Commercials Are Streaming’s New Norm, and Creators Aren’t Happy: “It’s Almost Worse Than Broadcast”
Commercials Are Streaming’s New Norm, and Creators Aren’t Happy: “It’s Almost Worse Than Broadcast”
cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/6302705
Even if the creators weren’t pissed, the entire selling point of streaming was on demand, ad free, and a large library to choose from. Every single streaming service that subdivided Netflix and Hulu’s content shares have reneged on that entire concept by creating smaller libraries, making them unaffordable, and now they’re shoehorning in ads if we won’t cough up more money.
It’s almost like a moral imperative to pirate from these fuckers.
The entire selling point of cable was no signal loss and ad free... Then the point of satellite was more options and ad free. Those sneaky ads keep finding their way in.
Don't forget that on-demand is being reduced as well now that many platforms are trickling out episodes for their marquee shows at a weekly rate. Looking at you Apple.
I much prefer the trickle of releases to a lump season dump.
It allows time to digest, discuss and catch up throughout the release schedule if you're invested in the story. You can convince your friends to watch a few episodes to catch up and then watch the end of the season together. You can read fan theories online, formulate your own, and overall each weekly episode can result in a lot of engaging fun interactions.
With a series dump you have to binge it and wait for others to do the same in order to talk about it. The whole time you're actively avoiding spoilers from friends/coworkers and avoiding reading about it online. The end result is you disengage from the fandoms/communities while you are getting through the show, which to me takes a lot of the fun out of a big show.
I compare the difference between Stranger Things and GoT. To me these are probably two of the most significant pop-culture releases in the last decade or so.
Game of Thrones resulted in hundreds of thousands of theories every week online and in public. T-Shirts were made based on popular online theories that never panned out in season. You would rag on friends who guessed the plot twist wrong and deify those who got their predictions spot on. Especially in my demographic the two months GoT was on was all about GoT.
Stranger Things on the other hand, while still wildly popular hits differently. It's much more of a build up to release, a week or two of "man that was awesome" followed by "I hope they make the next season soon." Retroactive discussions happen for a while, but the discussions and the hype fizzles much more quickly.
If I want to watch a trickle release show in one dump, I still can, I just wait until the whole season out, reactivate the subscription. Then I binge it.
For me it's much more fun to have an episode or two a week and build momentum through a season than it is to set off a one time firework.
There is a simple solution for that. Rotate your services every 3 months, watch the entire season and only come back when there’s something to watch.
Quality over quantity is something streaming services can’t do. There’s so much shit shoved in our faces that I find myself watching less and less. Is a crash on the horizon or can the market sustain the number of active participants?
It’s a real shame because piracy is bridging the service gap which the industry themselves managed to eliminate, albeit briefly, only to introduce it again.
If you trust any corporate media concern to not succumb to enshittification, then you deserve to watch your stupid commercials. You paid for the privilege because you enabled the abuser.
I prefer to get what I pay for and I pay for nothing, media-wise. If I watch ads, it's because I'm watching something like the Super Bowl with my OTA DVR that's playing on network TV. It's free, so OK - commercials. If I'm watching anything else, it's on my Plex server and there are no commercials.
I do pay for entertainment. I pay for experiences, like going to the movies, going to live rock shows, going to performances or exhibitions - all IRL - but that's about it. I might consider paying for other entertainment options but there is one thing I won't ever do: I won't pay for media that I don't own and I won't watch commercials for media I paid for.
Edit: look at all the butthurt. Go ahead and keep paying through the nose then if you like it so much. I'm sure all the millionaires and billionaires who profit off your largesse will continue to treat you with the same kindness as they have in the past.
"People deserve to be exploited because they dared to use a convenient, affordable service."
Seriously, what a bad take. It's not like I gave them all my passwords and Power of Attorney! It's fine your budgeting decisions work for you, but you shouldn't cheer on companies providing a bad experience to customers that "trusted" them...
