I don't understand how people paying for prime can stand that crappy prime video UI anyway.
it's basically fine and unoffensive ui to 99.9% of people
people see it as functionally free because they bought prime for free delivery
People don't know how to pirate
I'm deep into the seven seas but I still use prime because a family member pays for it. Its a decent enough ui and has some live stuff I can throw on to keep kids entertained. However, I've already added the shows I watch on prime to my jellyfin server just because this change is going to make me not want to use it anymore.
I weighed anchor despite paying for Prime for years. For one, you never know when they’ll drop a show, and two I prefer all my media in my polled interface.
I ended up dropping Prime two years ago because Amazon simply can’t hold up their end of their 2 day bargain. I live in a college town and when the school year starts their delivery time stretches to nearly 2 weeks. The rest of the year it fluctuates between 3 and 7 days. That’s not Prime in any way. Of course, without prime, note they wait 3-6 days before even shipping my packages so everything is a week to ten days. OTOH, Walmart - though having a smaller selection- is being me next day service on about 60% of my orders and two day on the rest …for less than half the annual fee.
My only lament is the weird Chinese electronics/components Amazon sellers stock FBA. It doesn’t take me too long to get to $35, but I do miss the $5 impulse buy of small packs of arduino actuators or pneumatic push connectors when inspiration strikes.
Yep. I don’t consider it as a valuable streaming platform. If they removed it from the general prime I would not buy it separately.
I can understand 1 and 2, although, for 3, even though, most of my (nontechie) friends don't know how to pirate, they know how to look up grey streaming sites like 123movies, sflix, fmovies, etc
I’m a shameless sailor but my wife has it for the free shipping.
Their menus are ass but I really like the actual player ui. Love pausing and seeing who is in the scene.
I can't agree with #1. The interface is that of Amazon's regular storefront and it often mixes paid media in with the free stuff or has stupid stuff like seasons 2, 4, & 6 being free while 1, 3, & 5 are paid. Maybe it's different in the TV apps, but the browser version is atrocious.
The player interface is excellent. Being able to see who the actors are in each scene is one of my favorite UI features.
I agree that finding a thing you want to watch is meh at best. Especially because they mix in rentals, purchasable content, and prime content all in the home interface window.
That said, yo ho matey.
Yes, X-ray is a fantastic feature. I have to give them that. The rest of it is trash.
Yeah if you hate immersion it’s great.
They also have a ton of subtitles and audio options. Like a shit ton.
Meanwhile Netflix most times doesn’t even have subtitles in one or more of the official languages where I live. And for sure they could have more, considering where they operate, they just choose not to.
However prime UI sucks for splitting shows between seasons so they get recommended multiple times. It just makes no sense
When I still was paying for prime (cancelled it last price increase) I was pirating any prime videos as that was easier than dealing with the shitty prime video UI.
Not to mention the shockingly bad picture quality.
The 4k stuff isn't terrible, but anything that's in HD is bloody awful.
I hit the high seas when they wouldn't let me watch the shit i paid for in high def. Fuck that.
I pay for Amazon prime. The only time I watch Prime Video is every once in a while I wonder: is Stargate: Universe as terrible as I remember? And then I try watching it and remember that it is. 
I honestly thought it wasn't terrible and would have benefitted from fleshing out the rest of the story. It was definitely a huge departure from the styling of SGU and Atlantis but not horrible on its own.
It's slightly more convenient than sailing, considering it's attached to my unlimited photo backup
I originally started paying for prime for the free shipping. Prime video is a perk as far as I'm concerned. I haven't re-evaluated it in a long time though to see if it's worth it. I do order a ton of stuff on amazon since I live 160km from the nearest city.
The UI had a "recent" glow up, it was way worse before.
The moment each show got a pre-reel for another Amazon show this was clearly the path they where taking.
Already cancelled a good 6 months ago.
Yeah, Prime Video already has commercials.
Yeah I thought that was a pretty obvious attempt to ease people into it. So this news doesn't come as a shock. If anything I'm surprised it took this long.
At least they give you a slip button, unlike Paramount+
When they announced this, it was the last straw for me with Amazon that caused me to finally cancel Prime, which I've paid for annually since it was first offered. Things I've been complacently shrugging off until now:
their delivery misses/delays have gotten consistently worse over the past year and a half
they screwed up my combined music library when they changed Amazon Music, which was working great before the change
Audible keeps pushing up-sale subscriptions I don't want, and is inconsistently working with Android Auto now (but was fine until about a year ago)
Prime Video ads and up-sale "channels"
book editions (especially textbook editions): they limit the ability to re-sell old editions of textbooks when newer editions are currently in print. Many classes specify old editions because that's what the curricula and syllabi have built around and the profs can take responsibility for validating the content. This is a serious issue with the number of errors that manage to get past editors for math and science texts, and they publish new editions for cash grabs when no actual new or useful information has been added.
They really don't have to do much to keep me complacent tbh - just stop breaking things that already work(ish). Find whatever the deliverable requirements were in like 2015 and just return to those.
I am in the exact same boat. The removal of "free" rotating streaming video content and limiting it to only Amazon funded shows with "free with prime" videos being hosted by 3rd party apps (fuck off, freevee) was bad enough but to start showing ads was the final straw
I cancelled my prime today. $150/yr. I can wait a few extra days for the things I need to order
I went through this a couple years ago. Decided Jeff Bezos does not need any more money, cancelled prime. Funny this was that most things ship the same as always, get them in like 2 or 3 days.
In fact, most other online retailers offer similar free 2 day shipping to stay competitive and I usually find stuff of Amazon first.
Same.
Should have done it sooner.
I can wait a few extra days for the things I need to order
Amazon’s already provided that. Their delivery went from stellar to shit.
The only reason I ever had Prime was free shipping, then I realized as soon as I bundled my orders to be over a certain dollar figure I STILL got free shipping, I kicked Prime to the curb.
For me it was the "Amazon Day" shipping that bundles up a week's worth of separate orders into one shipping day. Convenient sure but now I'm not getting 2-day shipping... so what am I paying for again? I'll just bundle up the orders and shipping my damn self.
Yeah, if I need something next day, I'll go buy it today. :)
I cancelled Amazon Prime awhile ago when the customer service took a nose dive and I realized too many of the 3rd party vendors were using Amazon as their defective products outlet.
But I actively and permanently skipped out on an Amazon Prime subscription because they refused to give me a pro-rated refund on the remaining 8-9 months of service after I cancelled. They literally told me that they start with the pro-rated amount, then subtract out the cost of all the "free" movie/show/music rentals as well as all the "free" shipping on orders during the time you've had prime, and you only get whatever remains (if anything). Within the first 3 -4 months, I had already accrued enough "free" $5.99 shipping and $3 - $4 rentals that it exceeded the $100 or whatever cost of a prime membership was back in those days, so I got no refund. Bunch of crooks.
No surprise, I'm completely on board with folks kicking Prime to the curb.
wow, wtf. what a scam.
You can even get a free week of prime for 2 dollars by just not giving-in which you can then immediately cancel and get ovre and over and over and over again.
It's like a second golden age of internet piracy, and it's happening because streaming over saturated itself just like cable lmao
Yeah, streaming services are losing the plot. I'm good lol.
Give it time and we’ll all be back on Netflix with all the catalogs available there.
Pirate services are cheaper and have better apps
Pirate "services"?
Servarr Suite. Netflix interface, piracy backend. Operates over Usenet. Can handle movies, tv, music and ebooks. I've been told there are viable workarounds for televised sports, specifically F1.
Thanks for reminding me to cancel my prime.
