafted to create a partial attention.

Anecdotally... since that's all we have right now anyhow... my kids grew up in a similar situation, where I paid money for things and refused to pay money for ad-laden content, and they're almost oblivious to the ads. So far the only ads that have resulted in me being asked for things are things we would have ended up with anyhow. E.g., they both played and enjoyed Mario vs. Rabbids on the Switch, and they ended up seeing an ad for it and were interested. But I already knew about it and it was going to end up purchased anyhow. (Though I've told them I am likely to wait for it to go on sale.) I have not been bombarded with a laundry list of requests when they go to the grandparents (where they end up watching hours of TV, alas) or something.

(Note I set the bar at "I was asked for something." I'm not claiming they're 100% mathematically immune to ads, anymore than I or anyone else is. Just that it wasn't like a forest fire charging through rich ground for the first time.)

Given the way our society is becoming more and more ad-focused, I have started to think that marketing should be taught to more people earlier. My first marketing class was a 300-level elective in my junior year of college, and it was invaluable in understanding the subtle ways advertisement is meant to reel you in, and how nobody is truly unaffected by advertisement, no matter how much they think they are.

Anecdotal, but my 17yo is currently taking a marketing class in high school. I don’t not how much media literacy that includes.

Unless they're using uBlock of course.

Anecdotal data but I do not watch ads.

When I occasionally see one (usually at restaurants or such), it's.. weird? People in ads don't talk like real people. The timing and intonation and facial expressions are all off.

I think my lack of exposure to ads has made them feel very alien to me.

I know its anecdotal, but I grew up only having air channels (4 in total, all state-owned) that had crazy long ad-spaces, something like 15 minute intervals of _just_ ads, and 10 min of contents (series with 28 minute episodes had an hour of airtime here, half their runtime was ads). I completely filter them out, always have.

When I watch TV (seeing a boxing match, or a movie when at my in-laws' house), and an advertisement space is coming up, the TV magically turns much louder, blasting some jingle and colorful bursts, but I automatically stand up to go to the loo or get drinks or something.

With streaming services, it's something else entirely. I must skip them, I get this discomfort in me, an urge to make the obvious text-to-speech ad that was auto-generated to tick my keywords shut up immediately. I wonder if it is because its targeted to me directly, or if it is because I have the ability to make it shut up, that I get this boiling sensation in my head when they come up.

Still, I'd never pay for something like Spotify Premium or Youtube Premium just to get rid of them. Even if it were just a buck, I wouldn't do it.

If Apple becomes an ad company, I'll have to seriously reconsider my commitment to Apple.

The only reason I moved away from Android was Google. I had no real complaints from the phones or Android user-experience itself.

Too bad you didn't know that you can use Android without Google. Checkout grapheneos.org or lineageos.org.

Also, /e/ os*

I mean, what are you really going to do? Apple has $4b ad revenue and you aren't moving. I'm sure just like now you'll have a reason "oh it's not actually X" or whatever.

People make all these dramatic commitments but they never go through with it, or they leave out the true caveats that would weaken the statement.

Based on what little privacy research we have, between Apple and Google, neither is privacy-friendly, but at least Apple is more so than Google.

That is to say, I don’t see why one would move when the alternative is worse.

What phone would you get?

I'll just go back to Android. If my only options are adware companies, I might as well get the cheaper product.

How about https://puri.sm/products/librem-5 or https://pine64.org/pinephone?

I might be wrong, but it feels like this will negatively affect their other products in the long term. Brand reputation goes both ways.

Of course, in KPI spreadsheets Apple TV will bring more revenue and that's what counts. Slower growth of iPhone sales will be blamed on global recession.

“The last bastion is Apple TV. Apple is going to be a very good ad experience with probably a low ad load. They’re already actually very diversified in terms of revenue streams so there’s less pressure to fit lots of ads.”

If it's true now, it won't be later on.

I hate how Apple is becoming increasingly an advertising company.

Every company, once it reaches a certain size, only can grow materially through certain venues: government contracts, financing, advertising, etc.

True, but Apple has so many interesting spaces it could grow into through M&A activity as opposed to putting ads in its TV service. Off the top of my head, wearables and gaming are just two that could promote a ton of genuine growth as opposed to promoting pirating by introducing ads.

There are plenty of whip-smart folks at Apple, surely they know people adopted streaming services due to lack of ads, and have the ability to pirate stuff pretty easily.

Why do the largest companies need to grow any further? Maybe they should not? The world does not grow.

What's interesting is how this all worked out for them, whether it's serendipitous or purposeful.

Conventional consumer data collection relies on users coming to the collection mechanism i.e. spending time on a website or interactions on social media.

Apple is poised to withstand many privacy protection measures because their collection mechanism is in millions of peoples' hands and pockets. iPhone users are providing high-resolution data to their platform. The accuracy of your personality profile and related data are nicely packaged and easy to convert into highly targeted advertising.

The idea that Tim Cook is Batman is pretty far fetched.

He isn't (but it would be cool if he was).