You understand that someone has to pay for that entertainment shit you use to kill your time with? You are literally shitting on people who are paying for you.
Yo-ho, all together, hoist the coooolors high...
Yup, streaming has just become cable v2. I dusted off the VPN and went back to that. As a famous someone once said:
Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem
If the experience with piracy is FAR superior to streaming you can guess which way I'm going to go....
Pirating is work. Streaming was convenience.
The less convenient streaming is, the more likely I’m willing to work.
Was work
Piracy is not a lot of work nowadays. Setting it up once takes some time, but after that everything is automated. If I want to watch a movie or show, I enter my overseer URL into a browser, search the name of it, click on request, and a few minutes later it will be ready to watch on my Plex and Jellyfin, that are also shared with friends and family so they can also browse my library and request stuff easily
What I want to know is how much money could insurance companies (cough, Liberty Mutual, cough) POSSIBLY be saving people when they are buying ads on every video on Youtube.
I always wondered what if someone started an insurance business that didn’t spend billions on advertisements, it just offered genuinely lower rates. When you sign up you have to sign something promising you’ll tell 2 other people.
"We can't lower prices! Look at how much we have to spend!!"
Points at billions in ad slots being watched by mostly AI now
There are plenty of insurance companies that are like this. They're significantly cheaper than the nationally advertised insurance options.
That’s what you’re seeing. Not what I’m seeing. Welcome to the wonderful world of targeted ads.
I only get Doctor Drew telling me stuff is a metabolism killer.
You guys watch ads on YouTube? When YT gets the better of UblockO for a couple days, I just open the YT homepage, see which of the regular channels I check out have new videos or I look through my recommended and then I open piped or yewtu.be. Fuck YT. I refuse to watch ads. When I open a YT link through lemmy, I’ll close the window immediately if an ad starts playing. Fuck these companies.
I mostly get ads for stuff I've researched online; anything I buy for the house, kitchen, or simply tools for business, I make sure is "Buy It For Life" quality
Targeted ads are hilarious. Yes, Google, I did. I did just buy a pair of Knipex Cobra pipe grips. That will be the last time ever I buy them, and they will still be hanging around a secondhand shop 150 years after I've turned to fuckin dust. The advert for Shungong Best Grip is a fuckin waste of electrons
Lol, I get eavestrough filters and fat guy t-shirts. They can tell I'm an old fucker but not that I'm skinny as hell
They'd lose money. Advertising works - that's why companies are doing it.
It is worse than broadcast.
If you learn anything about screenwriting, there are certain patterns and structures you follow (like acts in a play) to accommodate commercials, like to build suspense and keep the viewer interested and not changing the channel.
Streaming never had this, if you look at shows written for these platforms. The writers either ignored or didn’t even know about these conventions.
Now adding commercials later, it is even more annoying to the viewer as the original material was not meant to accommodate them.
Streaming just keeps fucking up. I already canceled my netflix. I’m on basic cable for network tv and I just pirate everything else.
Wait... They add advertising in the middle of shows? I thought it would be at the beginning, between episodes, on the UI, etc.
Nope, it's classic ad breaks, but since the shows weren't made expecting them the ads just appear suddenly every X minutes instead.
By streamers ignoring all the decades of broadcasting experience, and all established what's fair air-time for both content and commercial. That's the frustration... they're rewriting standards. And doing it poorly. And at top speed.
And with streaming, you're not locked into a 42-47 minute long episode either, so are some episodes going to have more, or is there someone with a stop watch going "this seems like a good place for an ad break"?
Why are you on basic cable for network tv? It's broadcast over the air in HD for free.
Some people live in areas with poor service even with beefy antennas.
Get an hdhomerun or equivalent for local TV at home in a streaming format. It even integrates into Plex for DVR.
A cheaper solution (if you're already running a server) would be TVheadend and a cheap USB-dongle for DVB-T, DVB-C or DVB-S.
Okay, I need to say it: having an ad for your own programming is still an ad.
