Tbh, the worst part is when you pay for it and still get ads anyway. Feels like double dipping, but it's obviously going to happen because wall street doesn't like when line only goes up a little.
Yeah that’s totally galling. Shrinkflation for online services.
You know some shiny-suited corporate asshole got a huge bonus for coming up with that though.
Yeah it's crazy. We have TV plan with some 100 channels bundled up with internet, and sometimes rarely when I watch TV I'm just baffled by the fact a paid service still is full of ads
We let it happen. You either put your foot down at the first instance of this thing or you lose any ability to do it because it eventually gets so big you can't stop it without some whole new technology. But there's always going to be people who say "how else are people going to pay for websites if not advertising" I say not my fucking problem. Just like robbing my free time with bullshit ads wasn't their problem.
The creator of the radio and even the US government were wary of the idea of introducing ads into American living rooms, but look at us now.
Given my entertainment options, I found a small developer that sells an app for a couple bucks that allows me to pull streams through my phone and transcode it and chromecast it to my projector. Juijitsu Kaisen never looked so good.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.instantbits.cast.webvideo
I guess I should mention they also defang, adblock, and can fake useragents if they attempt to block based on usermask/profiling. See why I wanted to pay this cat?
the problem is that making the line go up even a little gets exponentially harder with time. because the graph not going up at any given point in time is so unimaginably horrible to them, they keep having to think of new insidious ways of satisfying it
I actually find myself wondering lately "what's so bad about stable (+/- 5%/annum) profits for some stretches of time." Sure you're not eating up market share, but a couple million in the pocket every year really isn't that bad...
I... May not be cut out for capitalism...
Only private companies can get away with thinking like that. Companies that can put the stakeholder's interest ahead of the shareholder.
Companies who stay private can do this. It's when you have investors that you're fucked and the ponzi scheme starts.
The idea, in its purest form, is that companies will innovate to keep investors happy. They will keep expanding and making wonderful new products. As an example, a printer company will start making phones, then laptops, then maybe expand into chemicals or farm equipment, making bold innovations at every step.
Companies who can't innovate do this shit (inflate prices until they suck) and then they die because they're no longer competitive.
...in theory.
Pirate everything. Pirate streams, torrents, whatever.
Pirate. Everything.
*unless it's an independent artist of some sort. then, just buy some merch from them or something.
Hells yeah. Really excited to buy his film on bluray and something else because shipping will be a bitch but still excited for his film.
While listening to Spotify using a custom APK, which enables premium features: I support this message!
In fact you should even pirate piracy. Next time steal someone else's torrent and seed that instead!
Note: Yes, I do realise ;)
The price of playing skyrim for every minute of my life until I die
With game pass: Over $9000.00
Just buying the game: $59.99
If Todd was to be asked about any of this you'd be paying for looking at their promo stuff. Greedy cuck. That's why they pushed so hard for FO76 to be always online, even though it's completely pointless.
Gamepass is a great deal if it has 4 or more games a year come out that you want to play, and that's if you pay full price instead of buying cards, etc.
What if I play all my games on a 3 year delay and buy all 4 games for $15 with DLC included?
I feel like that's stretching reality unless you're getting localized pricing for lower income countries. I've never seen an AAA game drop below $10 in just 3 years, especially if it's an AAA game that also got DLC. On average it's usually just 40-50% off after that kind of duration, mayyyybe 60% off. Anything more than that is usually because the game sucked ass or it's really old.
I keep hearing how great Gamepass is but I really fail to see how unless you just began gaming like one year ago. Every once in awhile I look to see what’s on there and it’s just old games I’ve played before.
I really don't get much use out of reviews and trailers. The only way for me to know if I like a game is to try it. I test tons of Gamepass games and finish half a dozen a year, give or take.
Just in the last month it's had Sea of Stars, Starfield, Lies of P, and Payday 3 release.
Lots of others too, of course. But those are the 4 that caught my attention.
Gamepass is great for extended trials, especially indie games with middling to good ratings. Other than that, it's nice to play the back catalog of MS games if you missed them. At least for PC, that's what I got out of it.
