Disney Raising Prices Days After Confirming Ads Will Now Show Up on Every Tier
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Assuming you even care about legality, of course.
Yeah, it's harder. But you can get a lot of "harder" things done in the amount of time you otherwise spend watching ads, after all. Because to me one of the worst things about ads is they're stealing dollars from me to make cents, if not fractions of a cent. This makes them on the dumb end of the bandit classification by the Basic Laws of Human Stupidity metric: https://harmful.cat-v.org/people/basic-laws-of-human-stupidi... It's so dumb.
And as long as we keep letting them give us an option to buy out the ads, but then they get to stick ads on that option anyhow, we can never get our way out of ads on these things. I don't mind buying them out because they make so little money anyhow but by simple game theory "buy out ads + put ads on anyhow" is always > "buy out ads". You need to cancel if they do this to you. I can't, because I don't have a Disney+ subscription. But you really need to. You need to turn the option into either "let us buy out the ads" or "lose the subscription" for them.
Which of course is why physical media will increasingly rarely be offered as an option going forward
Rent-seeking behavior is too good to give up, so companies will move all content to streaming only services (games, movies, tv, music, books, etc...) in the majority of cases.
Physical media will only be available at very high prices, for a very limited selection of content.
We will go from "doctrine of first sale" around content licensing to the utterly crippled "you own a temporary, non-transferrable, and ephemeral license to stream this content from us on exactly this service using only approved devices until we decide otherwise".
The moral action in this case is to simply stop paying. Period.
Long term - we should be fighting to enshrine a new flavor of "doctrine of first sale" for the digital age.
Ex - maybe purchasing any content license sold with the word "buy" should enshrine your right to use, transfer, sell, or otherwise consume in any reasonable form that content for the duration of the copyright + 7 years. And we will not enforce copyright for items that can't be bought (only rented).
a whole lot of people had to die for an 8 hour work day.
if you're not willing to exert pressure, sometimes aggressively, then your way of life is already dead.
The system is not there to help you or me. The system is to protect and accelerate the flow of money up to the 0.1% at any and all costs. It does not matter if it will destroy the environment or if the innocent people will die.
People need to wake up to this fact, band together, and fix it by any means necessary. Until that happens "should" ideas are wasted breath.
There’ll always be community theater!
I already hear your wheels turning, thinking machine learning will provide a way to remove the ads from the content, but as the AI labs start to control all the compute they will assuredly insert their own ads into what you tried to remove.
Or maybe you still think we're in the 1950s when there were explicit ad breaks? In modern works ads are injected into the storyline. You can't just start dropping frames at random if you want to preserve the performance in its entirety.
There are absolutely hard breaks before and after ads. Sounds like you might be talking about product placement, which to be clear, no one anywhere else in this thread is talking about.
That's fine. We can't all know everything. But why are you trying to participate in a discussion, by your own admission, you don't understand?
You can do it with ffmpeg losslessly with pretty much any media.
The only thing that's hard to remove is sponsorships built into the script (brought to you by snapple), but people don't tend to like that sort of thing in a show.
Okay. I'll be extremely generous and let you prove that with just a single frame. https://www.dexerto.com/cdn-image/wp-content/uploads/2024/02...
Rules:
- You have 2 seconds.
- No machine learning (e.g. content-aware fill) allowed.
- Result must remove the distraction of the ad, not replace it with something equally distracting. Blurs, black squares, etc. not accepted.
- Video recording of the process provided in a follow up reply.
Go!
> The only thing that's hard to remove is sponsorships built into the script (brought to you by snapple), but people don't tend to like that sort of thing in a show.
2. I was using hyperbole, which I think was pretty obvious. It does take some time to isolate frames for advertisements. It's not, however, terribly hard to do and is something people would do if the way ripping in the future is pulling video directly from HDMI output.
3. Who are you to setup a game with rules and requirements for me to fulfill?
So my followup reply is you did not read my comment charitably or fully before issuing a challenge.
Take any open multimodal LLM, set it up with a scriptable video editor, uncensored Qwen-Image then tell it where the ads are and what to replace them with. That's it.
You can do all of it locally on a 5 year old gaming PC with pretty good results. Of course it works better if you have Opus driving it but that's not a hard requirement.
as many disks and vhs as you can handle. check the disks for scratches just in case, but otherwise you can find oodles
I make a point to own my own books. Even if I first read them as ebooks or audiobooks, if I want to keep it forever I'll pick up a used copy (they're cheap).
I've considered the same for film. The only things I looked up that are just completely unavailable are Streaming Original series. Maybe this has to do with the sort of library I'd want to keep, but I don't think so.
You can live without watching whatever the latest show is.
You can live without watching whatever the latest show is.
I don’t care about whatever shows I’m missing.
Don’t spend your time watching, spend your time making your own dreams come true.
Which sports I watch may change over time, as companies like Disney (ESPN) ruin one sport after another with too many ads and especially too much in-game gambling content, but I'll likely keep watching sports.
Explained here in a 1-hour video: https://youtu.be/rwhUpu9MfZ0
PBS looks like it has some ok stuff
However, I did notice a number of times where my kids would have a harder time initially connecting with new social groups as there was less shared experience/context. They'd want to have some kind of make believe play where they'd assume a character from a show, but my kids had no context as to the expectations of the rest of the group and would struggle connecting. Its like the other kids were speaking a totally different language. Things would usually eventually work themselves out, but things could have been smoother and less stressful for my kids had they known the context.
Its like, back in the day, you'd be able to strike up a conversation with a someone and reference something from a show on one of the few TV stations, and there was a good chance the other person might have seen it and could get the reference. A shared experience, despite not being together at the time. Now days, good luck.
Octonauts, Gabby's Dollhouse, Paw Patrol (and spinoffs), Puffin Rock, Peppa Pig, Lucas the Spider on Netflix.