Paramount. I'm looking at you, Paramount. I don't want to watch your shitty movie/TV show/whatever about the shitty mom from the His Dark Materials series losing another kid. Stop playing the same goddamn ad for it before every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Especially since you feel the need to double whatever goddamn volume I have set in the opening to the ad. I pay for the subscription, I already bought your product. Fuck off with your shitty ad.
I mean, others do it too and it pisses me off, but I'm on Season 2 of TNG and I may just have to get it some other way and canceling Paramount because that ad has started really getting to me.
When a company gets that hostile in their design to their paying customers is when I start advocating for flying a Jolly Roger.
Honestly, a preview for another show on the same service doesn’t bother me AS LONG AS it is skippable. I’ve never used paramount so I’m not sure if that’s the case.
If I’m being honest when I was a kid part of the fun of going to the movies was the previews before, finding out about upcoming movies and what not.
I do agree that you shouldn’t see the same preview every episode cause that’s super annoying. But I’d be totally fine with one per session or something. Again, as long as it’s skippable right from the start.
It's not skippable as far as I can tell. It also frequently advertises shows I've already watched. Sometimes it advertises the show I'm trying to watch.
I'm pretty sure it also has the "ad counter" showing on the screen during this as well.
Here's what they call it in their docs:
You'll also see a quick preview only once per day before any show to keep you up-to-date on our original programming.
It's not an ad, it's a "preview." /s
They advertise as extra $ for ad free, but then they put ads in it. That's dishonest.
What I have to do whenever I watch a show is start the show, get the pre-roll, exit out, then start the show again. It's annoying and a stupid hoop to jump through just to not have to watch the same pre-roll over and over.
Paramount definitely seems to be the worst about this ... their app in general is really frustrating.
Max does it occasionally but it's rare enough I don't notice.
Yes! I pay for an ad free experience on YouTube but support tells me that ads for their own products don’t count. Fuckers.
Just here to remind everyone while piracy is important, it's also very important to teach the less tech savy among your acquaintances how to pirate too. Conglomerates only learn when their bottom line is effected after all, so teach all your friends how to hoist that black flag.
IF you go down that route, there needs to be a warning: Do it properly, use a VPN if you are torrenting, get a usenet account if you want fast speeds that encrypts the connection and so on - basically, teach it correct. Because some countries or rather law agencies WILL hunt you down if they even get some hint of your actual IP-Address...
Used DVDs at pawn shops and thrift stores ftw.
This. Just yesterday I bought a batch of films, DVD's 1$ and Blu-Rays 1,5$ a piece. And they were mostly new films.
DVD's are perfectly fine for TV and Blu-Rays for my projector.
I never jumped to the streaming bandwagon and my disc collection has grown exponentially in the last few years, since most people gave up on discs. Their loss.
Any tips to get started?
I think Debrid services are the easiest and safest to get started. They download files for you from various services (share hosters and torrents), and then let you download them from their servers. That means only they know your IP (but don't log it, like a VPN), and they also download with full speed from sites that require a premium account, for a fraction of the cost. With RDT-Client you can also use some of them with Arr apps, once you get to automating the process.
Another thing would be Usenet. It's surprisingly easy to set up and get started, just find a provider, some indexers, and a download client. It has a ton of good content, and it doesn't depend on seeders for file availability and high download speeds.
With those two you can download anonymously and at high speeds from all the popular sources (most share hosters, torrents, Usenet), and you don't run the risk of leaking your IP because you haven't set things up correctly.
I considering piracy after Netflix came out. Does it have ads yet.
Edit: wow, that’s not what I meant to type. I haven’t considered piracy since Netflix became a thing. And so far, I haven’t seen any ads on that service. Still finding plenty to watch on that in my spare time as well. Currently enjoying Fall of the House of Usher, the live action One-Piece, and a Supertroopers like show called Tacoma FD.
