Media embedded advertising has already been a thing for years, but companies hate leaving money on the table so they cannot resist the temptation of showing more ads.
I wonder why it is that Steam hasn't had any issues remaining such a successful video game platform, while other forms of media have struggled to keep up.
You're competing with piracy, but you throw ads in my face. I can download any show or movie I want and have it playing in minutes without having to deal with multi platform bullshit. That's real convenience. Oh, and the show or movie never gets taken away because some execs decided to be greedy.
Although at this point I'm so fed up with most modern media that I've lost any interest to watch it, even if it's free and in a convenient format. Most stuff doesn't even seem interesting enough to pirate.
The age of mindless consumption is nearing an end. I'm hopeful that the future will be a mix of locally crafted consumption balanced with a healthy mix of content creation.
> I wonder why it is that Steam hasn't had any issues remaining such a successful video game platform, while other forms of media have struggled to keep up.
it's privately owned
and by someone that loves video games that was already wealthy when he founded the company
Steam is successful because its advertising is rather low key, showing a popup with offers, and providing a search, directory plus suggestions. Their gain is from consumer analytics too. (They also take a cut for using their platform from the game developers or publishers.
It also provides some added value like achievements, basic social media in forms of forums and chat, some (somewhat broken at times) controller handling, some bug reporting, cloud save handling, voice communication handling, even some space to host game related content.
On the whole, more value added than taken by paltry ads. The bigger value minus is the "Steam DRM" - requirement for an online connection to use the downloaded application.
And providence help you if you post inflammatory comments under an account that owns game access licenses. You will lose that.
The other ones don't do it quite as effectively, esp. the suggestions part. Being a game library and download service is not what makes Steam in particular good, though it is an essential part.
Steam's most important advertising is actually quite in your face, and used to occupy a good part of the gaming sphere for a couple of weeks each year: their sales with discounts between 50-90% (calculated from the current "regular price" which for older games is often already far below original retail price). They've switched it up in recent years, making the summer sales tamer in exchange for more weekly sales, but the concept stays the same: sell "old" games for prices you can't refuse. And that's why people don't mind: when they tell you it's a great offer it genuinely is.
Everyone else in gaming is fighting for the newest releases. That's the battleground XBox and Playstation use, and that's where newcomers like the Epic Game Store try to beat Steam. Steam meanwhile is pretty toned down on new releases, and is going for long tail sales instead.
They are really good at it, too. Fallout 4 for just 8€? Brilliant, I've heard so much about it, let me check it out. But just 5€ more and I get all the DLC? And there's a bundle with Skyrim? Before I realise whats going on I spent 30€ on games released a decade ago that I don't really have time to play anyway.
Bethesda releases aren't games you play, they're hobbies you pursue. Imagine all the enjoyable hours you'll spend browsing nexus and creating a stable environment for each of the games you own. It's almost like having an aquarium.
Skyrim is the raspberry pi of video games. So many hours getting something “just right” to the follow up by never using it for that purpose. Always good to have around though just in case.
It’s important to take Steam DRM in context. In a world where DRM was becoming more intrusive by the day, and you had to contend with every game having its own unique way to mess your system up in its fight against piracy, Steam provided one single DRM system that almost everybody agrees to use. For consumers, worse than no DRM, but miles ahead of the status quo it replaced.
Also, Steam does have an offline mode. You just have to ping the mothership every few weeks iirc.
To add to this, the original Witcher is the game that made me decide I was never again going to install a game directly. It was going to be steam or gog, and I've kept to that over the years with few exceptions (rpg maker games, etc).
As a freelance developer I would run vmware with a dedicated partition for the VM. The VM was linux and the partition itself was either ext3 or reiserFS (can't remember).
Since Windows didn't recognize the partition, the DRM for witcher repartitioned that drive so it would have a "secret" partition to track who knows what.
That affected my ability to earn money and was doing things to my PC I would never have accepted if asked.
compared to that, steam is a godsend. I understand people complaining about steam, but to this day I'm still a huge fan of steam for what it forced the gaming industry to accept.
I still prefer GoG due to its policies, but steam is fantastic.
You can download all 3 Witcher games without DRM after buying them on GoG. Did you have the standalone version? I don't understand why they put a DRM in it.
In some ways, Steam has provided an experience better than having no DRM. I can hop in a friend's computer and download any game I've purchased. Or I can delete old games to free up space and redownload them later (without having to deal with DVDs or external USB drives).
The tradeoff is handing over the control of my game library to a company. I can see how that tradeoffs can be compelling to some and not worthwhile to others.
The thing is Valve is the sort of company that has built that elusive relationship - trust - so much so that I would expect them to arrange for some way to keep people most of their games if the service was shutdown, and if they didn’t, it would be a surprise.
Most of the games from big studios still use their own DRM on Steam because Steam DRM is worthless, I can crack it in 5 seconds for any game on steam, that's why you often see games that have Steam+Denuvo or Steam+CustomDRM.
True, but it's (as far as I know) the only DRM that is not listed in the store page. "Third party" DRMs like Denuvo must be listed there, but Steam's gets a free pass.
For me it’s about context. Steam ads do not bother me that much since it’s easy to turn off/dismiss, but also importantly they're "first party" - I’m already on steam and a gaming mood so I don’t mind checking out offers for other games.
Streaming ads are annoying because under no circumstances I'd be thinking of picking up tampons while watching a football game.
Not OP but honestly i am tired of it. If i'm on stackoverflow, i want to see ads for a new course, a job posting or a clickbait tech article on a new stack that makes Java bearable. When i'm researching some obscure history, i don't mind ads about JC Martin latest book available on amazon (and i might even buy it!), and when i'm looking for camping gear, i don't mind ads for other camping gear.
That i get ads for camping gear when i'm looking for information on the French second restoration, and when that ad takes my whole screen, i get fed up and reinstall ublock.
It's easy. I know one person who made a lot of money from blogging. Affiliate links + direct ads to Festool or a know paint company. It beats adtech by a mile five years ago (for revenue at least). I think it doesn't work as well now with Intagram and tiktok, but he still get money from that.
There was a time when the internet was not beholden to advertisers, but still managed to deliver all kinds of lovingly/obsessively detailed sites on obscure topics like the second French restoration. It was slower and jankier and (arguably) harder to navigate, but it showed that many people are happy to produce and maintain online content without resorting to ad-veillance.
Well with the right approach, you don't need to give any data. I've said before on here that I think affiliate marketing is acceptable for text content, if the thing that I'm recommended is actually something I'd use. Caveat is it should be both obvious it's an affiliate link, but also unobtrusive and I should gain value from the material, not just link-stuffing every other word in a recipe blog.
The video equivalent is the sponsored segment, which producers insert because they know people block ads and they don't make enough from YouTube alone. These can be good if they're actually relevant to the content. The problem is when I'm watching a video about coffee and the presenter tries, for the umpteenth time, to sell me Squarespace. Usually the product in the video is also affiliate-linked in the description (plus all the AV gear the producer uses) In contrast, I'll watch someone like MarcoReps shill me JLPCB because he's using the boards in the video and they actually look good.
In both cases, I think targeted affiliate advertising can work if it's done well, and it's a lot better than generic follow-me advertising that has no relevant to the page content.
I am not willing to give up my personal data for the sake of advertising. I don’t understand stand why advertisers need to be so intrusive. If you visit a tech news site vs a celebrity news site like TMZ, you can make some generalizations about the audiences without more evasive targeting.
In a hypothetical world where personal data is securely shared and stored, I'd prefer a more targeted ads (if ad free is not an option or the price of that option does not justify the content)
I personally do not mind the idea of targeted ads and data brokers but as a software engineer I know my data is not safe due to ignorance or incompetence
I often wonder how much better the click through rates are for Steam than the ad industry as a whole. I’d estimate that I typically click on at least 4-5 ads on the steam home page a week. I actively enjoy scrolling through them to see if there’s anything that looks interesting to me.