Cocomelon, Helper Cars, Little Angel, Blippi, and many unboxing videos on YouTubeKids. Actually YouTube has a lot of full episodes from other sources as well - it's my go-to for Octonauts, Peppa Pig, and Paw Patrol when I set my kids up on my 11yo Macbook that's too old to run Netflix. I suspect many of the videos I think of as being from YouTube actually have their own sites elsewhere (isn't Cocomelon owned by ABC?).
Disney is a very small part of my kids' viewing habits. Pretty much just use it for the Mickie Mouse and Bluey franchises.
Physical media is being done away with, both discs and players.
Seems like streaming is the future we are going to be fed.
Of course then as another comment here said, you're more likely to realize you don't actually want any of it. And then when you realize it's not worth pennies to store, you also realize it's not worth your time to watch.
This is about $/TB on bigger drives. If you only want a 1TB drive it'll be more like $50.
Don't get an SSD, far too expensive.
2 Mb/s is awful for anything with movement, 8 Mb/s is decent enough, 20 Mb/s is very good to my eyes, and 80 Mb/s is nice, clearly better especially in scenes with significant movement, but it's not revolutionary. I don't watch webrips unless there's no other option, it's mostly WEB-DL or bluray rips.
A UHD movie with UHD and dolby audio and all that is anywhere from 50 to 70Gb. That's if you rip it straight off the disc.
You can shrink it a little by being pickier about which audio tracks you take, but not much.
You can do other things to it to make it smaller, but then it's not the equivalent of the physical disc
720p is good enough for me so... can we all just use that and give up on transcoding?
I purchased one of those $150 tiny machines on Amazon specifically for the Intel integrated graphics so my Plex server can transcode easily. All media is another one of my servers, shared via NFS.
I've noticed that there are fewer new releases, but apparently people are increasingly buying physical media (that statistic might be squewed by counting vinyl releases).
But that said most of the films/TV I watch is old stuff anyway, and every time I visit a large store I walk away with 5+ disks.
Just yesterday I bought a physical copy of Fight Club for €1, alongside Trainspotting, Blade, and a boxed set of black and white St Trinian's movies. Definitely enough media to keep me entertained for the next week or two.
You can only win by unsubscribing.
I'm mildly short on HDD space right now due to hardware prices, but I want to hoard some local LLM models as well, again not for a current need, but just in case something changes.
Physical media is only cheaper if the user is ok with re-watching the same videos repeatedly. The higher cost of the DVD/Blu-ray discs can be amortized over multiple repeat viewings. (Good example is a 5-year old kid wanting to re-watch Frozen or Shrek cartoons again for the 100th time. A DVD player is cheaper than a Disney+ subscription in that scenario.)
Digital streaming subscriptions are cheaper if the user almost always prefers watching new shows instead of re-runs. That's the viewing habit of the vast majority of subscribers. Trying to only buy physical media to get a constant diet of new shows -- even buying the cheaper used discs from thrift stores -- will cost more than a subscription. Also, the physical discs are not immediately playable on an iPad/smartphone so requires extra hassle of ripping/transcoding that most normies don't want to do. Also, buying harddrives for the NAS server to store the rips isn't cheap either.
I'm all too aware of people preferring brand new shows because I've ripped several hundred DVDs to a stack of terabyte harddrives that nobody ever watches. Instead, they'd rather see what's new on Netflix, HBO Max, Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV+ ...
EDIT to add an update of a previous comment about my friend's defiance against ads added to Amazon Prime Videos by borrowing DVDs from the public library. She lost that battle because she finished all the DVDs she wanted to watch so had to go back to Amazon Videos for new content. She now endures the Amazon's ads. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42388626
She really tried to fight ads by avoiding the platform but couldn't sustain it because she ran out of free DVDs to checkout from the library. This means buying DVDs to get something new to watch if trying to stick with physical media and unfortunately, that costs more than streaming platforms. She deals with the ad interruptions by multitasking on an iPad when they come on.
In general library stuff is of relatively high quality and they have budgets for taking care of the collection.
I'd encourage anyone reading to go to your local library if you haven't been in a while. Check out a book. See if they have a makerspace. Do some remote work there. They're wonderful places. They become more and more important with every passing year.
Not many of those left in my local libraries. They downsized to popular fiction and a rack of magazines to introduce more sofas and space for charity cake stalls. And "mindful colouring-in" if you're around for the 4.5 days of the week that they're open.
Libraries threw away the one thing that made them unique, curated knowledge, in order to compete with Starbucks as a "third space".
The public libraries in major cities like the New York Public Library have sizable collections. The smaller libraries in the outer suburbs have a much smaller selection. Yes, there's also inter-library loan system for the suburbs to pull from the big city library but there are restrictions such as only having 3 items at a time.
The neighborhood public libraries are wonderful resources but there can be limitations (quantity of titles) that prevent it from being a sustainable substitute for streaming for someone that wants to watch ~2 hours of content every day. My friend tried the public library and it was only a temporary reprieve from the ads on streaming platforms. The library simply didn't have enough content for her to watch.
A smaller portion comes from used bookstores. For TV series in particular it’s still very cost effective on a money per viewing hour basis. Especially for kids’ media because my kids do want to watch the same thing over and over.
I also do some à la carte rentals. Maybe 3-4 movies per year, so the total cost is low.
That said, you’re absolutely right, this only works for me because I don’t particularly care about new shoes and streaming exclusives. If you’re willing to take the view that media doesn’t need to be new to be good then we currently live in a post-scarcity society where video entertainment is concerned. Which isn’t to say that people who prefer new things are wrong, but I am genuinely impressed by the amount of enshittification that people will tolerate (maybe after some grumbling, but still) in the service of that preference.
For now. Physical media is being phased out. Sony just quitted the blu-ray player business after others also did and Disney already stopped releasing new discs in Australia.
Music somehow is different, but movies, sporting events, dramatic series, etc. where the hook is that you don't know what's going to happen I can really only enjoy watching once.
