Uh huh. I don't think you can lump all streaming service customers into a single bucket like that. You've got people who don't want to watch ads, and people who don't care about ads, and the...
“Consumers don’t just tolerate advertising in video content — in most cases, they actually see benefits from it,” says Mark Loughney, senior consultant to Hub.
Uh huh. I don't think you can lump all streaming service customers into a single bucket like that. You've got people who don't want to watch ads, and people who don't care about ads, and the behavior of those two cohorts are going to differ wildly. I don't think they'll be able to "convert" people from the first group into the second group, more likely they're just going to chase the first group away from the service entirely (which is fine, it's their prerogative to cater to whatever cohort they want). I know I personally would drop any service if they started making me watch ads, even if they reduced or eliminated the subscription fee entirely.
I think the real problem the services have to contend with is that you can subscribe for a month or two and binge everything you care about on that service, then drop your subscription and wait until the next thing you want to watch comes along. Users who care about not seeing ads and have to contend with these ever-increasing subscription prices are going to be way more likely to service-surf like that which could end up hurting their margins on those service tiers even more, sending them into a price hike death spiral.
That's about right, force me to watch ads and I'm getting the ol' eyepatch and jolly rodger out of storage. The slight inconvenience of finding what I want to watch is better than wasting part of...
That's about right, force me to watch ads and I'm getting the ol' eyepatch and jolly rodger out of storage. The slight inconvenience of finding what I want to watch is better than wasting part of my life watching ads I'll just ignore anyway.
Also, for older films and series, streaming services are competing with sellers of dvds. At the rate we watch since we both work and now I am in school, if I am interested in a series, it can be a...
Also, for older films and series, streaming services are competing with sellers of dvds. At the rate we watch since we both work and now I am in school, if I am interested in a series, it can be a lot cheaper to just fork out for the DVDs.
That quote reeks of the consumer-friendly spin companies make to sound like they care about the experience when the main motivation is clearly revenue.
That quote reeks of the consumer-friendly spin companies make to sound like they care about the experience when the main motivation is clearly revenue.
Personally, I refuse to watch ads now. There isn't a price point that will make m change to an ad-supported tier. I'll happily stop using a service entirely rather than watch ads. We have limited...
Personally, I refuse to watch ads now. There isn't a price point that will make m change to an ad-supported tier. I'll happily stop using a service entirely rather than watch ads. We have limited lifespans, and I will never voluntarily give up a portion of my life for advertisements.
Yeah I'm one of those people. Got Hulu when they had a $1/mo promo and once that ended, I promptly set up a little Jellyfish server and downloaded the shows and movies I care about.
Yeah I'm one of those people. Got Hulu when they had a $1/mo promo and once that ended, I promptly set up a little Jellyfish server and downloaded the shows and movies I care about.
I gotta say, I find it a little amusing I'm willing to pay $10-$15/mo for a seedbox and not for X streaming platform, however, I think the experience is that much better. I can download whatever I...
I gotta say, I find it a little amusing I'm willing to pay $10-$15/mo for a seedbox and not for X streaming platform, however, I think the experience is that much better. I can download whatever I want and stream it for that price, or I can pay the same amount and get a select amount of movies.
Also, I go out of my way to not see ads with any service. I don't use twitch because of how they circumvent ad blockers.
The only services I really use nowadays are YouTube and then my VPN so I pay for those. I simply do not use any other streaming service enough to justify the subscription costs. YouTube is slowly...
The only services I really use nowadays are YouTube and then my VPN so I pay for those. I simply do not use any other streaming service enough to justify the subscription costs. YouTube is slowly increasing the cost which is annoying but YouTube's algorithm for videos and for music seem to understand me the best so I find it hard to switch away. For other sites, Firefox + uBlock Origin seem to work well enough to block ads.
There are some ways around their circumventions, by the way. TTV LOL PRO (along with uBlock Origin) has been working for me on Firefox, at least for now.
I don't use twitch because of how they circumvent ad blockers.
There are some ways around their circumventions, by the way. TTV LOL PRO (along with uBlock Origin) has been working for me on Firefox, at least for now.
It's good you point that out as some people probably don't know. Even uBlock Origin I had issues awhile back with it not working on Twitch but recently I subscribed to more of the blocklists and...