You're welcome.
If there are commercials, why should someone need an Amazon Prime membership at all? It becomes just like broadcast TV then, and they should just allow anyone to watch to maximize revenue. They have all this AWS infrastructure to deliver video, why not maximize the use of it?
👨🏻🦲🫳🏻💰
But wouldn't they make more money by not requiring a subscription and having many more viewers? They will get paid for showing ads, not collecting Prime subscriptions.
If you don't have prime you might not buy things from Amazon which would probably be a net loss compared to the potential ad revenue increase.
Nice to know I can finally cancel Prime though. The entire value proposition has now gone. Free shipping is hugely conditional (and prices are artificially jacked to cover it in the first place), and now they want to put the worst thing on the internet (ads) into the only component of Prime I still sorta kinda use sometimes. I'd rather keep the $140 a year or whatever.
Personally, idgaf what they do with Prime Video. After about a decade of having Prime, the only thing that has ever caught my attention was Rings of Power and that shat the bed so I'm good there.
I order enough off Amazon that faster delivery is a major draw for me. Ordering from other merchants is a drag because Amazon set the standard forever ago. But is it worth $140/year? Idk, I'll have to do the value calculation on that one. But it's getting closer to not being worth it. Especially if they continue to bundle the cost of video that I don't use onto my shipping subscription.
I canceled my Prime account this past summer when I was informed they were going to increase my yearly fee. I've been a Prime member since 2003. It used to be FREE strict 2 day shipping on everything amazon sold. I think it was $85 a year then. 100% worth the fee. The shipping got worse and worse until the peak shit when they sold the contract for shipping to USPS from UPS for the majority of packages. Used to be if something wasn't there by the guaranteed delivery date, you could call and complain and you'd get a month of prime added to your account. Then it got so frequent they started changing that to a $5 credit if you complained. Now they just change the "guaranteed" date if it's going to be late, and no one gives a fuck if it still doesn't get there. All this time the fee has ballooned to over $140. Now you're telling me they're going to start adding commercials to their streaming? It's total horse shit from one of the largest companies in the world. They shit the bed with the gawd awful Rings of Power and are passing that cost on to us. Fuck Amazon, Hulu, Disney, Netflix. They are all garbage companies. Fcuking pirate everything you can.
Guess I’ll just start downloading that content too because I’m not paying you more for the same shit. I’d get rid of it altogether if it wasn’t just included as part of prime in general.
Cancelled! Bye!
Me too! I'd been meaning to, but finally did it yesterday right after they sent the email letting me know hahaha
I have Prime and have never actually used it. I still watch Amazon shows, but I'll be fucked if I use their shit interface or expose myself to their datamining to do it. Let alone watch fucking ads.
Piracy is a UX issue.
I tried to use their UX. Its bad. And the worst is I fell asleep watching something like Project Bluebook once. And the Prime Reccomendations streamed a SHITLOAD of alien conspiracy content while i slept. It ruined the recs etc. And you cant delete the primary account profile....only the sub-profiles.
Frankly i only go on it to see what I should maybe load into Sonarr/Radarr at this point. fuck em.
So you absorbed a bunch of alien conspiracy stuff while you were sleeping?
Worse. It went off into other conspiracy subjects like 9/11 and all sorts of crap. Theres frankly a lot of weird stuff on amazon prime for free that i would have never seen had i not dozed off.
Most of the other apps (netflix, plex, etc) and even the streaming platform (roku) have measures to combat falling asleep. Whether its disabling auto-play (which amazon didnt have) or bandwidth saver features that will periodically ask if you are still there (which amazon appears to somehow bypass or disable, or did).
These days though i set a sleep timer to shut off the lights and TV at midnight.
That's actually kind of hilarious
Yeah it is in a way. Thankfully it doesn’t leech into my main Amazon shopping reccomendations.
I was watching Yellowstone on Prime back in 2021, before they moved it to a premium tier, and the audio was always out of sync when using Prime Video, so I had to adjust the audio sync latency, and remember to switch it back when watching other content. This was on an Nvidia Shield Pro, too, so not some scrappy TV vendor's implementation of the app on some underpowered SoC.
After a while, I gave up and just watched it on my Plex server instead. I could also use the Watch Together feature to watch it synchronously with friends, a feature not supported by Prime Video.
In my case, the piracy (if you call it that, when I was at the time a Prime member) was absolutely a UX issue, not a price issue.
Jellyfin
Planning a build with my friend, we are going 50/50 in for a dedicated Jellyfin server + NAS to preserve all our media.
I've been trying, but for some reason, it will not recognize my HD. I'be reformatted my drive...tried different drives...I don't know what else to do.
I've got the next week off, migrating from Plex to Jellyfin is on my todo list, but I really like the pipeline I have set up now for .. my sailing habit. arrr
Amazon has been progressively getting worse and worse. I was not a member of Prime for the video. It was a nice perk.
The combination of Amazon making it hard to search for things to buy, the huge amount of low quality crap for sale with confusing descriptions, and this most recent change of putting in place ads if I do not pay an additional fee has led me to cancel my subscription.
They have taken the enshittification too far. Good bye Amazon. Hello Home Depot, Target, et al.
What a bunch of cunts. FFS, it is never enough. Their return policy sucks now, too. It used to be that if Amazon fucked up your order, they'd refund you and you could keep the product. It made ordering online a relatively risk-free proposition. Now, they won't refund you until you ship it back, even if it is their fuck up, which really kills the convenience factor. Plus, you get to over-pay for most things. What's not to love?
What you describe at the end is how it became a monopoly.
The beginning is how a monopoly acts.
People surely abused things and rather than take a measured approach, they brought out Thor’s hammer like a bunch of chuds.
You expect a company to let you keep stuff that they send you wrongly?
Let me know which company still has this policy. I need to trick them into sending me some very expensive graphic cards wrongfully
I didn't say that they should, I said that they did. And they did it to overcome people's hesitation to buy online. You take a risk ordering online because you don't physically pick the item you want.
Your comment is relevant nonetheless since I suspect they stopped their original return policy because of scams.
The point is that Amazon would help you out when your stuff was broken, missing, or mistaken. They won’t lift a finger to fix their own errors now.
That’s not my experience. I recently got in touch with them about some Jabra earbuds that were just over two years old and had developed a fault. I was prepared to quote the UK consumer rights act to them, but it wasn’t necessary. They refunded them immediately and said I didn’t need to bother returning them.
Depends where you live but unsolicited goods acts will often let you keep stuff in this way.
It's their responsibility to get product they sent wrongly back.
Yes, within reason. I'm actually not sure where that line is drawn though. Like whether sending a pre-paid shipping label and asking you to drop it off at a nearby UPS store is enough or if they actually have to have someone pick it up from your home or wherever it was shipped to.
You might already know this, but be mindful that if a company sent you the wrong thing and it wasn't a gift or solicitation, (i.e. an error - even if it was a preventable error) you do legally have to give it back if asked. Which is fair IMO. If I'm sending something expensive and fat finger the address, I'd want it back too.
On the last return I did, I wasn't reimbursed until it was received at their depot. Which was only an extra day.
USENET is my happy place.
This is the way
I had never heard of usenet, this is eye opening thank you! I have been thinking about reverting back to torrents, might have to try this out first though.
I looked into usenet but I first tried RealDebrid and it's been great. I personally have went with Alldebrid
Taking notes right now
You guys should have the same reaction to all bad software news. It would be consistent.
Thankfully, much of Amazons content shows up on Usenet so I can just download the ad-free versions there and then watch it.
Say less.
🏴☠️
Looks like I'm cancelling.
