• SeekPie@lemm.ee
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      10 days ago

      I’ve been using RD + Stremio for 2 years now, has worked great (except when RD shut down, then switched to Debrid-Link, which was as easy as RD). It costs about 3€ per month, though I think it has been worth it.

  • JiveTurkey@lemmy.world
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    11 days ago

    If people would just drop their service en masse they would stop doing this shit. Everyone acts like they can be without a streaming service for a month or two so they’ll just complain as they continue to hand them money.

    • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.org
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      11 days ago

      In other areas, yeah, probably.

      But with music, movies, and TV, they’ll just blame piracy, crank up the DRM and bullshit on their own platforms, pat themselves on the back, and raise prices.

    • Death_Equity@lemmy.world
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      11 days ago

      The reality is there aren’t enough people that care about ads to do that.

      You either grew up with TV commercials or you grew up with ads, the conditioning is already there. There is a narrow band of people who don’t watch much or any TV and got on the internet for most content that remember when ads weren’t a thing. They have done studies and reviewed user data to determine how much ads they can play.

      They might push users to leave by tickling the ad tolerance while increasing subscription fees, but that is unlikely to happen as the frog is already boiled.

    • Chocrates@lemmy.world
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      11 days ago

      I cancelled everything but paramount recently. Just cant quit star trek. Until I fix my DNS server at least

    • scarabic@lemmy.world
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      9 days ago

      I’m interested to know if Hulu is under pressure from content owners here. The way this is worded makes it sound like ads are a negotiated part of some of their content licensing deals that they cannot avoid. I’m just curious if that’s in part because of the content owners. Maybe those owners don’t want to give content for a flat fee and instead want a % cut of the business, or something?

      • meowMix2525@lemm.ee
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        10 days ago

        That’s the point of what they’re saying. If you’re only buying a subscription to the content then it’s not theft to get access to that content by other means.

        • ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca
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          10 days ago

          the point is that it’s incorrect

          You aren’t buying it so the rest of the sentence is irrelevant

          Like stealing from blockbuster because you can rent it vs the video bin at the department store

          Nothing wrong with piracy without being dishonest about it

          • Jhex@lemmy.world
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            10 days ago

            Ok, commercials on no add streaming services are akin to renting a beach house all for your fam but the landlord shows up and takes a giant dump in the only bathroom available

        • MrGeekman@lemmy.world
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          10 days ago

          If you’re going to hang onto the files for the foreseeable future, there is a big difference. Streaming services only grang you access as long as you pay. You rent access from them. Just because you subscribe to Hulu doesn’t mean you own anything. iTunes is a different story.

  • doctortofu@reddthat.com
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    10 days ago

    What a wonderful world we live in - boneless chicken with bones, ad-free streaming with ads, unlimited plans with limits… What’s next, Nestle releasing microplastics and cadmium free water (guess what’s in it!)?

    • unalivejoy@lemm.ee
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      10 days ago

      Ad free with ads isn’t new to me. Paramount Plus will sometimes show pre-roll ads. They’re usually ads for other shows on Paramount and you can skip it right away, but it’s an ad nonetheless.

      I could go without the unskippable 5 second branding bumper though.

  • reddig33@lemmy.world
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    11 days ago

    I’d say “sounds like a lawsuit”. After all, you can’t advertise something as no ads, and then show ads.

    But then I remember who is in charge for the next four years and realize they’ll just get away with it.

    • subtext@lemmy.world
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      11 days ago

      They get away with it with that damned asterisk. So long as you put an asterisk, you could say this comment does not contain English words*

      * comment may contain some or all English and / or any other language words

    • SaltySalamander@fedia.io
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      11 days ago

      They’ve literally been doing this for over a decade, at least. There were always some shows on Hulu that the “ad-free” plan didn’t include as ad-free, though they usually only showed ads at the beginning and the end of the show.

    • nogooduser@lemmy.world
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      10 days ago

      Another one that shouldn’t be allowed but is are the unlimited* plans where the * indicates that it’s not really unlimited.

      • snooggums@lemmy.world
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        10 days ago

        Anything where the clear statement with such a marker indicating it is not true should be illegal. ‘Up to’ claims should also be illegal unless they are true for 99%+ of users/customers.

    • SmokeyDope@lemmy.world
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      10 days ago

      Look being real they would get away with it no matter which decrepit old man was in office or what their politics are. America is a corporatocracy wearing the skin of democracy. When the IRS audited Microsoft for tax evasion, the IRS got sued and defunded through lobbying to the point of being forced to back off. Fucking Microsoft took down the IRS. The world has changed and our old institutions of power are waning.

  • w3dd1e@lemm.ee
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    10 days ago

    I first time I see an ad on my ad-free subscription, I will cancel like I did with Prime Video.

    It’s like they want us to become pirates.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      10 days ago

      Just a numbers game. More people will absorb the costs than cancel their subscriptions. So these streaming services can keep ratcheting until they hit a breaking point. There’s no disincentive to these behaviors, as long as net revenue increases quarter to quarter.

      Piracy requires a certain degree of technical competence and internet savvy that the vast majority of end users don’t have.

    • MrGeekman@lemmy.world
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      10 days ago

      By “high seas”, you’re referring to torrenting, right? Not ripping DVDs and Blu-Rays?

  • 1rre@discuss.tchncs.de
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    10 days ago

    Product placement is advertising, and as such saying “no ads” while not blurring out product placement would be misselling the service

    • SkyezOpen@lemmy.world
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      10 days ago

      Sometimes it’s important to the plot to let the viewer know about the cool refreshing taste of Pißwasser German lager.

      • Bronzebeard@lemm.ee
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        10 days ago

        There’s several shows where it was important to production that they had those as they would have been cancelled without it. Community and Chuck were both basically saved by Subway.

        • SkyezOpen@lemmy.world
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          10 days ago

          They’ll be forgiven when we finally get the goddamn community movie and they make their bread not shit.

          • Bronzebeard@lemm.ee
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            10 days ago

            The movie is in production right now. Allison Brie posted about rewatching the series to prepare

  • mtchristo@lemm.ee
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    10 days ago

    Ads free but with ads ! So words included in a contract don’t carry the same meaning as in the dictionary ?

  • starman2112@sh.itjust.works
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    10 days ago

    Pirate your shows. Not just as a defense against ads, but as a defense against Disney throwing plotlines down the Memory Hole

    • Merlin@lemm.ee
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      10 days ago

      This is what I do:

      1. Buy a perpetual license to the content I want (usually on Prime or Microsoft Store)
      2. Pirate it and load it onto my PLEX server.

      This is the only way I can actually have control over the content that I fucking paid for. If that makes me a thief, then so be it.

      Of course, this only works for PPV content. I generally just don’t watch content that’s available via streaming subscriptions only. I never paid for cable and I’m not paying for cable 2.0.