I suppose at some point you will have to have your device's camera on to confirm you really are interacting with the ads, but currently I can get stuff done during the ads by being in another window.
(but yes... https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTlYlSF... )
Unless you just, you know, don't watch. Which is what I do. I ask myself, is it even worth all this hassle to watch this stuff? Is it that good? And for me, the answer is, no, it isn't. I can find better things to do with my time. So I do.
I see way more happy, healthy, financially secure folks past middle age in software than I did in restaurants. I sometimes miss the fun but it’s mostly grueling.
Also, watching what working in the trades did to family and friends.
Take up a physical hobby to stay in balance, and/or learn a musical instrument, if you are able. Hope you hang in there.
And on topic, for some light viewing material for young children, go right now and download all the Mr. Rogers episodes you can get your hands on, while we still can.
I have fond memories of Disney but as an adult there’s not much I appreciate. The oldest stuff is gauche and a lot of the newest stuff is cracked out. There are just a handful I think are really appropriate for my kids, and I’ve retained digital backups of those.
And I spend a lot of time reading to the kids. They constantly beg me for it. It’s hard to do at times but harder to disappoint them.
I've already been pausing subscriptions left and right as my trends have been focusing on one platform's content that I'm not even using the others that I'm paying for that month. After dumping Prime, I eventually dumped Disney+/Hulu bundle for being the most expensive. I then got yet another notice from Netflix for increase rates which was already paused so I just went ahead and canceled it as well.
I wonder how much physical media I could acquire if I was to spend the same money that is not being spent on streaming platforms. I bet within a year, I could build up a pretty decent back catalog from used and $5 bins.
However, "own a share of their media" means what, that I can have a legit claim to 30s worth of the content? How is that calculated? Divide the number of tax payers in the city by the number of seconds of each bit of content to see how much of it I "own"? You're really bending the concept of tax payer funding here. If that's how you want to go through life, then you do you
My only major critique of it is the library doesn’t know you wanted to borrow then, and usage metrics are very important for them when it comes to deciding what to purchase. But I get what he’s suggesting, it makes sense even if it’s imperfect (I personally wouldn’t do it).
Once you’re talking about ripping library materials, why not just skip the library and download the same items without touching the physical. How is that worse?
(Or both... here in Canada, Rogers is a "wonderful" mix of both...)
This has been the play for a while. I remember when the xbox game pass dropped for the first time. All the younger people were going crazy about how good of a deal it was, and all the tech-weary people could instantly tell that the price will get jacked up again and again and by the time you bail you'll own precisely nothing.
It's not necessarily wrong to take advantage of VC subsidizing you in a bid to gather an audience, but you should always keep in mind that the goal is to have the captive audience so you best have an escape plan, once the prices rise beyond any reasonable point. For movies in particular I struggle how the super-fragmented streaming landscape is worth a damn even if you don't want to sail the seas.
I was gobsmacked when I started browsing the physical stuff that my local library has available to check out for free. YMMV, of course, since every library will have different priorities in how they spend their money, but it’s not hard to learn what resources are available to you and sometimes they are substantial.
Oh, and while we’re on the subject of commercial-free streaming services, Kanopy and Hoopla are awesome and something everyone who complains here about paid streaming options should be using a lot more of.
You can buy battery-powered drills for 25 € or less on Amazon, they'll last for years of occasional use, and they're more than adequate for assembling furniture and other light tasks. If you can afford new furniture, there's really no excuse for not owning at least a cheap power drill.
The hardest part was figuring out the folder where to save the media on the Ubuntu and give Jeyyfin read permissions on that folder via some Linux commands. It was not that hard because Jellyfin tips and tricks are all over the internet (Reddit for example.)
1. Buy a Mac Mini (actually the hardest part given shortages).
2. Download Jellyfin. Drag and drop it into your applications dir.
3. Point it at your downloads dir.
4. Install Jellyfin on your Android TV/whatever.
Yeah, I've done more to it than that (I'm on HN after all), but for people used to torrenting there's nothing here that would present much of a challenge.
you gotta get a VPN, get on a good tracker, get good downloads, make sure shit is correctly labelled, and make sure you don't obliterate bandwidth.
mac mini isn't required, an old laptop with linux or a NUC or whatever could do the job. but that's also trivial.
Using CheapCharts and buying Movies and TV on iTunes. Yes you don't "own it" and yes there are the rare occasional license revocations but it's not often enough for me to care about that--They still remain in your library anyways.
I have been diligently collecting quality, fun, and beloved movies over the past 2 years when they go on sale. That or buying bundles when they go on sale. I've amassed a solid collection of quality media, a lot of which is not on any streaming platform. I even have a lot of Disney titles as well!
I can watch it wherever, whenever and I can download it to devices.
Eat your heart out Disney, Netflix, etc...
agreed : have been doing that since 15ish years ago, works fine, no time squandered on stupid ass "ask your doctor about ___" ads, and that time saved is hugely valuable.
Once or twice a year during the holiday sales season I'll buy some new shows/seasons from iTunes. These are always downloaded and backed up, so I never have to worry about license changes, etc.
For old shows (20+ years) I will either rip the old DVDs or torrent guilt free.
When I travel, I load up my iPad or an SD card with my latest queue of shows so I can stick to my weekly TV schedule..
And I spend nothing on streaming.
For example, I recently got the entire bundle for HBO's Rome for $9.99. That is ~50 minutes per episode (22 episodes), or $0.54/hour, which is not a bad deal! For a casual viewer like me, who might spend <6 hours each week watching TV, this should last a little more than 3 weeks. Recently, The Sopranos went on sale for $29.99, or $0.38/hour.
For streaming vs. buying to work, you just have to be patient about nabbing ~1-2 purchases per month and not be tempted to buy every single day.
The best part is the reduced cognitive load - you don't have to spend time browsing for content every day, and there are no ads, too.
