Corporatism is running rampant. It's almost a full-blown punishment model. Soon the entertainment platforms will be demanding a fee for NOT subscribing to their service.
No, it IS a full-blown punishment model. Remember, everyone else is bundling this garbage with their service, too, so the price raises Disney does is an excuse that forces everyone downstream that bundles to raise prices too.
I'm not even sure which Disney+ susbription I apparently am a part of at this point - my cable company provides it, my wireless provider provides it, hell, even shopping platforms are now shoving this crap into it as a 'perk'. I didn't want it in the first place but I'm forced to have it like a bundled set of cable channels I didn't want to subscribe to.
... dear God, it's just cable TV package cramming all over again just across every single service industry now.
Never did refer to it as punishment myself. Perhaps it's fitting. My favorite term is "enemy". The interfaces, lack of meaningful configuration, enshittified search. They ALL do it. It's mind boggling to treat paying customers like this. Like enemies.
In the end, it all leads to advertising. This is just the basic business model in the US/World right now. Get enough eyeballs on your product, whether it's TV, social media, AI, the ditch on the side of the highway; then monetize it with ads. I don't understand why at this point anyone is surprised that a company like Disney would put ads every possible place, even their highest tier of streaming.
"But I specifically chose the highest option so I wouldn't see ads!" well, now you have the option to pay the highest tier to see less ads. For now. By paying for the highest tier, Disney knows you are a higher quality consumer with the most disposable income of all the users on that platform; that's exactly the users Disney can charge the most for advertising spend. From an exec's standpoint, why wouldn't you? sure, they'll lose some paying customers, but will probably make more in the short term at least, which is all that matters.
It's unclear why you're arguing for this. We already know about the downsides of low-regulation capitalism. They're still downsides, and we may reasonably continue to talk about them as such.
There's a whole genre of comment like this where the implication is that if some effect is either predictable or inevitable by the nature of large in-place systems, then individuals are somehow not allowed to criticize the people choosing to enact the effects.
We all have free will. Just because you can legally make money being annoying or otherwise shitty, and if you didn't do it then somebody else would, that carries absolutely no implication that nobody is allowed to judge you for making that choice.
In theory you’re right it’s an often repeated talking point but I just don’t understand why am I worth advertising to but not worth creating products for?
The products I see advertised are either stupid or so overpriced that it means buying them is stupid.
I am entirely willing to spend money and I have decent savings. I just expect the products put on offer to be worth buying.
Why doesnt disney just play their own ads? I think its because most of the companies paying to advertise never recover their money, and their sales attribution is so bad they can't even tell they are wasting money.
It's funny because it's such a treadmill situation! Yes, I guess I'm valuable to advertisers because I'm a high-value target because I paid to not see ads. But surely there's a dollar amount there! A dollar amount of how much I am worth to advertisers, and presumably I can pay them that directly.
But then if I pay them for really no ads, like for realzies, then ... I'm an even more valuable target! And there's a dollar value for that.
So I pay them for really no ads, pinkie swear this time, then ... I'm an even more valuable target! And there's a dollar value for that.
I cannot possibly be of infinite value to these companies.
But will they? We've been trained to accept slop at every turn. Food tastes worse and we just accept it (society as a whole - not saying you or I personally). I'm sure Disney has competent product people watching over this. They'll A/B test their way into "maximum amount of ads they can show before losing a critical mass of users". They'll optimize. Folks will get used to that as "the new normal". Disney will adjust from time to time to show more ads as people allow.
I do agree though. It seems like pretty bad behavior to charge 20 dollars AND insisting on showering us with ads.
> Calling it a deficiency in service, the Hyderabad consumer commission ordered an OTT platform to refund Rs 1,499 and pay compensation to a subscriber after it introduced advertisements midway into his paid ad-free subscription.
Well, if you want the root cause: this is what happens when your society is predicated on perpetual growth. Everything would collapse if we just left good things alone, so instead we’re stuck either innovating and creating new good things or squeezing the juice out of what already exists.