They decide what they do offer to publishers for game pass rights. If they increase the fee, it's because they started to pay more for whatever offered to us.
HAHAHAHAHA sure mate
If ms increases prices it won't be for profit, it'll be to be kind to publishers lmao
The price per minute I've paid for playing Skyrim + Skyrim SE + Skyrim Anniversary Edition, all DLCs included: Less than 0.01 USD/minute
It's infuriating.
I mainly play on PC where thankfully I don't have to worry about that.
But I also have a Nintendo switch, and get this shit... they don't even let you back up your save games online. we're talking about fucking kilobytes of data per game that they're too stingy to provide.
You can't even back up game saves to the microSD!
If your switch breaks, is stolen, or you just get a new one, you lose your game saves unless you pay for Nintendo online.
Well yeah. The fact they don't even allow you to back it up to your microSD is proof of that
Exactly. If you could move across consoles, you would, especially when a competitor like SteamDeck comes along.
No I don't. Gold was there pretty much from the get go. Without would be better, but what you asked I don't recall existing.
Only selected few games had that on PS2. Games were largely SP on top of that. It wasn't default free, it was a fee except for few exceptions.
Never owned PS3 so no comment on that.
BUT, my original question is still applicable. The past you speak of wasn't common and not something that's agreed to be the "good old days" so to speak.
Not saying what you peddle wouldn't be great, it would, but your statement simply isn't accurate.
Everyone is saying Piracy but I say Public LIbraries, which often have CDs/DVDs/BDs/games now (depending on your locale). They're taxpayer funded, so you might as well get your money's worth, and they keep track of how often stuff gets borrowed which determines future financial support.
(And if you are tech-savvy enough to be on Lemmy, you probably know how to make a ... permanent copy ... for yourself to keep)
Libraries are great. Just think about it, if libraries as a concept hasn't already exist, there is absolutely zero chance it will be invented in our time due to our overly restricting copyright law.
And also due to a rightward shift in the Overton window. A place where people just get to borrow books for free? That's socialism. And it will completely kill the entire books industry
Which is exactly why big corporations are lobbying hard to get public library stripped of funds by any means necessary. I mean you can even 3D print spare parts in many libraries for free by now! The super rich cannot have that.
Or save the time and gas money and download it.
I mean shit, I don't even have a DVD burner in any of my computers. Haven't for a decade and a half. You expect me to grab my external drive to burn a copy? I can download anything on my gigabit connection in 5 minutes.
Brothers, sisters, others, it's time we return to the old ways. To the high seas. We steal from those who own, but do not pay to own, the content they distribute. We will share this media amongst ourselves until they learn that we were willing to pay with dollars, but not with time.
we shall pirate on the beaches, we shall pirate on the landing grounds, we shall pirate in the fields and in the streets, we shall pirate in the hills; we shall never surrender
We shall pirate in the alleys, in the fields, in the chats and we shall never surrender to the greedy hands of Sony, Nintendo and alike
I like to bootleg the major studios and patreon the indie artists that are giving their shit away for free.
Where do you stand on indie artists that are using Patreon to act like major studios, e.g. nothing is free and their work is limited release and deleted after the month?
I find it harder to be upset about what an artist does with their work because they're the sole creator and didn't exploit anyone to make it. The limited release stuff doesn't sound great but none of the artists I follow do that, I certainly wouldn't support them if they did. If they're planning to never release the art ever again then I think there's a fair argument to be made for piracy, although if you're just waiting for the month to turn over to look at it guilt free, well, I think you're just trying to justify it to yourself.
I've seen a few that delete their stuff after the month and never release it again. IIRC, at least one of them was making relatively huge cash per month and only ever released cropped previews publicly, so that one was definitely what I'd call predatory, but that is just the most extreme case I've seen. I hate that false scarcity works so well.
I've never seen an indie artist on Patreon that delete shit or used any kind of DRM. At least no artist that I've been inspired to support.
I try to never steal from people, only corporations.