And yes, there is some elaborate workaround to create a brand new account and share the original with the new but fundamentally I could no longer access what I purchased because I moved. And no, I didn't get a refund for the years of purchased content.
I have a little "dance" I have to do to change my store back to the UK (I'm British) and you need a valid british credit/debit card and address to switch stores to the UK store...
I live in Sweden now and I got a bit bent out of shape when I moved and discovered this was the case.
Btw, buying things doesn't mean they won't remove it: https://blog.dijit.sh/importance-of-self-hosted-backups/
They have been ffffing around for way too long. I can not wait for find out arrive and I hope it's excessive and very harsh.
I did cancel Disney+, For the cost of 4 movie purchases or a series a month basically.
I thought about Jellyfin, but it was worth the convenience cost to get them easily viewable.
Movies Anywhere helps because i just buy them wherever they are on sale and watch in 1 place.
The ad is intentional, they possess the time, and now they've been deprived of it forever making it stolen, lost, or cost them.
I haven't seen a television ad since before 2001 or so, unless you count the muted ones at the Mexican restaurant out of the corner of my eye. I'm not sure why anyone ever watches those. Subscription services are inferior to self-hosted streaming.
If buying isn't owning, then piracy isn't stealing.
Further, big AI companies don't care about copyright laws, so I assume this is the current reality.
Laws only make sense if they are fair and applied equally.
Laws and morals are not the same thing. What is legal may be immoral. What is illegal may be moral.
More and more I'm politically frustrated by government leaders and society just openly ignoring the law--although, I guess I did sort of argue that's sometimes okay in the last paragraph...
I guess it comes down to this. What laws do you elevate above others? What laws do you consider acceptable to ignore, and what laws do you consider morally valid?
There are some who commit moral atrocities because it's the law, we know it's sad but the law is really important and must be enforced, and then in the next breath they start an illegal war of aggression and bomb hundreds of kids. I guess the law was never really their greatest concern. Sorry if I'm being a bit too on the nose.
Democractic laws needs a guiding framework that considers these moral and ethical aspects, as these kind of things can be easily missed or overlooked if not documented as a mandatory tests for legality of law. Otherwise people have to constantly be on the lookout for sneaky laws that takes away the core values that may not be immediately apparent. Laws should be entirely written and modified only be legislature, and courts cannot be allowed to interpret it in any different way or apply it out of context or allowed to edit or delete laws, which is what legislative body is for.
www.hanaplay.tv
1. Rent/stream your MSM
2. Buy hard copies of your MSM and digitize
3. Pirate MSM
4. Realize that MSM is hot garbage and stop ingesting it
I was paying for Netflix, but through a thousand cuts they pushed me away from streaming platforms entirely. I probably spend more on hard drives now than I would have with streaming subscriptions, but it's an infinitely better service.
My two favourite apps are Sonarr and Radarr. They make the collection process seamless.
I wonder if we could regulate a requirement that service providers that serve ads must
1. offer "remove ads" as its own standalone/unbundled thing-you-can-pay-for in relation to any given product or service they offer
2. have at least one SKU of "remove ads" that isn't a subscription, but rather a one-time lifetime purchase, costed at at most the fair-market-value-set projected LTV of the profit they'd make from ads being served to an average user across said average user's lifetime use of the product/service
3. and where these "remove ads" payables must use wording that ties them to a very specific and regulatorily-defined contractual-relationship structure, where the contract cannot have a unilateral change-in-terms clause ("the terms of this contract may be changed at any time" etc); cannot have an arbitration clause (so while you might not be able to sue for product performance, you must be empowered to sue if the company ever again shows you an ad during use of said product); must have a successors-and-assigns clause (so buyouts don't void the contract, but rather obligate the buyer to now execute it on the company's behalf); etc.
4. and where the company is not allowed to factor in whether you have an active "no ads" benefit in calculating dynamic pricing for other offerings (i.e. they can't crank up the prices of their "with ads" product plans for "no ads" purchasers, because then they'd just hide the increasing cost of "no ads" inside the plan cost, effectively making "ad plan where you actually watch ads" and "ad plan where you don't watch ads because of your benefit" into two different SKUs, mooting the unbundling of "no ads".)
With such a regulation in place, companies could always increase the costs of their actual product plans and make them more expensive; and could still continue to bundle "remove ads" as a perk of some plans (slowly slipping upward through pricing tiers as it does today); but they'd be stuck serving anyone who buys a "remove ads" one-time purchase, the same way that those airlines that once offered "lifetime flights" as a limited giveaway were then stuck serving those customers.
The goal is to replace your "best hamburgers in X-city" search by just defaulting to McDonalds.
So when I'm out shopping I see brands that I've found advertised. I see brands I've never heard of. I look at both. But what one is selling products that are fully accessible to me, fully owned by me? Which ones use online features that can/will eventually be stripped and put behind a a subscription model? What ones are using quality manufacturing materials? Which ones are using cheap plastics or vaneers? Which ones have local brick and mortar presence where I can take issues in person? For instance, there's a very heavy Costco effect to my shopping. I've bought products from brands I'm pretty iffy on because I know Costco is going to take that return with no fuss if I get it home and discover there's something about that product I find distasteful.
And I should say that I'm not a very big consumer. Trying to do this a lot, buying for a family (kids, spouse, etc.) could quickly become overwhelming. I know how exhausting it is to need to read labels every time you're buying food because how often they enshittify the recipe, adding thickeners or allergens that weren't there the last time you bought it.
It won't work for everyone but the answer really is the same thing its always been: Be a conscious consumer. Research what you want before you buy. Know what is worth spending extra on, and what is marketing nonsense. Find companies with positive reputation (but still be observant for how you can be fucked when they sell out next year), and try to support local.
When you dig into advertising model attribution, there aren't a whole lot of signals that the way we currently jam advertising down people's throats actually sells more things.
