Amazon's Prime Video will start serving ads on January 29 unless you pay extra

DeadNinja@lemmy.world to Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com – 572 points –
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It's just cable tv all over again. Pay for 8 services to get a handful of shows you want to watch with the other 90% not being touched , now with ads creeping back in too .

And yet, people will fall for it again and again

People that don't pirate won't have a choice.

While I'm all for piracy (obviously), there's always a choice. Decades ago when cable was going through this, TV was at the center of culture and absolutely everyone watched it.

That's just not true anymore. Even aside from piracy, they have to compete for people's time and attention with videogames, social media, and all sorts of other internet-based entertainment. I suspect a lot of the executives making these decisions don't realize this - they think it's still 20 years ago when having some of your biggest shows on your channel guaranteed a big audience. If they squeeze too hard people will just spend their time with other sorts of entertainment.

I think that the publishing industry is a good comparison - look at where it is now. It still produces stuff but its cultural relevance is a pale shadow of what it once was and its margins are razor-thin because few people are going to pay a premium even for a bestseller. I think that that's the long-term fate of TV and movies, especially as the generation that was weened on them dies off and a new generation that watched much less growing up comes of age.

publishing industry

As in book publishing?

Not me ! But not everyone has a PC that can store tons of movies and shows so they don't have much other choice . There's one streaming service that I think is only in Canada called crave that charges an extra $10 to watch on anything other than your phone it's just the worst .

But not everyone has a PC

That's a decision they've made for themselves. No sympathy. Computers are cheap, storage even cheaper.

at least you can choose to pay for one streamer at a time, binge, switch, repeat.

(for now, anyway.. until they all quit the full season drops and/or start putting their catalog on a rotation like the 'disney vault' was to home video).

Or only offer annual contracts with early cancellation fees.

they'd go a 'no refunds' policy first, which they'd totally get away with in the u.s.

Yeah, this is what is next. Another thing might be to split up one service into subcategories, like family, sci-fi, cinema or whatever and then charging for each individually. Obviously ending up more expensive if you get them all than what it is now.