I had subscriptions to 4 different streaming sites. They pull bullshit and I cancelled. I now watch everything on one site with better quality streams and no commercials for the cost of a nice vpn. I didn't drop them because I can't afford it, I dropped them because their service sucked and I'm not going to deal with or support that BULLSHIT.
What site is this?
I love torrents but my uncle is always talking about Flixtor
What site? DM if you'd rather not comment. I ain't no snitch
If also like to know what site this is so i can avoid it. I DMed you.
Paid services with ads are unconscionable and should not be supported, but I do watch Tubi or Pluto sometimes, and it's not nearly as bad as the amount of ads I see on my parents' screen with cable
Agreed, in my experience Tubi and Pluto both have very reasonable length, good quality ads. I declined to re-up on YouTube TV for NCAA football season this year specifically because I can stand their ads. At that price tier, they honestly expect me to sit through My Pillow ads??
The ads are so much less anxiety inducing as well. At least, on Pluto they are
I dropped prime after the announcement... Who's next?
What pisses me off is that I signed up for a year last summer. This change should not have happened for people who already paid for Prime.
With shipping getting worse, yeah ... I'm cancelling that.
Guess Bezos doesn't have enough money.
Are you even getting two-day shipping anymore? I canceled Prime last year because my non-Prime items were arriving well before my Prime ones, with Prime sometimes taking two weeks.
With their sucky shipping, having to navigate a minefield of cheap trash-tier products, and now their video service getting riddled with ads -- I think if Amazon were just being introduced to the world in its current state, no one would even use it. We'd consider it a joke.
All Amazon has going for it anymore is that it's known and people use it out of habit.
We weren’t watching it anyway and we can handle waiting a few days for shipping. We dropped it too.
Canceling ours tomorrow actually.
Because they HAVE to increase their share values year after year; just making billions isn't good enough, they have to make more billions compared to the last year.
It's truly pure greed, as streaming was amazing when it first started, and Netflix was making a killing even back then. But now, nope, fuck you all, we want more and more until we can't squeeze anything more out from you.
It's why I've increased my kodi/real debrid usage over the past few years
I've tried to argue a company that made $800k profit this year even tho they made $900k last year is still a profitable business and people unironically argue that company is dying and bad...
Big number = good Smaller number = bad
It works for them when dealing with shareholders
Hoist the colors
Hoist up the thing! Batten down the whatsit!
What's that thing spinning? Somebody should stop it!
Turn hard to port! (That's not port) Now I've got it!
Trust me, I'm in control!
I haven't used streaming services in a couple of years. Now I'm just doing all piracy and watching it through my Jellyfin server
I just recently stopped as well... Have to still cancel prime though
It just requires so much more foresight in planning what you're going to watch.
I can request a show, do a load of laundry and have it available. I've decent enough Internet where a movie can be available in as little as 5 minutes if it finds a nice little hevc webrip. I get that it's not instant but a proper setup can have you rocking and rolling in under an hour.
It’s a fair criticism but I find the drawbacks to be quite tolerable compared to the benefits. Each person must do their own calculus. As the user above alluded to, there are apps which make the experience almost seamless. My two favourite apps ever are Radarr and Sonarr.
Not with enough server space.
Streaming services aren't much better, they regularly didn't have what I wanted to watch and I'm not subscribing to more than one. Now I'm subscribing to none and watch what I want instead of what Netflix has available.
Well I just download more or less everything that comes out lol. It's like having my own streaming service with thousands if movies and shows available.
I'm amazed that they have any customers paying to listen to ads. I wont stand for it and I find it surprising others would.
In one year Amazon made it impossible to listen to albums on Prime Music, and shoved ads into everything on Prime Video.
Easy cancel for me. I can go without your next day shipping.
Better still I can buy from someone else.
Qobuz
The alternative is either:
I agree it's unacceptable for me, but I also get why so many people just put up with it.
And it's a heave-ho-hi-ho, comin' down the Bay
Stealin' films and movies and all the other games
And it's a ho-hey-hi-hey, corpos bar your doors
When you see the Jolly Roger on Francisco's mighty shores!