Among other things, Steam is not operated by a publicly-traded company.
They don't need to answer to faceless shareholders at the end of every quarter. They can settle for making whatever they consider to be "enough money" without chasing endless growth.
Steam still has shareholders to answer to, with the same human motives as any shareholder, so I don't think this argument holds water. I suspect they'd try to get whatever growth they can because otherwise eventually someone will overtake them.
And empirically they are still growing at rates [1] not common among any class of companies, so someone there is certainty pushing for incredible growth.
The difference is that their shares are not publicly offered. Their shareholders much more likely to be people with vested interests in the company's long-term health, rather than retail investors and hedge funds who reliably demand short-term returns.
Also I'm pretty sure they are making enough money as they are. And don't need to chase that ever increasing stock valuation. Which might not even mean increased profits.
But public stocks seems to focus on valuation over profits, which is reasonable given how things turned out.
Apple going from 1 trillion to 2 trillion valuation is much more valuable to shareholders than Apple paying out 100 billion in profits. But if the stocks aren't publicly traded then the main pay-out are the profits, so they try to maximize profit over growth, which is probably much healthier for the economy overall.
That is exactly what I said, publicly traded companies cares about growth over profits, while companies that never intends to go public and therefore doesn't benefit from valuations tend to care about profit over growth.
Profit and growth go together. In Amazon's case lots of profit is what fueled their growth: at each point they made far more money than needed to sustain, so they bought growth instead of paying out to shareholders.
Sorry I misread your comment. Either way I don't think either extreme viewpoint is right. I'd say publicly traded companies and their investors care about both growth and profits for different reasons.
The majority of public shares are held in long term investments like 401ks, whose owners are most certainly interested in long term growth. Buy and hold is by far the biggest amount of investment type of stockholder. Most people don't care to fiddle with microtrading.
As the buffet bet made clear, and as the majority of advice and investors do, long term ownership outgrows those chasing short term returns, despite pop belief.
I think you vastly overestimate the dollar amounts behind stock owners.
Retail investors and hedge funds do not always demand short-term results. If that was the case, Tesla and growth companies like it would simply not exist on the stock market. Instead, they are wildly popular.
What makes you think this? Did you look it up? Have a source?
Every 401k or other investment place I've seen allows either taking dividends or reinvesting them. I've never one seen a fund that picks only divide free or divided providing stocks as a choice.
And every big fund also provides all sorts of general index funds, which certainly contain both. And individual stocks themselves decide to pay dividends or not, and routinely change so.
I don't think your distinction is at all a relevant factor in these funds to nearly any end buyer.
Please provide a citation as to why you think your claim is true.
Netflix is publicly traded and had managed to avoid shoving ads down the throats of user for almost as long as Steam has been around.
Steam is moreso lucky that the PC market was pretty much ignored by all the large game publishers for a very long time and had very little competition. We will see what happens in another 10 years now that even Sony is launching it's own PC launcher. PC is now more important (even Japan is finally opening to the gaming PC scene).
What was the rationale for publicly-traded companies again? Because it sounds like having publicly-traded companies make things worse for the companies themselves and for society in general.
> I wonder why it is that Steam hasn't had any issues remaining such a successful video game platform, while other forms of media have struggled to keep up.
Well, Youtube's ad problem comes from the fact that it is run by the largest internet advertiser. Netflix--video streaming in general--suffers from the fact that there are very few major content producers, and after seeing the monetary success of Netflix, the content producers decided to create their own streaming platforms and deliver their content only via them.
While there have been attempts to build alternative video game platforms than Steam (notably Epic Games Store and Origin), they haven't been able to enforce an exclusivity deal of the kind that showed up in video streaming. I'm not entirely certain why, but it seems to be a mixture of the lack of centralization in developers (so must-have is much less a factor in video games as it is for movies), the need for multi-platform distribution anyways to reach consoles, and the necessary social media integration (you need friend lists to be able to invite friends) making fragmentation more painful for users.
Epic game store definitely tries to enforce exclusivity. Prime example beeing Square Enix games. FF7 Remake first released on Epic Game Store and only much later released on Steam. Kingdom Hearts still isn't available in Steam and probably never will be. It's one of the prime reasons I will never buy from them. That way lies madness.
Yes, they've tried to, but as I've said, it hasn't been particularly effective. Most of the games that had the year-long Epic store exclusivity period happily released on Steam at the end of that period.
Epic giveaway tactics is mainly targeted at their Fortnite audience. There are some kids who never had a Steam account before, but who play Fortnite. So Epic goal is to get them on the hook by providing them with a library of free games.
At the same time giveaways mean very little for existing Steam audience. Piracy was always easy on PC and gamers choose Steam over piracy not jusf because of law or moral reasons, but because Steam is more convinient and offer tons of features.
EGS is simply lacking a lot of niche, but importanf features. Most people likely only ever 5% of Steam features, but you soon find how useful are some of them when you try other platform.
At the end of the day a movie or tv show is a non-interactive stream of media that has two states, play or pause. (Rewind, fast forward and skip sometimes too.)
A games launcher is a lot more complicated. A few publishers have tried their hand at it (EA Origin, Ubisoft Uplay) and for the most part they suck.
I disagree re Netflix. They invented their own problems by pivoting from an video platform to a platform that measured itself by how much attention it could steal or time it could waste.
You may recall they were patting themselves in the back by adopting this strategy of minimally viable programming. Well, Disney got their shit together and turns out people want to watch good TV. Whatcha know?
It’s a management failure and the ad pivot is a bigger failure. If there was a board with a clue, they would fire the management and start over.
Steam was at the right place at the right time. Also it was more insidious in its behavior. Throughout the late 2000s and 2010s most AAA games were Steam releases only. Even boxed copies were not much more than a Steam code. This allowed them to build a powerful network effect. At some point gamers were demanding that any new big release was a Steam release ("no steam no buy").
This does make some sense. Games are big (file size wise) and prone to updates. Steam helped handle this distribution in a reasonable way.
It's also why people prefer app stores or package managers, because they give a predictable distribution experience over hunting for scattered software.
I'd say the problem with Steam is that it should have a community-run alternative/competitor. There hasn't been much push for one since Steam isn't a walled garden and Valve has historically been pretty ethical, but still...
> Games are big (file size wise) and prone to updates. Steam helped handle this distribution in a reasonable way.
Indeed. Steam is the original package manager of Windows. It's so good that nobody really remembers what it was like before Steam. They don't remember downloading and manually applying half a dozen incremental patches to their games. People are used to its incredible convenience now.
As far as DRM content licensing digital fiefdoms go, it's certainly the least bad. It's easy to forget that we don't really own anything on Steam. It certainly pisses me off when other studios start launching shitty alternatives to it that are even worse in every single way.
There's another factor too: Steam just plain doesn't change the store that much. When I open the Steam store to browse, I bypass literally everything to scroll to the bottom of the page. There I will find a few tabbed lists. One will show me new and "trending" games (I have no idea what they consider trending), one will show me the current top selling games, and another will show me upcoming games that are receiving hype. I rarely ever view anything else on that page unless they're running a seasonal sale.
> The age of mindless consumption is nearing an end
I think the only thing that could do that is a degree of general poverty so great that mindless consumption immediately impacts survival. And even then some people would choose intoxicants over food and shelter.
> “ I can download any show or movie I want and have it playing in minutes without having to deal with multi platform bullshit.”
Is this as true as it once was? It seems most of the old trackers are offline or dead now. I’d guess because of the success of streaming services finally meeting the market demand. It’s also possible I’m just old and out of the loop now.