This has nothing with perpetual growth and everything with training your population to defend these practices with "oh, they're just companies, don't use it if you don't like it!" instead of fighting back.
Vigilante justice, you say? Now you are talking!! We certainly are not going to see things get better on their own, and the government definitely isn’t going to take the side of consumers.
I'm not sure consumer rights protections would deliver better experiences.
Government is predictably slow, inefficient, and does just about everything at a service level that is only accepted because there is no other choice.
We are seeing an increasingly exaggerated cycle that goes like this:
1. Innovation takes huge investment to launch
2. Early adopters enjoy amazing new product(s) while companies bear losses
3. Companies eventually must face debt so quality of products decrease and price increases
OpenAI and Anthropic have perhaps set the record for going from 1 to 2 in the biggest (financially) and fastest manner ever, and we are all hurtling towards step 3 with a possible too-big-to-fail scenario.
Back to Disney Plus: I don't have a sagely answer. Free markets do sometimes need government to curb monopoly power, and Disney is certainly has a sort of monopolistic power due to their huge portfolio of franchises and content.
Government is predictably slow, inefficient, and does just about everything at a service level that is only accepted because there is no other choice.
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Generally true but there have been a lot of examples demonstrating the opposite.
The NPS (and Reacreation.gov) does an amazing job considering their resource level, NASA arguably delivered innovation at an unprecedented scale for decades, and up until it was purposefully fucked with the US Postal Service offered a fantastic dependable, affordable and pretty innovative product. The Hold Mail is simple and elegant as just one minor example.
Given how ridiculously inefficient (i.e. extractive) private companies are in areas which were previously government run... yea I think at this point there might be stronger evidence that private companies are MUCH slower and less efficient. They can move faster at times, but they often do so with outrageously clear malicious intent, so that isn't exactly something to congratulate them for.
What's the confusion? The company was ordered to refund the Rs. 1499 that he had paid for the subscription plus pay an additional fine of Rs. 8000 (as compensation and litigation costs), all totalling to Rs. 9500.
This is not an option for everyone, but as someone who gave up TV several years ago (not entirely, just mostly), not feeling the draw of these platforms or having to put up with their costs and changes is really nice.
TV is sort of like caffeine (another thing I gave up - though that one wasn't by choice, but required by my doctors) in that you cannot imagine yourself living without it and wouldn't want to. And the first few months of abstinence are genuinely very difficult.
But eventually it gets easier, and then it gets completely easy, and then you actually feel as good or better than before. And once you finally become accustomed to it, you can't imagine going back to the old way.
I haven't had a functional TV in my home for over 5 years now. I will sometimes watch shows on my laptop but that's about it.
In place of a TV I have a high res audio transport and speakers that are used for music. Spotify isn't exactly a saint but it would be challenging for them to do what Disney is doing without losing all their customers.
I try Qobuz out every year but my dumb niche music tastes aren't as available there.I hope they continue to grow because I love the idea of leaving Spotify.
I've given up on all streaming services because none of them offer a model where my money goes to the artists I listen to and not to Taylor Swift and other top-40 nonsense. Switching completely to Plex + PlexAmp + Bandcamp + iTunes purchased music (it's DRM free). It helps that I have ~300 CDs to kick start my library.
Can attest that Tidal is basically completely satisfying as a Spotify replacement for me. I use a dedicated podcast app and buy any audiobooks I want from Libro.fm Haven’t looked back.
Still continue to slowly build my CD + mp3 collection in case this wonderful era of “cheap subscription for almost all the world’s music ad-free” doesn’t last forever.
After setting up a nas + sonarr setup, it's amazing how much my tv usage went down, simply due to having to actually choose what to view before it appears on my tv.
And it's also apparent how little content is currently worth a conscious watch. Every year or so I make a quick check for what great things appeared in the period, and not much has popped up.
I feel back in the day you still saw ads that were kind of creative and there was a certain glamour around being the one brand with the best ads.
Current ones are outright unpleasant, the "make the viewer feel bad about something" kind or directly spam folder level of scammy. Nobody takes pride anymore on their advertising.