Well, you'd think the local corpos would know that I'm at large
But just the other day I found an unprotected RAR
I snuck up right behind them and they were none the wiser
I copied their film and shared it, and screwed the advertisers
Beautiful take on the Arrogant Worms classic! <3
Thanks! It's one of my favourite songs, though I usually prefer the Captain Tractor version, heh
I let all my streaming subscriptions die off when my debit card expired this year and I haven't looked back. Gaming is cheaper and more entertaining. All the new movies I would want to watch never make it to streaming services anyway (without an additional rental fee)
That's all fine and good but I want to point out so everyone can watch out for this - sometimes if you have a subscription and your card expires or gets lost/stolen and replaced, companies can somehow get your new card info without you giving it to them and keep your shit active. So you can't assume that a new card will take care of old subscriptions that you totally forgot about. You have to check your statements.
Just wait until games start injecting ads...
Start?
Yeah if you buy good games they have a much better cost to entertainment ratios than having a bunch of streaming services do. It's the games I end up not liking that ruin it.
Stop supporting greedy bastards that are trying to push hard psychological manipulation down you throat, only for you to buy so shit no-one needs.
It's so weird that everybody knows how bad propaganda is and yet we let corporations do it to us hundreds of times per day every single day.
Got Disney plus subscription for free through some other stuff I need to have, but it's the ad supported standard plan, you pay and still get loads of ads. Even with the subscription I just download stuff for my Jellyfin.
🏴☠️
So are commercial randomly placed, or are the shows paced to have commercial breaks like the old tv days?
The thing I always noticed when a service places their own ads, is even when there are “ad breaks” on the timeline, the ads don’t always show up there. Or the screen blacks out for a few seconds, then the show plays, THEN the ad would play.
Granted, this was a while ago when I actually put up with that bullshit, so maybe it’s changed by now. But it was done very, very sloppily and is almost certainly a creator’s worst nightmare for the story.
Content providers can probably include chapter markers in their content. I also suspect it's not hard to detect a scene transition. Failing these, randomly placed.
This was my problem with hulu back in the day. Short episodes like Futurama would have a commercial shoved in at like 3 minutes and then again at 10 or whatever, it was obnoxious and shittily implemented.
As I ironically, read the article, ads kept appearing over text.
Yo ho ho I took a bite of Gum Gum!
That's a long article - here, put some music on while you read.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
put some music on while you read
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
After a swift click on “not now,” this viewer cued up one of the more successful titles currently gracing Amazon’s roster — the second season of beefcake vigilante drama Reacher.
Interruptions, which included a spot for another series (Hudson & Rex, starring a German Shepherd detective) and a reminder from the folks at Intuit Turbotax that filling season has commenced, were indeed limited.
“We fought so hard to get rid of commercials,” says Alan Poul, executive producer and director of Max original Tokyo Vice which returns for a second season on Feb. 8.
Paramount expands its own ad-supported tier internationally later in 2024 — and though no official plans have been announced, recent hires at Apple TV+ suggest the tech behemoth will eventually introduce ads as well.
David E. Kelley, the one-time broadcast golden boy who gave audiences Picket Fences, Chicago Hope and Ally McBeal before pivoting to premiere outlets like HBO (Big Little Lies) and Netflix (The Lincoln Lawyer), seems similarly disenchanted.
Netflix, which recently cited that 40 percent of all new sign-ups opt for ads, announced the “retirement” of its least expensive commercial-free tier in the coming second quarter.
The original article contains 1,205 words, the summary contains 191 words. Saved 84%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Went to check out the "Mr and Mrs Smith" series on Prime (with Donald Glover), and was notified that there would be ads now unless I upgraded. I almost never watch anything on Prime, but figured "why not, I already have it"... and then immediately closed it when I saw that message. Switched back over to Stremio, cause why the fuck would I watch ads when I already pay for the service? Gotta convince the wife to cancel Prime, but it's next on the chopping block. Only ones left will be youtube music (family still uses it) and Debrid (which will stay for as long as it's good). Netflix, Hulu, Disney, ESPN, HBO... all of them gone
This is why I'm sailing the high seas again.