However, it does seem fairly likely that he's a bit of a pushover, politically. I hate to beat a dead horse, but this is the guy who doubled-down on China while even Google was appalled by how they were using personal data to hunt dissidents. He's not Batman, but he's also not powerless to stop the incredible human suffering caused through Apple's deliberate labor partners and political allies. If Tim Cook had the gall to start moving away from China 10 years ago, maybe he'd have a shot at being even better than Bruce Wayne.

All of this is to say, Tim Cook is certainly not going to stand up for your data privacy when national interests step in. The best he can do is encrypt your device and give you a copy of th- I mean, your keys.

“Incredible human suffering”? This doesn’t seem like a serious comment.

I mean, Apple has put Lidar into a decent percentage of iPhones over the past few years. Wifi and cellular signals can be used in a similar way to generate low-resolution maps of the world around your phone. And there's of course cameras on the front and back.

All running on closed source Apple software, with no physical on/off switch for those data collection pathways... or even the phone itself, which never fully shuts down. So maybe Tim Cook really is Big Brother.

There are no data pathways for aggregating that data. It just gets used by apps.

How does your comment relate to my original one?

I have a question:

Does the current state our attention economy and advertising ecosystem play a major role in the destruction of our planet, depletion of resources, and perhaps the rise in depression through hyper-consumerism?

I see it more as, where business is going these days simply isn't compatible with the real progress we see on stuff like Star Trek.

Some examples of real progress: automation, leisure time, low or no taxes on labor, residual income for everyone, longer lifespans, having children without fear of the world ending in a few years, radical inclusion, decommodification, politics without corruption, ending sexism/racism/agism/ableism/etc, renewable (free or nearly free) energy, free education, free or nearly free basic resources of life like food/shelter, free or nearly free medical care, a gradually lowering retirement age as tech improves..

Some examples of phantom progress: advertising, collecting rents, converting unsustainable resources to capital, profiting from externalities, exploitation of the commons for private gain, charging interest, profiting from the labor of others, paying dividends, exclusivity, service industries, lobbying, divisive politics, monopoly/duopoly, patents/copyrights, unjust law enforcement (unequally applied), celebrity, royalty, dynastic wealth, patriarchy, for-profit insurance, service fees on the transfer of money, forcing the indigent and elderly to work to survive..

Seen through this lens, the larger and less competitive companies grow, the more they impede real progress. We currently live under the largest companies in the history of the world, exploiting more people than at any other time except perhaps during colonialism/slavery. Which is now returning as neocolonialism as the rest of the world catches up to the developed world, so without a cheap labor force, we exploit ourselves.

I only see one outcome without some kind of spiritual revolution: the gradual loss of income and buying power for working people, following a curve like Moore's Law where access to resources halves every 5-10 years as we're steadily outcompeted by the tech of moneyed interests, until money loses most of its value sometime in the 2030s and menial labor grows to fill the entirety of our waking lives.

If Apple truly wanted to innovate, it could for example lead by building its products in the US at standard rates for labor and resources.

Since Apple can't or won't do that, it turns to phantom tech to maintain profits as its ability to innovate for the common good (its original vision) continues to diminish.

I think it's a harder stretch to say it plays a major role in the destruction of the planet and depletion of resources but in my totally non-expert opinion I am positive that the rise in depression is coupled with it.

Advertising has always been a thing but advances in the last 50-70 years in tech and human sciences has turned the problem up to 11. Increasingly every little move we make and thing we say is recorded, analyzed, run through an algorithm, then used to trick the lizard part of our brain into opening our wallet.

Humans were not meant to be under CONSTANT psychological assault like this and if I were king I would outlaw marketing departments and severely restrict advertising across the board.

I think the argument would be that prior to advertising as we know it today, people bought things because they needed them, and at a substantially lower level of consumption. For example you might need a pair of work boots, walking shoes, and dress shoes. Advertisements for 19th century shoes generally focused on their features, like quality, comfort, fit or value.

Born from WWI's propaganda was the idea of using communication to convince someone of something against their interest or for your policy objectives. For example, all x are monsters and you should risk your life to go fight them, using emotional responses and conceptual associations. “make the world safe for democracy.”[1] After the war it was realized these same techniques could be used to make people buy things they didn't need. Shoes are often now sold by convincing you they will make you more athletic, cool or similar self image. As a result there is now no limit on the number of shoes that a person "needs".

This consumer culture[3], and was somewhat a conscious decision in response to the challenge faced by business from the ability to produce outstripping people's demands or overproduction. Consumers were trained via advertising, in order to keep production and growth humming, at the unseen expense of overconsumption. From Paul M. Mazur's :American Prosperity: Its Causes and Consequences" in 1928,

"Advertising is an educational force. If effective, desires increase, standards of living are raised, purchases are made; purchases create production, production creates purchasing power, and the circle can be made complete if desire is at this point strong enough to convert that power into actual purchases.

Of course there exists theoretically that danger point when consumption has reached its limit. Such a breaking point is probably non-existent.[2]

[1]https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-woodrow-wilsons-p...

[2]https://quoteinvestigator.com/2021/01/21/desires/

[3]https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/a-brief-history-of-consum...