I found that YT Shorts became absolutely terrible around the time they removed the dislike button. This could be because the recommendation algorithm is lacking adequate signals now, or they could be intentionally pushing profitable bad content and removing any signal of possible backlash.
Short form video inherently has fundamental differences to what it will support and optimize towards. Just the selection effect of who prefers to watch shorts over long form content produces a different optimum that IMO is far worse.
Take a population, and then remove anyone who is willing to invest more than 60 seconds on a idea, and then sample the "preferences" of that population.
What did you expect to end up with?
Creators who I really like still end up producing trash on shorts because that's what gets traction, because the problem is what is actually liked by someone who wants to just mindlessly scroll 30 seconds at a time is really bad
No, there was an extremely quick and obvious drop-off in quality that is not excused by "vertical short video has different dynamics"
Before the change my shorts feed roughly aligned with my main homepage feed (which has also gotten worse since they made the dislike button a placebo there). After, it's mostly AI voiceovers reading out Reddit or Twitter comments about life situations, placed over Minecraft gameplay. This is probably a convergent point in the algorithm as you said but it's also extremely relevant that I have no way to tell it "stop that"
The idiom "idiot box" has been used in Canada and the USA as well; it features in Heinlein's 1961 novel "Stranger in a Strange Land", and is generally cited as having come into being in 1955.
TV sort of means different things to different people. To some it means cable, so giving up TV means switching to subscription channels. To others giving up TV means dropping subscription channels (Prime, HBO etc) but maybe watching youtube videos on the TV. But then would watching the same youtube videos on your phone count as watching "TV"? It sucks just as much time and attention, and it's even worse because now it is always in your pocket. I, for example, watch Amazon prime videos on my laptop while I do other stuff and I still feel like I am watching "TV" even though it's not on the actual TV
I find I live in seasonal cycles with and without it. Basically the only time I watch any TV is the dark depths of winter. It's definitely like going without caffeine or alcohol for long stretches of time.
There are really quality TV shows, and films on streaming, out there.
Giving up TV is no different from giving up reading literature, or listening to music, or whatever artistic experience you want to have.
Watching a TV show like Adolescence is no different from reading great literature. And fortunately, there's so much great TV from the past couple of decades, you don't ever have to watch bad or brainrot TV if you don't want to.
There's nothing noble about trying to abstain from that.
It’s less noble than reading, since that exercises the mind and lets it wander and fill in details, etc. But I agree with a watered down version of your statement that compares television to something like watching a play, etc. which certainly has value
I just want a company to tell me truly what it is worth to them from me to not show me ads. Maybe the cost is truly so much higher than I expect that I wouldn't pay it, but for fuck's sake give me the option! Is it $15/month extra instead of $5? $30/month extra? Somewhere, that line exists where the company would financially benefit, I just wish they'd actually define it.
When I was getting married, I engaged a baker to make pies for our wedding. Two weeks before the wedding they cancelled, saying very apologetically they had not catered many weddings with only pies and couldn't do it at the price they quoted. I had to practically beg them to just give me a price that was profitable for them (20% higher, in the end), and then let me decide. This feels just like that.
I understand the rationale here, but I just don't believe I'm worth more to Disney (in this instance) as a recipient of these shitty ads than if they let me pay $2000/year to not have them; of course, that is more than I'm willing to pay.
I am receptive to the idea repeated across responses that Disney (or any other internet media company) cannot do this as a tier for all because it degrades the value of the advertising audience they sell to ad buyers by removing high earners. But it is still difficult for me to buy that there is truly no line at which it is worth it for them.
It's not easy to calculate how much you are worth because it depends on so many factors. And it wouldn't be nice to charge you 10x more than what they charge someone else.
This information is available in the annual reports of all these companies. It's the advertising revenue per user per year. For Meta it's like $100 a year for U.S. users.
The problem is that such a line doesn’t exist, because they’re always looking for ways to increase profit for shareholders. On day X, they’ll be fine offering you an ad free sub, but on day X+Y there will be a meeting where they discuss what they can do to improve their revenue numbers and someone will suggest adding just a few ads to the ad-free tier.