Is Prime Video something that people sign up for a d would cancel? I thought it was something they just happened to get when buying the express shipping package.
It's all part of the Prime package. I signed up because they had the new Star Trek shows.
You can buy the video-only version of prime which is cheaper than the full prime.
Each part of Prime just keeps getting shittier and shittier, this could definitely be a straw that broke the camel's back situation. Shipping stopped being 2-days every time during the pandemic, returns used to allow for pick up at your house are now drop off at a store. Music catalog is being slowly locked behind Unlimited, and now it's all station-ified so you can't even listen to what you want.
Yarrr, this be some bullshit.
Hoist the sails.
Bummer. Not because of the extra $3, honestly I'll probably just pay it. But because until now Prime programming has been able to operate with a certain freedom. I know 0 people with prime for the video (as opposed to the free delivery) so they were willing to take risks with the shows.
Solos and Tales from the Loop are both amazing works of art that would never have shown up on network TV, or Netflix which would much rather make cheap mass appeal shows with little depth. Even more shows with wider appeal (e.g. The Expanse) might not survive the TV Executive mindset now that they have a reason to care about the number of views as a primary metric, over user happiness.
And honestly, it all baffles me, I will gladly subscribe to a streaming service for one great show. Produce 3 or 4 a year and I'm subscribed for good. If I wanted an endless string of medicore baking reality shows, I'd get cable again.
Ugh yes. I canceled my Amazon Prime like 5 years ago, and swore off Amazon completely until they started streaming Vox Machina. Sucks that's the service Critical Role went with, but it is what it is.
I should check out Tales from the Loop too.... and cancel AppleTV now that Ted Lasso is over.
Their catalog is so shit that I don't even know what plays on Amazon. Back when they refused to make an Android video app I just got all their crap from other means. I've had prime for years just for the shipping I've never watched a video through their service.
It seems like every streaming service catalog is deteriorating. Almost every time I've looked up a movie to watch on justwatch, they're only available for rental/"purchase." I'm done paying my hard earned money for dogshit services.
I've also just kind of given up on watching much of anything, I have better things to do than sit in front of the TV for hours on end.
I have better things to do than sit in front of the TV for hours on end.
I hear that. I watch way less than I used to. I've also made it a point to stay out of other people's algorithms as much as I can. I only pull exactly what I want from youtube then go do something else. You can't doom scroll Lemmy because you run out of doom after 30-40 minutes.
My guilty pleasure is still binging certain series, but I try to wait to watch stuff until it's canceled or at the very least until the season is over and I can just catch up in a weekend.
Prime's entire UI already sucks dick. I can't even tell which shows/movies I can watch without having to pay, rent, or subscribe. Like mfer I'm paying to watch whatever Amazon has to offer. I only use it for The Boys, Reacher, and Invincible. Even with how much I would love to support these shows, fuck Amazon.
🏴☠️
No point in paying for Prime Video when other services like Tubi or even Pluto TV offer free movies/shows with ads built-in. When I realized that it was easy to cancel.
And bring that keg of mead on board with ya, ya dastardly scallywags 🏴☠️
Capitalism marches onward.
Oh well.
I
hate
ads. I will gladly let go of anything I lose when I drop it.
Ads have been designed by psychologists to be as Intrusive and stimulating as possible.
I barely watch anything anyway, so good bye TV, I've suffered thee long enough
FYI here is a site with instructions on how to cancel your prime membership since it's not the easiest thing to find.
I was able to cancel on the mobile app using this same process.
Amazon has turned to utter shit these days. They've been requiring you to show your ID to get a refund. Getting asked by some Indian dude who I can barely understand a picture of my government issued ID sure doesn't feel comforting.
So for those who don’t know, this happened with cable back in the day. No ads was part of the pitch, then they were slowly introduced, the appeal of the product fell, and, at least in my circles, fewer held on to the product over time.
that’s patently untrue.
the first cable stations were OTA (network) stations from major cities being served to rural areas. those had ads.
the first cable-specific channel was TBS which was just a converted Atlanta NBC channel that also had ads.
as basic cable grew, new channels launched with ads.
Premium channels like HBO launched in the 70s without ads but afaik those channels are still ad-free except self-promotion between shows.
Well, not everyone lives in the US or has the same timeline or window of experience. I should have made the relativism of my statement more clear, though it was touched on briefly.
I don’t think my “window of experience” has any impact on the objective reality that cable had ads from square 1.
Remember the times when we paid for such a service to get rid of ads? By now I cancelled my prime membership.
Well, they can fuck right off.
Ha, I just cancelled my prime. Nailed it.
I still have prime for the shipping, looks like I'll just be pirating prime video content. Fucking bastard pieces of shit.
I encourage you to think about dropping Prime. Saving your money. Their shipping really isn't that great (anymore), most orders $35 or more ships free, and the money you save ($14/15 per month) can go towards your purchases.
Start? In the UK here and it has always had ads. Even on paid
No it doesn't, it runs a trailer for something else before but I've never had ads mid program
Yeah we get that in the great white north. A immediately Skippable ad for a different show on prime. That is fine by me, however ads like on so many other services will mean I cancel and Maybe setup a plex.
Only for itself. Then they added Freevee stuff which had a load of obnoxious ads in. Now they're adding that to everything, unless you pay extra.
Cancel. Amazon are a cancer.
I don’t use Amazon much anymore anyway, because the products are overwhelmed with cheap, poor quality trash you couldn’t peddle on alibaba and completely worthless, largely faked reviews and ratings. I order once or twice a year some replacement cable or adapter I can’t find anywhere else reasonably quick, but that’s pretty much it, so canceling over this ad bullshit doesn’t really hurt me much.
Next on the list is my Netflix sub, which I largely use just for oldtrek reruns as second screen background noise while I use my computer. I could probably, uh, procure those shows fairly easy, or splurge on a collectors edition and would still save money.
Nah, most of it is coming from Alibaba, but at a markup.
There’s a used media shop down the street and I’m contemplating getting dvd/bluray box sets of my favorites so that I have offline media available.
Go ahead, I did the same and I really don't miss Netflix. I should also mention I have crappy internet, so it's much better/easier to just download good quality vidéo files overnight than sit through a constantly-buffering 240p stream
Amazon Prime Podcasts wants you to know that ads are bad and they offer them as free*. But here they are talking out the other side of their bean counters saying that ads aren't a problem.
The fast talking at the end of the ad says "some podcasts may contain ads."
Man, the enshitification is really taking over.
These companies have to compete in a higher interest rate environment. Otherwise their stock will fall and they won't be able to refinance debt. The free money era is over.
Or... CEOs could stop giving themselves such large bonuses I guess?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Earlier this year, Amazon announced plans to start incorporating ads into movies and TV shows streamed from its Prime Video service, and now the company has revealed a specific date when you’ll start seeing them: it’s January 29th.
No action is required from you, and there is no change to the current price of your Prime membership,” the company wrote.
Customers have the option of paying an additional $2.99 per month to keep avoiding advertisements.
The rest of the email summarizes the many benefits of a Prime subscription — no doubt an attempt to keep customers from cancelling over this decision.
The move comes as competing streaming services continue to raise subscription rates across the board.
The monthly cost of Amazon Prime isn’t changing, but if you want to preserve the same experience you have today starting on January 29th, you’ll end up paying more.
The original article contains 282 words, the summary contains 145 words. Saved 49%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
I just got too many channels for like 16 bucks from China.
They can fuck right off. That said they have a decent output so I'm not going to cancel them outright.
I’ve got all the content for like 0 bucks from some sea fairing scalllywags.
