I've returned to the high seas, eye patch and all.
I found a seedbox provider that is fairly cheap and works well. I have a long standing rss feed for new shows so next step is going to be getting it setup to auto download for me. I can do it locally but spectrum is hard core with the dmca notices and I don't want to risk losing my account.
Sonarr and Radarr with NZBGet, usenet indexer and a cheap unlimited news server provider, and you're laughing. I have everything downloading automagically as soon as its release, loads right into Jellyfin - all on a copyright notice keen ISP and never have any issues because im not sharing anything up, its all down with usenet
I have Spectrum as well, but using a VPN w/ dead switch turned on has worked thus far. They really are ruthless with dmca though. Hate Spectrum with a deep, deep passion, and not just because of that, but everything else. There's a competitor rolling out fiber everywhere in my city though, so I will soon be ditching them, thankfully.
I pay about $300 per year for an IPTV service that provides over 3000 channels which means all the news and sports I can think of. Also on demand TV and movies, and recordings of popular live sports. It allows 2 public IPs so I share this service with my brother. It's amazing. I've used a few different IPTV services that got shutdown and this one is the best. It's been about 2 years now which is about as long as I've seen these services last so I hope it doesn't get shut down anytime soon.
Even as a child, when we had cable, I would ask my dad why we still had to watch commercials even though we pay for the service. I understood why stations like CBS, NBC, or ABC may have needed ads as they were free over-the-air, but surely paying for cable should mean no ads, right?
Never had a good answer. It's pretty fucked up that we collectively allowed them to pull that shit on us and put up with it for like 3 decades.
There was a brief and glorious time when Pay Cable was billed as being ad-free. You would still see promos for other shows and channels between shows, but there were no commercial breaks!
Hulu has a lower price tear that includes ads. It makes it more affordable for some people. If they had started out with ads I would be less upset, but for a big company like Amazon it just seems like they're trying to make even more money off of the consumer.
Hulu DID start out with ads. When they launched it was an entirely ad supported service. Hulu+ didn't come until years later. After several years of running two tiers of service, free ad supported and paid ad free, they dropped the free tier. Now, years later, we're back to ads with Hulu, but this time you pay for the privilege.
Right, but the business model is totally different. You're paying your cable provider for access, you're not paying to watch the TV shows. The TV shows were financed by broadcaster advertising revenues among other streams of income. With Amazon, you're paying for access and to fund their programs. Ads are just greedy and anti-consumer for a vertically integrated platform like Amazon Video.
To be fair, Prime Video has always just been a free perk attached to prime (and with all the other 'perks' combined you could basically consider it free). For example I get an extra 3% back on all my Amazon orders by being a prime member. At the current cost of prime and just with the home supplies I order w/ subscribe and save, it pays for itself. That's not to say I'm happy with this, but in actuality they're fairly well positioned with the product to make this move and have most of the user base be merely disgruntled.
Better not be advert breaks in the service I PAY FOR, or else I'm out.
I'm not paying anybody to serve me adverts. Ever.
Their application is already god awful, and their database is built incredibly poorly (what idiot decided that different seasons of one TV show should have entirely separate listings in the database, often making it hard to find?!).
AND, they're constantly trying to shove extra paid stuff down my throat, like something called Paramount+, in the thing I'm already bloody paying for.
I'm already at the edge of my tether with these people for their crappy service. If they introduce advertisment breaks into a service I'm paying for? That would be a direct insult, and I don't stand for that sort of thing.
their database is built incredibly poorly (what idiot decided that different seasons of one TV show should have entirely separate listings in the database, often making it hard to find?!).
Likely this is legacy from when you would buy each season as a DVD set
Wow, first they destroy Prime Music to push you to pay extra for Music Unlimited and now this? I have no idea what the value of Prime even is now unless you order online frequently, which is harder and harder to justify with all the shady and low quality sellers polluting the site.
Same, I've only watched one or two shows that have actually been included with Prime....don't know if I'm just looking for the wrong shows/movies though
I've been planning on cancelling prime at the end of the year. This closes the decision making process for me.
I've been sticking to Pluto and Tubi lately. Yes, they have ads, but they are entirely free and have enough content to keep me entertained for the duration of my ever decreasing television watching habits.
(End of year because due to terms and conditions, there is no benefit to cancel early)
My experience with prime delivery in 2023 is that it has gone from two days to four days to two weeks to completely lost fuck you trying to get a refund.