It's a useless tax of human economic activity. It fulfills the same purpose as tree trunks of trees in the forest. And it's similarly expesive for companies and for everyone else around. It should be mostly banned and replaced with state sposored directory of goods and services available at the national market.
If it didn’t work, they wouldn’t do it and it wouldn’t be the cornerstone of the internet economy. No one is immune.
To borrow from Sagan: I could similarly claim that a dragon lived in your garage. You would rightly be doubtful and expect proof of said claims. I'll leave the rest of that gem for you to read if you haven't before (one of my favorites!).
Instead it the goal is to bump up the concept of the brand into your short-term memory, and perhaps as a bonus to associate that with positive emotion or at the very least to normalize the brand.
Later when you are making a purchasing decision, the brand is more present in your mind and makes it a more likely outcome.
Of course this is more complicated and nefarious when the brand’s products are addictive or have addictive-like qualities, which arguably includes McDonald’s.
Marketing and advertising aren't the same thing but I swear both sides of that coin have devolved via some process of carcinization where their claws emerge from the darkness everywhere people gather. Especially places where those claws are inappropriate and unwanted and yet it still works.
I think for a Mom & Pop trying to build some form of brand recognition in their small community, it gets people informed.
But persuasive convincing, the mind control target that marketers claim to be able to drive? Nah.
When I see ads for things on YouTube, I automatically assume it's a scam... Because it almost always is!
Where could that possibly end up causing problems?
Also it doesn't actually show you the news. It just shows you links to news sites that you need to be separately subscribed to if you want to read them, so in that sense you're just not getting the product you probably thought you were getting (access to balanced news), so it's a double scam.
There's video essays about this on YouTube of course since that's where Ground News was mainly advertised.
If what you say about the audience composition and the general background situation were at all true, it would be impossible for them to find sponsors, because it would require YouTubers who depend on appealing to a partisan audience to deliberately seek to betray them. And if what you say about the product were at all true, it would again be impossible for them to find sponsors, because none of the YouTubers would be willing to endorse the product.
If anything, the problem with Ground News is that they buy into the same categorization scheme of the news that you do, perhaps with a different bias but the same clustering and same false impression of a single-dimension spectrum.
You deliberately misunderstand the point about advertising audiences, that is not how advertising audiences work, at all. The point about influencers rejecting shady sponsors is also false, and circular. All evidence suggests they mostly accept sponsors who offer money.
If Ground News "bought into the same categorisation that I do" there would be literally no reason for it to exist. It exists to change the categorisation you buy into.
there is the illusion of "balanced" or more in the know but they are no more balanced than any other curator, and in many cases try really, really hard to present a mixed view of something that is otherwise inexcusable.
like I get ads for Lexus -- I'm in a big city and don't need / want a car, but like Lexus is a real brand, basically Toyota.
Some no-name VPN or idle-game app is an immediate "I will actively avoid this, froever"
Their reporting system is useless, too. Funny thing, though, sometimes Gmail spam-filters legitimate automated emails from YouTube.
Both on android and web.
They work because you are infinity percent more likely to buy something you know exists vs something you don't know exists.
TV is sort of like caffeine (another thing I gave up - though that one wasn't by choice, but required by my doctors) in that you cannot imagine yourself living without it and wouldn't want to. And the first few months of abstinence are genuinely very difficult.
But eventually it gets easier, and then it gets completely easy, and then you actually feel as good or better than before. And once you finally become accustomed to it, you can't imagine going back to the old way.
In place of a TV I have a high res audio transport and speakers that are used for music. Spotify isn't exactly a saint but it would be challenging for them to do what Disney is doing without losing all their customers.
Still continue to slowly build my CD + mp3 collection in case this wonderful era of “cheap subscription for almost all the world’s music ad-free” doesn’t last forever.
And it's also apparent how little content is currently worth a conscious watch. Every year or so I make a quick check for what great things appeared in the period, and not much has popped up.
It's always the feeds themselves that get you.
Current ones are outright unpleasant, the "make the viewer feel bad about something" kind or directly spam folder level of scammy. Nobody takes pride anymore on their advertising.
I still watch YT Shorts about series and news. That is pretty much TV.
Take a population, and then remove anyone who is willing to invest more than 60 seconds on a idea, and then sample the "preferences" of that population.
What did you expect to end up with?
Creators who I really like still end up producing trash on shorts because that's what gets traction, because the problem is what is actually liked by someone who wants to just mindlessly scroll 30 seconds at a time is really bad
Before the change my shorts feed roughly aligned with my main homepage feed (which has also gotten worse since they made the dislike button a placebo there). After, it's mostly AI voiceovers reading out Reddit or Twitter comments about life situations, placed over Minecraft gameplay. This is probably a convergent point in the algorithm as you said but it's also extremely relevant that I have no way to tell it "stop that"
I only watch YouTube, but I grew tired of the algorithm and wanted traditional TV, but for YT. So created this: https://channelsurfer.tv
I keep shorts out.
Giving up TV is no different from giving up reading literature, or listening to music, or whatever artistic experience you want to have.
Watching a TV show like Adolescence is no different from reading great literature. And fortunately, there's so much great TV from the past couple of decades, you don't ever have to watch bad or brainrot TV if you don't want to.
There's nothing noble about trying to abstain from that.
E.g. Paid for ad-free OTT viewing but commercials ‘appeared after a month’, man wins Rs 9,500 ( https://indianexpress.com/article/legal-news/paid-ad-free-ot... ):
> Calling it a deficiency in service, the Hyderabad consumer commission ordered an OTT platform to refund Rs 1,499 and pay compensation to a subscriber after it introduced advertisements midway into his paid ad-free subscription.
Government is predictably slow, inefficient, and does just about everything at a service level that is only accepted because there is no other choice.
We are seeing an increasingly exaggerated cycle that goes like this: 1. Innovation takes huge investment to launch 2. Early adopters enjoy amazing new product(s) while companies bear losses 3. Companies eventually must face debt so quality of products decrease and price increases
OpenAI and Anthropic have perhaps set the record for going from 1 to 2 in the biggest (financially) and fastest manner ever, and we are all hurtling towards step 3 with a possible too-big-to-fail scenario.