I've seen a few different methods. Scrubbed Patreon profiles, archives with passwords that change every month and aren't redistributed, etc. I've run into several artists who do this.
I don't have Peacock but I'm hanging out at my parents house and apparently when you pay for Peacock you have to watch ads at the beginning and end of shows PLUS every time you pause.
Every single time they paused it transitioned to an ad. What psychopaths run NBC?
Never pay any of this services BTW, I have no regrets and I never feel that I miss something.
Concur. I pay for the following subscription services:
That's all. Everyone else can go fuck themselves. If I can't buy it outright, I don't need it. If it's digital, it's on the Pirate Bay. Prime is bullshit anyway. I don't need a predatory gym membership; Putting an elliptical machine in my own house cost me all of $200 and it's mine forever. I don't pay for Dropbox or OneDrive or whatever; I have a massive hard drive in my PC and I can access remotely it via my VPN. Etc.
Same. I would never pay them for their shitty little services. Imagine paying monthly for dropbox, sporify etc for years... That's so much money.
Eh Spotify gets a whole family unlimited for 17 euro, it's pretty convenient compared to going finding and uploading to my device or purchasing individually.
There once was a piracy website so grand in the world of music streaming that even to this day nothing comes close
Grooveshark :(
Or you can just use apps like ViMusic or InnerTune, which are foss and provide infinite offline adless playback for free.
I don't hate subscription based services if they're priced fairly and make sense.
Paying monthly for a service that then starts giving you less, adds more premium plans, introduces ads, etc. is garbage.
Paying for a game, then having to pay a monthly fee to play (WoW, for example), is garbage.
Paying for software, but then having to pay monthly to use the software, is garbage.
Paying for software, but then having to pay monthly to be allowed to contact support (Blue Iris), is garbage.
But paying for things like Spotify, where you get access to pretty much all songs as they release, have no limit on how much you listen to, and it has a fair student pricing or family pricing, that's fine. Way better than paying per song.
I mean shit, if I paid for every song I have in my library on Spotify, I'd owe $1430. My Spotify is $17 per month, spit between 4 people, so I pay $4.25. I can either pay for every song in my library and not add any more, or pay for Spotify for 28 years and continue growing my library..
WoW and other MMOs are not just games with slapped on subscription costs. It is a very specific subtype of games which have much higher maintenance cost than an arena shooter. There is a reason these games get shutdown when certain financial thresholds get passed beyond let's do something more profitable.
Honestly, this.
The economics of the world are such that people need to be paid for the content they produce. Having a direct relationship between me as the consumer and them as the producer is the way we don't get shit like all of the ad-based spyware that surrounds shit like Facebook. It won't completely prevent it, but it gives a good business plan for it not to happen.
I'd vastly prefer something that didn't require some megacorp as evil as Amazon. But.. this could actually make as much sense as is possible with our current economic system.
Nah, fuck subscriptions. If I can't buy it once and own it, then it's a scam on consumers. Change my view.
I did. Look at my Spotify example. It's literally more expensive to own the songs than to pay for Spotify.
Unless you only want like 30 songs.
Still cheaper, though.
I'd rather have access to pretty much every song on demand for $4 per month and not own it, than pay per song.
I pay $4.25 per month for Spotify. That's $51 per year. I have access to pretty much every song, or I could buy 39 songs to own instead.
I save more than 39 songs per month. Financially it makes no sense to buy them. Especially if you consider I get bored of some songs, and never listen to them again.
The way I look at it, is I don't pay to listen to the music, I pay for the convenience.
Most music I listen to is on YouTube, where if I wanted to, I could just download it and "own" the song for free. However, in the interest of saving time, letting Spotify create playlists based on what I listen to, I just pay a monthly fee. Not to mention that I can share my playlists on multiple devices, whereas if I download music, I can't.
I also have a family plan with all spots filled up, so that's 6 people listening to all their music for $20/mo CAD. Far superior to buying an album or individual songs.
There was a prophetic podcast episode from the series Plain English a while back that I constantly think about.
In that episode the author describes how the internet is going through a revolution.