Further, I stopped using eBay in the late 2000s because everything there became "fell off a truck in China" quality. This is what a vast percentage of Amazon product has become.
I canceled last time they raised the price and started including football. The only thing prime is really good for is if you like making a bunch of little purchases frequently. I honestly don't miss it at all. When I do buy something, you get free shipping on anything else you buy for the next 24 hours. That ends up covering the little stuff I might have forgotten on the original order and prime shipping was rarely 2 days anymore anyway, so what's an extra day or two wait.
Remember folks who are currently subscribed: They do not give prorated refunds for full year subs. When you cancel the service ends immediately. Setup calendar reminders or eat the sunk cost now because Amazon Prime is just a typical subscription entrapment scheme that will only get harder and harder to cancel, like a gym membership.
Edit: Thanks /u/@firadin - Cancel now, you don't lose anything and the membership simply won't renew on your renewal date.
Is that new? When I cancelled last year a couple months into my year long subscription I got the money back for the unused months. No problem, easy too.
That's not accurate, they don't stop your benefits when you hit the cancel button. I just cancelled today and have my benefits until the end of my yearly subscription in November.
This isn't even really normal entshitification, they added videos and some music cheap Spotify knockoff to their fast delivery flat rate. Nobody asked them to.
Then they slowly raised the price, essentially locking everyone that just wanted free fast delivery into a video streaming service and kept increasing the price.
They did this to force existing subscribers into their "new" business idea of a video streaming service, when they couldn't yet compete with the competition back then. Good news for them, their competitors are shit now.
Now they can include advertisements in it too and add more expensive advertisement free tiers. Essentially increasing the price again, but hiding it so people can't ask for subscription fees back in Europe.
Do they really think most people have forgotten they just wanted a fast delivery flat rate? They will never offer their delivery flat rate without video and all that stuff again, only if a legislature would force them.
I just cancelled. Was thinking about doing it during the last price hike but never got around to it. Good thing they announced it now since it was going to renewed on the 15th of October.
Be careful when you try to order stuff from Amazon without prime. They try to coerce you into getting prime about 4 times during the checkout process. It's so scummy.
Amazon Prime hasn't been good for years. There's no reason to pay for it.
If amazon was smart they would have not included their streaming service in their free shipping subscription but now it just feels like an expensive bloated product with minimal value.
So glad I cancelled Prime a few months ago. Turns out, I’m still getting free shipping even without it and I didn’t find Rings of Power worth pirating.
Users will have the option to buy an ad-free subscription for an additional $2.99 per month, while the current prices will give them the version with ads.
Wow, that’s actually really shitty. They should have just raised the prices by $24, and announced a cheaper version of prime with ads. Nobody would have questioned it.
Prime is still worth it to me for the free shipping, but I won't be watching their video if I have to watch ads and I certainly won't be paying extra for the privilege of not having to watch them.
I really hate the "free shipping" line. It's not free, you are literally paying a monthly fee for it, even if you buy nothing. That is in no way "free".
Are you really buying from Amazon more than twice a month? If yes, stop/wait and combine shipments. If not, cancel prime because even at their now-standard $6 shipping per order, you'd break even or save $6-$12.
I've taught my parents this, and they now see the idiocy in buying things the second they think of them, even if they won't use it for weeks. A $4 item with $6 shipping is so incredibly stupid, but now that they wait until they "need" a few items, suddenly shipping is $0 because they reached the $35 tipping point. Even at the 'discounted' federal assistance price level of prime (I'm disabled), it made no sense.
That, and they claim you get "faster" shipping with Prime but in my area at least they always manage to fuck it up, so they wind up delivering every single order days or sometimes a week later than they originally promised. I therefore have no desire to pay them a bribe just to fuck up anyway; they stuff I order without Prime gets here in the same time frame 95% of the time. It's literally worthless.
This might make me reconsider my prime subscription. I already find prime video a bit lacking but combined with free shipping I find the service as a whole worth paying for, however I’m not sure I order enough for free shipping alone to be worth it
It's one of my favorite streaming services. The Grand tour, Clarkson's farm, the boys, marvelous Mrs maisel, the wheel of time, that lotr series, peripheral. They have a decent catalogue. Plus it's "free" because I get prime for shipping.
Id probably ask my buddy for access to his Plex if they add ads. I already get annoyed that they show me stuff I'd have to pay extra for in the same screen as the prime content.