Technology

Back in the day, before streaming was a thing, there were lots of people saying that they'd gladly pay for content if it was served to them in a convenient way. But why would you pay for a worse experience (at that time physical media, often at lower quality, and lower availability) when you can get a better one for free?

Along came streaming. Lo and behold, piracy decreased. Where the fuck do you even go to pirate music anymore? All the big sites have shut down. Video piracy is kinda still going strong, probably mostly due to bullshit concerning exclusives, but it's way less than it used to be.

Its their platform, they can do whatever they want with it I guess, but this trend is definitely gonna be a big boost to piracy.

I mean, yeah. I signed up for a year of Prime last summer. They just decide to put in ads? At least wait for the subscription to expire before pulling this crap.

Every time they do something like this, I wait longer and longer to resubscribe. It's just been getting worse, not better.

Bezos, just go to Mars already with the rest of the billionaires. Guess how much taxes you'll save up there. We don't need you.

Prime was a reasonable value for me a decade ago. The streaming side was never the main draw but it was a nice added bonus, especially when Netflix started to lose a lot of the content I actually wanted to watch.

Unfortunately, Amazon's been flooded with worthless trash, and they made the conscious decision to make searching and filtering as useless as possible. It's actually impressive that they've so degraded their service that it's usually more convenient for me to go shopping locally than to try to navigate the unending mine field on Amazon.

So of course they try to ruin the last thing keeping me subscribed. I'm done, they can fuck off. I've got a jellyfin server, I don't need these assholes.

Unfortunately, I'm sure they'll make an obscene amount of money with this move, because apparently the world is full of people who will pay good money to bend over and take it.

Meanwhile I get support for both completely ad free with infinite selection on my Jellyfin server... What on earth are these companies thinking, you literally get a superior product by not paying for it. I would gladly pay a small fee per download of DRM free files if that were an option.

Just cancelled my prime subscription today. It was set to renew on Friday. I've been with prime for close to 10 years.

I don't see any value. The price has nearly doubled since originally signing up. The free two day shipping was nice but more and more 2 days is 3-4 and I can get free shipping anyway on any order over $35 without prime so I'll just build up my cart and be patient or order from another place.

The video content was nice but they're fucking joking if they think I'm going to watch ads or pay $3 more per month to not have ads. I can easily pirate most content including live sports and they're making it far less convenient to be part of their ecosystem.

I get my books from the library and store my photos locally.

The literal only downside i see is my buddy won't get his twitch prime subscription from me every month so I guess I'm costing him like $2/month but he's got several hundred so he'll do without.

Go after netflix too.

yar HAR!

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I don't regularly watch anything on APV so this specific action doesn't really effect me -but- the uninhibited profit seeking by the Entertainment Industry is out of control. As a high income household we've silently absorbed the rate hikes and content splitting in order to keep enjoying content but the latest industry moves around account sharing and charging extra for basic stuff is getting to be too much. The former because I've got kids in College and I shouldn't have to pay for extra"accounts, even with Student Discounts, so they can watch things and I definitely shouldn't have to pay for simple add-ons like HD, Vision, and Atmos!

I'm lucky enough to be able to stand up a Media Server (Plex in my case) and am currently integrating that with "Arrr" services so I can hop off this carousel of rent-seeking insanity.