Amazon Prime Video will start showing ads on January 29th

Zarathustra[H] said:
I never understood why people bother with he complexity and load of Plex. I just NAS/SMB/NFS everything and play back in full glorious bitrate without any experience ruining transcodes.
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I haven't used Plex before. This seems like a good point to me.

Is transcoding really a needed thing on a home LAN? Unless you're streaming to a Sega Game Gear or some shit, I imagine decoding performance is a non issue for anything that isn't ancient, and bandwidth is plenty abundant in network for whatever absurd quality you want, even over wireless.
 
socK said:
I haven't used Plex before. This seems like a good point to me.

Is transcoding really a needed thing on a home LAN? Unless you're streaming to a Sega Game Gear or some shit, I imagine decoding performance is a non issue for anything that isn't ancient, and bandwidth is plenty abundant in network for whatever absurd quality you want, even over wireless.
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no transcoding isnt necessary. I stream Plex from a local NAS (Synology 920+) and stream to ROKU Ultra's, PC's, and TV's with built-in android apps. No issues. I have about 250 movies and 15 shows on it.
 
ng4ever said:
Mainly for remote viewing.

Think 4g lte and 5g

I can't get 100 Mbps 24/7 when in a car or out and about.
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I guess that's the part that I don't get.

I have never once been interested in watching movies or TV on a mobile device outside (or inside) my house.

I either put it on the big screen, or I don't watch it at all.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
I guess that's the part that I don't get.

I have never once been interested in watching movies or TV on a mobile device outside (or inside) my house.

I either put it on the big screen, or I don't watch it at all.
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Oh I agree with you.

I mainly only watch movies or TV I already seen at home on a mobile device.

Guess there always VR but I don't want to carry a VR around lol.

It the only way to have a big screen virtually out and about. Though I don't think it is totally there yet just for that.

Plus it would look dumb unless the VR was the size of normal glasses.
 
sleepeeg3 said:
It's not. Walmart is doing a pretty good job competing. Order X amount and free delivery. Get deliveries faster than Prime, now.
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Yep.

Though they still have limited stock in my opinion with some stuff.

If Walmart plays their cards right they could overtake Amazon.
 
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Improvise, adapt to change, and move forward. I refuse to watch commercials. Period. Any service that forces them on me, I do not need. Don't need or want Prime. As soon as my adblockers don't work on YouTube, or I truly can't find a method to defeat them, I'm gone.

F them. :)
 
NukeDukem said:
Improvise, adapt to change, and move forward. I refuse to watch commercials. Period. Any service that forces them on me, I do not need. Don't need or want Prime. As soon as my adblockers don't work on YouTube, or I truly can't find a method to defeat them, I'm gone.

F them. :)
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Same i 100% refuse to watch commercials. I dont consume the same amount of material i once did just due to lack of interest in political BS being crammed down my throat but when i do i dont need the 19min of commercials per 60min of broadcast
 
I have a distinct feeling that this is the first step in decoupling Amazon Streaming from Amazon Prime and selling it as a separate service instead of included with Prime...
 
The biggest thing that makes me sad is that more ads means less content in most cases. An hour-long episode with zero commercials is an hours' worth of content. An hour-long episode with commercials is usually only 38-48 minutes of actual content. That means that shows will either start making shorter episodes or episodes will be getting chopped up to make room for the ads.

Theoretically, when talking purely about on-demand streaming, they could just add the commercials on while keeping the full hour of actual content since there wouldn't necessarily be a hard time-limit of one-hour, but it doesn't usually seem to work out that way.
 
cjcox said:
As sheep, since others started doing this awhile back, we pay and pay more, then pay more, and pay again and yet now, get commercials, and we pay again.

Streaming IS the new cable. Instead of "cord cutting" maybe we need "dam the stream".
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I vote we call it "Beavering"!
 
Flogger23m said:
The whole point of paying to watch a movie is so you don't have to watch ads. If you're going to watch ads, it needs to be free.
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I am going to plug Tubi here. It's free and you don't even need an account to watch it, so no data tracking, and the ads are not even terrible. I've averaged around one 60 second commercial for every 2-3 hours of content consumed, and they're good enough to frontload ads so you're never interrupted in the middle of a movie. If they do serve ads in the middle of you watching something, I have yet to see it. The best part is they have a lot of content that you can't find elsewhere, and I'm talking about vintage stuff. It's not all shovelware.
GotNoRice said:
The biggest thing that makes me sad is that more ads means less content in most cases. An hour-long episode with zero commercials is an hours' worth of content. An hour-long episode with commercials is usually only 38-48 minutes of actual content. That means that shows will either start making shorter episodes or episodes will be getting chopped up to make room for the ads.