We rarely watch anything on Prime except for a few original shows like Upload and Reacher. Prime Video is usually an afterthought.
I have Amazon Prime which includes Prime Video and I just watched the first four episodes of Reacher 2 on Stremio with Torrentio. Before this, I binged all of Better Call Saul also on the latter, before cancelling Netflix. I also cancelled Disney+ after they announced the second price hike in less than a year, ended up watching Loki 2 also on Stremio. Fuck this greedy assholes.
Canceled. And long overdue I’ll admit
Just before our yearly subscription ends. I’m busy ripping and saving what we like for the next month and finally canceling prime this year, this is just the added motivation to remember how much it sucks.
its been fun watching all these streaming bullets whiz by me and my giant smokin' NAS. i feel like neo!
but really, who didnt see this coming the day they announced their service?
How would they show ads to me if I don't use their services?
The TV side of Amazon Prime is functionally free. And its not like I'm going to cancel the service when what I really use it for is mail-order retail shopping.
So I'll pirate their smattering of good shows and they'll tell advertisers I watch their stupid ads. Everyone gets to play pretend and the wheels of commerce will continue to turn.
Even though I don't have Prime, Amazon's moves are making other sites more attractive. Walmart has been pretty good recently, offering 2-3 day shipping at no additional cost in my experience, along with a better app UI/UX. Now that Amazon has upped the minimum for free shipping, the only edge it holds over Walmart is the wider selection.
Are there any videos/guides to set up a Usenet for dummies? Asking for a friend of mine.
Look up "trash guides" for the *arr programs. I use Sabnzbd, Prowlarr, Sonarr, Radarr, Recyclarr, Jellyseerr, and Jellyfin. All in docker containers on their own vlan. Lemme know if you need any help.
Thanks for the software tips! I think this plus what I've read is a great start!
I forgot to add, when I transitioned into usenet, the most confusing part was that you need to find 2 separate services. From what I understand 1st is access to a usenet to connect to, and 2nd is a service that knows how to crawl and search the 1st to find what you're looking for.
I could be wrong about that, but that's how understand it, and have yet to have issues with my setup.
Aye matey! In fact, they're are entire communities right here in the Lemmyverse all about sailing the digital seas!
Kind of interesting what can be done without the oversight of corporate overlords and monied interests.
So if I understand this right, I can use something like nzbget as the downloader and eweka to download from/as the indexer. Correct?
Is there anything else I would need to get/set up?
My Prime membership is up in March. I've already decided to not renew it, since they decided to cancel The Peripheral. Had I not already made that decision, this change would have made it for me anyway.
I also cancelled, mainly because "prime" shipping is meaningless now. But the addition of ads is the cherry on top.
In a word: yarrrrr
I'd forgotten they were gonna start doing this. I've got Amazon for the shipping there video has always been leaking. I use it maybe twice a year. They're probably trying to delay a price increase to Amazon and increase revenue.
Presently, every time i dive into az video i find nothing and that my time spent was in vain... so now they want me to pay even more for this added misery? Easy decision... I'm out.
As for video streaming, it's going to take a breakup of the Big Tech monopolies via revival of anti-trust laws to fix that. Hear the first chapter of The Internet Con (skip to 2m5s) by Cory Doctorow for more on that.
I've already canceled my Amazon prime subscription. I'm just waiting for it to expire in March
*unless you're not a customer
There is no change to the current price of your Prime membership. We will also offer a new ad-free option for an additional $2.99 per month* that you can sign up for here.
Then there is a price change you damn dimwit, you just gave the shitty tier the same pricing as the old normal tier, and amped up the normal tier by $3.00. I absolutely hate the wording for this, you just know it was to be able to not release the ad membership at a lower price.
We have prime because we order enough through Amazon that the 'free' shipping we pay for is still a good deal. If I don't watch any Amazon video anymore, that's fine. And I don't plan to if there are commercials.
Yeah, my monthly coffee subscription saves me enough to pay for prime in four months. I don't really use the video service enough to care.
My parents still watch cable and the odd time I've seen an ad for some other service advertised as only 12/mo with ads or something like that. Is that supposed to sound good to anyone. All these shit corporations need to get fucked.
This has two effects. First, it is supposed to entice with a "cheap" option. Second, it normalizes ads being part of the experience.
I only watched grand tour anyway, but I can't cancel it since my mother loves the frees shipping.
It's not really free shipping. It's built into Amazon's astronomical fees. It's practically impossible to make sense of it, I had to use their fee calculator tool.
Their "most favoured nation policy" (meaning you can't sell your stuff cheaper than you sell on Amazon) should be flat out illegal.
The only reason I still have Prime Video is because of a super weird bug where it tries to charge an already expired card. Somehow, it doesn't register as expired and I can just "renew" it every month
If the price was slightly higher and it'd remove ads on twitch, I might buy it
eh, I don't really care. It's a gimme with prime. TBH I rarely watch anything on it. The only thing I'm watching right now is the current season of Reacher.
As soon as I saw this I cancelled immediately. I’ve been a member since, um, ever?
Stremio + Torrentio
Sounds like a great time to cancel.
If Video is the reason you have prime, sure. Personally the shipping is still the reason I have it. I don't really use the video service at all. Frankly I wish they'd unbundle all of the stuff and let me pay for just shipping.
This year the shipping has gone from two days from ordering to two days from processing to two weeks to maybe we'll just lose the order entirely.
Add to that that so many of the sellers seem to have migrated over from the eBay "hey look at this cheap knockoff crap that fell off a truck" crowd, and I'm just not seeing the benefit anymore.
My renewal is a week from today. I think I'm going to cancel by then.
I really don't know where I go from here vis a vis online ordering. Probably just use my boss' account when there's something that I just can't get anywhere else.
Mmm, interesting. Here in the UK Amazon actually added a new option - instead of next day delivery you can now get deliver stuff today on some specific items.
Lol time to unprime
Fortunately a VPN is like 30 quid a year. Jellyfin and Radarr are my jam now.
I've kept Netflix and Disney+ for now. I was looking to cancel one for a while, and Amazon made that an easy choice. There's fucking nothing on it at the best of times.
I wish delivery / video was separate because I'd cancel immediately.
You can use Amazon to buy things without subscribing. $35+ order gets free shipping
It's just dystopic
It's worse than you think. As an advertiser, I can actually buy targeted product placements in shows. So, let's say I'm Google, and I know you recently searched for a Google Pixel. If I pay for product placements in the next Prime show, I can get all the phones to be Pixels when you watch it.
But if your friend searched for an iPhone, and he gets targeted by apple, the phones in the show could be iPhones.
Like the live ads on sports broadcasts. They can change to advertise local business depending on your region.
Woah I didn't know the extent of the targeting
Other than Good Omens, and Grand Tour I guess, what's even on Prime Video that's not elsewhere?
The Boys, The Expanse (last 3 seasons), Wheel of Time and Rings of Power are all Prime exclusives.
It's mind boggling to see the volume of content Amazon has produced that nobody cares about. Rings of Power was $89 million per episode. Citadel was $42 million per episode. There are solutions other than, "Higher fees".
But Upload and The Boys are pretty good.
“The boys” and a possible “fallout”
I really liked Uploaded. Guess it's getting downloaded. And not from Amazon.
Honestly. I'm surprised they haven't done this sooner. Prince video is included with a normal prime subscription. So, with some of the originals they've produced and paying for the rights to many movies/shows, they are probably bleeding money with this service..
You make it sound like a savvy business decision to double dip with subscriptions and ads. They choose to give it away with prime to get market share from Netflix. All that's changed is they've decided you're ready to be bent over a barrel now.