This is why people go scorched earth with adblockers. There’s a lot of discussion about “good” ad networks being allowlisted, but they are all just one missed earnings report away from implementing dark patterns. None of them are trustworthy.
It seems like there's no limit on that because you're more valuable to them as a potential product for their ad reselling business that whatever price you may bring not to be a product. I'm sure luxury companies would be interested to show you ad if the subscription was 2000$/month
Sounds like you're waiting for somebody to tell you how much money they need. There's no answer, they need all the money. If somebody asked you how much money you needed to do something, and you had no competition and they would not or could not walk away, you wouldn't have an answer either. You'd take all the money.
This is just how not having antitrust, media ownership limitations, or consumer protections works. The actors, crew, and production companies are in the same boat as you when dealing with Disney.
> If somebody asked you how much money you needed to do something, and you had no competition and they would not or could not walk away, you wouldn't have an answer either. You'd take all the money.
I mean I wouldn't because I'm not a moral-free corporate entity whose only goal is to maximize my own gain. Further, the analogy doesn't apply because in the streaming and internet media context I can walk away and have walked away. I do not use any social media except this site and Letterboxd; I've moved largely to physical media and season buys of shows I like, I watch sports on the antenna, NBA TV, or illicit streaming sites with ad blockers running overtime (unless it's on NBA League Pass, which doesn't advertise to me!).
From this point on, every year "physical media & a Jellyfin install" is going to be more sensible.
Assuming you even care about legality, of course.
Yeah, it's harder. But you can get a lot of "harder" things done in the amount of time you otherwise spend watching ads, after all. Because to me one of the worst things about ads is they're stealing dollars from me to make cents, if not fractions of a cent. This makes them on the dumb end of the bandit classification by the Basic Laws of Human Stupidity metric: https://harmful.cat-v.org/people/basic-laws-of-human-stupidi... It's so dumb.
And as long as we keep letting them give us an option to buy out the ads, but then they get to stick ads on that option anyhow, we can never get our way out of ads on these things. I don't mind buying them out because they make so little money anyhow but by simple game theory "buy out ads + put ads on anyhow" is always > "buy out ads". You need to cancel if they do this to you. I can't, because I don't have a Disney+ subscription. But you really need to. You need to turn the option into either "let us buy out the ads" or "lose the subscription" for them.
Yup - my take is this is coming for absolutely everything. (it's already mostly here for tv).
Rent-seeking behavior is too good to give up, so companies will move all content to streaming only services (games, movies, tv, music, books, etc...) in the majority of cases.
Physical media will only be available at very high prices, for a very limited selection of content.
We will go from "doctrine of first sale" around content licensing to the utterly crippled "you own a temporary, non-transferrable, and ephemeral license to stream this content from us on exactly this service using only approved devices until we decide otherwise".
The moral action in this case is to simply stop paying. Period.
Long term - we should be fighting to enshrine a new flavor of "doctrine of first sale" for the digital age.
Ex - maybe purchasing any content license sold with the word "buy" should enshrine your right to use, transfer, sell, or otherwise consume in any reasonable form that content for the duration of the copyright + 7 years. And we will not enforce copyright for items that can't be bought (only rented).
I think we'll end up seeing legislation against the license version of all of this content. Instead, you'll get to own it and move it around as necessary. This hasn't been necessary yet, but if that becomes the only option, then ownership becomes a more important question.
The problem with every "should" idea is that *THE SYSTEM WORKS AS INTENDED*
The system is not there to help you or me. The system is to protect and accelerate the flow of money up to the 0.1% at any and all costs. It does not matter if it will destroy the environment or if the innocent people will die.
People need to wake up to this fact, band together, and fix it by any means necessary. Until that happens "should" ideas are wasted breath.
Unless they beam it into our brains we will find ways to rip it. Even if it means recording it with a camera. Then cameras will have content id. But you can't stop the signal.
By that point there will be enough digitized entertainment already produced to last a lifetime. We’re just on the long tail of diminishing returns now.