Because the underlying conditions are the same as last time.
TV economics are hard. I think where basic cable and network TV make it work is that the content was filmed in a way to have natural ad breaks to make it less disruptive to the viewing experience. That becomes terrible when you shoehorn ads into places they don't belong. On the other hand, watching that content without ad breaks that was filmed with ad breaks also plays out weird because you'll have that commercial cliffhaner music/scene that is quickly followed with resolution before you have time to wonder "what is going to happen?" So shit gets weird when you have a tier model where some people get ad breaks and others don't because your content isn't made to satisfy both use cases.
TV is expensive to make and these are businesses that make money. A simple reductive "if user pays any money they deserve no ads" problem. It's a challenge of things like "The business needs to make X dollars per user and if we have ads we need to charge Y bucks where Y = X - expected ad revenue." The other challenge is in order to have an ad business you need to convince advertisers you have ad viewers they want to reach. Well, advertisers like rich people with lots of money, and they probably don't have the cheaper ad supported tiers. So can a TV company really support a completely ad free tier? Or do they still need to serve some, but less ads, to make sure their advertisers know they can get their ads seen by the platforms richest users?
It's an industry that's earning literal billions every single year...they absolutely don't need to have ads, they could serve their paying users a good ad-free product, and still make money. They choose to deliberately annoy their paying customers because they're fucking greedy.
They choose to deliberately annoy their paying customers because...
Capitalism. Must not only make profits, and must not only make the same profits as last time, but must make MORE profits. They must always increase or else you're declining according to capitalism. The greed is built in to the system.
Fuck the system.
Fake news. Netflix is the only one making a profit. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/17/hollywood-streaming-profits-struggles.html
I don't know why lemmy users love spreading misinformation that all streaming platforms are taking in profit hand over fist.
I mean, it's pretty simple for me in that I won't pay for a streaming service that has ads. Others might, but I don't care what others pay for. I left cable for this reason and I'll leave its next incarnation if that is to be.
I have a hard time understanding why a option to view it either with ads or pay money to not show ads is bad.
I understand it's frustrating that you already pay and still see ads.
In the end you choose to buy something from a company which sells something. Either you pay with your money or with your attention if you don't want to pay, just don't use their service.
I much rather have the option to pay to get rid of ads than not having it like it was in the 90ies.
Because it's a gradual death-march to pricing out the ad free tiers entirely. Right now we're in the 'illusion of choice' phase. But ad free tiers will continue to become more and more expensive until one day corporations can turn around and justify removing them by blaming consumers. "We're getting rid of our ad-free plans due to lack of consumer interest." It won't be a lack of interest. It'll be a lack of affordability. And you can be damn sure once the ad-free plans are gone those ad based plans will end up priced at the rate for the old ad-free options. It's corporate gaslighting and it's happening right now.
Then stop paying for the service if you're not happy with it. Vote with your wallet.
Like, corporations need to make money... People understand that, right? They going to try to do things to make money. As a consumer, you decide the point at which the value is no longer there for you.
You're not entitled to streaming services. It's not a human right. I understand that it sucks to be priced out of a service you like.
So back in the day we did this thing called boycotting and it worked pretty well. If people didn't care they just kept their mouth shut and their lives improved anyway
They probably wouldn't need to pull stunts like this if people just accepted that the price will slowly increase over time. However they don't. People hate when someone increases prices. The issue here however is that 10 euros 5 years ago buys you more than 10 euros today and that's how it will always be. If a company like Netflix just sticks to the 10 euros a month price for decades then the only way to maintain the same amount of revenue is to gain more customers each year. However if the number of customers stays the same aswell as the prices then they're effectively making less profit each year.