It's good you point that out as some people probably don't know. Even uBlock Origin I had issues awhile back with it not working on Twitch but recently I subscribed to more of the blocklists and tried Twitch again and it worked fairly well in my limited tests, but it seemed to have some issues that TTV LOL PRO was able to deal with a little better.
But to defend those who still might have an issue with Twitch anti-adblocking, those ad block solutions do work on Twitch the vast majority of the time in my experience, but there are occasional hiccups with them. To someone who is fine with just mostly not seeing ads or not dealing with the problems of anti-adblocking measures, then it's good enough, but if someone doesn't like being frequently interrupted in some shape or form, what Twitch does to adblockers can be a bit annoying. It's kinda like ads themselves, some people can tolerate a certain amount of ads or they can tolerate them for 5 seconds if a skip option is offered etc. but there's varying degrees of tolerance based on the interruption.
Twitch has successfully made their anti-adblocking features in such a way that in my experience, it's impossible to avoid those interruptions. If I'm choosing between services where I can completely avoid interruptions, and services where I can't, depending on the differences in content and what I'm wanting to watch/listen to at any given time, the interruptions do matter some in how I choose.
The interruptions I'm speaking about is that in some cases, the streams just stop completely when ad-blocking begins, and most of the time they resume when the ad-blocking ends but sometimes they don't. And sometimes it works really well and it's no interruption at all, you don't even realize there were ads being blocked. There's also the resolution drops and what not as well that happen occasionally, which if you're watching some games being played it can make it impossible to actually see what is happening at low resolution.
Yeah, the Twitch Adblock extension works well enough for me, hiccups aside. Twitch does stop you from watching when embedded on another website, though - it tosses on nag screens every minute or...
Yeah, the Twitch Adblock extension works well enough for me, hiccups aside.
Twitch does stop you from watching when embedded on another website, though - it tosses on nag screens every minute or so. This breaks... Saltybet, I guess? Why? Maybe it's for people accessing through the official websites of very large events?
I'm hoping for a tipping point with people getting fed up of the advertising itself. I don't know if it's just me, but the more marketing I see behind somthing the less willing I am to engage with...
I'm hoping for a tipping point with people getting fed up of the advertising itself.
I don't know if it's just me, but the more marketing I see behind somthing the less willing I am to engage with it.
Like I know the local KFC is paying a small fortune for digital exposure because it's always top of the list for most food apps and all over banners, endless scrolls, YouTube spots and any other space they can find. But even though I don't eat their food, I've gone from indifferent to loathing the brand for just being in my face so much.
It's a trade-off of some kind generally. There's usually some kind of investment of time and learning things to get into other options. For example, lots of people go through Usenet providers and...
It's a trade-off of some kind generally. There's usually some kind of investment of time and learning things to get into other options. For example, lots of people go through Usenet providers and set up Sonarr/Radarr (which I'm sure you don't know what those are, but that's kinda my point in that it takes a bit of time and learning to understand what these services are and how they work together). And many of them still cost some money in some way, but generally less than multiple streaming services. I'm being vague because I don't know what the exact rules are on discussing such subject matter here, I'm pretty sure what I've said so far is fine but I don't know where the line is. But it's also the same with torrenting, that can be simpler to understand or get into in some ways, other than finding different torrent sites or getting invited to them depending on what content you want.
But my point is that there's lots of information out there and people willing to point you in the right direction, but none of them are quite as simple or straightforward as creating an account and putting in your credit card info on the big streaming services. Just depends on if you're more willing to pay in time up front (and maybe a little here or there along the way) rather than money in subscriptions every month.
Last time I checked into modern usenet the paid services included VPNs which should mask your traffic to the ISP. I used Forte Agent back in the dial up days so I'm somewhat familiar with it all...
Last time I checked into modern usenet the paid services included VPNs which should mask your traffic to the ISP.
I used Forte Agent back in the dial up days so I'm somewhat familiar with it all but the modern FAQs/How To's seemed to make things look way more convoluted then I remember between the news indexer and the agent program(s). That was my stopping point but I keep forgetting to at least try a free trial to see if it is all just klunky instructions..
Some of them do, but the VPNs aren't entirely necessary from what I've read (and in my personal experience as well). Of course if you're looking to be extra safe then a VPN is good to have, but at...