If we're going just off of the total runtime of all films ever produced, that point was probably already reached before WW2. But that's not entirely relevant, because an average person won't be equally interested in watching everything. There could still be increasingly small niches to fill.
The bad news is the camera sees the same thing the eye does (at least to a reasonable approximation), so that means you will still see ads in the output.
I already hear your wheels turning, thinking machine learning will provide a way to remove the ads from the content, but as the AI labs start to control all the compute they will assuredly insert their own ads into what you tried to remove.
Why would anyone need machine learning to edit a video? There are dozens or hundreds of free open source video editing programs. Only one person needs to edit the ads out.
Okay, I'll grant you that there are some talented artists who are able to convincingly remove ads from images using traditional Photoshop tools, assuming you can find a dusty old computer kicking around that no AI lab wants to bother with. But doing that over many frames, as required for video, is a time sink nobody is going to realistically commit to.
Or maybe you still think we're in the 1950s when there were explicit ad breaks? In modern works ads are injected into the storyline. You can't just start dropping frames at random if you want to preserve the performance in its entirety.
I literally have no idea what you’re talking about. You’re saying we can’t splice ads out?
There are absolutely hard breaks before and after ads. Sounds like you might be talking about product placement, which to be clear, no one anywhere else in this thread is talking about.
It takes 2 seconds for a human to remove an ad from media. It happens so fast there are even browser plugins (sponsorblock) which crowdsource removing sponsorship plugs from youtube videos.
You can do it with ffmpeg losslessly with pretty much any media.
The only thing that's hard to remove is sponsorships built into the script (brought to you by snapple), but people don't tend to like that sort of thing in a show.
> The only thing that's hard to remove is sponsorships built into the script (brought to you by snapple), but people don't tend to like that sort of thing in a show.
2. I was using hyperbole, which I think was pretty obvious. It does take some time to isolate frames for advertisements. It's not, however, terribly hard to do and is something people would do if the way ripping in the future is pulling video directly from HDMI output.
3. Who are you to setup a game with rules and requirements for me to fulfill?
So my followup reply is you did not read my comment charitably or fully before issuing a challenge.
AI labs controlling all the compute is not realistic. You don't need a frontier video model to remove ads in a movie.
Take any open multimodal LLM, set it up with a scriptable video editor, uncensored Qwen-Image then tell it where the ads are and what to replace them with. That's it.
You can do all of it locally on a 5 year old gaming PC with pretty good results. Of course it works better if you have Opus driving it but that's not a hard requirement.
Then old things shall become new again. And people may get the first taste of a world they have sought all of their young lives, and rejoice in a world recorded in media they may not understand: before default-irony, before default-sarcasm; many will not care for it, but perhaps some will delight that there is many lifetimes of media hiding there, on the bookshelf of humanity, covered in dust and ready to consume
I make a point to own my own books. Even if I first read them as ebooks or audiobooks, if I want to keep it forever I'll pick up a used copy (they're cheap).
I've considered the same for film. The only things I looked up that are just completely unavailable are Streaming Original series. Maybe this has to do with the sort of library I'd want to keep, but I don't think so.
Local stores around here no longer carry blu-ray media since sales have fallen off and few people even own the players. Bought a bunch of clearance discs last year but that might be it.
We can just move on as a society from Disney. It didn't exist in 1900, no reason for it to exist now. It doesn't deserve a permanent place in western culture.
Those people are already not paying for sports. That is a massive market, worth bikkuons and billions annually. People are not going to simply stop watching professional sports. Especially because historically that has always been very expensive
Agreed! When they make you start paying for ads, it’s time to do something else. I haven’t had a subscription to any TV service in years because of the ads.
There's probably something to be said for being inspired by people living their dreams. Like it was no doubt inspirational for many to watch Jordan living his dream of being a baseball player no matter what people expected of him.
Honestly, even if your brother is right, who cares? I find it quite enjoyable to watch other folks play sports. So I'm going to continue to watch live sports.
Which sports I watch may change over time, as companies like Disney (ESPN) ruin one sport after another with too many ads and especially too much in-game gambling content, but I'll likely keep watching sports.