I'll just say that not every talking point is directly related to every other talking point.

No, those are mostly caused by having over 7 billion people and improving quality of life.

This looks like classic bait and switch in the tech industry. "Trust us, we are only interested in selling you hardware and maybe some services that protect your privacy." Once the people are sufficiently captured and wires deeply embedded, gradually change the terms and networks.

I'm wondering if this is going to be the start of a lower cost tier, or perhaps raising the price to watch without ads? I don't think Apple could get away with normal ads on Apple TV without an option to get rid of them, even if it's a light touch.

This is inevitable for basically every media service whether its streaming music like Spotify, connected tv like Hulu, etc. You'll have a premium tier with no ads, perhaps a less ads but still some ads semi premium tier, and then an ads supported tier that is either free + ads or some small fee + ads. I know it's verboten to say this on Hacker News but it plays out this way over and over because some % of the consumers (read most of them) are actually okay with the trade off of having ads to pay less or pay not at all. This is even more pronounced outside the US where some markets are 99% ad supported. People should have the choice to pay for an ad free experience but its also okay for others to choose an ad supported one too.

The issue is when there is no ad-free tier.

Cable TV started out ad-free. The content was paid for by subscribers. But that wasn't enough. Now cable TV is just as ad-ridden as broadcast TV.

Even Spotify will randomly shove an ad in my face when all I want to do is navigate to my playlist, and I'm a paying subscriber. I hate the way it interrupts my flow so much that I'm probably going to cancel them in the next month or so.

My girlfriend just canceled her Hulu last night because they just raised the rates on even the ad-supported tier.

I feel like it's inevitable now that all streaming services are going to add an ad-based tier. Initially it will just be a cheaper option and you'll still be able to pay for an ad-free experience, but I am concerned that eventually the ad-free option will go away. It probably depends on how much money the services can make from advertising per subscriber per month - but it seems plausible that ads could be worth more per subscription to the streaming services than the $10ish dollars a month most of them charge.

The sad thing that sticks in my head is that, if you’re the person who could afford the higher tier ad-free experience, you’re also worth more to the advertisers than people who can’t afford ad-free.

so if ad-based free tiers are profitable at all, then they are going to be more profitable than the paid subscriptions, and ad-free options will go away.

pavlov suggests companies now just sell the high value ad-free users data so they can be targeted by ads elsewhere in their lives while the source service remains (technically) ad free, which makes a sickening amount of sense.

See, I think they'll creep ads into the "adless" tier, and it will become a "less ads" tier in reality.

Paramount+ already does this with their "adless" tier, it has ads. Unskippable ads.

Ideally, that would qualify for action from FTC or whatever government agency is responsible for businesses advertising one thing and selling another.

They'll just call it the "Ad Light" tier then.

That has precedent (including with YouTube and Kindles), and I always assume that the platform owner did the math.

But it's interesting to me because I'd guess that the people with disposable income and willing to spend it on luxuries (including not seeing ads)... would be among the most valuable targets of consumer product/service advertisers.

That's why the streaming platform can sell those users' data at a premium to a platform like Facebook. When the platform does reach that user with an ad placement somewhere else, that spot is valuable.

They've done a ton of free content already, like Baseball or Jon Stewart and if I had to bet they're rushing to put ads on all the free access they're giving. Whether or not we'll see an ad-supported tier depends on how popular their other hobbled tiers are. The Apple Music paid tier but only with access through Siri comes to mind.

Lower cost tier and Apple? Nope. Just normal (very high) cost and maybe much highier cost. IMHO

iPhone SE, iPad, and the MacBook Air all disagree with you. I feel like this is the cheapest Apple products have ever been. My grandma had a colorful $2000 Apple laptop in early 2000s and you can get a MacBook Air now for $1000. That's a heck of a price decline without figuring inflation.

I wouldn't call any of those low cost.

Only relative to other Apple products might they be considered "cheaper".

Chromebooks start around $150, and perform well at around $400 and are perfect for the grandma use-case

I was pretty surprised at how shit ChromeOS' accessibility features are, when my elderly dad got one, considering their market is basically young kids and old people.

I wasn't very clear. She had a mac laptop around 1998 or so.

Apple has finally lost touch, it was bound to happen eventually. Ads will seriously hurt their reputation as a premium product. The ads will metastasize and spread from product to product, tainting everything they touch.

This will make a good case study on why a company shouldn't get too greedy about 10 years from now.

When did "planning" become synonymous with doing something "quietly," as though it's somehow underhanded, deceptive, or nefarious? Just because Apple didn't respond to Digiday's stupid request for comment doesn't mean they're up to no good. Companies very rarely make their roadmaps public or hold press conferences for initiatives they're working on.

Ads are often underhanded, deceptive, or nefarious so any plans to add them can be considered as such by extension.

I’m investing in a media server, hard drives and a seedbox.

Good investment. Would recommend you set up raid 1 for the hard drives if you can afford it, single redundancy is very nice to have. I'd also recommend jellyfin over plex or any of the other big proprietary players out there. Jellyfin just works, and has a pretty good list of plugins for metadata.