Basically 20 years ago, the internet was all about gaining numbers. Companies could operate at a loss if they got people signed up. Facebook, Google, YouTube, Uber, Deliveroo, etc. they were all about getting you in their mailing list or consumer list and who cares what happens then.
Now there’s an issue because that model is not profitable. In order to continue, all the internet is moving towards subscription.
In a sense, I don’t think of that as intrinsically bad. Patreon is a good example. The internet is now filled up with so much shit that people are willing to pay to filter it. So with Patreon, you pay a fee to support an artist to produce the content you want. That itself isn’t a bad idea.
Now that being said, a lot of “bad things” do emerge. The fact that you can no longer buy software like Adobe and it’s all subscription based. That’s shit. But that also inspired software alternatives like Affinity Designer.
The fact that you can no longer buy software like Adobe and it’s all subscription based
100% the biggest factor in me deciding to buy Magix Vegas (formerly Sony Vegas) video editing software was because they still sold lifetime codes. Have I gotten $400 worth of value out of it? Fuck no. But I can use it whenever I want for as long as I want without worrying about whether or not I can afford it for the month.
The you have companies like Filmora who tried to turn lifetime licenses into subscription ones...
Ironically enough the only reason I bought Vegas in the first place was because of the changes to Wondershare
It’s not that I don’t want to pay for the service, it’s just that I hate the automatic recurring withdrawals, even if I can cancel monthly.
I would probably use more subscriptions if I could just pay like three month of access in advance - basically like these gift cards work.
It's not that i don't want to pay, it's just that their "service" isn't serving me and thus not worth the money.
Give me my cd's back lol. Let me own what i purchase.
I use an iPod that I've modded 128gb into. It's great. All the convenience of my own high quality music library, without having hundreds of CDs around.
My phone is 512gb and i use about 80 myself, largest part is porn(yeah i'm aware, it's bad...very bad,i need some time).
I've decided to start pirating again as my device has plenty of space to keep my music.
The biggest thing is getting all lf the music, so nowadays i'll just play what i have and sometimes go: "oh damn i forgot about billie eilish" for example and make a mental note until the next time i'm at my computer with some time to spare.
Slowly but steadily decreasing my porn stock and replacing it with music i would've bought as cd's.
Nah, it needs to be brought down a couple notches.
It's bad.
The porn is legal, just so we're clear on that lol.
Not all of them. Spotify doesn't, they know that people will just pay monthly, they don't have any reason to offer a discount
Image Transcription:
A crazy trollface stick figure hides behind a crudely drawn square, holding a shotgun and saying "I HATE SUBSCRIPTION BASED SERVICES I HATE SUBSCRIPTION BASED SERVICES I HATE SUBSCRIPTION BASED SERVICES" as an army of harp darps wearing blue helmets with various logos on them come through a crudely drawn door.
Around the harp darps are various statements they are making as they move into the room. At the front left, below a harp darp wearing the Adobe logo, is the text "You can afford it, come on". To the right of the Adobe harp darp is one wearing the Dropbox logo. Behind the Adobe harp darps is one wearing the Netflix logo, and behind the Dropbox harp darp is one wearing the Spotify logo. Between the front four harp darps is the text "Just $15 bro". To the upper right of the Spotify harp darp is the text "Limited Ads dude". Behind the Spotify harp darp is one wearing a Twitter (now X) Verified blue tick, with the text above its head reading "It's less than a cup of coffee bro...come on". To the right of the Twitter Verified harp darp is one with the Nintendo Switch Online logo. To the upper right of the Nintendo Switch Online harp darp is the text "It's just a small monthly payment dude", and to the bottom right of the same harp darp is the text "You use it all the time Anyway bro". Behind and to the left of the Twitter Verified harp darp is one wearing an Amazon Prime logo, standing outside the door.
[I am a human, if I’ve made a mistake please let me know. Please consider providing alt-text for ease of use. Thank you. 💜 We have a community! If you wish for us to transcribe something, want to help improve ease of use here on Lemmy, or just want to hang out with us, join us at !lemmy_scribes@lemmy.world!]