I'm not even sure which Disney+ susbription I apparently am a part of at this point - my cable company provides it, my wireless provider provides it, hell, even shopping platforms are now shoving this crap into it as a 'perk'. I didn't want it in the first place but I'm forced to have it like a bundled set of cable channels I didn't want to subscribe to.
... dear God, it's just cable TV package cramming all over again just across every single service industry now.
"'Unmissable TV' to be enforced by law"
"But I specifically chose the highest option so I wouldn't see ads!" well, now you have the option to pay the highest tier to see less ads. For now. By paying for the highest tier, Disney knows you are a higher quality consumer with the most disposable income of all the users on that platform; that's exactly the users Disney can charge the most for advertising spend. From an exec's standpoint, why wouldn't you? sure, they'll lose some paying customers, but will probably make more in the short term at least, which is all that matters.
There's a whole genre of comment like this where the implication is that if some effect is either predictable or inevitable by the nature of large in-place systems, then individuals are somehow not allowed to criticize the people choosing to enact the effects.
We all have free will. Just because you can legally make money being annoying or otherwise shitty, and if you didn't do it then somebody else would, that carries absolutely no implication that nobody is allowed to judge you for making that choice.
I am entirely willing to spend money and I have decent savings. I just expect the products put on offer to be worth buying.
But then if I pay them for really no ads, like for realzies, then ... I'm an even more valuable target! And there's a dollar value for that.
So I pay them for really no ads, pinkie swear this time, then ... I'm an even more valuable target! And there's a dollar value for that.
I cannot possibly be of infinite value to these companies.
I do agree though. It seems like pretty bad behavior to charge 20 dollars AND insisting on showering us with ads.
E.g. Paid for ad-free OTT viewing but commercials ‘appeared after a month’, man wins Rs 9,500 ( https://indianexpress.com/article/legal-news/paid-ad-free-ot... ):
> Calling it a deficiency in service, the Hyderabad consumer commission ordered an OTT platform to refund Rs 1,499 and pay compensation to a subscriber after it introduced advertisements midway into his paid ad-free subscription.
Government is predictably slow, inefficient, and does just about everything at a service level that is only accepted because there is no other choice.
We are seeing an increasingly exaggerated cycle that goes like this: 1. Innovation takes huge investment to launch 2. Early adopters enjoy amazing new product(s) while companies bear losses 3. Companies eventually must face debt so quality of products decrease and price increases
OpenAI and Anthropic have perhaps set the record for going from 1 to 2 in the biggest (financially) and fastest manner ever, and we are all hurtling towards step 3 with a possible too-big-to-fail scenario.
Back to Disney Plus: I don't have a sagely answer. Free markets do sometimes need government to curb monopoly power, and Disney is certainly has a sort of monopolistic power due to their huge portfolio of franchises and content.
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Generally true but there have been a lot of examples demonstrating the opposite.
The NPS (and Reacreation.gov) does an amazing job considering their resource level, NASA arguably delivered innovation at an unprecedented scale for decades, and up until it was purposefully fucked with the US Postal Service offered a fantastic dependable, affordable and pretty innovative product. The Hold Mail is simple and elegant as just one minor example.
> ordered an OTT platform to refund Rs 1,499
How are these reconciled?
TV is sort of like caffeine (another thing I gave up - though that one wasn't by choice, but required by my doctors) in that you cannot imagine yourself living without it and wouldn't want to. And the first few months of abstinence are genuinely very difficult.
But eventually it gets easier, and then it gets completely easy, and then you actually feel as good or better than before. And once you finally become accustomed to it, you can't imagine going back to the old way.
In place of a TV I have a high res audio transport and speakers that are used for music. Spotify isn't exactly a saint but it would be challenging for them to do what Disney is doing without losing all their customers.
Still continue to slowly build my CD + mp3 collection in case this wonderful era of “cheap subscription for almost all the world’s music ad-free” doesn’t last forever.
And it's also apparent how little content is currently worth a conscious watch. Every year or so I make a quick check for what great things appeared in the period, and not much has popped up.