The biggest drawback I've found is that I did have to make an account with opensubtitles to have automatic subtitles, and if you try to load too many pieces of media at once you may run into the 50 api's downloads per day limit for free accounts.

Got jellyfish up and running! Thanks

or just pay for put.io

Doesn't that achieve the same thing as a seedbox but with less control and higher cost?

Seedboxes are great when used with private trackers, but the trackers usually have very strict rules about which clients you can use, how long you must seed, etc.

I'd never heard of this service. Seems nice. Do you use it yourself, and how do you like it?

I stopped using Prime Video because of the stupid 5s forced ads in the beginning. It will be a serious turn off to the Apple ecosystem if they do the same.

Et tu, Apple? Although I predict that in true Apple style, they’ll somehow manage to make ads fashionable in 3-5 years.

I'm currently reading Tim Wu's "The Attention Merchants" about the history of advertising and can't recommend it enough. It's not a happy or encouraging story, however.

This feels inevitable. When you chase growth infinitely ads becoming more appealing over time.

running ads with that amount of content is a no-brainer and it's pretty much going to be required to keep it profitable. I wouldn't be surprised if apple TV+ is losing money, I've seen $1B tossed around online.

20+ years now of not watching a single video ad (since the TiVo). I will never ever go back to that insanity. I'm unlikely to hoist the jolly rodger again as my internet connection is tied to my income. Honestly, I know that the day will eventually come when these parasites will eliminate ad-free streaming and ad-blocking on the web. At which point I will raise my middle finger as a flag and tackle my neglected reading list.

Obligatory Bill Hicks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHEOGrkhDp0

Any reason you wouldn't use a seedbox? I'm strongly considering one since streaming service Balkanization started, and price increases are only making it more tempting. All I have to do is cancel one service to justify it, after all.

You are asking me why I wouldn't pay for a service provided by dubious entities that is primarily used for activities that are illegal?

There are a lot of happy seedbox users out there -- I know quite a few. The companies sometimes go belly-up, but it's not like they're doing something truly repugnant like human trafficking or stealing from vulnerable people. They're just running a VM and providing an IP and not asking you any questions about what you're doing.

No judgement from me. Dumb laws deserve disobedience - cannabis wouldn't have become legalized if people didn't break the law. Personally though, I have decided that I am past the life stage where I wanna practice civil disobedience.

Yeah, there's really no way I'm going back to a cable tv style ad hellscape. Before subscription streaming services I bought a lot of physical media so I might go back to that or the digital equivalent.

I've personally gone back to reading more books instead of watching more TV, and it has been more fulfilling. It doesn't work for everything I used to watch - but for my main consumption of fiction, I now prefer books/audiobooks over TV. On the plus side, the artists are supported more directly with book sales rather than circuitous route of payment involved in subscription-based streaming. It also reduces the surface area where I can be exposed to ads.

How much of this is tied to facebook being shut out of targeted ads?

Really not looking forward to this -- this is a serious brand risk for apple to step into more advertising.

I do not like apple at all and do not use their products and even I recognize this is a dumb move. They have tricked people into their walled gardens for years now and this might be the thing that finally wakes people up to the fact they are manipulating them into apple only services

If this move proves profitable (likely will) shareholders will pressure Apple to move further into ads. I wonder what an alternative ecosystem would look like.

Does anybody have experience with Fairphone/PinePhone/Librem as their daily driver? I don't necessarily need all the apps, but the common ones like WhatsApp, Amazon, Uber, Doordash, etc. Also, which wearables work best with open source phones?

I suspect this will fail, because Apple is fundamentally against providing the level of data large ad buyers want.

We already saw this happen with iAd.

Competing services should ironically be somewhat happy about this news. Apples entry into this space might help to legitimize it and quell at least some of the outrage.

<company> is quietly <action> has been a trend for some time, love it!

If I can continue to pay to avoid ads I will be ok with it.

If News+ is any indication, your outlooks are bleak:

> Why are there ads in Apple News Plus news feed? Just subscribed to Apple News Plus. I am surprised to see ads in the Apple News Plus feed. Please remove these ads for paying subscribers. I realize that ads in articles that Apple can't control, but it is insulting to have them in the feed itself.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252017203

No longer watching TV... Going back to reading and news...

More like (cr)Apple!

Bold prediction: if ads on paid streaming services become the norm, there will be a renaissance of piracy because it will once again offer the superior user experience.

It's inevitable. Paying for cable TV was once pitched to the American public as a reprieve from ads. Now, virtually all cable TV channels have more ads than than broadcast television had in the first place.

Why does this meme always come up in any discussion when it only takes a little bit of research (if you aren’t old enough to remember) to know this was never true?

Cable TV was first pitched as a method to get broadcast TV - with ads - in places that couldn’t get broadcast. Cable companies put big towers up and rebroadcasted network TV - with ads.

Then HBO came along as an ad free premium channel and it still is.

Then the “Superstations” like TBS out of Atlanta came along. Which were always ad supported and started broadcasting nationally.