More so than ever before. The only difference is that it's all a lot more decentralized. The easiest source of information is from legal filings. A lazy way to get this it to search Google for whatever, and at the bottom it will state something like 'In response to US DMCA we've removed [x] results from this page. You can read the complaints here, here, here...' Read the complaints. Otherwise you can search for more select filings. For instance this [1] is an older report from the RIAA on "Notorious Markets." They're quite a friendly organization - providing URLS, descriptions, and details on each site even including their modus operandi.
Also if you happen to speak a language outside the big Western languages, then it's all trivial and a simple search anywhere will yield even better than above.
The availability of content is still superior to paid offerings. The problem is discoverability.
10+ years ago you could get a well seeded torrent anything by googling "anything+torrent". Nowadays you can still get anything but you have to be way more tech savvy and have to break out of your comfort zone. This could mean invite only sites,Russian speaking sites,Fiddling with baidu download scripts etc.
Seeing how much activity peak mininova had[0] compared to the public tracker offerings of today makes me a bit sad. There are still great places to leech some warez but "the more the merrier" is always true for p2p based sharing :^)
I've literally looked for things that I could reasonably expect to be on the Internet and couldn't find them on the Internet. The newest hot thing is still available, of course, but an obscure 5 years old show may not always be.
>I've literally looked for things that I could reasonably expect to be on the Internet and couldn't find them on the Internet.
Everything is in private communities now. Almost all the content you can think exists on usenet, but all the good indexers are invite-only (and often pay to play. My usenet subscription + the yearly fees to various private trackers was just a little less expensive than Netflix (up until the most recent price hike).
With all due respect, probably you just have to look harder. I managed to track down a clean scene release of an 18 year old PC game[0] just a few hours ago with the help of Yandex and the offline translator plugin for Firefox.
The problem with seeding, for me, is that it effectively implies a need to keep two copies of content. One however you downloaded it and then one actually named properly and stored in a reasonable hierarchy... (Not to mention all the *.nfo and *.lnk they include!)
Hardlink ftw. The only problem is when contents are compressed into rar or whatever. For video it doesnt even make sense from space-saving angle. Anyone can explain why so much torrents are like this?
I wanted to watch the currently in-progress season of a certain anime via the usual legit sites like Crunchyroll, Funimation, etc. All of this anime's seasons are now "not available in my region due to licensing issues".
The DVD/Blu-Ray season sets cost 85-90€ each(!!!) for 13 (~20-22 minutes) episodes per season. That price to me is simply unacceptable, since that's more for one season than the entirety of series like "Friends" or "House, M.D.", either of which provide vastly more content and are WAY more popular than any anime.
As it stands now, I'll probably just wait until the last six episodes of this season become available then use the free "test period" for the "aniverse" channel on Prime Video, on which I arbitrarily can't watch 1080p HD because I have the absolute audacity of not using Windows (a problem which downloads from certain ... 3rd-party sites do not share).
But it's a self-perpetuating death loop problem. At those prices, the only buyers are extreme fans buying it almost more like a merchandise item (compare figurines) than people who want to view the content. I know this is a thing in Japan-- the anime releases tend to be a few episodes at a time, at prices that would be considered astronomical most places.
There are potentially many market equilibria-- selling 200 copies at $100, 400 copies at $50, or 1000 copies at $10.
If they switched to a bargain-priced model, you enable tsundoku-style purchasing-- put up a big display of "here's a hundred back-catalog series, 13 episodes on two DVDs in a flimsy cardboard sleeve for 1000 yen each", people would be willing to take much more risk on buying them.
Arguably, there's a lot of information being lost because they only see purchase data of people hardcore enough to pay the current high prices. (I wonder if to an extent this impacts anime's tendency for fanservice choices-- they're chasing an artificially narrow market)
There's still the opportunity for price-discrimination for fanatics with limited editions with better packaging, extra content, and feelies.
It's interesting to contrast that the price of manga was almost impossibly low. In Japan, (at least it used to be) like 1/3 the price as in the US for a 200-page volume, and the omnibus magazines were pretty cheap, which made it more amenable to risk-taking purchases.
Japanese manga is still really cheap. The latest volume of One Piece is 484 Yen on Amazon Japan which is about $3.50 USD. An English US volume is $10. Books in Japan are absurdly cheap in general, I believe by law.
Anime though is often way way cheaper in the US although that may have changed since Sony started buying up most of the players. Although this does have some downsides as US releases are usually hard-coded to have English subs on when using Japanese voices, no Japanese subs etc. to try and discourage reverse importing. But yeah easily a 5th the cost of collecting the whole set from the Japanese releases. Only Aniplex (who Sony owned) would do the garbage $80 for 2-3 episodes in US.
The same thing is frequently true of Japanese video games as well, often seemingly arbitrarily costing several times comparable titles. I'm quite curious what drives this "cultural" phenomena. It seems almost certain that their price:demand curve is messed up to the point that lowering the price would result in increased revenue, but they seem very content to stick with this system - apparently outside of games as well.
Anybody with any insights into Japanese culture/business? I've always wondered why this was, or if it's something as simple as inertia.
Anyway now Blu-ray for anime is tend to be a fan goods rather than practical media, while paperbook is still decent media for manga. Many people no longer have Blu-ray player equipment, and obviously not work for smartphone/tablet. Average people just watch anime by streaming subscription. Manga subscription is growing but not a major thing for popular mangas.
TPB is still going strong. Older content is sometimes difficult to find but anything new or even slightly popular from the last 50 years is more-often-than-not obtainable.
Imagine a world where anyone who wants can set up his little torrent seedbox sharing with the whole globe some content they really like without worrying about getting a nice little letter in the mail. I'm pretty sure if people were free to do so (and cheap and easy commercial options sprung up) we would be able to find any content we desire and download it and (if it's popular enough) even stream it
For comedy gold, look through the DMCA notifications that Google links you to, and that's your index of helpful and current torrent sites. Many are very usable through machine translation too.
Just hop on over to Rutracker, there's plenty of stuff. And Usenet is still great for movies and TV, although in my experience music is getting a lot harder to find (the wide and free/cheap availability of music streaming probably has something to do with this).
Maybe not. As far as I can tell it doesn't prioritize engagement/hours spent over everything else, first page is a mixture of very niche stuff and very common stuff with very little clickbait either way.
To me HN feels like having a conversation with an interesting friend. It's not necessarily the most productive thing to do, nor it has any other major goal inherent to it, still at the end of the day it doesn't feel mindless or time lost.
To compare, if I use Twitter for 10mins, it's 1min of entertainment at best and 9minutes of bullshit/flamebait/doomscrolling/shallow crap that makes me feel dizzy by the end of it.
It's definitely not its design goal as far as I can tell. However we the people in general have addictive tendencies and we're just kind of turning HN into every other compulsively scrolling social media.
The age of mindless consumption has fully arrived, with AI-driven platforms like TikTok feeding you endless content for free. It's just that selling behavior manipulation of your users (e.g. ads) turned out to be a better business model than (honest) subscription payments.
That's refreshing to read. I thought I was the only one tired of reruns of the office and south park combined with vapid cheaply produced reality and tik tok video clip replay shows.
I really wonder why anyone would dump $100 or more on cable TV any more unless perhaps they need to watch sports channels.
Commercials are dull as well, the way they repeat "accidentally"... ugh.
It will eventually burn out once the pandemic isolation is all over.
It's really going to be a drought for blockbuster entertainment, At least we have plenty of 90s movies and music to fall back on, It's a good thing I kept my old DVDs, Mp4s, Mp3s, and my DVDr drive... No commercials at all unless I want to see them. :)
The golden age of movie piracy has already passed. It is becoming quite hard to pirate 10y+ movies at a good quality. Also, streaming services do offer remastered film versions rarely available for pirates.