Back to Disney Plus: I don't have a sagely answer. Free markets do sometimes need government to curb monopoly power, and Disney is certainly has a sort of monopolistic power due to their huge portfolio of franchises and content.
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Generally true but there have been a lot of examples demonstrating the opposite.
The NPS (and Reacreation.gov) does an amazing job considering their resource level, NASA arguably delivered innovation at an unprecedented scale for decades, and up until it was purposefully fucked with the US Postal Service offered a fantastic dependable, affordable and pretty innovative product. The Hold Mail is simple and elegant as just one minor example.
> ordered an OTT platform to refund Rs 1,499
How are these reconciled?
Also, Hulu include content from other companies which require ads to be played and only offer the ad free experience on their own platform.
Here is a more detailed write up on the actual changes. https://rentry.co/tbr2owcq
> We’ve clarified that all Service Plans may include: (i) promotional content, (ii) sponsorships, and (iii) advertisements before/after playback of Content and in channels, live/as-live, special events, and any third-party services content.
Emphasis on "before/after playback of Content" and live etc. So they are opening the door for ads everywhere, not just on live TV or Hulu.
It seems it is only in the UK and European subscribers TOS from 06/18/26.
This is pedantic. If folk can't see that this is a slow roll towards rolling out the same thing in the US eventually, I've got a bridge to sell you.
Subscribers vote, elect a slate of directors who each get a fraction of the content-budget to spend as per their campaign promises. Licensing content, buying it in perpetuity, producing it themselves or funding some group of creators -- none of this "how can we milk customers more", and no more fruitless community campaigns to save a beloved series, you just need some critical mass of subscribers to vote for the guy whose platform is "I will keep making more seasons as fast as possible until the sun boils the ocean".
Dropout does their original content on around 1 million subscribers @ $6/mo.
There's also licensing existing content -- the mega corps building walled gardens aren't likely to play ball, but if you make it painless and have non-exploitative terms, there's countless smaller content producers who would happily upload their catalogue to another service.
I think if the right group of founders (experience in streaming,v experience in content production, good professional network with existing smaller production companies) was able to kickstart it with a million subscribers, give or take, they'd have decent odds of providing enough value to start a more subscribers -> more content spiral instead of the reverse.
Anyone motivated to do this for a smaller group would rather just run a private tracker. The overheads are enormous when you’re not negotiating in bulk.
"But I specifically chose the highest option so I wouldn't see ads!" well, now you have the option to pay the highest tier to see less ads. For now. By paying for the highest tier, Disney knows you are a higher quality consumer with the most disposable income of all the users on that platform; that's exactly the users Disney can charge the most for advertising spend. From an exec's standpoint, why wouldn't you? sure, they'll lose some paying customers, but will probably make more in the short term at least, which is all that matters.
There's a whole genre of comment like this where the implication is that if some effect is either predictable or inevitable by the nature of large in-place systems, then individuals are somehow not allowed to criticize the people choosing to enact the effects.
We all have free will. Just because you can legally make money being annoying or otherwise shitty, and if you didn't do it then somebody else would, that carries absolutely no implication that nobody is allowed to judge you for making that choice.
I am entirely willing to spend money and I have decent savings. I just expect the products put on offer to be worth buying.
But then if I pay them for really no ads, like for realzies, then ... I'm an even more valuable target! And there's a dollar value for that.
So I pay them for really no ads, pinkie swear this time, then ... I'm an even more valuable target! And there's a dollar value for that.
I cannot possibly be of infinite value to these companies.
I understand that sports will tend to have ads displayed in the stadium and so on, and that some show may feature characters drinking Pepsi rather than Coke because of an agreement. And I guess movies may have trailers. Is that the extent of it? If I get what feels like an obvious "ad" then we'll probably be canceling, but I guess I'm okay with those things that I mentioned.
This implies that "Disney+ Standard With Ads" DOES have ad breaks. The other plans could force you to watch ads before your movie starts.
It's some criminal gangster saying "hey that's a nice free ad-tier, shame if something happened to it. Listen, you pay me $36/year for protection, and all this goes away. Capice?"
Remember when the appeal was that streaming was cheaper than cable? So, yeah. Shareholders were not going to just take that lying down when they know what can squeeze their consumers far harder than they anticipated.
Plus, they are now removing movies that you have "bought" or "purchased" while offering NO refunds.
"If buying isn't owning, pirating isn't stealing" -Cory Doctorow
But if anything, the racket is bundling free shipping with ad-free video and everything else. Raising prices periodically to keep up with inflation is not a racket. And whether you would prefer to get downgraded to the advertising plan or automatically pay more is a personal choice, and automatically downgrading you rather than renewing you at a higher price is in some ways a more sensible default. (Though I'd prefer to be upgraded to the higher price generally and be notified so I have the option to downgrade or cancel, though downgrade really isn't an option I would consider.)
And I wish I was being dramatic here, but truly anytime I feel I've wrapped my head around the depravity of man I just remember that we have "paid" tiers of TV that show ads and I sleep soundly knowing the bottom remains unfathomed.
I went to best buy, bought their Sony blu-ray player and a 128GB USB stick, went to Walmart and raided their $5 DVD bin, downloaded a bunch of old children's content from archive.org onto the jump drive, put it in the blu-ray player, and now my children have more quality content than they could ever want to watch. I recommend any parent do this instead of paying for streaming, the experience is 1,000x better.
No more streaming subscriptions. I'm done with the corporate greed.