Yo ho yo ho.
I don't understand how people paying for prime can stand that crappy prime video UI anyway.
I'm deep into the seven seas but I still use prime because a family member pays for it. Its a decent enough ui and has some live stuff I can throw on to keep kids entertained. However, I've already added the shows I watch on prime to my jellyfin server just because this change is going to make me not want to use it anymore.
I weighed anchor despite paying for Prime for years. For one, you never know when they’ll drop a show, and two I prefer all my media in my polled interface.
I ended up dropping Prime two years ago because Amazon simply can’t hold up their end of their 2 day bargain. I live in a college town and when the school year starts their delivery time stretches to nearly 2 weeks. The rest of the year it fluctuates between 3 and 7 days. That’s not Prime in any way. Of course, without prime, note they wait 3-6 days before even shipping my packages so everything is a week to ten days. OTOH, Walmart - though having a smaller selection- is being me next day service on about 60% of my orders and two day on the rest …for less than half the annual fee.
My only lament is the weird Chinese electronics/components Amazon sellers stock FBA. It doesn’t take me too long to get to $35, but I do miss the $5 impulse buy of small packs of arduino actuators or pneumatic push connectors when inspiration strikes.
Yep. I don’t consider it as a valuable streaming platform. If they removed it from the general prime I would not buy it separately.
I can understand 1 and 2, although, for 3, even though, most of my (nontechie) friends don't know how to pirate, they know how to look up grey streaming sites like 123movies, sflix, fmovies, etc
I’m a shameless sailor but my wife has it for the free shipping.
Their menus are ass but I really like the actual player ui. Love pausing and seeing who is in the scene.
I can't agree with #1. The interface is that of Amazon's regular storefront and it often mixes paid media in with the free stuff or has stupid stuff like seasons 2, 4, & 6 being free while 1, 3, & 5 are paid. Maybe it's different in the TV apps, but the browser version is atrocious.
The player interface is excellent. Being able to see who the actors are in each scene is one of my favorite UI features.
I agree that finding a thing you want to watch is meh at best. Especially because they mix in rentals, purchasable content, and prime content all in the home interface window.
That said, yo ho matey.
Yes, X-ray is a fantastic feature. I have to give them that. The rest of it is trash.
Yeah if you hate immersion it’s great.
They also have a ton of subtitles and audio options. Like a shit ton.
Meanwhile Netflix most times doesn’t even have subtitles in one or more of the official languages where I live. And for sure they could have more, considering where they operate, they just choose not to.
However prime UI sucks for splitting shows between seasons so they get recommended multiple times. It just makes no sense
When I still was paying for prime (cancelled it last price increase) I was pirating any prime videos as that was easier than dealing with the shitty prime video UI.
Not to mention the shockingly bad picture quality.
The 4k stuff isn't terrible, but anything that's in HD is bloody awful.
I hit the high seas when they wouldn't let me watch the shit i paid for in high def. Fuck that.
I pay for Amazon prime. The only time I watch Prime Video is every once in a while I wonder: is Stargate: Universe as terrible as I remember? And then I try watching it and remember that it is. 
I honestly thought it wasn't terrible and would have benefitted from fleshing out the rest of the story. It was definitely a huge departure from the styling of SGU and Atlantis but not horrible on its own.
It's slightly more convenient than sailing, considering it's attached to my unlimited photo backup
I originally started paying for prime for the free shipping. Prime video is a perk as far as I'm concerned. I haven't re-evaluated it in a long time though to see if it's worth it. I do order a ton of stuff on amazon since I live 160km from the nearest city.
The UI had a "recent" glow up, it was way worse before.
The moment each show got a pre-reel for another Amazon show this was clearly the path they where taking.
Already cancelled a good 6 months ago.
Yeah, Prime Video already has commercials.
Yeah I thought that was a pretty obvious attempt to ease people into it. So this news doesn't come as a shock. If anything I'm surprised it took this long.
At least they give you a slip button, unlike Paramount+
When they announced this, it was the last straw for me with Amazon that caused me to finally cancel Prime, which I've paid for annually since it was first offered. Things I've been complacently shrugging off until now:
their delivery misses/delays have gotten consistently worse over the past year and a half
they screwed up my combined music library when they changed Amazon Music, which was working great before the change
Audible keeps pushing up-sale subscriptions I don't want, and is inconsistently working with Android Auto now (but was fine until about a year ago)
Prime Video ads and up-sale "channels"
book editions (especially textbook editions): they limit the ability to re-sell old editions of textbooks when newer editions are currently in print. Many classes specify old editions because that's what the curricula and syllabi have built around and the profs can take responsibility for validating the content. This is a serious issue with the number of errors that manage to get past editors for math and science texts, and they publish new editions for cash grabs when no actual new or useful information has been added.
They really don't have to do much to keep me complacent tbh - just stop breaking things that already work(ish). Find whatever the deliverable requirements were in like 2015 and just return to those.
I am in the exact same boat. The removal of "free" rotating streaming video content and limiting it to only Amazon funded shows with "free with prime" videos being hosted by 3rd party apps (fuck off, freevee) was bad enough but to start showing ads was the final straw
I cancelled my prime today. $150/yr. I can wait a few extra days for the things I need to order
I went through this a couple years ago. Decided Jeff Bezos does not need any more money, cancelled prime. Funny this was that most things ship the same as always, get them in like 2 or 3 days.
In fact, most other online retailers offer similar free 2 day shipping to stay competitive and I usually find stuff of Amazon first.
Same.
Should have done it sooner.
Amazon’s already provided that. Their delivery went from stellar to shit.
The only reason I ever had Prime was free shipping, then I realized as soon as I bundled my orders to be over a certain dollar figure I STILL got free shipping, I kicked Prime to the curb.
For me it was the "Amazon Day" shipping that bundles up a week's worth of separate orders into one shipping day. Convenient sure but now I'm not getting 2-day shipping... so what am I paying for again? I'll just bundle up the orders and shipping my damn self.
Yeah, if I need something next day, I'll go buy it today. :)
I cancelled Amazon Prime awhile ago when the customer service took a nose dive and I realized too many of the 3rd party vendors were using Amazon as their defective products outlet.
But I actively and permanently skipped out on an Amazon Prime subscription because they refused to give me a pro-rated refund on the remaining 8-9 months of service after I cancelled. They literally told me that they start with the pro-rated amount, then subtract out the cost of all the "free" movie/show/music rentals as well as all the "free" shipping on orders during the time you've had prime, and you only get whatever remains (if anything). Within the first 3 -4 months, I had already accrued enough "free" $5.99 shipping and $3 - $4 rentals that it exceeded the $100 or whatever cost of a prime membership was back in those days, so I got no refund. Bunch of crooks.
No surprise, I'm completely on board with folks kicking Prime to the curb.
wow, wtf. what a scam.
You can even get a free week of prime for 2 dollars by just not giving-in which you can then immediately cancel and get ovre and over and over and over again.
It's like a second golden age of internet piracy, and it's happening because streaming over saturated itself just like cable lmao
The cancelled Coyote vs ACME movie might only be available on the high seas, matey. It be my current white whale, yarr.
Yeah, streaming services are losing the plot. I'm good lol.
Give it time and we’ll all be back on Netflix with all the catalogs available there.
Pirate services are cheaper and have better apps
Pirate "services"?
Servarr Suite. Netflix interface, piracy backend. Operates over Usenet. Can handle movies, tv, music and ebooks. I've been told there are viable workarounds for televised sports, specifically F1.
Thanks for reminding me to cancel my prime.