It's a strange state when YouTube videos of villagers in Africa building a mud hut or a guy in Asia building a fish tank taken with cheap cameras by amateur videographers are many times more entertaining then Hollywood blockbusters that cost 10's of millions to make.
I feel like clicking the link and getting hit immediately with four tiers of subscription option from the Financial Times was a strong enough case in point that I scarcely needed to read the article itself.
I had to go check - $40/mo for a digital newspaper?! Surely this is aimed at a different demographic than mine, because I can’t imagine anyone I know paying that for news.
I know many Finance/Wall St and (Financial/Management) academic types who pay for FT.
It's high quality, financial news with a European perspective (vs the WSJ which is very US-centric). I assume they keep the prices high enough to support their operations without having to dilute their coverage for the mass market who will want their celebrity news, daily outrage fodder, censorship etc.
They've had a noticeable increase in almost-clickbait titles in the last few years. So it's not like they've remained unaffected by the decline in news media.
Maybe they've always been there, but it just took you a few years to notice them. By how often you hear this sentiment (X newspaper used to be better, more thoughtful and analytical), you'd expect news articles written a few decades ago to read like dissertations. Except they all read about the same, newsy and for a general audience. My theory is it takes a few years to notice the crap, but the crap was there all the time.
"The money thrown into the convenience economy has also created a crowded marketplace. Couch potatoes can choose between Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney Plus and others, and a glut of ultrafast delivery and takeout services; ride-seekers can switch between Uber, Lyft and Bolt. "
Home video and taxi-cab service are very different sectors.
Uber has engaged in some pretty "creative" (i.e. unethical) business tactics to muscle their way into the taxi industry while avoiding both regulations and the payment of decent wages. They moved fast, but it was only a matter of time before government regulators (and their own reputation) caught up to them. Transportation is, indeed, something that's going to go back up in price in the short-term, if only because Uber and the Uber-wannabe's were using a business model that was never sustainable. I'd expect considerable contraction of this market as multiple companies fight each other for dwindling profits.
Home streaming, on the other hand, is simply coming off of a pandemic boom. When people were stuck at home, surprise surprise, they watched a lot of TV. Demand will correct to no less than what it was a couple years ago. The problems streaming providers face are entirely self inflicted. e.g. Fragmentation. It's going to remain hard for any single streamer to make as much as Netflix did when Netflix was pretty much the only streamer. Expecting consumers to pay five different companies on a monthly basis for what basically amounts to "channels" is not a delusion likely to persist much longer. We might see cable-TV style aggregation of streaming services take over, enabling users to pay a single monthly bill for all their streaming needs. Unlike transportation, there are free alternatives to streaming (i.e. piracy) that consumers will turn to in increasing numbers if streaming providers stay on their current course. This alone dictates that streaming must become more convenient in the near future, not less so. Showing ads on a service that isn't free is outright suicidal.
> Uber has engaged in some pretty "creative" (i.e. unethical) business tactics to muscle their way into the taxi industry while avoiding both regulations and the payment of decent wages. They moved fast, but it was only a matter of time before government regulators (and their own reputation) caught up to them. Transportation is, indeed, something that's going to go back up in price in the short-term, if only because Uber and the Uber-wannabe's were using a business model that was never sustainable. I'd expect considerable contraction of this market as multiple companies fight each other for dwindling profits.
I want to push back on calling Uber's methods to avoiding regulations to be unethical, separately from discussing the wages. When they were starting, taxis had regulatory capture with their de facto monopoly. Lobbying over many decades prevented fair and healthy competition for out-of-date reasoning (like medallions and landmark tests). To break this corruption required illegal (and gray area) techniques, but I don't think it's unethical to destroy something that is unethical itself. Not all positive change can happen from following all the laws. Had they gotten shut down in the beginning, I think that would have been a major societal negative, and other ride-share companies coming on their coattails would not have happened.
> I want to push back on calling Uber's methods to avoiding regulations to be unethical, separately from discussing the wages.
Nope. Uber doesn't get a pass.
Uber could have confined themselves to the secondary cities with terrible cab service. Basically that's any city in the US other than New York and Chicago. People would (and some did!) have greeted them like liberators. For example, taxi service in Las Vegas was horrible until ridesharing showed up. San Diego taxis to the airport never showed up on time before ridesharing. etc.
Had Uber built up a commanding service in these secondary cities, they would have had all the momentum they needed to run over the incumbents in New York legally.
But, no, Uber decided they couldn't simply be a profitable business. Oh, no, they have to be unicorn-level and that wouldn't happen unless they were in the biggest cities right off. And then, when they showed up, they didn't even try to follow regulations with a fig leaf and were operating blatantly illegally.
And this is all on top of the fact that Uber and Lyft are skirting minimum wage laws.
But why ? You start with the place with the most impact and deal with the long tail later. So NYC should be the first. Several states don't allow direct sales of electric vehicles despite how well it works in other states. It's a pointless legal issue that will drag on for years/decades. If Tesla et al. had the same impunity and legal cover as Uber, they would be selling everywhere, and we would all be better off.
> But why ? You start with the place with the most impact and deal with the long tail later. So NYC should be the first.
Because your "long tail" of poorly functional taxi systems consisted of cities like Los Angeles, Houston, and San Diego. These aren't tiny even when compared to New York. "Most impact" should be the largest city without a functional taxi system. THOSE should have been the focus and then you would have had demand pull into New York and Chicago.
But, no, Uber wanted the "growth hack" of burning VC cash to transfer a bunch of people from the already functional taxi system into the ridesharing system.
> If Tesla et al. had the same impunity and legal cover as Uber, they would be selling everywhere, and we would all be better off.
Laws exist for a reason. Sometimes, such as the case of Tesla, those laws go out of date and should be changed. The medallion system, however, came into existence to avoid malfeasance by drivers. And, as we have seen, as Uber has reduced pay to the drivers, we are getting the exact problems medallions were put in place to solve.
> Uber could have confined themselves to the secondary cities with terrible cab service.
They've improved certain qualities of cab service here in Austin (like availability) but they've also severely diminished other qualities (like knowing that your driver won't drive straight past the exit because they don't speak English and don't know the roads and don't look at their GPS; or like demand-based pricing).
> People would (and some did!) have greeted them like liberators.
Yeah, because they were running a huge loss-leader to make themselves seem better than the competition until the competition was gone.
I agree that they don't get a pass but... ugh. Their practices, ignoring all law and regulation which apply to them, were not/are not okay no matter where they took place.
> When they were starting, taxis had regulatory capture with their de facto monopoly.
That might be true in some areas, but it certainly isn't in others. And nothing was stopping Uber from being a regulated taxi operator. Instead they were just friends using a networking platform to give each other rides (imagine heavy air quotes throughout that sentence)... while the networking platform set the prices and set the costs and took a large cut...
And in reality Uber et al are already far more expensive than taxis were before they took over. They're also subject to most of the same regulation... except the ones that kept pricing down and predictable/plannable... as taxis were, to boot.
That’s the problem. You are unwilling to discuss the wages. This predatory capture also existed to ensure a decent wage.
Uber did everything they could to hide the true cost of being a driver. Tons of sneaky fees. Gray area for insuring your car. Dropping drivers wages just after they bought their vehicle from a Uber financing program.
There’s a reason the quality of Uber drivers went down, the good ones realized that there was no money to be made once you accounted for all the hidden cost.
It's not like the average taxi driver was rolling in cash either. There are plenty of hidden fees with leasing a cab and medallions as well. I have little sympathy for taxi industry because half the time they try to hustle me.
> That’s the problem. You are unwilling to discuss the wages. This predatory capture also existed to ensure a decent wage.