It's always the feeds themselves that get you.
Current ones are outright unpleasant, the "make the viewer feel bad about something" kind or directly spam folder level of scammy. Nobody takes pride anymore on their advertising.
I still watch YT Shorts about series and news. That is pretty much TV.
Take a population, and then remove anyone who is willing to invest more than 60 seconds on a idea, and then sample the "preferences" of that population.
What did you expect to end up with?
Creators who I really like still end up producing trash on shorts because that's what gets traction, because the problem is what is actually liked by someone who wants to just mindlessly scroll 30 seconds at a time is really bad
Before the change my shorts feed roughly aligned with my main homepage feed (which has also gotten worse since they made the dislike button a placebo there). After, it's mostly AI voiceovers reading out Reddit or Twitter comments about life situations, placed over Minecraft gameplay. This is probably a convergent point in the algorithm as you said but it's also extremely relevant that I have no way to tell it "stop that"
I only watch YouTube, but I grew tired of the algorithm and wanted traditional TV, but for YT. So created this: https://channelsurfer.tv
I keep shorts out.
Giving up TV is no different from giving up reading literature, or listening to music, or whatever artistic experience you want to have.
Watching a TV show like Adolescence is no different from reading great literature. And fortunately, there's so much great TV from the past couple of decades, you don't ever have to watch bad or brainrot TV if you don't want to.
There's nothing noble about trying to abstain from that.
When I was getting married, I engaged a baker to make pies for our wedding. Two weeks before the wedding they cancelled, saying very apologetically they had not catered many weddings with only pies and couldn't do it at the price they quoted. I had to practically beg them to just give me a price that was profitable for them (20% higher, in the end), and then let me decide. This feels just like that.
The line doesn't exists. It's most profitable for the company to repeatedly:
1. Have an ad-supported tier and a no-ads tier
2. Wait for most people to move to the no-ads tier
3. Introduce ads into the no-ads tier
4. Wait for people to get sick of ads
5. Introduce a new, higher cost no ads tier
There is no threshold where it's more profitable for the company to never introduce ads at that price point.
I am receptive to the idea repeated across responses that Disney (or any other internet media company) cannot do this as a tier for all because it degrades the value of the advertising audience they sell to ad buyers by removing high earners. But it is still difficult for me to buy that there is truly no line at which it is worth it for them.
This is why people go scorched earth with adblockers. There’s a lot of discussion about “good” ad networks being allowlisted, but they are all just one missed earnings report away from implementing dark patterns. None of them are trustworthy.
This is just how not having antitrust, media ownership limitations, or consumer protections works. The actors, crew, and production companies are in the same boat as you when dealing with Disney.
I mean I wouldn't because I'm not a moral-free corporate entity whose only goal is to maximize my own gain. Further, the analogy doesn't apply because in the streaming and internet media context I can walk away and have walked away. I do not use any social media except this site and Letterboxd; I've moved largely to physical media and season buys of shows I like, I watch sports on the antenna, NBA TV, or illicit streaming sites with ad blockers running overtime (unless it's on NBA League Pass, which doesn't advertise to me!).
You can squeeze customers quite a bit but once they go back to pirating it's incredible hard to get them to subscribe again.
Assuming you even care about legality, of course.
Yeah, it's harder. But you can get a lot of "harder" things done in the amount of time you otherwise spend watching ads, after all. Because to me one of the worst things about ads is they're stealing dollars from me to make cents, if not fractions of a cent. This makes them on the dumb end of the bandit classification by the Basic Laws of Human Stupidity metric: https://harmful.cat-v.org/people/basic-laws-of-human-stupidi... It's so dumb.
And as long as we keep letting them give us an option to buy out the ads, but then they get to stick ads on that option anyhow, we can never get our way out of ads on these things. I don't mind buying them out because they make so little money anyhow but by simple game theory "buy out ads + put ads on anyhow" is always > "buy out ads". You need to cancel if they do this to you. I can't, because I don't have a Disney+ subscription. But you really need to. You need to turn the option into either "let us buy out the ads" or "lose the subscription" for them.