Then the first cable channels came along like MTV, Lifetime, ESPN, USA. Not only dud they have ads from day one, they had infomercials to fill out the time when they didn’t have programming to show.

There has never been a time since the invention of cable TV in the US that it was ad free.

Thanks for mentioning this. I’ll admit I believed the meme.

From a 1981 NYT article

> Although cable television was never conceived of as television without commercial interruption, there has been a widespread impression - among the public, at least -that cable would be supported largely by viewers' monthly subscription fees.

https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/26/arts/will-cable-tv-be-inv...

> Then the first cable channels came along like MTV, Lifetime, ESPN, USA.

MTV was actually a ripoff of QUBE channel C-1 program "Sight on Sound" which didn't air advertisements the way we think of them. Instead record labels could pay to have their music videos prioritized or to run giveaway contests.

QUBE also lead to the creation of Nickelodeon (Which itself was ad-free for several years). QUBE channel C-3 "Pinwheel" was the first cable channel made for only young children, and was spun off into Nickelodeon when QUBE went defunct.

The QUBE T channels were just cable links to conventional OTA broadcast television channels (T for television).

QUBE C channels (C for community) did not have ad breaks. Instead there would be sponsored giveaways or sponsored shows which eventually lead to the current practice of infomercials. Except with QUBE the segments were live and viewers could push one of 5 buttons on the remote to interact with the program. For example in a sponsored cosmetics segment viewers could vote on whether the next topic would be one of 5 options, lipstick, mascara, etc. Sight on Sound would ask some questions about current viewer demographics (are you male/female. Are you in age group ABCDE. How many people are watching right now), the dj would say it was to play music matching the current demographic, but it was mainly collected to give metrics to sponsored segments or to wait for an appropriate time to play a sponsored segment.

But what most urban people considered "cable" at the time would be the QUBE P-channels. P for Pay. Unlike other pay channels at the time like HBO, the P channels were a monthly subscription (each), not pay per view. Notably, QUBE got into the news several times because of channel P-10, which aired softcore porn.

Also ESPN did not initially air advertisements during programming, only in between programs. But they also only had sports no one really cared about for the first few years. No major sports, no college games. But they did have highlights and some international sports.

https://youtu.be/7Fz1bSViIZw

The main reason early cable-only channels didn't have advertising is mainly because the subscriber numbers were so small there wasn't much revenue to be made targeting 5-10k viewers. Once subscriber numbers went up, and higher budget programming was in-demand (sports licensing is ridiculously expensive) ad breaks similar to OTA channels were introduced. But many of cable's early adopters bought into it on word of mouth, and word at the time was "no ad breaks!" It wasn't a goal of cable TV, just a side effect of the development.

It was only a few years, but there were a few years when cable tv had no ad breaks for the majority of urban subscribers. It's sort of like someone saying Netflix used to have pretty much every show and movie, and then pulling up stats from 2014 and beyond saying no they didn't.

Well its inevitable to have an ad-tier and an ad-free tier at least. One of the benefits of digital ads v. linear TV ads.

What do you do when you find out that you make more per ad-tier user than you do for ad-free user[0]?

The incentives go in the wrong direction from a UX perspective

[0] https://www.cordcuttersnews.com/hulu-makes-about-15-in-reven...

I went back years ago when a lot of media companies started pulling their stuff off Netflix in favor of creating their own platforms.

Cloudbox on a rented dedicated server, everything is automatic and things just show up in Plex.

I love how horrible UX ends up wasting hardware - not that this is something to be held against people who host their own media services, I'm doing the same. But serving media is definitely a thing that scales well with centralized CDNs and other infrastructure - copying the same data to everyone's personal cloud hosted Plex implies duplicating a lot of terabytes, essentially wasting hard drive space, nobody watches their Plex troves 24/7, so the hard drives and CPUs will be idling a good amount of their life. Popcorntime was a great way to increase homebrew media distribution efficiency w.r.t. to content delivery and storage, maybe it's time it got resurected?

I have to disagree with you.

Coming from a country where media consumption used the be expensive, the reason people pirated entertainment was mainly due to cost. Not because it was inconvenient to see an ad.

Streaming will still be miles more convenient than piracy. All I have to do is turn on my apple tv, grab the remote and watch whatever I want, whenever I want. I don’t have to dig through some torrent sites, download it, then stream it to the tv.

At this point, I actually pay for Netflix + Hulu(+ESPN+Disney) + Amazon Prime + I get HBO Max with my AT&T plan otherwise would also have to pay for that one. In the past I have also paid, for a limited amount of time, for Apple TV, Paramount+, Starz, Cinemax, The Criterion Channel, FuboTV, BritBox and Peacock. I'm probably forgetting a few.

I'm fairly certain Comcast's cable package they keep spamming me costs less than those combined

Media consumption is expensive again. All we've done is move from the cable bundle with terrible content to a different set of un-/re-bundled channels where the slightly better content lives.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/10/hbo-max-d...

Media consumption of everything all at once is expensive.

But it is on demand now, which is a great improvement.