Theoretically, when talking purely about on-demand streaming, they could just add the commercials on while keeping the full hour of actual content since there wouldn't necessarily be a hard time-limit of one-hour, but it doesn't usually seem to work out that way.
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Streaming series still conform to the 40-45 minute-per-episode format from cable, for the most part. You're still not getting a full hour's worth of content even in the absence of commercials.
 
Armenius said:
Streaming series still conform to the 40-45 minute-per-episode format from cable, for the most part. You're still not getting a full hour's worth of content even in the absence of commercials.
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I'm not the type that goes out of my way to watch every random streaming show, but the latest Amazon show I watched was The Boys and every single episode was exactly 60 minutes, no commercials.
 
Nobu said:
Ya'know, for $110 you could have 6-10 or more blurays/dvds every year, with 6 or so episodes each for serial content. No sub. No gb internet. No takes-backsies.
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Wow! So what do I watch for the other 11 months of the year? Rewatch the same shows?

That said, the Christmas season is over, so I think I can probably cancel my Prime subscription. It really has been one of those "too lazy to cancel it" because yeah ordering just about anything at any price point and it shows up in 2 days or less is convenient but when I look back on my purchase history, it just doesn't make good financial sense... well as soon as I finish watching Reacher :D
 
sfsuphysics said:
Wow! So what do I watch for the other 11 months of the year? Rewatch the same shows?

That said, the Christmas season is over, so I think I can probably cancel my Prime subscription. It really has been one of those "too lazy to cancel it" because yeah ordering just about anything at any price point and it shows up in 2 days or less is convenient but when I look back on my purchase history, it just doesn't make good financial sense... well as soon as I finish watching Reacher :D
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Honestly it gets rather boring benging drama all day every day. Maybe pick up another hobby?
 
GotNoRice said:
I'm not the type that goes out of my way to watch every random streaming show, but the latest Amazon show I watched was The Boys and every single episode was exactly 60 minutes, no commercials.
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I wonder why they did that. There is seemingly no reason to adhere to a set time length for streaming shows. Are they planning to send it to regular TV, an archaic decision from someone high up, just for marketing reasons, or something else?
 
This just seems like shooting themselves in the foot. Amazon Prime, through the price changes in the core shipping services (which I have to admit continue to be the best of their kind that I've found so far. Same day, overnight, 2nd day etc...for free for just about everything. Atop this, you can also get Whole Foods delivery for free within a 2-hour window; there's also Prime Fresh if you live in certain areas as I recall but that's another upgraded service) , they started to add the digital stuff as value added. Prime gave you options to a good variety of Kindle stuff, Twitch Prime gave you ad-free + giveaways of free games and game content, Prime Video let you see many of their media including originals - some of which are pretty decent etc..all ad-free. You could even grant Prime shipping benefits to other Amazon accounts which has of course been very useful - however I always bristled that they didn't grant the same access to Prime Video or Kindle this way which seemed strange; Netflix allowed you to have multiple accounts/profiles for those in the house so it seemed odd Prime didn't. The price for Prime increased a bit over the years but it more or less kept up with new features and maintained the old ones so I never was too upset it was no longer $80/year and even at $100 it was a good deal etc.

Now they make this decision which, atop the Twitch TV having ads even for Twitch Prime subscribers, seems increasingly odd. There are more streaming services than ever and all of them decided to pull the exclusivity angle for certain shows and the like, not unlike the premium channels of cable - to the point they pulled stuff off early coming services like netflix in order to put it on Paramount+ or Hulu or whatever the heck else. They have to know its now a competitive market - its not that people subscribe to one or two and get 80% of what they want to watch and was on cable for $10-15/month. So adding commercials and otherwise fucking around is making it more likely people will just fuck off . Amazon doesn't have bad originals necessarily, people will put it into their value calculation for keeping subbed toPrime. However, a lot of people won't like the ads and/or won't want to pay extra to keep them away or bother to watch at all. They may spend their time on another streaming service for which they're paying and is ad free . So this seems to just be a waste for Amazon trying to grow the brand. They'd be better served for Video by having a new CHEAPER alternative streaming option, independent from Prime , that has commercials. Someone may be willingt o pay that $3-5 month a la carte if Amazon figures out how to keep the commercials short and non-annoying, but when you're paying for Prime and used to getting the option of Video without commercials its a universal downgrade that makes people assess how much they really want to keep using Prime in the first place.