Which of course is why physical media will increasingly rarely be offered as an option going forward
Rent-seeking behavior is too good to give up, so companies will move all content to streaming only services (games, movies, tv, music, books, etc...) in the majority of cases.
Physical media will only be available at very high prices, for a very limited selection of content.
We will go from "doctrine of first sale" around content licensing to the utterly crippled "you own a temporary, non-transferrable, and ephemeral license to stream this content from us on exactly this service using only approved devices until we decide otherwise".
The moral action in this case is to simply stop paying. Period.
Long term - we should be fighting to enshrine a new flavor of "doctrine of first sale" for the digital age.
Ex - maybe purchasing any content license sold with the word "buy" should enshrine your right to use, transfer, sell, or otherwise consume in any reasonable form that content for the duration of the copyright + 7 years. And we will not enforce copyright for items that can't be bought (only rented).
a whole lot of people had to die for an 8 hour work day.
if you're not willing to exert pressure, sometimes aggressively, then your way of life is already dead.
The system is not there to help you or me. The system is to protect and accelerate the flow of money up to the 0.1% at any and all costs. It does not matter if it will destroy the environment or if the innocent people will die.
People need to wake up to this fact, band together, and fix it by any means necessary. Until that happens "should" ideas are wasted breath.
There’ll always be community theater!
I already hear your wheels turning, thinking machine learning will provide a way to remove the ads from the content, but as the AI labs start to control all the compute they will assuredly insert their own ads into what you tried to remove.
Or maybe you still think we're in the 1950s when there were explicit ad breaks? In modern works ads are injected into the storyline. You can't just start dropping frames at random if you want to preserve the performance in its entirety.
There are absolutely hard breaks before and after ads. Sounds like you might be talking about product placement, which to be clear, no one anywhere else in this thread is talking about.
That's fine. We can't all know everything. But why are you trying to participate in a discussion, by your own admission, you don't understand?
You can do it with ffmpeg losslessly with pretty much any media.
The only thing that's hard to remove is sponsorships built into the script (brought to you by snapple), but people don't tend to like that sort of thing in a show.
Okay. I'll be extremely generous and let you prove that with just a single frame. https://www.dexerto.com/cdn-image/wp-content/uploads/2024/02...
Rules:
- You have 2 seconds.
- No machine learning (e.g. content-aware fill) allowed.
- Result must remove the distraction of the ad, not replace it with something equally distracting. Blurs, black squares, etc. not accepted.
- Video recording of the process provided in a follow up reply.
Go!
> The only thing that's hard to remove is sponsorships built into the script (brought to you by snapple), but people don't tend to like that sort of thing in a show.
2. I was using hyperbole, which I think was pretty obvious. It does take some time to isolate frames for advertisements. It's not, however, terribly hard to do and is something people would do if the way ripping in the future is pulling video directly from HDMI output.
3. Who are you to setup a game with rules and requirements for me to fulfill?
So my followup reply is you did not read my comment charitably or fully before issuing a challenge.
Take any open multimodal LLM, set it up with a scriptable video editor, uncensored Qwen-Image then tell it where the ads are and what to replace them with. That's it.
You can do all of it locally on a 5 year old gaming PC with pretty good results. Of course it works better if you have Opus driving it but that's not a hard requirement.
as many disks and vhs as you can handle. check the disks for scratches just in case, but otherwise you can find oodles
I make a point to own my own books. Even if I first read them as ebooks or audiobooks, if I want to keep it forever I'll pick up a used copy (they're cheap).
I've considered the same for film. The only things I looked up that are just completely unavailable are Streaming Original series. Maybe this has to do with the sort of library I'd want to keep, but I don't think so.
You can live without watching whatever the latest show is.
You can live without watching whatever the latest show is.
I don’t care about whatever shows I’m missing.
Don’t spend your time watching, spend your time making your own dreams come true.
Which sports I watch may change over time, as companies like Disney (ESPN) ruin one sport after another with too many ads and especially too much in-game gambling content, but I'll likely keep watching sports.