So a few got a highly inflated "decent" wage and the people that desperately needed this work are just out of luck because they can't afford a medallion?
I was going to say, streaming with “gig economy” ride sharing are completely different.
Streaming really has no right to not be “convenient”. The only reason it’s reverting to inconvenient is because of beaurocracy and aggressive licensing and copyright enforcement. One can argue that it costs money to make movies and producers need to get that money back, but even older movies which have already been released and made huge profits are no longer available or available on different platforms. Then there is region locking and overlooked movies which are flat-out unavailable. Because of all this, there is widespread piracy, and afaik if you have a good pirate setup streaming is still very convenient.
On the other hand, the convenience and low price of ride-sharing and delivery apps was unsustainable, temporary, and didn’t even really exist in the first place. When you get an Uber it costs like $10 for a 10-minute ride on a good day, and the delivery fees are often as much as the cost of your meal itself. Yet Uber doesn’t even make profit (I don’t know how that works and they’re not bankrupt, they have external funding but are allegedly losing money every year on their actual services). You can’t pirate a free ride or meal.
The streaming services are aggregated through fire stick, Roku, Google and Apple tv, etc. The payment model and delivery of content is different now though.
Streaming services are akin to channel packages from traditional cable. You get an aggregate of content for a price per month. The issue is the point of aggregation is meaningless to the consumer for the popular services (Netflix, Apple tv, prime).
In traditional cable it's done by topic (movie package with HBO, showtime, starz or sports package). With these more popular streaming services it's aggregated by production company and other arbitrary things that are meaningless. Leaving me with 8 thousand movies on a service where I only care about 10, but I pay either way.
The Crunchyroll model of "this is an anime streaming service" has it right for VOD in my opinion, as does WWE.
I think a micro payment setup would work better for something like Netflix. Something like pay $1/month to watch stranger things. $40/month gets you 40 shows per month. Free to watch first 5 episodes or something. I can't think of any better way to truly gauge what's popular than to let people vote with their wallet directly.
Right now with these services it feels like we're subsidizing content that nobody cares about leading to a big murky pool of trash content. Just my 2 cents.
When your only skill is something that most Americans learn in HS (drivers licence), then you cannot really expect to earn more than minimum wage, which will never be a "decent" wage, almost by definition.
Uber is also going to run into the issue that if they want to charge much more than they do now, it is often more sensible to use some other means of transportation because it will be too expensive and, well, people can trivially do the work themselves.
Try an ad-free (or substantially reduced) life for a month or two. Stop watching/reading any ad-based content. It can have a positive effect on your outlook.
I have YouTube premium and download everything that I like. A home NAS is extremely handy like that. Mine is not even 10TB and I still have more than a year worth of watching. Also it's not illegal because I don't distribute anything.
I use a local website run by volunteers that ask permission of publishing houses before putting every scanned & OCR'd & spell-checked book in their online library. Again, not illegal, there's a clause for distribution when you work in something like a library capacity.
I use a Twitch client to watch stuff ad-free because I don't use it so often so as to get premium. Or I just download the stream after it ends. Tough luck, Amazon, no money from me. YouTube's service is better anyway.
---
The "Black Mirror"-ization of our economy has a very predictable ending but the execs are trapped in a bubble of yes-people and have no clue how the world out there works -- thus everything will continue going exactly as predicted by many. One part of the populace will remain in the bubble but there will be a lot of others -- like you and me -- that will do their own media collection and consumption, grow part of our own food, repair our own tech, craft items to use around the house etc.
Corporations know no mercy and they will not stop however. They will keep changing the narrative ad infinitum until everyone is dependent on them at birth. But they won't ever get to that point in the first place and will inevitably fail. Normal people can be swayed only so far. That's the part that they are missing -- which is quite puzzling to me, not like it's hard to figure it out.
But I made my peace with the coming events. It's like watching an avalanche: you have a pretty good idea what it does and how far it will go and the damage it will inflict but physics doesn't care that you watch and know what will happen -- the event will happen regardless.
The future is this: extreme segregation. Kind of like the big COVID-19 divide that happened even between people in the same family. That will keep happening in other areas of life. It's how people are.
I do, too. And every month I spend a little bit more time fast-forwarding past people awkwardly dropping pitches for NordVPN into the middle of their videos.
SponsorBlock helps but yeah, it can't cover everything.
Rarely a problem for me though, I quickly filter out the sellouts.
And it's still worth it for the occasional how-to video because part of the time I truly get helped. I can stomach some promotion (but like you I do dislike it).
WTF is up with Nord? I always felt that VPNs were a pretty niche tech tool, but I see those ads freaking everywhere. Are there that many people that use VPNs that warrant the ad investment?
It’s economics: much like with car insurance, the market is a zero-sum game because the quality providers all more or less have equivalent levels of service - thus advertising becomes the most effective way to capture revenue, because prospective buyers don’t generally have complete enough information to e.g. assess a firm’s “operational excellence” or technical qualities on their own.
I don't agree that it's zero sum - this is a niche market that, if it could reach a broader audience, would experience an influx of new customers. That could potentially benefit all the players in the market, though of course it would benefit the company driving the popularisation the most.
Personally I think that in marketing like this NordVPN are not trying to convince existing VPN users that their service is better than their competitors'. Rather, they are trying to convince non-VPN users that they need a VPN.
VPN marketing seems to boil down to two things. Either scaring people about their ISPs and "hackers" trying to steal something. Or circumventing geo-ip blocks... Now later is valid, but somewhat questionable use. And first depends, but probably not needed unless they really want to use that unsecured airport wlan...
So it is really convincing people they need it. For those reasons...
> this is a niche market that, if it could reach a broader audience, would experience an influx of new customers.
Honestly curious: what makes you think that?
I'm someone who really likes VPNs, but in all my experience, they have some really rough edges for non-technical people. I would never recommend one to my non-technical friends or family unless they had a very specific need for it.
Using Nord as an example, since it's a popular option:
- The client takes >90 seconds to load and connect on my Win10 Intel Atom craptop.
- Apple often flags some Nord IPs (probably due to legitimate abuse/attacks coming from them) - leading to Apple Maps, Siri, and other services hanging indefinitely on iOS.
- As of a year ago, the Nord CLI client was completely borking the networking on my stock Debian 10 install whenever I went idle for a few hours. (Didn't dig super deep, but the CLI client would go totally unresponsive and I couldn't get network going again by any other means apart from full reboot.)
- Majority of banking/financial service websites block you.
- You're much more likely to get flagged/run into issues when making payments or signing up for any sort of new account.
- Many desktop apps don't gracefully handle the IP change when you connect to VPN.
Some of this is Nord-specific, but my point is that people just looking to dip their toes in the water are going to run into some form of similar issue - and that makes VPNs not very user-friendly to the general public. That's why I think most of the people who'd want a VPN already know about them.
Is your thinking that more ads would convince people who don’t currently care about privacy to care about it? Or that there’s a contingent of privacy advocates with enough tech skills to navigate these issues that aren’t aware of VPNs yet?
Furthermore, it is marginal cost for the content creating peoples. They just have to read the script and roll the supplied graphics. If they get $1 from total sales then it is worthwhile if you are only getting 2K views. Maybe these VPNs offer a minimum fee and then commission on top so that there is always a payday, albeit small.
None of them seem to record bespoke content where they demo the VPN for real or show how it works.
The message has pivoted to getting content from region locked services such as Netflix.
With car insurance (the last time I was watching TV, some years ago) they had rather silly 'meerkats' with Russian stereotype characters selling the insurance, with the people collecting the fluffy toy versions of the 'meerkats'. If you renew your insurance every year you get another 'meerkat' and soon the goal is to collect the set.
Often it is the company that pays the insurance but the employee gets the 'meerkat', maybe to post to eBay...