Good thing from the current situation is it being the end of times for these services. Constant need for income increase to appease share holders means infinite growth, which is impossible. But individual doesn't see that, they just want more. So progress of any software towards service model is pretty straight forward.
First they start splitting software into smaller versions and selling both for slightly higher price combined than when they were single piece. Then they start releasing more frequent versions but that has limited impact. So they start introducing forward incompatibilities. Only new software will support both old and new versions of the document, forcing buyers to buy latest. When that reaches its optimal maximum they decide to switch to yearly subscription and force everyone to use those by same ways as they forced them to use newer versions.
Subscription based model is limited. It has no progression other than increase in price and it's only a matter of testing how much people are willing to pay. Sometimes even go above reasonable price but then go with "exclusive" content as if to justify higher price. This of course works for a while, but exclusive content costs money and is harder to produce consistently at high quality...
And after that, there's no progression. It's a battle royale among service provides but they can't back out because of share holders and can't revert to other business models. So some of them will stretch themselves thin and burst others will keep on living from that vapor until a new contender comes.
Yep, absolutely. My family still has spotify and netflix subscriptions, but i already canceled prime before the previous price hike. I'd have already canceled netflix if it was my decision and the only service i still see value in is spotify.
Unfortunately, I believe that feeling will change if you look into how Spotify actually harms the artists by forcing them to use their product even though they make slim to none profit. The more you know.
Not really. Fixing systemic problems is not up to the individual. I'm paying for music, which i already only due to the convenience.
..but capitalism is so good, things only get better!!! The market is too regulated, is the problem
You know, what you can not find on EBay you can find on PBay. Or whatever warez site you prefer.
I haven't been into the pirating scene for a few years, last time I was active pirate bay was the best. why not use it anymore?
Pretty much everything on there is monitored by the rights holders and anything that's not is loaded with malware. L337 or torrent leech is what you want these days, for the mainstream stuff. TL requires invites but they're easy enough to get and it's got pretty much all the mainstream TV, movies, and software. If you want more niche stuff you'd want to look around a bit more, though.
"The Pirate Bay / TPB - Site is no longer moderated, so its very risky for software and games" source
https://www.techspot.com/news/99242-pirate-bay-restores-new-user-registrations-twist.html
Spud17, moderator of ThePirateBay says you're wrong.
I wouldn't use a pirate streaming site over torrenting even if I was getting paid to do so lol the releases generally have terrible bitrates and low picture quality, likely because they're the smallest files the site uploaders could find. They're convenient if you can't afford a VPN and don't care about file quality when it comes to movies and shows, but I prefer being able to select a high quality file with good encoding, quality compression (265, AV1), and known high quality uploaders, like UTR and QxR. That's only possible through torrenting the file or getting it through Usenet.
Those Times where Warez-Streaming-Sites had low quality are long gone. While 4k=3840 releases are rare, we have mostly 1920 nowadays with some 1280 in-between, often Bluray- or Streaming-Rips without re-encoding, at least if the source was H264/H265. Older MPEG2/4 though is still often recoded. You can easily re-encode an old MPEG2-Bluray from 20Gig to H265 4Gig without visibly loss. With more modern Codecs the Data is usually "re-containered" which means the Content itself isn't changed, only the Encryption and Container are changed.
Overall Streamingz-Sites are pretty good nowadays, Amazon and Netflix take up to one minute to switch to high Bitrate quality for me. With Warez-Sites you have to wait 3-5 seconds but then it immediately starts at Max Quality and NEVER at lower quality. And their Search actually works great and is well organized and everything reacts so much faster because they reduce the eye candy. They also often have bookmarks - which don't work as good as commercial providers but good enough.
I can only have access to Amazon, Netflix, Joyn and Public Television Media Centres so for other providers your mileage may vary.
Meh. I still prefer Stremio and my custom configured Jackett setup for searching for torrents. Just has more features and more control. I've never encountered a pirate streaming site with even half the features Stremio has. I will grant you that anime streaming sites have gotten a lot better over the years, but I still don't trust general pirate streaming sites. It's great to hear they got better though. Easier acess to media is always a good thing.