And people can also pick and choose. I can buy individual episodes or seasons, or I can pay for one service per month and then cancel and pay for another next month. Or people can pay for everything all at once if they want. Or they can watch YouTube for free or pay to have fewer ad breaks.

I see lots of improvement compared to the previous situation.

The Criterion Channel and MUBI are the only video streaming subscriptions I ever found real sustained value in.

>I don’t have to dig through some torrent sites, download it, then stream it to the tv.

You don't have to do that these days, either. There's software out there that will happily keep tabs on your favorite shows and films and download them as soon as they're available via torrent/newsgroup/etc., and then drop it directly into Plex, Kodi, or wherever, automagically.

Just like streaming, but without the cost.

It will even download as you watch if you want to watch something without a delay.

What might be some of the better software that does this?

So I can avoid them, of course.

> I don’t have to dig through some torrent sites, download it, then stream it to the tv.

This is not the reality of piracy in 2022.

https://radarr.video/

https://sonarr.tv/

https://www.plex.tv/

Just google “popcorn time”. It’s a user friendly UI for torrent world. On the facade it looks like regular streaming service. In the back it downloads and shows torrents seamlesly. Depending on yor country, consider using VPN.

FAIK it's currently down.

I have access to apple TV, the service, but it is easier for me to use Kodi on a raspberry pi to watch it. Make of that what you will. I know there needs to be a hub for all of the streaming services, and the options seem imperfect in one significant way or another.

How accessible is piracy for the average person? I’ve had people in my circle of friends and acquaintances ask me how to pirate media safely. They are broadly aware that music and movies can be pirated, but they typically just visit some sketchy website that plays the content in the browser or they do not attempt to pirate anything because they are afraid of getting caught and/or sued.

Downloading a torrent client and VPN is seen as confusingly complicated for many of them. Once I help them get past that, I also have to train them to search safely and parse the file names of what they are trying to find. More than just informing them that a movie is not a 25 MB exe file, but that there is a convention around encoding/file type, bit rate, and how episodes/tracks are named.

It is understandable, but I think there is a huge mental barrier for most non-savvy computer users. I think that unless there is some friendly and non-sketchy all in one service to facilitate piracy there will not be some widespread upswell in piracy among the general public.

Would a "widespread upswell in piracy amongst the general public" ultimately be a good thing? How much more accessible can it get? If A.) clicking through a software installer and B.) reading file names is too high a barrier of entry... Streaming services will gladly take your money.

A small-scale solution could be setting up a Jellyfin or similar server for all your friends + family members. Curate it with what they ask for, maybe give them access to a Sonarr instance so they can add content themselves. There are client apps for smart TVs, phones, and a web player. Maybe they'll like it so much they tell their friends, or want to set up their own :)

A few friends in different US regions running Jellyfin in a container with an Hdhomerun (~$100) and rabbit ears (~$50) could effectively reproduce the DirectTV Sunday ticket (~$300).

I anticipate some version of family and friend supported distributed services to continue growing in the near future.

There used to be an app called Popcorn Time which had a Netflix-like UI but was actually serving the videos from torrents. It would attempt to download the torrent data sequentially so you could stream the show/movie after about 10 seconds of buffering.

I’ll admit that A) and B) are ultimately really simple things that most people should be able to manage. However I’ve come to learn that most people are not nearly as comfortable using computers as we would think. They use computers very narrowly and are hesitant to break them.

I’d recommend looking into Radarr and Sonarr. Those two programs really simplify the process and is basically automated once the initial setup including automatically moving and renaming the files for to a plex library if you happen to be interested in using something like plex. I personally think Usenet is better than torrenting but I also choose to spend about $60ish dollars per year on providers and indexers because I feel that it’s worth the cost.

for me this was infinitely harder than using kodi or just torrenting and saving to library. and i work in software dev with CS major.

Great points, but I'd like to draw attention to the distinction between pirating media and doing so safely.

It used to be that either one required a bit of know-how, but I've personally seen cases where the barrier to entry is lower for just obtaining the media. Safety isn't just an afterthought as much as total ignorance.

In the most alarming case I witnessed, an acquaintance of mine had a friend who "knew enough to be dangerous": they were sideloading an app on their settop box for them that just pulled from some site. I'm sure it would work to watch rips of new movies or whatever, but I doubt it even used TLS.

I had to explain to my acquaintance that not only would it be easily visible by their ISP (and why that's bad), but that it was almost certainly illegal in the first place.

Getting a movie for free sounds obviously sketchy to most of us, but think about the number of gadgets and services that have been advertising exactly that for decades[0]. Understanding the difference requires some technical knowledge.

[0]: The catch usually being that "free" really means "after fulfilling some other obligation", such as signing up for a free trial of something.

You can also be the person that downloads things and hosts it privately for your friends. You could even share it via onedrive or similar cloud platforms provided you zip, encrypt/pw protect and rename it.