You're welcome.
If there are commercials, why should someone need an Amazon Prime membership at all? It becomes just like broadcast TV then, and they should just allow anyone to watch to maximize revenue. They have all this AWS infrastructure to deliver video, why not maximize the use of it?
👨🏻🦲🫳🏻💰
But wouldn't they make more money by not requiring a subscription and having many more viewers? They will get paid for showing ads, not collecting Prime subscriptions.
If you don't have prime you might not buy things from Amazon which would probably be a net loss compared to the potential ad revenue increase.
Nice to know I can finally cancel Prime though. The entire value proposition has now gone. Free shipping is hugely conditional (and prices are artificially jacked to cover it in the first place), and now they want to put the worst thing on the internet (ads) into the only component of Prime I still sorta kinda use sometimes. I'd rather keep the $140 a year or whatever.
Personally, idgaf what they do with Prime Video. After about a decade of having Prime, the only thing that has ever caught my attention was Rings of Power and that shat the bed so I'm good there.
I order enough off Amazon that faster delivery is a major draw for me. Ordering from other merchants is a drag because Amazon set the standard forever ago. But is it worth $140/year? Idk, I'll have to do the value calculation on that one. But it's getting closer to not being worth it. Especially if they continue to bundle the cost of video that I don't use onto my shipping subscription.
I canceled my Prime account this past summer when I was informed they were going to increase my yearly fee. I've been a Prime member since 2003. It used to be FREE strict 2 day shipping on everything amazon sold. I think it was $85 a year then. 100% worth the fee. The shipping got worse and worse until the peak shit when they sold the contract for shipping to USPS from UPS for the majority of packages. Used to be if something wasn't there by the guaranteed delivery date, you could call and complain and you'd get a month of prime added to your account. Then it got so frequent they started changing that to a $5 credit if you complained. Now they just change the "guaranteed" date if it's going to be late, and no one gives a fuck if it still doesn't get there. All this time the fee has ballooned to over $140. Now you're telling me they're going to start adding commercials to their streaming? It's total horse shit from one of the largest companies in the world. They shit the bed with the gawd awful Rings of Power and are passing that cost on to us. Fuck Amazon, Hulu, Disney, Netflix. They are all garbage companies. Fcuking pirate everything you can.
Guess I’ll just start downloading that content too because I’m not paying you more for the same shit. I’d get rid of it altogether if it wasn’t just included as part of prime in general.
Cancelled! Bye!
Me too! I'd been meaning to, but finally did it yesterday right after they sent the email letting me know hahaha
I have Prime and have never actually used it. I still watch Amazon shows, but I'll be fucked if I use their shit interface or expose myself to their datamining to do it. Let alone watch fucking ads.
Piracy is a UX issue.
I tried to use their UX. Its bad. And the worst is I fell asleep watching something like Project Bluebook once. And the Prime Reccomendations streamed a SHITLOAD of alien conspiracy content while i slept. It ruined the recs etc. And you cant delete the primary account profile....only the sub-profiles.
Frankly i only go on it to see what I should maybe load into Sonarr/Radarr at this point. fuck em.
So you absorbed a bunch of alien conspiracy stuff while you were sleeping?
Worse. It went off into other conspiracy subjects like 9/11 and all sorts of crap. Theres frankly a lot of weird stuff on amazon prime for free that i would have never seen had i not dozed off.
Most of the other apps (netflix, plex, etc) and even the streaming platform (roku) have measures to combat falling asleep. Whether its disabling auto-play (which amazon didnt have) or bandwidth saver features that will periodically ask if you are still there (which amazon appears to somehow bypass or disable, or did).
These days though i set a sleep timer to shut off the lights and TV at midnight.
That's actually kind of hilarious
Yeah it is in a way. Thankfully it doesn’t leech into my main Amazon shopping reccomendations.
I was watching Yellowstone on Prime back in 2021, before they moved it to a premium tier, and the audio was always out of sync when using Prime Video, so I had to adjust the audio sync latency, and remember to switch it back when watching other content. This was on an Nvidia Shield Pro, too, so not some scrappy TV vendor's implementation of the app on some underpowered SoC.
After a while, I gave up and just watched it on my Plex server instead. I could also use the Watch Together feature to watch it synchronously with friends, a feature not supported by Prime Video.
In my case, the piracy (if you call it that, when I was at the time a Prime member) was absolutely a UX issue, not a price issue.
Jellyfin
Planning a build with my friend, we are going 50/50 in for a dedicated Jellyfin server + NAS to preserve all our media.
I've been trying, but for some reason, it will not recognize my HD. I'be reformatted my drive...tried different drives...I don't know what else to do.
I've got the next week off, migrating from Plex to Jellyfin is on my todo list, but I really like the pipeline I have set up now for .. my sailing habit. arrr
Amazon has been progressively getting worse and worse. I was not a member of Prime for the video. It was a nice perk.
The combination of Amazon making it hard to search for things to buy, the huge amount of low quality crap for sale with confusing descriptions, and this most recent change of putting in place ads if I do not pay an additional fee has led me to cancel my subscription.
They have taken the enshittification too far. Good bye Amazon. Hello Home Depot, Target, et al.
What a bunch of cunts. FFS, it is never enough. Their return policy sucks now, too. It used to be that if Amazon fucked up your order, they'd refund you and you could keep the product. It made ordering online a relatively risk-free proposition. Now, they won't refund you until you ship it back, even if it is their fuck up, which really kills the convenience factor. Plus, you get to over-pay for most things. What's not to love?
What you describe at the end is how it became a monopoly.
The beginning is how a monopoly acts.
People surely abused things and rather than take a measured approach, they brought out Thor’s hammer like a bunch of chuds.
You expect a company to let you keep stuff that they send you wrongly? Let me know which company still has this policy. I need to trick them into sending me some very expensive graphic cards wrongfully
I didn't say that they should, I said that they did. And they did it to overcome people's hesitation to buy online. You take a risk ordering online because you don't physically pick the item you want.
Your comment is relevant nonetheless since I suspect they stopped their original return policy because of scams.
The point is that Amazon would help you out when your stuff was broken, missing, or mistaken. They won’t lift a finger to fix their own errors now.
That’s not my experience. I recently got in touch with them about some Jabra earbuds that were just over two years old and had developed a fault. I was prepared to quote the UK consumer rights act to them, but it wasn’t necessary. They refunded them immediately and said I didn’t need to bother returning them.
Depends where you live but unsolicited goods acts will often let you keep stuff in this way.
It's their responsibility to get product they sent wrongly back.
Yes, within reason. I'm actually not sure where that line is drawn though. Like whether sending a pre-paid shipping label and asking you to drop it off at a nearby UPS store is enough or if they actually have to have someone pick it up from your home or wherever it was shipped to.
You might already know this, but be mindful that if a company sent you the wrong thing and it wasn't a gift or solicitation, (i.e. an error - even if it was a preventable error) you do legally have to give it back if asked. Which is fair IMO. If I'm sending something expensive and fat finger the address, I'd want it back too.
On the last return I did, I wasn't reimbursed until it was received at their depot. Which was only an extra day.
USENET is my happy place.
This is the way
I had never heard of usenet, this is eye opening thank you! I have been thinking about reverting back to torrents, might have to try this out first though.
I looked into usenet but I first tried RealDebrid and it's been great. I personally have went with Alldebrid
Taking notes right now
You guys should have the same reaction to all bad software news. It would be consistent.
Thankfully, much of Amazons content shows up on Usenet so I can just download the ad-free versions there and then watch it.
Say less.
🏴☠️
Looks like I'm cancelling.