Now personally, totally independent of my experience of course and just as a hypothetical, a better use of one's money and time would be to grab a couple of Android set top boxes that are reputable (Amazon Fire TV Stick Max is a low cost option if on sale ) and sideload on Kodi, the open source media center. Then, you go out of your way to find certain Addons. "Addons4Kodi" you might say a good place to start that will get you where you need to go. After that, if you can afford it I suggest a "Debrid" service for newsgroups and premium hosting torrent indexing; Premiumize is perhaps the most comprehensive, but Real Debrid is cheaper, and there are others. Set up all things properly, and you can basically go into Kodi load a properly configured addon (anime fans, check out Otaku - it even has a really great "get me everything related to this series, TV and movie alike, in the proper order of seasons and series" funtionality) and then browse for anything, it will query cached torrents or newsgroups for sources, and off you go. There's also each addon has its viewing lists like "trending all times" or "popular, this season" as well as being able to search. If you like to create watchlists and the like, there are services like Trakt (in general)or some specific to a type of media MAL/Kitsu/Anilist for anime etc. There's a lot of other stuff you can do as well

The above is a great solution if you want to just search for and watch things remotely more akin to a make your own streaming service, automating a lot of the searching for a particular torrent or file - very useful for family members who are less technical. Now if you have a lot of local content or you need to do local transcoding, then something like Jellyfin (Plex is the eldest and most popular but proprietary, Emby was supposed to be a FOSS replacement until they went proprietary, and Jellyfin was based on Emby keeping it open source and has developed a lot since then. Either way though, its a good way to get quick access to the media you wish , especially when the powers that be continue to fragment, raise prices, and cut out features. Of course, that's just one hypothetical ...

Edit: I feel bad for one particular creator on YouTube. Years ago she started out animating and producing an interesting adult-focused animated project, made an hour long pilot, and then decided to go with a side-story in the sme universe . Over the years it has grown into something of streaming/broadcast quality independently, totally free with 30+ minute episodes. I'm to understand her team does VERY well on merch/patron sneak peeks and the like aside from YT views and th like, but late this year it was announced that her 'big break" was onto Amazon Prime Video, where the original pilot'd series would come to fruition with like an 8+ episode season to debut in Jan 2024. She worked quite hard and ina "friend of a friend" sense know those involved with the project and I'll feel quite bad if right after her show debuts Amazon pulls this garbage; I can only hope that it will launch with the entire season dropping at once rather than the dicking around emulating old TV that sadly has gotten more common with streaming series. Either way, I hope it does well - Amazon and Netflix seem to take risks on more "edgy' originals compared to some of the others (excepting of course those that are mirrors of old school premium channels like MGM+, Starz+, Showtime, or MAX (aka HBO + Cinemax)).
 
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The original Amazon Music wasn't bad but now they want extra money for the exact music tracks I used to listen to for the price of Prime. So I don't bother with the music side. I'm going to agree with ataromotoboshi18. I think they will separate Video from the shipping service. I never did use Prime Video that much anyways so they're not getting $2.99 from me. Other streaming services that I have can get cut if they continue to increase the price. The only ones I won't dump right a way are Netflix and Disney+ because my new step kids watch that in Ecuador and they only have three TV channels and they are mostly infomercials. I don't watch either of them that much. I still subscribe to cable.

Currently working on an Emby/Jellyfin/Plex situation.
 
Wade88 said:
This man has no small children or idiot aunts.
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I have an 80 year old mother in law that visits for several months at a time, and she has no problem operating Kodi front ends I have set up in the living room, bed rooms and home theater.

Neither did the kid when he was 5-6. He is 16 now, and can still handle it :p
 
kac77 said:
Trust me I thought the same, but the problem arises the moment when you want to access content directly from a Smart TV or even your PS5.
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Which smart TV can't handle DLNA streaming directly from the NAS? Not arguing with you, just want to put them on the list to avoid should I ever be looking to upgrade.

I've had 2 Samsung TVs in the past that worked well with this with their built in software alone, and my current Sony 65" from 2016 (I think) runs android. I just downloaded the VLC app from the app store and I was off to the races. More recently I switched to Kodi as it seems to handle HDR content better.
 
I found that for the items that you did not have to pay extra for, Prime Video was quite good. However, much of what I personally wanted to watch required that I paid extra for those videos.
 
Eulogy said:
So, I mean, you're doing the same thing as Plex then, just a different app.
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Not really. I mean, with Plex you are operating a complicated transcode system, with databases, etc.