My niece's inheritance is mostly 'meerkat' toys and a few empty beer bottles.
I am holding out with OpenVPN on a VPS until cuddly toys get given out with VPNs and they are advertised in every YT show with AI generated cuddly toys with AI accents.
Unfortunately your downloads are either not actually legally owned by you, just licensed, and potentially subject to DRM in some cases.
Same with the books. The library asking permission is actually good and what may make it legal. However, that is called a license and may have serious limitations.
Thanks for the clarification. Yep I know but enforcing this requires a game of whack-a-mole with tens of millions of moles to whack. I wish them luck.
It's a thin ice, obviously, but let's also recognize the fact that they forced us to walk on ice in the first place. They made up the rules. Had there been any sanity in these people left a lot of money would have never been expended in making examples out of regular Joes and Janes.
Can you be so kind and explain the setup behind the youtube-NAS bridge? Are videos being downloaded automatically? Are subtitles added to the local files? Do you have to manually select all videos you want to archive/safe on your NAS?
I might have misled you about the complexity of my setup, sorry.
I didn't even setup something like FreeNAS or something. I just setup ZFS and enabled SMB and NFS on top of it. This is on a spare computer that I've setup with Linux.
Then I've setup `cron` tasks that run various scripts that just download various YouTube playlists -- hand-picked and curated by me.
Nothing you'd call an intelligent software. Just hand-picked places on YouTube to monitor and sync once a day.
It's only automatic insofar as `cron` executes `yt-dlp` with a bunch of URLs.
If I am paying for something I am not watching ads. I will cancel the service and find something else to do with my time, but I will never willingly watch ads.
I knew this day would come and have been preparing. Every company I thought was trustworthy has proven me wrong. So now I’ve decided to provide my own services. I have a NAS and have digitized my movie and music collection and can stream it to any TV in my house. Netflix, Disney, etc can go pound sand. It has to be this way, as long as advertising remains legal, life will slowly approach a Black Mirror episode where things we once owned will become subscriptions ad nauseum.
I could say a bit about well paid engineers who don't pay for the content they consume - it's something I've observed everywhere I go, and I don't think it's one of our more attractive qualities (I'm in there too). I also agree that advertising is an insidious force that corrupts nearly everything it touches.
The funny part to me is that my parents do a fire safety puppet show for children and can keep them enraptured for half an hour with zero budget. For centuries, people have been entertained by Punch and Judy shows. It makes me think that maybe the $20M/episode stuff we do now is impressive, but perhaps a bit over-engineered.
> I could say a bit about well paid engineers who don't pay for the content they consume
That may cover many people, but GP's post seems different. They went out of their way to "digitize their [presumably bought] collection" just to be able to avoid ads.
This doesn't sound at all like "not paying for the content", they're actually paying above the content: I don't think the NAS comes from the pirate bay.
We've actually seen this in practice: when Netflix was the only game in town and carried everything ad-free, piracy cratered. Now that all the paid providers are beginning to show ads, and you have to have 50 different subscriptions to watch what you want, piracy looks better again.
I don't watch many movies / series / videos, so I'm happy with what I get with my Prime subscription, which I'd have either way.
But now that more and more of my Spotify tracks are "not available in my region" anymore, I'm seriously starting to investigate alternatives. Spoiler: it's not another streaming provider. Rather, looking to buy a bunch of hard drives and dusting off my old cd player, so I can rip whatever CDs I can get my hands on at second-hand stores around me.
I doubt the media company lawyers would see it that way. And while they're ghouls, they'd have a point too. What counts as paying? I've got a colleague who would never download a movie illegally; he simply has a constant stream of Netflix DVDs (they're still doing that in case you thought that business was totally dead) that he rips and then sends back. He's paying someone for content, right?
I think the difference is that if you buy the cd, even second hand, and keep it, you're fine because you own it.
At least in Europe, there's the whole "personal copy tax" that's levied on all storage media as well as a "private copying exception" to copyright law.
In Finland you are not allowed make a copy if you need to bypass a strong copy protection. According to decision from 2008 from appeals court (supreme court did not grant appeal) DVD's CSS is considered to be such. Given that it's not very strong from technical point of view and that pretty much all CDs do contain some form of copy protection it's hard to say if you are allowed to make personal copies of most of the commercial CDs.
Fair enough. I don't really care for movies, so I wouldn't go through that trouble, but I don't recall having encountered any audio CD with copy protection. Would those work in a regular, old-style cd-player, like, say, in a stereo?
There has been various ones over the years. These include e.g. key2Audio, Cactus Data Shield & Copy Control. They generally played without issues on normal CD players, but I did hear that especially car stereos did sometimes have issues with them. The way most of them worked were by attempting to hide the audio tracks from computer CD drives to make the ripping harder.
I haven't really used audio CDs for ~15 years so I don't know what the situation is these days. At least the technologies I mentioned are no longer being used to according to Wikipedia. One way to tell if the disc has these kind of copy protections or not is to check if it has the Compact Disc Digital Audio logo. It's trademarked and Philips does not allow using the logo for CDs that break the specification. They do however allow setting the "no copy" bit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bozo_bit). No clue if that would be strong copy protection or not in Finnish courts.
It isn't the over engineering that's the problem*. It's that if you're spending $20m it needs to appeal to everyone, not offend anyone, and you end up with blandness that doesn't say anything to anyone.
That kind of budget suggests lots of cgi which is its own problem, but that's a different rant.
Advertising corrupts even the things you pay for, but more importantly than that I did pay for Netflix and currently do pay for Disney+, but the amount people expect you to pay for their content is way out of the value you get out of it. Typically even the lowest levels you pay for on Patreon for a single podcast gets close to what you pay for Netflix for a month, which doesn't make sense from a consumer perspective.
Yeah I agree, you should still pay for the content. I buy the music off of Bleep and 7digital and own all the movies no torrenting. If I could do it over again I’d build the NAS myself to save some money since that was the most expensive upstart cost.
There is a good side to the service economy: the stuff you don't own, you don't have to fix (it's the service provider's problem), and therefore there will be no planned obsolescence, and less waste.
Why is everyone acting so apocalyptic? Netflix is offering a cheaper tier with ads. If you don’t want ads, keep paying for the tier you have been paying.
Because that's how it starts. Eventually, the cheaper tier will be with more ads, the more expensive tier will no longer be ad-free, but have "some" ads.
HBO has been ad free since the 70s. There hasn’t been a cable service or streaming service that started ad free and then didn’t offer an ad free offering
All cable networks started ad-free because they charged a monthly subscription fee, then almost all of them gradually started introducing ads in addition to the subscription fee. HBO is one of the few exceptions. The fact that cable networks let you pay a second monthly subscription fee for HBO hardly constitutes an "ad free offering."
Where does this myth come from? Cable was first used to bring network broadcast TV with ads to places with no reception. Then came the “Superstations” like TBS and WGN. That were rebroadcast of local stations over satellite. Then came ESPN, CNN etc. cable TV always had ads except for the premium channels.
While I realize this is more of a sabre rattle than reality, hopefully in reality youre using ublock origin. You won't see any ads on that pirate stream.
Come the fuck on. This may have been true during the honeymoon phase of these services where everybody was scamming consumers with the bait part of bait-and-switch, but it has not been true for quite some time. Any of these convenience services charge dearly for the privilege nowadays, through fees, hidden menu markups, shitty subscription "deals" (WOW, I can save 30% on each order for signing up for $9.99/mo or whatever... how about cutting 100% of my order fees for your BS recurring lineitem bullshit?), and just plain general price increases.
Can you explain your setup a little bit. I have sling and I can record shows that are store in their cloud. however the fast forward is not exactly smooth to skip ads. most of the time Its skips a little too far ahead or too early and I end up fiddling with it going forward and backwards to be in a reasonably right spot (~5 secs before the ad finishes or after it finishes.)