>friendly and non-sketchy all in one service to facilitate piracy

I've heard that paid Plexshares are more or less this. You pay to access a private streaming server that has all the content you could ever want. No VPNs, no torrent clients, no parsing formats, no viruses, no running an HDMI cable from a PC to your TV. It's as easy as any other paid streaming service, without exclusive content restrictions.

Syncler + Premiumize or Real Debris is fantastic and super easy to use. No server setup needed, you stream everything. Comes working out of the box and if you want to play with some settings it's in an easy settings menu.

Much like how private chat and gaming servers work, I expect the onus will fall upon the tech-savvy to host content for their friends via services like Plex, Jellyfin, or the like.

Honestly I'm already off most of streaming services and use put.io for everything, including services that I'm already paying for. The home page that pushes garbage to my mind is another reason I'm avoiding those services. I want to watch things that I mindfully picked.

My approach has long been to "buy" content but then obtain that content via torrent.

Even if something is streaming, and you have access to all/most streaming services, its a pain to figure out what is on what platform.

Want to watch the new season on x? Oh even though HBO has all the old seasons, the new season is on another service.

Want to watch x movie you saw on netflix two months ago? Netflix doesnt have the rights anymore now and you'll have to dig through your streaming services to see where it landed or hope whatever, "Where is this streaming?" website you land on is accurate and up to date.

I find Roku's search engine great for this scenario. Tells you which service and also if its free with membership, without membership, or paid per episode

This isn’t really that hard on Apple TV though. Siri has universal search and will show media and punch out to the right app.

The Pirate Bay has all the seasons. Even with the hassle of starting my VPN, downloading, making sure it's in the right format, dealing with subtitles (looking at you, Better Call Saul), piracy is a better experience than fragmented streaming.

Only to a geek. I much rather just pay money and juggle the streaming services. I had a Mac Mini running Front Row connected to a TV back in 2005 and then graduated to Plex until 2020. It’s really not worth it when both the AppleTV and Roku have universal search.

Superior UX, really? I'd agree if it were pre-2012 (Megaupload takedown), because back then torrent sites used to be able to operate with impunity. Go to the site, type something into search, then download.

Now everything has moved to private trackers, invite-only Discords and more and more outside of the clearweb. That's a far worse UX IMO.

I find that to get the superior UX experience, there is quite a lot of work that has to be done upfront. A lot of technical experience is also assumed because many of these “bridges” don't have real guides.

But once you do go through those trenches, it can be quite amazing to see how simple everything can be if things weren't exclusive to a dozen different streaming services.

Piracy is already the vastly superior user experience (If you are willing to put the time/money into it).

it never stopped being a superior experience for many types of users and many locations

Remember when you would pay for cable TV services so you didn't have to watch ads? -- something, something Pepperidge Farms meme.

That time was never

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33177999

People who wanted to steal tv shows never stopped. It's an ethics thing, not a convenience thing.

I really don't think it's that simple. Ethics bend and break around inconvenience.

I absolutely stopped pirating due to the convenience of streaming.

Maybe I'm unusual, but I doubt it.

And to say that it's just an ethics thing, is completely ignorant view. It's perfectly acceptable to torrent something when living in a country that wasn't deemed worthy by the rights holder to release their product there.

Music piracy took off because people wanted to consume mp3s but the music industry kept telling them they should use CDs instead.

Very few people operate against ethics, virtually everyone considers convenience (or, in other words, non-tangible use cost).

Apple doing a 0 to 100 on ads is pretty remarkable.

Bold prediction: Apple will increasingly turn to services to maintain revenue growth as people don't upgrade their hardware as frequently because hardware innovation is also slowing down.

On a similar note, Apple will find it hard to move into VR because it'll never be a big enough business for them but a make or break for Meta.

Apple is definitely enamored with the service business model, but I think the issue with VR is a lot more clear-cut; Apple can't release a $1,000 headset in a market where $400 headsets exist too. VR is a novelty, and people will probably reach for whichever option is cheaper.

If you want a more clear-cut example of this happening in the past, compare the launch of the PS3 with the Xbox 360. The PS3 was the better console in every way, being faster, having more features and not being made by Microsoft!

The Xbox 360 destroyed the PS3 at launch. Turns out, desperate consumers just wanted a cheap box to play vidya on. I think Meta knows this, which is why they go out of their way to undercut everyone, all the time.

>Apple can't release a $1,000 headset in a market where $400 headsets exist too. VR is a novelty, and people will probably reach for whichever option is cheaper.

I disagree. Apple did this kind of thing with the iPod and the iPhone. IIRC, the iPhone was $600 when it came out, and people paid it, even when there were dozens of other options. There are certainly people who are price sensitive, but Apple’s never really cared about selling to those people anyway.

We'll have to see. Considering the amount of negativity I hear surrounding VR, I personally believe Apple is going to have an upwards battle selling their units. Even though people (myself included) hate Facebook, the value proposition of the Quest is a lot easier to sell.

FWIW, Macs still struggle to surmount the number of Windows machines in circulation, much less the number of Chromebooks floating around out there. Maybe you won't buy Meta's headset... but what options will schools make? How about businesses? Gamers? Thrill-seekers? Apple's marketing tactics are second-to-none, but many a business has outsmarted them in the past. Meta might just be next-up to bat.