This is essentially just a shared NAS drive with a frontend that plays things back as if they were local files in a folder.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
Not really. I mean, with Plex you are operating a complicated transcode system, with databases, etc.

This is essentially just a shared NAS drive with a frontend that plays things back as if they were local files in a folder.
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You don't "operate" any of that. It's all internal to the app... there's no more complexity in it than opening the app (or in my case, having the docker container run). It's plug and play, just like Kodi.
 
"Aggressive agreement" needs to be a thing. Or a song.

Hold my beer. Look out SoundCloud!
 
Nobu said:
Honestly it gets rather boring benging drama all day every day. Maybe pick up another hobby?
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who said anything about binging drama all day every day, I'm just saying you comparing 6-10 blurays as being a reasonable substitute for a years worth of watching TV, which I greatly disagree with, sure you can do shows or movies or whatever and maybe that does reflect your yearly TV consumption in which case glad you found a solution but I feel like if you watch so little TV then you probably didn't have a problem to begin with.
 
GoT season 2 had 10 episodes. At almost 1 hour each, that's 10 hours of content. If you watched two a day it'd still take you ten days to finish, and that's just one show, one season. You can get it for $10 or less (the s1 & s2 box set is $10 from some sellers). Get one or two seasons from 6 shows you didn't watch and you'd be good for almost half a year, sell the whole bunch on ebay and you might even come out ahead. (or keep for later) Repeat as necessary.

If you ran out of shows, there's no way you weren't benging. There's over 30 years worth of content out there, and a lot of it is fantastic, even the old stuff.

Streaming is a joke, whether you watch 10 hrs a week or not.
 
Showbiz said:
Which smart TV can't handle DLNA streaming directly from the NAS? Not arguing with you, just want to put them on the list to avoid should I ever be looking to upgrade.

I've had 2 Samsung TVs in the past that worked well with this with their built in software alone, and my current Sony 65" from 2016 (I think) runs android. I just downloaded the VLC app from the app store and I was off to the races. More recently I switched to Kodi as it seems to handle HDR content better.
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VLC is my go-to app for viewing offline files over the network, since I can browse SMB network shares directly from my file server through the VLC app. That's my preferred method since there is no transcoding involved, etc. The only thing that sucks is that with thousands of movies, it's difficult to remember what many of those movies even are when scrolling through the list. One thing that is super amazing about many of the DLNA-based apps is that they also scrape info from IMDB or similar and give you a description of each movie as you are browsing them. That's ridiculously helpful, especially for family members.

In many cases we end up getting the idea to watch a certain movie via seeing that movie in the cable channel listing (on a commercial channel) or on one of the free streaming services. But instead of clicking on it, we just switch to VLC and watch the commercial-free version instead. Even if it's on a channel or service that doesn't have commercials, I'd rather watch a high-bitrate 4k bluray rip than some low-bitrate streaming version full of obvious color banding and other compression artifacts. Obviously streaming services have a vested interest in keeping the bitrate as low as possible to keep bandwidth costs down. People are so focused on resolution, thinking 4K is the gold standard. Most don't realize that in many cases even a high-bitrate 720p movie can look better than a low-bitrate 4k movie. #BitrateMatters
 
kac77 said:
Trust me I thought the same, but the problem arises the moment when you want to access content directly from a Smart TV or even your PS5.
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You can access content from a nas on a ps5? What? Tell me how.
 
delita said:
Can't wait until we go full circle and see a mass influx of people start resubscribing to cable because their packages end up cheaper than the piecemealed streaming networks.
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Been talking about this for quite a while. To get everything you want is a mess of different streaming services that would cost more than cable.

wargames.jpg
 
kamikazi said:
Been talking about this for quite a while. To get everything you want is a mess of different streaming services that would cost more than cable.
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this is why we just sign up for something when we can binge watch and then cancel. So we may have a service for a month and watch a bunch of stuff then cancel it, then maybe 6 months later do it again.
 
kamikazi said:
Been talking about this for quite a while. To get everything you want is a mess of different streaming services that would cost more than cable.

View attachment 623355
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This is incorrect in my personal experience. To get all the stuff I wanted on cable, I would have to go to their “top tier” of service because the cable company knows what channels people really want and they divide them across different tiers. So, if I got the top tier of service, and without teaser rates, it was well over $250 a month. This was the exact same issue with Direct TV.

Just getting the channels I want is much less than $250 a month. Less than 1/2.
 
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