This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Yo ho yo ho.
I don't understand how people paying for prime can stand that crappy prime video UI anyway.
I'm deep into the seven seas but I still use prime because a family member pays for it. Its a decent enough ui and has some live stuff I can throw on to keep kids entertained. However, I've already added the shows I watch on prime to my jellyfin server just because this change is going to make me not want to use it anymore.
Yep. I don’t consider it as a valuable streaming platform. If they removed it from the general prime I would not buy it separately.
The player interface is excellent. Being able to see who the actors are in each scene is one of my favorite UI features.
I agree that finding a thing you want to watch is meh at best. Especially because they mix in rentals, purchasable content, and prime content all in the home interface window.
That said, yo ho matey.
Yes, X-ray is a fantastic feature. I have to give them that. The rest of it is trash.
The moment each show got a pre-reel for another Amazon show this was clearly the path they where taking.
Already cancelled a good 6 months ago.
Yeah, Prime Video already has commercials.
Yeah I thought that was a pretty obvious attempt to ease people into it. So this news doesn't come as a shock. If anything I'm surprised it took this long.
“We aim to have meaningfully fewer ads than linear TV and other streaming TV providers. No action is required from you, and there is no change to the current price of your Prime membership,”
The double-speak is relatively subtle, but it's always interesting to see how much work they put into gaslighting their customers:
Pretty gross, Amazon.
The enshittification will continue until profit margins improve
Enshitification won't stop until the frogs realize that they are being boiled to death and jump out of the pot.
Or until we get back to 0% interest rates that these companies could get for the past 10 years. The free money dried up!
When they announced this, it was the last straw for me with Amazon that caused me to finally cancel Prime, which I've paid for annually since it was first offered. Things I've been complacently shrugging off until now:
their delivery misses/delays have gotten consistently worse over the past year and a half
they screwed up my combined music library when they changed Amazon Music, which was working great before the change
Audible keeps pushing up-sale subscriptions I don't want, and is inconsistently working with Android Auto now (but was fine until about a year ago)
Prime Video ads and up-sale "channels"
book editions (especially textbook editions): they limit the ability to re-sell old editions of textbooks when newer editions are currently in print. Many classes specify old editions because that's what the curricula and syllabi have built around and the profs can take responsibility for validating the content. This is a serious issue with the number of errors that manage to get past editors for math and science texts, and they publish new editions for cash grabs when no actual new or useful information has been added.
They really don't have to do much to keep me complacent tbh - just stop breaking things that already work(ish). Find whatever the deliverable requirements were in like 2015 and just return to those.
I am in the exact same boat. The removal of "free" rotating streaming video content and limiting it to only Amazon funded shows with "free with prime" videos being hosted by 3rd party apps (fuck off, freevee) was bad enough but to start showing ads was the final straw
I cancelled my prime today. $150/yr. I can wait a few extra days for the things I need to order
The only reason I ever had Prime was free shipping, then I realized as soon as I bundled my orders to be over a certain dollar figure I STILL got free shipping, I kicked Prime to the curb.
For me it was the "Amazon Day" shipping that bundles up a week's worth of separate orders into one shipping day. Convenient sure but now I'm not getting 2-day shipping... so what am I paying for again? I'll just bundle up the orders and shipping my damn self.
I cancelled Amazon Prime awhile ago when the customer service took a nose dive and I realized too many of the 3rd party vendors were using Amazon as their defective products outlet.
But I actively and permanently skipped out on an Amazon Prime subscription because they refused to give me a pro-rated refund on the remaining 8-9 months of service after I cancelled. They literally told me that they start with the pro-rated amount, then subtract out the cost of all the "free" movie/show/music rentals as well as all the "free" shipping on orders during the time you've had prime, and you only get whatever remains (if anything). Within the first 3 -4 months, I had already accrued enough "free" $5.99 shipping and $3 - $4 rentals that it exceeded the $100 or whatever cost of a prime membership was back in those days, so I got no refund. Bunch of crooks.
No surprise, I'm completely on board with folks kicking Prime to the curb.
I'm getting really tired of all this enshitification.
Now corporations start with that bulshit of "oh, that model wasn't sustainable actually" even though it worked perfectly fine for the last decade and they still get record profits year after year. They keep ripping everything from under us, this gotta stop.
It's like a second golden age of internet piracy, and it's happening because streaming over saturated itself just like cable lmao
Amazon has been progressively getting worse and worse. I was not a member of Prime for the video. It was a nice perk.
The combination of Amazon making it hard to search for things to buy, the huge amount of low quality crap for sale with confusing descriptions, and this most recent change of putting in place ads if I do not pay an additional fee has led me to cancel my subscription.
They have taken the enshittification too far. Good bye Amazon. Hello Home Depot, Target, et al.
The mods removed my comment with a link to a great free streaming site with the reason "don't link directly to pirated content." (great censorship!)
I don't see that in the rules, so I guess it's one of those "mystery" rules they can just make up on the spot.
Anyways, you can find free streaming sites here: https://rentry.co/megathread-movies-and-tv#streaming
I recommend using fmovies. Make sure you have Adnauseam or uBlock Origin installed.
streaming has absolutely no future. if they keep pulling shit like this it's going to decline even faster. i suppose it's more about sucking off advertisers than it is pleasing customers, too....if you're going to fail anyway why can't you at least make a positive difference in the world?
I have Prime and have never actually used it. I still watch Amazon shows, but I'll be fucked if I use their shit interface or expose myself to their datamining to do it. Let alone watch fucking ads.
Piracy is a UX issue.
Remember the times when we paid for such a service to get rid of ads? By now I cancelled my prime membership.
Amazon has turned to utter shit these days. They've been requiring you to show your ID to get a refund. Getting asked by some Indian dude who I can barely understand a picture of my government issued ID sure doesn't feel comforting.
Guess I’ll just start downloading that content too because I’m not paying you more for the same shit. I’d get rid of it altogether if it wasn’t just included as part of prime in general.
oooh yay more content to collect from torrents. Bye Bye Prime.
You guys should have the same reaction to all bad software news. It would be consistent.
fuck this company, the only thing i bought on amazon was filament for my 3d-printers. now that i zeroed in on a brand, i can just buy it at their online store. goodbye amazon.
I don’t use Amazon much anymore anyway, because the products are overwhelmed with cheap, poor quality trash you couldn’t peddle on alibaba and completely worthless, largely faked reviews and ratings. I order once or twice a year some replacement cable or adapter I can’t find anywhere else reasonably quick, but that’s pretty much it, so canceling over this ad bullshit doesn’t really hurt me much.
Next on the list is my Netflix sub, which I largely use just for oldtrek reruns as second screen background noise while I use my computer. I could probably, uh, procure those shows fairly easy, or splurge on a collectors edition and would still save money.
Thankfully, much of Amazons content shows up on Usenet so I can just download the ad-free versions there and then watch it.
Say less.
Amazon wants us to learn how to safely pirate? We'll ok if that's what they want.
My Prime membership is up in March. I've already decided to not renew it, since they decided to cancel The Peripheral. Had I not already made that decision, this change would have made it for me anyway.
Hoist the sails.
Hmm, I wonder why they don't make the ad-supported version free like, uh I dunno, Spotify, or YouTube
Oh, "Lemmy" guess, greed, isn't it?
No point in paying for Prime Video when other services like Tubi or even Pluto TV offer free movies/shows with ads built-in. When I realized that it was easy to cancel.
Yarrr, this be some bullshit.