Torrents of all kinds can be easily tracked and its users be sued because they do not only consume but also distribute.
One-Click-Hosters and Streamingz-Sites on the other side are hard to track and their users don't distribute.
At least by German Law it is mostly "we only care about distribution, not consumption". The later has an estimated damage of $1 per case, that is not even petty crime. Distribution on the other hand often is handled at $1000/case... I think there was not a single case of a Streamingz-User being prosecuted but already millions of Torrent-Users.
Larger % of DMCA tracked stuff than other sites. Set your VPN to a Caribbean country and yo ho ho no worries matey
I guess I win. I already am in the Caribbean. Call me Captain Jack Sparrow I guess.
What are they gonna do, send a British Navy ship with a letter of marque? Yo ho ho matey
Well, Pirate Bay is essentially the defacto website someone thinks of when they hear "This person pirates content." Because of this, game devs, Hollywood execs, etc end up putting out detectable torrents/illegitimate files onto this most popular pirating source.
"The Pirate Bay / TPB - Site is no longer moderated, so its very risky for software and games" source
The only subscription service that I pay for is tidal for music (pays artists more than Spotify, same cost) and that's only because maintaining a local library of music is too much of a pain for me right now. I may slowly build a local music library of only music I like, but I love listening to new artists so the $10 per month is worth the convenience.
YouTube? Ublock origin
Movie/tv streaming? Self hosted media library, plus some random services that are provided through my phone bill at no cost
File storage? Stored with my movies and TV on some hdds in raid
Amazon? Its not hard to find other retailers (or direct providers) with better prices and no subscription needed. Sometimes have to pay for shipping and it's slower, but worth it
Passing along advice someone else posted on lemmy. If you have an android TV box, look at Stremio + Torrentio. Game changer!
I do go for YouTube premium but that’s my primary source of entertainment nowadays and it does result in more money in my favorite content creators’ pockets (apparently more than ad-based revenue according to some sources at least). Plus YouTube music is included in that and is actually quite good.
Most music steaming services have garbage selection for dubstep anyways, so local library is the only way to go.
I pity that iOS users don't have a good option for downloading music off YouTube though.
Can you make any suggestions? I think I'm into dubstep but I have a hard time finding new artists
I pity that iOS users don’t have a good option for downloading music off YouTube though.
This looks good, not sure if you can customize the linked iOS shortcut to download music though: https://projectlounge.pw/ytdl
If you have at least 6tb of storage space and good internet, the RedTopia torrent is more than enough to fill out a personal music library. That + SoulSeek for whatever new stuff shows up in my feed is everything I could ever need. Streamed anywhere onto my phone through Plex or PlexAmp
The torrent itself is just torrent files for a 6tb music library split into 13 parts. Each torrent is about 500gb of lossless music
If you can point me in a direction for those 13 torrent files, I'll be very thankful!
Posting from my phone right now but I believe this post links to the files. . If not, then simply searching for "Redtopia FLAC" should bring them up
I've tried Tidal a couple of times and it never felt like it was hitting the mark. The HiFi is a solid feature though.
Yeah had the same feeling about tidal as well. Settled for Apple Music since they offer hifi and a nice interface. Spotify still has the best playlists but it’s getting feature bloat and the quality isn’t up to par
The best deal you will get is Apple Music. Especially if you are a classical music fan it is unbeatable. But another HiFi one that isn’t apple, is qobuz, although the song selection isn’t as wide as spotify or tidal or apple music. But they do pay artists a lot more and they have a webstore for purchasing FLAC and MP3s if that’s what you like.
I haven't had any issues with it, the quality isn't as good as self hosted flac files (unless you want to pay for the highest tier, I assume) but it's at least as good as Spotify imo. Big selling point initially was Plex integration though
What will we do with a drunken sailor? What will we do with a drunken sailor? What will we do with a drunken sailor? Early in the morning!