Some of them do, but the VPNs aren't entirely necessary from what I've read (and in my personal experience as well). Of course if you're looking to be extra safe then a VPN is good to have, but at that point I wouldn't necessarily go with the VPN that comes with the usenet provider but rather go with a VPN that is vetted, like Mullvad.
The difference in needing a VPN for usenet vs torrenting is a few things, torrents are out in the open so media companies can monitor the swarms and get IP addresses in there, and also torrents generally can result in anyone in the swarm seeding/sharing the file to others. For usenet, most people aren't sharing the files with others, they're just downloading them, and this connection isn't just out in the open for anyone to monitor the traffic, only the usenet provider knows. So media companies would have to subpoena or provide a warrant or something to get this information from the usenet provider I believe, or hope that the usenet provider would give it voluntarily which I doubt most would have any incentive to do that. It's kinda like if you downloaded a file off google drive or megaupload or any other site really.
Where people definitely do need VPNs when working with usenet providers is when they are uploading the content, because media companies would be far more willing to spend legal resources pursuing uploaders this way than they are downloaders. Most people aren't doing this.
Basically from what I've read and in my experience, you don't get the copyright letters/strikes sent to your ISP for downloading from usenet like you might downloading from public torrents, because they can't easily sit in the middle and gather your IP address. It seems most people aren't actually being taken to court when they get caught downloading things in public torrents, they're just getting copyright letters/strikes sent to their ISP. Doesn't mean in either case that if someone is willing to spend more legal resources they couldn't go the extra mile and send out subpoenas or such and sue you in court, which is where if you're being conservative about it you would still want a good VPN, but this type of thing seems very uncommon these days.
And we've come full circle. There is no reason to think that the cycle won't play out again - with pirating. People are willing to pay a reasonable price for access, convenience and to not be...
And we've come full circle. There is no reason to think that the cycle won't play out again - with pirating. People are willing to pay a reasonable price for access, convenience and to not be annoyed with ads. Perhaps I am wrong, though. Maybe it will be our generation who accepts the ads, and the next one who will rebel again. :D
Ads, in moderation, aren't the end of all things. However (personally) I will not do a paid tier with ads--EVER. I will not do free tier with ads being 20%+ of the run time. Ads playing at the...
Ads, in moderation, aren't the end of all things.
However (personally) I will not do a paid tier with ads--EVER.
I will not do free tier with ads being 20%+ of the run time.
Ads playing at the correct times are a must for me1
To me Pluto.tv has it right. Totally free, not even a login is required and they only have 2 short ads maybe every 15-20 minutes in my experience.
1I used to watch "Whose Line is it Anyways?" on the CW app and their commercial timing was SO, SO bad. They would always start the commercial about 3 seconds before the natural pause/changing of games in the show.
"Hahaha, ten points to Col--"
ad
ad
ad
ad
ad
"--in for that dance!
Our next game is Scenes from a Hat!"
I don't know if it is a shared platform behind the scenes but quite a few of the free services are all like that and I just can't.
More like “price discrimination”. Which, despite the scary sounding name, just means offering products at every level of demand to maximize how many paying customers you have.
More like “price discrimination”. Which, despite the scary sounding name, just means offering products at every level of demand to maximize how many paying customers you have.
It's a net negative for the end consumer but adding an ad tier allows you to raise the price of non-ad tiers and not lose subscribers. I hate it, just to be clear.
It's a net negative for the end consumer but adding an ad tier allows you to raise the price of non-ad tiers and not lose subscribers.
Uh huh. I don't think you can lump all streaming service customers into a single bucket like that. You've got people who don't want to watch ads, and people who don't care about ads, and the behavior of those two cohorts are going to differ wildly. I don't think they'll be able to "convert" people from the first group into the second group, more likely they're just going to chase the first group away from the service entirely (which is fine, it's their prerogative to cater to whatever cohort they want). I know I personally would drop any service if they started making me watch ads, even if they reduced or eliminated the subscription fee entirely.
I think the real problem the services have to contend with is that you can subscribe for a month or two and binge everything you care about on that service, then drop your subscription and wait until the next thing you want to watch comes along. Users who care about not seeing ads and have to contend with these ever-increasing subscription prices are going to be way more likely to service-surf like that which could end up hurting their margins on those service tiers even more, sending them into a price hike death spiral.