Is Prime Video something that people sign up for a d would cancel? I thought it was something they just happened to get when buying the express shipping package.
It's all part of the Prime package. I signed up because they had the new Star Trek shows.
You can buy the video-only version of prime which is cheaper than the full prime.
Each part of Prime just keeps getting shittier and shittier, this could definitely be a straw that broke the camel's back situation. Shipping stopped being 2-days every time during the pandemic, returns used to allow for pick up at your house are now drop off at a store. Music catalog is being slowly locked behind Unlimited, and now it's all station-ified so you can't even listen to what you want.
Yarrr, this be some bullshit.
Hoist the sails.
Bummer. Not because of the extra $3, honestly I'll probably just pay it. But because until now Prime programming has been able to operate with a certain freedom. I know 0 people with prime for the video (as opposed to the free delivery) so they were willing to take risks with the shows.
Solos and Tales from the Loop are both amazing works of art that would never have shown up on network TV, or Netflix which would much rather make cheap mass appeal shows with little depth. Even more shows with wider appeal (e.g. The Expanse) might not survive the TV Executive mindset now that they have a reason to care about the number of views as a primary metric, over user happiness.
And honestly, it all baffles me, I will gladly subscribe to a streaming service for one great show. Produce 3 or 4 a year and I'm subscribed for good. If I wanted an endless string of medicore baking reality shows, I'd get cable again.
Ugh yes. I canceled my Amazon Prime like 5 years ago, and swore off Amazon completely until they started streaming Vox Machina. Sucks that's the service Critical Role went with, but it is what it is.
I should check out Tales from the Loop too.... and cancel AppleTV now that Ted Lasso is over.
Their catalog is so shit that I don't even know what plays on Amazon. Back when they refused to make an Android video app I just got all their crap from other means. I've had prime for years just for the shipping I've never watched a video through their service.
It seems like every streaming service catalog is deteriorating. Almost every time I've looked up a movie to watch on justwatch, they're only available for rental/"purchase." I'm done paying my hard earned money for dogshit services.
I've also just kind of given up on watching much of anything, I have better things to do than sit in front of the TV for hours on end.
I hear that. I watch way less than I used to. I've also made it a point to stay out of other people's algorithms as much as I can. I only pull exactly what I want from youtube then go do something else. You can't doom scroll Lemmy because you run out of doom after 30-40 minutes.
My guilty pleasure is still binging certain series, but I try to wait to watch stuff until it's canceled or at the very least until the season is over and I can just catch up in a weekend.
Prime's entire UI already sucks dick. I can't even tell which shows/movies I can watch without having to pay, rent, or subscribe. Like mfer I'm paying to watch whatever Amazon has to offer. I only use it for The Boys, Reacher, and Invincible. Even with how much I would love to support these shows, fuck Amazon.
No point in paying for Prime Video when other services like Tubi or even Pluto TV offer free movies/shows with ads built-in. When I realized that it was easy to cancel.
And bring that keg of mead on board with ya, ya dastardly scallywags 🏴☠️
Capitalism marches onward.
Oh well.
I
hate
ads. I will gladly let go of anything I lose when I drop it.
Ads have been designed by psychologists to be as Intrusive and stimulating as possible.
I barely watch anything anyway, so good bye TV, I've suffered thee long enough
FYI here is a site with instructions on how to cancel your prime membership since it's not the easiest thing to find.
I was able to cancel on the mobile app using this same process.
Amazon has turned to utter shit these days. They've been requiring you to show your ID to get a refund. Getting asked by some Indian dude who I can barely understand a picture of my government issued ID sure doesn't feel comforting.
So for those who don’t know, this happened with cable back in the day. No ads was part of the pitch, then they were slowly introduced, the appeal of the product fell, and, at least in my circles, fewer held on to the product over time.
that’s patently untrue.
the first cable stations were OTA (network) stations from major cities being served to rural areas. those had ads.
the first cable-specific channel was TBS which was just a converted Atlanta NBC channel that also had ads.
as basic cable grew, new channels launched with ads.
Premium channels like HBO launched in the 70s without ads but afaik those channels are still ad-free except self-promotion between shows.
Well, not everyone lives in the US or has the same timeline or window of experience. I should have made the relativism of my statement more clear, though it was touched on briefly.
I don’t think my “window of experience” has any impact on the objective reality that cable had ads from square 1.
Remember the times when we paid for such a service to get rid of ads? By now I cancelled my prime membership.
Well, they can fuck right off.
Ha, I just cancelled my prime. Nailed it.
I still have prime for the shipping, looks like I'll just be pirating prime video content. Fucking bastard pieces of shit.
I encourage you to think about dropping Prime. Saving your money. Their shipping really isn't that great (anymore), most orders $35 or more ships free, and the money you save ($14/15 per month) can go towards your purchases.
Start? In the UK here and it has always had ads. Even on paid
No it doesn't, it runs a trailer for something else before but I've never had ads mid program
Yeah we get that in the great white north. A immediately Skippable ad for a different show on prime. That is fine by me, however ads like on so many other services will mean I cancel and Maybe setup a plex.
Only for itself. Then they added Freevee stuff which had a load of obnoxious ads in. Now they're adding that to everything, unless you pay extra.
Cancel. Amazon are a cancer.
I don’t use Amazon much anymore anyway, because the products are overwhelmed with cheap, poor quality trash you couldn’t peddle on alibaba and completely worthless, largely faked reviews and ratings. I order once or twice a year some replacement cable or adapter I can’t find anywhere else reasonably quick, but that’s pretty much it, so canceling over this ad bullshit doesn’t really hurt me much.
Next on the list is my Netflix sub, which I largely use just for oldtrek reruns as second screen background noise while I use my computer. I could probably, uh, procure those shows fairly easy, or splurge on a collectors edition and would still save money.
Nah, most of it is coming from Alibaba, but at a markup.
There’s a used media shop down the street and I’m contemplating getting dvd/bluray box sets of my favorites so that I have offline media available.
Go ahead, I did the same and I really don't miss Netflix. I should also mention I have crappy internet, so it's much better/easier to just download good quality vidéo files overnight than sit through a constantly-buffering 240p stream
The shitshow of video streaming continues!
Yo ho yo ho.
With this Amazon is taking a page from Nintendo's play book.
Amazon Plus Ultimate Gold
Amazon Prime Podcasts wants you to know that ads are bad and they offer them as free*. But here they are talking out the other side of their bean counters saying that ads aren't a problem.
Man, the enshitification is really taking over.
These companies have to compete in a higher interest rate environment. Otherwise their stock will fall and they won't be able to refinance debt. The free money era is over.
Or... CEOs could stop giving themselves such large bonuses I guess?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Earlier this year, Amazon announced plans to start incorporating ads into movies and TV shows streamed from its Prime Video service, and now the company has revealed a specific date when you’ll start seeing them: it’s January 29th.
No action is required from you, and there is no change to the current price of your Prime membership,” the company wrote.
Customers have the option of paying an additional $2.99 per month to keep avoiding advertisements.
The rest of the email summarizes the many benefits of a Prime subscription — no doubt an attempt to keep customers from cancelling over this decision.
The move comes as competing streaming services continue to raise subscription rates across the board.
The monthly cost of Amazon Prime isn’t changing, but if you want to preserve the same experience you have today starting on January 29th, you’ll end up paying more.
The original article contains 282 words, the summary contains 145 words. Saved 49%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
I just got too many channels for like 16 bucks from China.
They can fuck right off. That said they have a decent output so I'm not going to cancel them outright.
I’ve got all the content for like 0 bucks from some sea fairing scalllywags.