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k. Service Tiers With or Without Ads. We offer different Service Tiers, some with advertisements and some predominantly without. Service Tiers described as "no ads" or "ad-free" are generally free of commercial interruptions, with certain exceptions that may change from time to time, including where: (i) streaming rights or other limitations require certain Content to play with ads; or (ii) ads are served in certain live or linear Content or special events (and replays thereof). Additionally, "no ads" or "ad-free" Service Tiers may contain limited promotional content, such as brief clips about the Bundles (including messages promoting an upgrade thereto) and other content available on any services associated with the Bundles, and branded content, product integrations, or sponsorship messaging.
Please note that if you subscribe to multiple (or a bundle of) Service Tiers, Content from any ad-supported Service Tier will play with ads, while Content from any "no ads" or "ad-free" Service Tier will not (except as described above).
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So it's not quite as awful as what's reported here. This article is a month old and I haven't seen what it says was going to happen.
The setting of the show is influenced by their actions, but during the time period the show is set, the two most visibly active Sith - Palpatine and Vader - are high-ranking members of the government, and are entirely off-screen, and all Jedi are assumed dead or in hiding. The main character considers The Force to be superstition.
For my own taste, at least, I thought the show was very good, and it felt more "Star Wars" to me than most of the other spinoffs, sequels, prequels, and extended universe of the past decades. It really nails an overall sense of "how the universe works", in the setting. The aesthetics, the capabilities and limitations of technology, the social organization, and the sense of a wide and exotic universe, all match what seems "Star Wars" to me.
It's been the reality of media business models for a long time, like those big thick magazines like Glamour charged a high subscription price to qualify subscribers as people who can buy what's advertised. It's also one of the many reasons why I have distaste for The New York Times -- it is packed with low quality ads that discredit the quality of their editorial content. They're so greedy that an expensive subscription isn't enough, but the expensive subscription, in itself, improves the viability of the advertising model.
I'm not even sure which Disney+ susbription I apparently am a part of at this point - my cable company provides it, my wireless provider provides it, hell, even shopping platforms are now shoving this crap into it as a 'perk'. I didn't want it in the first place but I'm forced to have it like a bundled set of cable channels I didn't want to subscribe to.
... dear God, it's just cable TV package cramming all over again just across every single service industry now.
"'Unmissable TV' to be enforced by law"
Seems germane here.
The lesson I've learned, the same as I learned from Facebook, is "Never sign up to another service ever again". It's much easier to just never sign up than it is to convince the entire family that you should cancel something.
I just recently dropped Disney+ and Hulu from my ESPN unlimited subscription because the promo price ended and Disney/ESPN failed to send out a reminder email that the price was increasing. At least SiriusXM has the decency to send out a reminder email for the subscription increasing in price so you can go haggle a lower price.
Recently my partner was once again interested in watching something on netflix so instead i signed up for the cheapest 1080p ad-supported tier for $8 or thereabouts. I don't really watch it, and she won't miss the quality. If the ads don't bother her, so be it. If they do, we'll just stop watching paying for netflix again!
This was exactly the push I needed to cancel my subscription. We already own all the Disney DVDs that we actually love, and there hasn't been anything good released by Disney in ages.
When I was young, I pirated because I was broke. I could afford a DVD or I could afford to eat that week. Food usually won. Sometimes alcohol.
I got a decent job, and could afford to spend on things, but I still pirated because it was more convenient than going to a store I wouldn't ordinarily go to.
Then netflix started streaming movies/TV to the home and I stopped pirating basically instantly. Netflix was more convenient than pirating. Steam started getting good, so I stopped pirating games as well.
Then streaming service got balkanized. It wasn't enough to pay for Netflix anymore. I am expected to pay for literally half a dozen services, and when I do want to watch something, I would have to flip around between half of them before I find the right service to stream it from. And now they expect me to watch ads?
Fuck that. I still buy games on Steam and GoG because it's convenient. I pirate TV/movies because it's such a fucking pain in the dick to consume that media legally. I just can't be bothered when piracy is so much more convenient.
The only one that requires you to subscribe is Netflix, but it's also easy to cancel the subscription, so you can simply pay for 1 month as the price to watch a show.
No, you cannot. You can license them temporarily.
> two sources at Disney familiar with the change said the updated terms was intended to give Disney greater leeway to incorporate promotional spots for its other movies, TV shows and live events before and after content streams on Disney Plus, not traditional commercial spots.
> The use of the word “advertising” was intended to help its terms of service remain consistent across regions where the streaming platform is available, including countries where promotional spots for its own shows and other content might be legally considered an advertisement, even if the spots are not promoting third-party products or services.
> To that end, Disney’s plan is similar to what other streamers, including Paramount Plus, do with their platforms now. Paramount Plus has long streamed promotional spots for its own shows, movies and live events before content on its ad-free tier.
Now I'll let you decide if you trust more what the PR person says or what is written in T&C.
Lots of discussion then:
Disney+: New user agreement allows ads before movies in all subscriptions
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49784336
Disney+ and Hulu raise prices by up to 13 percent after doubling profits
They keep seeking the price to where consumers are finally pushed to the limit and I think they are almost there, finally
I do agree though. It seems like pretty bad behavior to charge 20 dollars AND insisting on showering us with ads.
Enough cancellations will trigger price raises to protect their quarter reports until the whole revenue model collapses, and they price themselves out of the streaming subscription business.
I am not an MBA, but it made sense to me.
You can squeeze customers quite a bit but once they go back to pirating it's incredible hard to get them to subscribe again.
It's TV "2.0" (meaning decentralized creators no gatekeepers) and the younger generations are watching it far more than anything else (and producing impressive content)
Scale is not required anymore to launch streaming platforms - white label works fine - and for the most part these major services sell property rights back and forth anyway every few months to keep you subscribed.
It’s pure cartel / oligopoly behavior. Can’t imagine this gets better since Ellison owns HBO and Paramount services.
My four year old hates ads ("too many commercials," he says), and with the continuous price increases and his...mercurial media diet, it's actually easier and cheaper for me to just buy DVDs or Blu Ray discs.