That's about right, force me to watch ads and I'm getting the ol' eyepatch and jolly rodger out of storage. The slight inconvenience of finding what I want to watch is better than wasting part of my life watching ads I'll just ignore anyway.
Also, for older films and series, streaming services are competing with sellers of dvds. At the rate we watch since we both work and now I am in school, if I am interested in a series, it can be a lot cheaper to just fork out for the DVDs.
That quote reeks of the consumer-friendly spin companies make to sound like they care about the experience when the main motivation is clearly revenue.
Personally, I refuse to watch ads now. There isn't a price point that will make m change to an ad-supported tier. I'll happily stop using a service entirely rather than watch ads. We have limited lifespans, and I will never voluntarily give up a portion of my life for advertisements.
There's a tipping point where people just pirate instead
Yeah I'm one of those people. Got Hulu when they had a $1/mo promo and once that ended, I promptly set up a little Jellyfish server and downloaded the shows and movies I care about.
I gotta say, I find it a little amusing I'm willing to pay $10-$15/mo for a seedbox and not for X streaming platform, however, I think the experience is that much better. I can download whatever I want and stream it for that price, or I can pay the same amount and get a select amount of movies.
Also, I go out of my way to not see ads with any service. I don't use twitch because of how they circumvent ad blockers.
The only services I really use nowadays are YouTube and then my VPN so I pay for those. I simply do not use any other streaming service enough to justify the subscription costs. YouTube is slowly increasing the cost which is annoying but YouTube's algorithm for videos and for music seem to understand me the best so I find it hard to switch away. For other sites, Firefox + uBlock Origin seem to work well enough to block ads.
There are some ways around their circumventions, by the way. TTV LOL PRO (along with uBlock Origin) has been working for me on Firefox, at least for now.
It's good you point that out as some people probably don't know. Even uBlock Origin I had issues awhile back with it not working on Twitch but recently I subscribed to more of the blocklists and tried Twitch again and it worked fairly well in my limited tests, but it seemed to have some issues that TTV LOL PRO was able to deal with a little better.
But to defend those who still might have an issue with Twitch anti-adblocking, those ad block solutions do work on Twitch the vast majority of the time in my experience, but there are occasional hiccups with them. To someone who is fine with just mostly not seeing ads or not dealing with the problems of anti-adblocking measures, then it's good enough, but if someone doesn't like being frequently interrupted in some shape or form, what Twitch does to adblockers can be a bit annoying. It's kinda like ads themselves, some people can tolerate a certain amount of ads or they can tolerate them for 5 seconds if a skip option is offered etc. but there's varying degrees of tolerance based on the interruption.
Twitch has successfully made their anti-adblocking features in such a way that in my experience, it's impossible to avoid those interruptions. If I'm choosing between services where I can completely avoid interruptions, and services where I can't, depending on the differences in content and what I'm wanting to watch/listen to at any given time, the interruptions do matter some in how I choose.
The interruptions I'm speaking about is that in some cases, the streams just stop completely when ad-blocking begins, and most of the time they resume when the ad-blocking ends but sometimes they don't. And sometimes it works really well and it's no interruption at all, you don't even realize there were ads being blocked. There's also the resolution drops and what not as well that happen occasionally, which if you're watching some games being played it can make it impossible to actually see what is happening at low resolution.
Yeah, the Twitch Adblock extension works well enough for me, hiccups aside.
Twitch does stop you from watching when embedded on another website, though - it tosses on nag screens every minute or so. This breaks... Saltybet, I guess? Why? Maybe it's for people accessing through the official websites of very large events?
I'm hoping for a tipping point with people getting fed up of the advertising itself.
I don't know if it's just me, but the more marketing I see behind somthing the less willing I am to engage with it.
Like I know the local KFC is paying a small fortune for digital exposure because it's always top of the list for most food apps and all over banners, endless scrolls, YouTube spots and any other space they can find. But even though I don't eat their food, I've gone from indifferent to loathing the brand for just being in my face so much.
I wish I had enough knowledge about pirating to know what would work well without getting me in trouble with my isp.