We rarely watch anything on Prime except for a few original shows like Upload and Reacher. Prime Video is usually an afterthought.
I have Amazon Prime which includes Prime Video and I just watched the first four episodes of Reacher 2 on Stremio with Torrentio. Before this, I binged all of Better Call Saul also on the latter, before cancelling Netflix. I also cancelled Disney+ after they announced the second price hike in less than a year, ended up watching Loki 2 also on Stremio. Fuck this greedy assholes.
Canceled. And long overdue I’ll admit
Just before our yearly subscription ends. I’m busy ripping and saving what we like for the next month and finally canceling prime this year, this is just the added motivation to remember how much it sucks.
its been fun watching all these streaming bullets whiz by me and my giant smokin' NAS. i feel like neo!
but really, who didnt see this coming the day they announced their service?
How would they show ads to me if I don't use their services?
The TV side of Amazon Prime is functionally free. And its not like I'm going to cancel the service when what I really use it for is mail-order retail shopping.
So I'll pirate their smattering of good shows and they'll tell advertisers I watch their stupid ads. Everyone gets to play pretend and the wheels of commerce will continue to turn.
Even though I don't have Prime, Amazon's moves are making other sites more attractive. Walmart has been pretty good recently, offering 2-3 day shipping at no additional cost in my experience, along with a better app UI/UX. Now that Amazon has upped the minimum for free shipping, the only edge it holds over Walmart is the wider selection.
Are there any videos/guides to set up a Usenet for dummies? Asking for a friend of mine.
Look up "trash guides" for the *arr programs. I use Sabnzbd, Prowlarr, Sonarr, Radarr, Recyclarr, Jellyseerr, and Jellyfin. All in docker containers on their own vlan. Lemme know if you need any help.
Thanks for the software tips! I think this plus what I've read is a great start!
I forgot to add, when I transitioned into usenet, the most confusing part was that you need to find 2 separate services. From what I understand 1st is access to a usenet to connect to, and 2nd is a service that knows how to crawl and search the 1st to find what you're looking for.
I could be wrong about that, but that's how understand it, and have yet to have issues with my setup.
Aye matey! In fact, they're are entire communities right here in the Lemmyverse all about sailing the digital seas!
Kind of interesting what can be done without the oversight of corporate overlords and monied interests.
So if I understand this right, I can use something like nzbget as the downloader and eweka to download from/as the indexer. Correct?
Is there anything else I would need to get/set up?
My Prime membership is up in March. I've already decided to not renew it, since they decided to cancel The Peripheral. Had I not already made that decision, this change would have made it for me anyway.
I also cancelled, mainly because "prime" shipping is meaningless now. But the addition of ads is the cherry on top.
In a word: yarrrrr
I'd forgotten they were gonna start doing this. I've got Amazon for the shipping there video has always been leaking. I use it maybe twice a year. They're probably trying to delay a price increase to Amazon and increase revenue.
Presently, every time i dive into az video i find nothing and that my time spent was in vain... so now they want me to pay even more for this added misery? Easy decision... I'm out.
Amazon replacements:
As for video streaming, it's going to take a breakup of the Big Tech monopolies via revival of anti-trust laws to fix that. Hear the first chapter of The Internet Con (skip to 2m5s) by Cory Doctorow for more on that.
I've already canceled my Amazon prime subscription. I'm just waiting for it to expire in March
*unless you're not a customer
Then there is a price change you damn dimwit, you just gave the shitty tier the same pricing as the old normal tier, and amped up the normal tier by $3.00. I absolutely hate the wording for this, you just know it was to be able to not release the ad membership at a lower price.
We have prime because we order enough through Amazon that the 'free' shipping we pay for is still a good deal. If I don't watch any Amazon video anymore, that's fine. And I don't plan to if there are commercials.
Yeah, my monthly coffee subscription saves me enough to pay for prime in four months. I don't really use the video service enough to care.
My parents still watch cable and the odd time I've seen an ad for some other service advertised as only 12/mo with ads or something like that. Is that supposed to sound good to anyone. All these shit corporations need to get fucked.
This has two effects. First, it is supposed to entice with a "cheap" option. Second, it normalizes ads being part of the experience.
I only watched grand tour anyway, but I can't cancel it since my mother loves the frees shipping.
It's not really free shipping. It's built into Amazon's astronomical fees. It's practically impossible to make sense of it, I had to use their fee calculator tool.
Their "most favoured nation policy" (meaning you can't sell your stuff cheaper than you sell on Amazon) should be flat out illegal.
The only reason I still have Prime Video is because of a super weird bug where it tries to charge an already expired card. Somehow, it doesn't register as expired and I can just "renew" it every month
If the price was slightly higher and it'd remove ads on twitch, I might buy it
eh, I don't really care. It's a gimme with prime. TBH I rarely watch anything on it. The only thing I'm watching right now is the current season of Reacher.
As soon as I saw this I cancelled immediately. I’ve been a member since, um, ever?
Stremio + Torrentio
Sounds like a great time to cancel.
If Video is the reason you have prime, sure. Personally the shipping is still the reason I have it. I don't really use the video service at all. Frankly I wish they'd unbundle all of the stuff and let me pay for just shipping.
This year the shipping has gone from two days from ordering to two days from processing to two weeks to maybe we'll just lose the order entirely.
Add to that that so many of the sellers seem to have migrated over from the eBay "hey look at this cheap knockoff crap that fell off a truck" crowd, and I'm just not seeing the benefit anymore.
My renewal is a week from today. I think I'm going to cancel by then.
I really don't know where I go from here vis a vis online ordering. Probably just use my boss' account when there's something that I just can't get anywhere else.
Mmm, interesting. Here in the UK Amazon actually added a new option - instead of next day delivery you can now get deliver stuff today on some specific items.
Lol time to unprime
Fortunately a VPN is like 30 quid a year. Jellyfin and Radarr are my jam now.
I've kept Netflix and Disney+ for now. I was looking to cancel one for a while, and Amazon made that an easy choice. There's fucking nothing on it at the best of times.
I wish delivery / video was separate because I'd cancel immediately.
You can use Amazon to buy things without subscribing. $35+ order gets free shipping
It's just dystopic
It's worse than you think. As an advertiser, I can actually buy targeted product placements in shows. So, let's say I'm Google, and I know you recently searched for a Google Pixel. If I pay for product placements in the next Prime show, I can get all the phones to be Pixels when you watch it.
But if your friend searched for an iPhone, and he gets targeted by apple, the phones in the show could be iPhones.
Like the live ads on sports broadcasts. They can change to advertise local business depending on your region.
Woah I didn't know the extent of the targeting
Other than Good Omens, and Grand Tour I guess, what's even on Prime Video that's not elsewhere?
The Boys, The Expanse (last 3 seasons), Wheel of Time and Rings of Power are all Prime exclusives.
It's mind boggling to see the volume of content Amazon has produced that nobody cares about. Rings of Power was $89 million per episode. Citadel was $42 million per episode. There are solutions other than, "Higher fees".
But Upload and The Boys are pretty good.
“The boys” and a possible “fallout”
I really liked Uploaded. Guess it's getting downloaded. And not from Amazon.
Honestly. I'm surprised they haven't done this sooner. Prince video is included with a normal prime subscription. So, with some of the originals they've produced and paying for the rights to many movies/shows, they are probably bleeding money with this service..
You make it sound like a savvy business decision to double dip with subscriptions and ads. They choose to give it away with prime to get market share from Netflix. All that's changed is they've decided you're ready to be bent over a barrel now.
True. I don't use it. But, it does cost money.