So, farewell Disney+. I'm perfectly happy to go back to discs—they're actually a better user experience than anything you choose to offer.
The more I learn Swedish, the less ignorant I become to the advertising and "gotcha" headlines on newspapers and stickers and such; and I'm noticing its outsized (negative) effect.
Time goes by quickly and suddenly it's been 10 years is a perfectly fine answer.
My partner actively prevented it also, she was ethnically Russian (Estonian) and wanted me to learn Russian before Swedish.
I know those elements are super common in English, but it seems dialed up to 11 in the other language. I wonder if it's basically the same in English, I'm just so used to it that it doesn't seem as fake.
Weren't they the ones that said they would never have ads when they first released ?
They're already one of the worst with advertisements mid show and one of the worst catalogues.
If you know of safe pirating sites that have good bandwidth and uptime, that's great! But lots of consumers aren't willing to go through ones with quetsionable ads, or fight the need to new ones bimonthly as the streaming sites churn like a game of whackamole.
So if you've got that hookup and know where to find them, the convenience exists for you, its easy and useful. For someone wanting to get into it, it might not be so convenient.
They've now even made a TV show about Darth Maul (Star Wars: Maul - Shadow Lord) during the Galactic Empire period. This is just beyond ridiculous. This is just rubbing salt into the wound and saying: "We can do anything we want, no matter how stupid or illogical. You'll eat shit and you'll like it!"
I'll never get over Darth Maul's return. I'll detest Star Wars for the rest of my life just because of this. The person that came up with it (Dave Filoni?) should be fired.
Then I pay for a subscription for a tool to remind me to cancel subscriptions and forget to cancel that one too.
There isn’t really anything good on there, they don’t have AAA series.
If you block a single domain at the DNS level you never see those ads either.
Like I get it if your kid wants to watch Disney shows and it buys you some peace and quiet. Otherwise, it's a firehose of content, everything's ultimately just a part of a franchise structure that's built more as a business plan than a piece of art, and there's no way to consume it all.
When I think of streaming services being owned by content producers, I think of the 1940s push to bar content producers from owning movie theaters. Unfortunately that anti-trust decree was removed in 2020 in support of big businesses. [0]
This is why content producers, like Disney, should not be able to run streaming services. They are no different then the movie theater owners before digital access.
USA keeps repealing anti-trust laws and allowing business to get bigger and more corrupt. This allows them to maximize their wealth by reducing competition. USA has become a Corporatocracy through the actions of putting big business ahead of their citizens.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pic....
What alternatives exists for kids? Youtube?
But I struggle to understand the economics of the streaming sites listed in the article. They receive an all-you-can-eat monthly payment but have to keep acquiring (including, it seems, making) new content. The linkage between the two is very loose (monthly vs daily) and most videos etc show up as new and then fade down the rankings. Seems like a pretty crappy business, and Netflix being independent, points towards that in its financial statements.
Also, the existence of this sentence in the article surprised me: “ It doesn’t help that Disney+ doesn’t make the kind of original content that wins at the Emmys.” Winning a major one can have a small boost on a film’s lifetime revenue, but overall the correlation between the two is weak. To paraphrase (ugh) Pournelle: Disney would rather have a lucrative film with no awards than a lauded film with no revenue.
i gave up on sailing the seas years ago but at these rates i can pay for decent seedboxen and vpns
As easy as drinking water.
> We use your personal data for interest-based advertising, as outlined in our Privacy Notice.
Sigh, this isn't the timeline I was hoping to end up in.
The news is a front for the wealthy to control the political narrative so they can pass laws to benefit themselves. Home improvement networks are fronts for real estate developers. Sports channels are fronts for bookies and merchandisers. And so on and so forth.
Web-based services like streaming are now a front for oligopolies. Or more accurately, maybe they always have been, at least since the Dot Bomb around 2000. But who are we kidding, the 1950s were literally a false narrative about the nuclear family vs the rabble, used to create the Cold War and skim trillions of dollars from the working poor on both sides of the conflict.
This stuff used to be the cynical conspiratorial view. But now I don't see how kids will be able to navigate the modern world without someone admitting what they already know: that it's all a lie.
When I was getting married, I engaged a baker to make pies for our wedding. Two weeks before the wedding they cancelled, saying very apologetically they had not catered many weddings with only pies and couldn't do it at the price they quoted. I had to practically beg them to just give me a price that was profitable for them (20% higher, in the end), and then let me decide. This feels just like that.
The line doesn't exists. It's most profitable for the company to repeatedly:
1. Have an ad-supported tier and a no-ads tier
2. Wait for most people to move to the no-ads tier
3. Introduce ads into the no-ads tier
4. Wait for people to get sick of ads
5. Introduce a new, higher cost no ads tier
There is no threshold where it's more profitable for the company to never introduce ads at that price point.
I am receptive to the idea repeated across responses that Disney (or any other internet media company) cannot do this as a tier for all because it degrades the value of the advertising audience they sell to ad buyers by removing high earners. But it is still difficult for me to buy that there is truly no line at which it is worth it for them.
This is why people go scorched earth with adblockers. There’s a lot of discussion about “good” ad networks being allowlisted, but they are all just one missed earnings report away from implementing dark patterns. None of them are trustworthy.
This is just how not having antitrust, media ownership limitations, or consumer protections works. The actors, crew, and production companies are in the same boat as you when dealing with Disney.
I mean I wouldn't because I'm not a moral-free corporate entity whose only goal is to maximize my own gain. Further, the analogy doesn't apply because in the streaming and internet media context I can walk away and have walked away. I do not use any social media except this site and Letterboxd; I've moved largely to physical media and season buys of shows I like, I watch sports on the antenna, NBA TV, or illicit streaming sites with ad blockers running overtime (unless it's on NBA League Pass, which doesn't advertise to me!).
The enshittification knows no bounds.
I know that they are probably going to roll out remote attestation at some point, but I cancelled YouTube Premium the last time they did an insane price raise.