You mean like Apple can’t release a $1200 phone and sell a “low cost phone” that’s $400 in a market where $70 unsubsidized phones exist?

I only got an Xbox 360 because I had an Xbox. I only had an Xbox because it had Halo, Halo 2, and Xbox Live. Price never came into the equation. If Sony had a better online multiplayer story and a killer game like Halo the PS3 things might have gone differently regardless of price point.

Isn’t that the exact analog of “Apple can’t release 1+k$ phone in a market where 50$ phones exist”? Which they very clearly can and do.

It's more like "Apple can't release a set-top box in a market where people get them for free", which is right. So right, as a matter of fact, that Apple had to develop AppleTV apps for the likes of FireTV, Tizen and Android. There are a number of markets that don't give a rat's ass about brand recognition, and unless Apple partners with Valve, I reckon VR/AR will be another one of those segments.

“ Apple can't release a $1,000 headset in a market where $400 headsets exist too.”

They definitely will, especially since Meta’s new kit is $1,500.

Sure, anyone can do anything.

Here's my "bold prediction" though - neither of those $1,000+ units will ever sell as well as the Quest. Especially WRT the consumer segment, Meta probably won't even stock the Quest Pro on shelves. It's clear that the Pro is more of a jab at the Hololens market anyways.

Have they been against ads? I don't know. I know they've been pushing privacy, but I always thought it was because they want to be the only ones to know your behavior so they can sell ads instead of FB or Google.

> On a similar note, Apple will find it hard to move into VR because it'll never be a big enough business for them but a make or break for Meta.

I'm not sure that there is much of a technology jump to move into VR for Apple.

More like 0 to 25. I hope they do go to 100 so we can move past the Apple mysticism which is rampant in the US.

No thanks. The day ads show up, my TV+ subscription will be gone. This double-dipping is ridiculous.

Yep, at this point I'm burnt out on ad exposure for the rest of my life. Exposure to AM/FM radio or cable TV for more than a few minutes is a grating experience. Any service that forces ads is dead to me.

I'm sure it was only last week on another apple thread some person got downvoted for suggesting apple will succumb to ad money. Seems the fabled apple can't resist the extra revenue.

General comment on Apple TV+. Is my impression incorrect that it is a distant last place among streaming services? There's nothing on. You get a free subscription if you replace your iThing and then it takes a few weeks to watch Ted Lasso and Severance, the only two shows they have, and you're ready to cancel.

Less content, but it's pretty consistently higher quality than other services, at least so far. It's more than just those two shows. It was actually kind of hilarious to see Apple win a best picture Oscar with a tiny indy film on their first try after seeing Netflix spend years and billions on huge names blowing their load on near miss after near miss.

That was the thing that got me to sign up for Apple TV+ and I was shocked by what a terrible film CODA turned out to be. Just complete schlock. I put it up there with "Crash" among films that won Best Picture purely due to lack of candidates that year.

I tried to watch some of the stuff they were heavily promoting, but couldn't get into them. Shining Girls is really bad. Tehran, a 3rd-party adaptation from Israel, is Netflix-grade trash that strains one's ability to suspend disbelief. Adding Glenn Close, an elderly American WASP, as a Mossad agent, did nothing to make this weird Israeli propaganda vehicle more believable.

Anyway these are all matters of taste but objectively I believe Apple TV+ has very few subs, which was my main point. It doesn't seem like a massive advertising opportunity.

As a quibble, "Crash" didn't win because lack of candidates- "Brokeback Mountain" lost due to lack of courage from the Academy's part.

Severance is really good, you should watch that. I've also heard good things about Ted Lasso and For All Mankind. I'm trying to finish WeCrashed, which has some great unsympathetic performances, but it's been a grind.

There's an uncanniness to Apple TV+ productions. They have gorgeously high production visual quality, in comparison to Netflix's notoriously flat and cheap affect, but most of their programming does seem mediocre story-wise.

You should watch Foundation and For All Mankind as well next time you replace an iThing. The Apple TV+ library is definitely a lot smaller than competitor's, but what is in there is on the whole incredibly high quality.

I enjoyed these TV shows: - Ted Lasso - Severance - Bad Sisters - Servant - Trying - Mythic Quest - The Morning Show (season 1)

And these movies: - Cha Cha Real Smooth - Swan Song - Coda - The Banker - The Tragedy of MacBeth - The Greatest Beer Run Ever

Looking forward to the Sidney movie as well.

They actually have very good shows overall. Not many, but very high quality.

Other than the ones you've mentioned there are also See, The Morning Show, Mythic Quest, and For All Mankind, which are all great, as well as Foundation, which was quite good as well.

They aren’t playing the same game as the other streaming services besides Amazon. Both Amazon and Apple are using streaming to get you into their ecosystem and make the bundle more attractive.

Also, "For All Mankind" and "Servant".

They've had a few shows, but I generally agree that it's pretty slim pickins there.

>There's nothing on.

They've got Yo Gabba Gabba.

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