It's a trade-off of some kind generally. There's usually some kind of investment of time and learning things to get into other options. For example, lots of people go through Usenet providers and set up Sonarr/Radarr (which I'm sure you don't know what those are, but that's kinda my point in that it takes a bit of time and learning to understand what these services are and how they work together). And many of them still cost some money in some way, but generally less than multiple streaming services. I'm being vague because I don't know what the exact rules are on discussing such subject matter here, I'm pretty sure what I've said so far is fine but I don't know where the line is. But it's also the same with torrenting, that can be simpler to understand or get into in some ways, other than finding different torrent sites or getting invited to them depending on what content you want.
But my point is that there's lots of information out there and people willing to point you in the right direction, but none of them are quite as simple or straightforward as creating an account and putting in your credit card info on the big streaming services. Just depends on if you're more willing to pay in time up front (and maybe a little here or there along the way) rather than money in subscriptions every month.
Last time I checked into modern usenet the paid services included VPNs which should mask your traffic to the ISP.
I used Forte Agent back in the dial up days so I'm somewhat familiar with it all but the modern FAQs/How To's seemed to make things look way more convoluted then I remember between the news indexer and the agent program(s). That was my stopping point but I keep forgetting to at least try a free trial to see if it is all just klunky instructions..
Some of them do, but the VPNs aren't entirely necessary from what I've read (and in my personal experience as well). Of course if you're looking to be extra safe then a VPN is good to have, but at that point I wouldn't necessarily go with the VPN that comes with the usenet provider but rather go with a VPN that is vetted, like Mullvad.
The difference in needing a VPN for usenet vs torrenting is a few things, torrents are out in the open so media companies can monitor the swarms and get IP addresses in there, and also torrents generally can result in anyone in the swarm seeding/sharing the file to others. For usenet, most people aren't sharing the files with others, they're just downloading them, and this connection isn't just out in the open for anyone to monitor the traffic, only the usenet provider knows. So media companies would have to subpoena or provide a warrant or something to get this information from the usenet provider I believe, or hope that the usenet provider would give it voluntarily which I doubt most would have any incentive to do that. It's kinda like if you downloaded a file off google drive or megaupload or any other site really.
Where people definitely do need VPNs when working with usenet providers is when they are uploading the content, because media companies would be far more willing to spend legal resources pursuing uploaders this way than they are downloaders. Most people aren't doing this.
Basically from what I've read and in my experience, you don't get the copyright letters/strikes sent to your ISP for downloading from usenet like you might downloading from public torrents, because they can't easily sit in the middle and gather your IP address. It seems most people aren't actually being taken to court when they get caught downloading things in public torrents, they're just getting copyright letters/strikes sent to their ISP. Doesn't mean in either case that if someone is willing to spend more legal resources they couldn't go the extra mile and send out subpoenas or such and sue you in court, which is where if you're being conservative about it you would still want a good VPN, but this type of thing seems very uncommon these days.
And we've come full circle. There is no reason to think that the cycle won't play out again - with pirating. People are willing to pay a reasonable price for access, convenience and to not be annoyed with ads. Perhaps I am wrong, though. Maybe it will be our generation who accepts the ads, and the next one who will rebel again. :D
Ads, in moderation, aren't the end of all things.
However (personally) I will not do a paid tier with ads--EVER.
I will not do free tier with ads being 20%+ of the run time.
Ads playing at the correct times are a must for me1
To me Pluto.tv has it right. Totally free, not even a login is required and they only have 2 short ads maybe every 15-20 minutes in my experience.
1I used to watch "Whose Line is it Anyways?" on the CW app and their commercial timing was SO, SO bad. They would always start the commercial about 3 seconds before the natural pause/changing of games in the show.
"Hahaha, ten points to Col--"
ad
ad
ad
ad
ad
"--in for that dance!
Our next game is Scenes from a Hat!"
I don't know if it is a shared platform behind the scenes but quite a few of the free services are all like that and I just can't.
I feel like this question can answered in two words, instead of a whole article.
"Ad Revenue"
Actually, one word is enough.
Money
Numbers have to keep going up somehow.
More like “price discrimination”. Which, despite the scary sounding name, just means offering products at every level of demand to maximize how many paying customers you have.
It's a net negative for the end consumer but adding an ad tier allows you to raise the price of non-ad tiers and not lose subscribers.
I hate it, just to be clear.
lods emone