[thih9]

Why are forced ads still a thing?

When given choice, people escape them - via netflix or adblock. The same people spend their free time watching youtube reviews, chatting on gear forums, or recommending each other deals on social media; it looks like people genuinely want to learn about good and fairly priced products.

I sincerely hope we’ll find a better way of reaching an audience than forced ads.

[someotherperson]

Don't worry, there will be a small monthly subscription of $9.99 to disable them! Or if you buy the new Roku Plus Extreme you can opt-out of personalized ads! What more could you want?

[thayne]

And then they will decide that no-ads should actually be slightly less ads instead. And if you are still using that Rolu Plus Extreme after two years, you don't deserve to be able to opt out anymore.

[thih9]

In my grandparent comment I mentioned “fairly priced products” - if the price (including ad removal) is fair and the product is good, I have no problems with paying.

[someotherperson]

What's a reasonable amount, in your opinion, to disable ads on a piece of hardware you purchased (i.e a Roku) to watch your own locally streamed media?

[thih9]

If that was added after I bought the product, zero for sure. If I knew about the cost upfront - whatever I’d be fine with at the time of purchase. Then again, likely a competing device without a subscription would be of better value.

[throw10920]

This comment is crazy. There's no reasonable way to fund a service without either ads or direct payment.

[add-sub-mul-div]

Ironically the fully skippable commercials on cable TV with a DVR are the best deal we can get anymore, anything in the streaming world can take control of the video stream away from you.

[chgs]

Piratebay still works right?

I just subscribe to paramount plus again to watch discovery. Seems perfectly reasonable, they give me a program I want (with no product placement from what I can gather - unlike the JJ Abram’s films with their “Budweiser classic”. I don’t think a self sealing stem boot counts), and I give them £8 a month. Everyone is happy.

However you try to double dip and I don’t give you a penny.

[thih9]

Piratebay may not work as smoothly.

Content doesn’t appear effortlessly on all your devices. Some subtitle languages may be missing. Less mainstream content may be of low quality, slow to download or missing too. Plus, you have to plan ahead or wait for the download to finish. At this point I would double check the streaming plan price (as long as there is an ad free tier).

[chgs]

I haven’t used pirate bay for a long time as I can simply buy or rent the material I want

However start putting adverts in that and it’s changes, it’s either “don’t watch at all” or “get from pirate bay (or elsewhere)”, because the product I want isn’t available.

20 years ago I used to get tv from places like irc because it was the only way to get the material. 25 years ago I hd no choice by to wait for the vhs to come out.

It’s a service problem, not a price problem. Sadly it seems companies want to make the service bad, which means they throw the baby out with the bath water.

[OkayPhysicist]

The core problem is that, as a amorphous class, consumers are more price sensitive than quality sensitive, and those that aren't tend to have very little price sensitivity. So the profit-optimal solution is to charge your minority of price insensitive users through the nose, and extract value from the price sensitive by enshitiffying your service.

This sucks for those of us in the middle ground (having taste but not unlimited budgets), as we get shoved into "eat shit and smile" group.

[thih9]

I like this summary, seems spot on.

This enshittification part looks especially interesting to me. For that you need a user base. So I guess any rules promoting fair competition would be relevant and pro consumer in this context. If the users can easily migrate to a non-enshittified provider, then all is well.

[ecnahc515]

If you are watching your Linux ISOs on your self-hosted setup that uses a Roku; presumably they can still inject ads; regardless of where/how you obtained the media.

[WirelessGigabit]

In Belgium I know of at least 1 provider who blocks you, once per hour, from being able to FF advertisements on recordings.

[emodendroket]

Roku loses money on making televisions and makes it back on advertising and services. It turns out people don't hate ads enough to spend money to not see them.