1) Are there any devices available that allow recording effortlessly and then allows skipping adds equally effortlessly?
2) What are the non ad service options - Netflix, Prime Video, HBO, Youtube Premium?..what else?
I used to use MythTV. I even built a PC with a device that could pull video from a cable box. There’s an IR blaster that will change channels on the cable box, and then a little box that takes the component video from the cable box (no DRM on that) and encodes it (to MPEG-2 if I remember?)
MythTV will process the shows to flag commercial breaks, which you can then skip automatically.
MythTV looks like it’s still an active project.
I stopped using it because I just don’t watch much TV these days and I just got tired of maintaining it. Renting the DVR from Comcast is worth it to me for my meagre needs. But if you’re into TV and don’t mind some geekery, MythTV is definitely a powerful and flexible system.
I was recording TV well over 10 years ago with a Hauppauge TV Tuner card in my PC. I tried MythTV (on Linux), and Kodi and the like, but settled on MediaPortal (on Windows). I controlled the PC with a HTPC remote. I originally used MediaPortal's recording engine, but eventually switched to Argus TV, because it had smarter features (and integrated back into MediaPortal, so nothing was lost on the GUI side).
Anyway, the way most of these recording engines would work is basically that they would feed the recorded video through a "script" at the end, and so within that script you could send it to another program to find the ads. This was done with [ComSkip](https://www.team-mediaportal.com/wiki/display/MediaPortal1/C...) on MediaPortal and Argus TV. From memory, ComSkip would write a txt file or similar next to the video, and that was like a metadata file letting the playback program know where the ads were.
I'm not 100% sure how ComSkip worked internally, but there are many clues in the video stream it could use to find the ads (eg. often the static logo would disappear, or the teletext end, or the volume increase). It wasn't perfect, but it was good enough. I reckon with today's machine learning capabilities, such a program could be written to skip the ads perfectly 99% of the time. But I doubt anyone will, because even I haven't used my HTPC in this manner for over 5 years (I don't even have the TV connected to the aerial any more). Now my HTPC is just a fanless mini PC stick with Win11, a keyboard and mouse on the coffee table, and I stream through the web browser.
Try out Channels DVR [1] as your DVR server on a small server/NUC, and HDHomeRun Quattro [2] as your tuner.
It’s a great combo. ChannelsDVR Ad detection always finds just the right spot in my experience (UK, but heard the same from US friends).
One caveat with HDHomeRun is they had supply chain issues like everyone else recently so their may not be in stock or might be easier to find via Amazon etc.
I have Frontier FIOS and a physical DVR Box. Yeah you have to get really good at stopping at the right point. But I've never found a cloud FF/RW that's close to as snappy as a physical box.
I finally broke down and paid for YouTube Premium. There is literally no other option to watch YouTube on a TV nowadays. It is absolutely mindblowing the level of nonstop ads they shove down your throat in-between (and during) every single video now. Completely unwatchable otherwise. And it's impossible to buy a dumb TV in 2022, so you're stuck with the official Android/Roku YouTube apps that have no ad-blocking capability. Even pihole doesn't work anymore; they've obviously figured out how to get around the DNS issue. It just seems like every day things are getting worse.
I see this sort of thing as a tax on the less-technologically-sophisticated. That's the essence of the whole tech business culture: Morlocks and Eloi.
SPOILER ALERT
> A work of future history and speculative evolution, Time Machine is interpreted in modern times as a commentary on the increasing inequality and class divisions of Wells' era, which he projects as giving rise to two separate human species: the fair, childlike Eloi, and the savage, simian Morlocks, distant descendants of the contemporary upper and lower classes respectively.
Here the "classes" are derived from technical skill and knowledge. It might seem bizarre to us here on HN but just knowing about e.g. ublock origin let alone how to install it makes you one of the elite.
I don't really know how to feel about all this. On the one hand, it seems regressive to me to herd folks into silos and milk them (FAANG). On the other hand, people have to take some personal responsibility for their own education and agency, right? Computers aren't really that hard? No one's holding a gun to their heads to make them use FAANG products and services. Certainly, the options to live a more free and open life are there, eh?
Mickey Mouse finally goes out of copyright next year.
It's really 50/50 because many people don't know it's even possible to have the better experience. Exploiting them and herding them into silos is extremely unjust. They should be educated or they should at least ask some techies. But I partially agree that even they should strive to inform themselves better because nobody is going to go to them and strike a conversation exactly on this topic.
As for the others, there I am fully with you. They are quite aware it can be done and they just can't be bothered to do it. To me that's an informed choice and thus -- consent. They don't get to complain about squat because they made the conscious choice.
I second the wireless mouse/ keyboard and will add that I bought a trackball mouse just for this, and it's a wonderful fit. No worrying about a proper surface for moving a mouse around.
I've been doing this for many years. The latest incarnation is an Intel NUC, which you can also use for other random home server stuff, and for vintage console emulation.
What we need is a good, simple dumbtv interface for a computer with network access and a DVB card/stick. One that can also bring up a full-screen browser window to deal with streaming service DRM. Have been considering getting something together with rust+gstreamer starting by cloning my old Philips dumbtv interface while using mplayer/mpv hotkey standards for everything else.
The all-encompassing, endlessly complicated yet somehow still inflexible Kodi is a bad solution for people like me. Let's start by making a dumbtv out of a cheap linux box + a monitor.
Perhaps too inconvenient for some, but use an hdmi cable for a direct hookup instead of (I'm assuming) a chromecast.
Maybe I'm just old fashioned at this point, but my "TV" is just used as a monitor to a dedicated media tower running windows.
I have an Amazon FireTV and one day, when I had my work Windows PC at home, it could stream via Bluetooth (like an external screen). There was lag when starting / changing videos, but otherwise it seemed to work well enough.
Don't most smart TVs have Bluetooth today? In my case, the FireTV is plugged into my (dumb) PC monitor.
I recently did the same. I swear they dialed up the ads to 11 in the last year. I was going to start tracking the ads:content ratio. I recall once for a 5 minute video I got: two 15sec un-skippable ads before any content, then a 15sec un-skippable ad followed by a skippable ad (7sec) at 1:15, then another two 15sec un-skippable ads at 3:10. I decided two things: the cost of premium was less than how much I value my time (watching ads), and that I enjoy the content available on YouTube more than similarly priced media subscriptions (Netflix, Hulu, Disney, etc.).
>> There is literally no other option to watch YouTube on a TV nowadays
I use https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTubeNext Smart Tube Next on a Firestick. I side loaded both the beta and release versions with adb. I have not seen a commercial since. If Release doesn't work, try Beta. One of them always seems to work.
>> And it's impossible to buy a dumb TV in 2022
Next best thing: I bought a Samsung TV last year and never accepted the Terms and Conditions. No ads.
I’m using SmartTube app on the FireTV. Works pretty well, no ads you can also pair your phone and cast. Just make sure app is always up-to-date, youtube keeps changing things and breaks app from time to time.
Not directed at you, but the DNS thing I have to say something and will keep doing it. We got hoodwinked with HTTPS. We handed over to the tech giants, on a silver platter, a secure and soon to be unstoppable mechanism that allows them to go straight from their servers to our eyeballs. We gave up our ability to control and intercept the content flowing through our networks and PCs.
The DNS and other Pihole stuff is a last ditch effort and a poor hack when really we should be able to inspect and alter all packets going through our networks.
And you see it. Your pihole hack doesn't work anymore. Because that was always a loophole and they're closing it now again with DoH (DNS over HTTPS).
All under the guise of privacy. Because somewhere sometime a long time ago an ISP added ads to your web pages and redirected DNS.
>And it's impossible to buy a dumb TV in 2022, so you're stuck with the official Android/Roku YouTube apps that have no ad-blocking capability.
You can just do literally the same thing you'd do with dumb TV and connect computer to one of it's HDMI ports. "Smartness" of a TV does not take away any feature from it, unless you're so hurt by software updates - which you can simply disregard by not connecting the TV to the internet.
I feel like I'm about to get to this point myself. It's absolutely insane that any decently popular video will cut to ads so often, without any regard for continuity. Much worse than cable ever was.
There is likely a free ad free method of watching YouTube on your TV. Anything based on android or LG webOS has ad-free YouTube apps (that don’t require root etc), and with the added benefit of skipping sponsor segments
As longs as you don't rely on The Algorithm (i.e. you watch a fixed set of channels), you could probably rig up some kind of NAS to TV streaming set up, using ytdlp to download videos to the NAS.
I think that convenience will get harder because the economic system in the US prioritizes everything but automation. Have a business plan where you can hire tons of people? Great! Here's your loan. Have an asset as collateral or the money itself before you need it? Great! Here's at least that much money. Have an invention to completely solve the problem of delivery because robots grow food in your backyard? Get lost!
I often think of the lyric from the Cheers theme song: "making your way in the world today takes everything you've got". Well, Millenials and Gen Z have about half the disposable income that Gen X had, and Gen X has about half what the Boomers had. In other words, it was 4 times easier to make it in the 80s than it is today. I was there, I remember what leisure was. And art and civic engagement and public works and everything else that we've all but lost today. Now our cities don't even have safe drinking water. That kind of travesty was unheard of in the 80s.
As the realities of late-stage capitalism crush down on the world harder and harder, the cost of making it will eventually pass what people are willing to pay. I think we're seeing the start of that with The Great Resignation and #vanlife.
If my feeling on this is correct, then deregulation and lower interest rates will speed the decline. Stuff like austerity backfires, and half the population knows that through experience now since stuff like 9/11 and the housing bubble popping.
So any hope of fixing supply chains powered by low-wage workers in the third world is a fantasy. They've seen the internet, they know that their best shot at a better life is not to succumb to servitude like their parents did. They're all going to organize and demand better compensation, like they should have done a generation ago.
Another way to look at this is that the value of things stays the same, but the value of currency falls. In another 10-20 years, currency will be so worthless that a home in some cities might cost $10 million. We're losing the ability to buy things because we can't hedge against that with our own ability to make things.
> "I'm not reading your site if you paywall it. There are too many other free resources that are just as good if not better."
This really indicates what our economy has become. Everybody talks about the two business models companies employ; ad-supported or fee-based. These are the selling models Occasionally, piracy is discussed. While it may be a business model, piracy obviously isn't a selling model. It is a consumer consumption model though.
We do have another consumption model that is more difficult to see because it does not include any explicit agreement between a company and a consumer. This emerges from companies that begin using loss-leading (money-losing) models to gain customers, initially. They then expect that they will generate a network effect or be able to rely on inertia (what Malcolm Gladwell generalizes as "sludge") to retain those customers when they later change their model to something profitable. This fails because there is always another business trying something similar. Each of these companies has the same global reach and customers can switch easily between them so they just hop from one unsustainable bargain to the next optimizing their own costs. They are disloyal leeches. I don't say that to be derogatory; it just seems the best description.
Consumers are mercenary, as are companies, and that’s the rational way to be in an economy of scale, where loyalty is “brand loyalty”. If consumers aren’t loyal, it’s a failure of the company’s marketing.
Implies there ever was, or should have been any loyalty. Should a child be loyal to a stranger offering candy? Let's even grant the stranger purest of intentions. Should they?
I personally am not friends with any corporation, and I'd laugh at any suggestion of the inverse. It's business, the few businesses that demonstrate and earn trust will have loyalty, but it's all uphill. Because after, they're just strangers.
Would you read my comment if I paywalled it? Seriously doubt it.
It's not like these little journal articles are the ultimate truth we all need to read. It's just a guy publishing his views on some topic. Views likely biased by his stakeholders at that. Views likely manipulated by PR firms if not government entities. Essentially propaganda advancing some narrative. When governments want people to view propaganda, they pay for an aircraft to airdrop leaflets. Yet we're expected to pay for the privilege of consuming their information?
Truth is on the internet if they want people to read their views they have to actively go out there and post them. They have to pay money and/or time to make it happen. They don't get to demand payment because opinions are infinite. Paid journals are a relic of the old world and its media where they had printing presses that made literal newspapers with columns on them and that was the only way to get a mass audience. That's over now. They need to deal with that fact or go bankrupt.
Hell, I don't even care about the articles posted here most of the time. I come here for the comments. I want to know what the people on this site have to say. The submitted article is just a conversation starter really. Anything notable or important in it will certainly be quoted here.
It’s not just about on demand online services. Inflation is sky high everywhere, that will eat up a lot of convenience in daily life. There is a small chance that this will reduce wealth inequality but it may be only temporary.
> Inflation is sky high everywhere, that will eat up a lot of convenience in daily life. There is a small chance that this will reduce wealth inequality but it may be only temporary.
High rates of inflation increases wealth inequality over time.
Those working paycheck to paycheck (or anything close to that; ie income dependent) can't outrun it, attempt to hedge against it, or typically even keep up with it. They rapidly fall behind. Their standard of living gets demolished quickly, as they're very sensitive to price increases on staple goods, energy costs (whether heating or gasoline et al.), or rent.
The capital / asset classes can keep up with or outrun inflation however. And the impact on them in terms of standard of living is entirely trivial. Elon Musk at $200 billion isn't much richer than Bill Gates was during his peak circa 1999-2000. Inflation adjusted they're quite close. The rich have kept up with inflation because they own assets that are capable of doing so (primarily equities, although other rich-person asset classes have done moderately well also, such as art and extremely valuable real-estate), the rest of the people largely have not kept up (and never will in the case of high inflation).
On top of this, the Fed's perma low rate program, required by the US Government's debt situation, bolsters the wealth inequality significantly by artificially inflating assets such as equities and housing.
Workers primarily do well in environments of low inflation with a supply / demand imbalance for labor (in favor of labor). That environment existed, most recently, in a stable manner, in parts of the 1990s and from roughly 2014-Covid.
This has nothing to do with convenience, it's about business which run large losses to expand their customer base. What Matt Levine calls the "MoviePass economy". https://archive.ph/bHsJV
It's not my fault that 99% of all internet businesses figured that bait and switch is a sound business plan. It really isn't.
They should have read some basic human psychology: it's extremely hard or impossible to take something away that was given for free for a long time. That's basic knowledge. My history and psychology teacher shared this tidbit with the class when I was in the 9th grade.
Furthermore, me and many others are not closed to the idea of paying for journalism but are not willing to track 20 subs across different services.
Bill me through my ISP. I'll pay it. Make an app tracking how much extra I'd pay the next month because I've read 5 FT, 3 WSJ and 7 NYT articles -- I want to know. Even better, put a banner beforehand: "Reading this article will add $0.05 to your monthly internet bill, press OK if you agree".
The technical and societal solutions are there. But the unfettered greed and everyone's desire to be the one and only still prevail. Hence: yes, I will expect free journalism until things change.
At the risk of belaboring my point, even if what you say is true this attitude is a root cause of this unfortunate situation.
Good journalism isn’t fungible — it costs money to produce. When we actively choose to not pay for media, we have no one but ourselves to blame for the awful biased or clickbait junk that results.
We are on a discussion board. I'm not going to pay for every paywall to access every article, and if a journalist wants me to read and discuss their article, it needs to not be paywalled.
You could say that posting a paywalled article on a discussion board is just an ad for paywall subs.
