14 ms·

A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

135 points by RickJWagner 4y ago

neea 4y ago
Paywall
- fein 4y ago
  Ironic that a site posting an article critical of the end of consumer convenience is sitting behind a paywall.
  - brasic 4y ago
    Why is it ironic? One reason all these services are introducing ads is consumers’ learned unwillingness to bear the full costs of the services they enjoy. I might argue that the true irony is grumbling about a news provider very reasonably limiting their product to those who have paid them.
    - fein 4y ago
      It's ironic because it's an upfront inconvenience to read what is ostensibly an article critical of how consumers are being inconvenienced. I'm not reading your site if you paywall it. There are too many other free resources that are just as good if not better.
      - brasic 4y ago
        At the risk of belaboring my point, even if what you say is true this attitude is a root cause of this unfortunate situation. Good journalism isn’t fungible — it costs money to produce. When we actively choose to not pay for media, we have no one but ourselves to blame for the awful biased or clickbait junk that results.
        fein 4y ago
        We are on a discussion board. I'm not going to pay for every paywall to access every article, and if a journalist wants me to read and discuss their article, it needs to not be paywalled. You could say that posting a paywalled article on a discussion board is just an ad for paywall subs.
    - pdimitar 4y ago
      It's not my fault that 99% of all internet businesses figured that bait and switch is a sound business plan. It really isn't. They should have read some basic human psychology: it's extremely hard or impossible to take something away that was given for free for a long time. That's basic knowledge. My history and psychology teacher shared this tidbit with the class when I was in the 9th grade. Furthermore, me and many others are not closed to the idea of paying for journalism but are not willing to track 20 subs across different services. Bill me through my ISP. I'll pay it. Make an app tracking how much extra I'd pay the next month because I've read 5 FT, 3 WSJ and 7 NYT articles -- I want to know. Even better, put a banner beforehand: "Reading this article will add $0.05 to your monthly internet bill, press OK if you agree". The technical and societal solutions are there. But the unfettered greed and everyone's desire to be the one and only still prevail. Hence: yes, I will expect free journalism until things change.
scrlk 4y ago
https://archive.ph/2hy4E https://archive.ph/2hy4E
Overtonwindow 4y ago
If I am paying for something I am not watching ads. I will cancel the service and find something else to do with my time, but I will never willingly watch ads.
- kderbyma 4y ago
  agree. Or of I must....it will pirated site ads....on banners around my pirated stream without video ads...
  - fezfight 4y ago
    While I realize this is more of a sabre rattle than reality, hopefully in reality youre using ublock origin. You won't see any ads on that pirate stream.
  - geraldwhen 4y ago
    ffmpeg -i http://source.m3u8 http://source.m3u8 -c copy out.mp4 Ads defeated.
- alexfromapex 4y ago
  I knew this day would come and have been preparing. Every company I thought was trustworthy has proven me wrong. So now I’ve decided to provide my own services. I have a NAS and have digitized my movie and music collection and can stream it to any TV in my house. Netflix, Disney, etc can go pound sand. It has to be this way, as long as advertising remains legal, life will slowly approach a Black Mirror episode where things we once owned will become subscriptions ad nauseum.
  - amelius 4y ago
    There is a good side to the service economy: the stuff you don't own, you don't have to fix (it's the service provider's problem), and therefore there will be no planned obsolescence, and less waste.
  - hotpotamus 4y ago
    I could say a bit about well paid engineers who don't pay for the content they consume - it's something I've observed everywhere I go, and I don't think it's one of our more attractive qualities (I'm in there too). I also agree that advertising is an insidious force that corrupts nearly everything it touches. The funny part to me is that my parents do a fire safety puppet show for children and can keep them enraptured for half an hour with zero budget. For centuries, people have been entertained by Punch and Judy shows. It makes me think that maybe the $20M/episode stuff we do now is impressive, but perhaps a bit over-engineered.
ramesh31 4y ago
I finally broke down and paid for YouTube Premium. There is literally no other option to watch YouTube on a TV nowadays. It is absolutely mindblowing the level of nonstop ads they shove down your throat in-between (and during) every single video now. Completely unwatchable otherwise. And it's impossible to buy a dumb TV in 2022, so you're stuck with the official Android/Roku YouTube apps that have no ad-blocking capability. Even pihole doesn't work anymore; they've obviously figured out how to get around the DNS issue. It just seems like every day things are getting worse.
- fein 4y ago
  As far as I can tell, ublock origin still works without a hitch, so just hook up a laptop/ tower to the TV and run YT in a browser?
  - gniv 4y ago
    When casting to the TV you get ads, even though you don't in the browser! I just tried it, since I had the same idea.
    - bicdez 4y ago
      Plug your laptop directly in via HDMI/DP. Buy an air mouse/keyboard to control it from your couch. Here's an example: https://www.amazon.com/Wireless-Keyboard-W1-Multifunctional-Projector/dp/B0787Z1C2G/ https://www.amazon.com/Wireless-Keyboard-W1-Multifunctional-... The flexible sovereign combo of a general purpose computer and a user agent. I use a forever-docked ThinkPad x230 under my TV, which can do 1080p and 802.11n (5GHz).
      - fein 4y ago
        I second the wireless mouse/ keyboard and will add that I bought a trackball mouse just for this, and it's a wonderful fit. No worrying about a proper surface for moving a mouse around.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
TheAceOfHearts 4y ago
Media embedded advertising has already been a thing for years, but companies hate leaving money on the table so they cannot resist the temptation of showing more ads. I wonder why it is that Steam hasn't had any issues remaining such a successful video game platform, while other forms of media have struggled to keep up. You're competing with piracy, but you throw ads in my face. I can download any show or movie I want and have it playing in minutes without having to deal with multi platform bullshit. That's real convenience. Oh, and the show or movie never gets taken away because some execs decided to be greedy. Although at this point I'm so fed up with most modern media that I've lost any interest to watch it, even if it's free and in a convenient format. Most stuff doesn't even seem interesting enough to pirate. The age of mindless consumption is nearing an end. I'm hopeful that the future will be a mix of locally crafted consumption balanced with a healthy mix of content creation.
- blibble 4y ago
  > I wonder why it is that Steam hasn't had any issues remaining such a successful video game platform, while other forms of media have struggled to keep up. it's privately owned and by someone that loves video games that was already wealthy when he founded the company
- bicdez 4y ago
  > The age of mindless consumption is nearing an end. How so?
- hirundo 4y ago
  > The age of mindless consumption is nearing an end I think the only thing that could do that is a degree of general poverty so great that mindless consumption immediately impacts survival. And even then some people would choose intoxicants over food and shelter.
- gonehome 4y ago
  > “ I can download any show or movie I want and have it playing in minutes without having to deal with multi platform bullshit.” Is this as true as it once was? It seems most of the old trackers are offline or dead now. I’d guess because of the success of streaming services finally meeting the market demand. It’s also possible I’m just old and out of the loop now.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
- ssivark 4y ago
  If I were to venture a guess, that’s likely what the article is about ;-)
ljsocal 4y ago
Try an ad-free (or substantially reduced) life for a month or two. Stop watching/reading any ad-based content. It can have a positive effect on your outlook.
pdimitar 4y ago
I have YouTube premium and download everything that I like. A home NAS is extremely handy like that. Mine is not even 10TB and I still have more than a year worth of watching. Also it's not illegal because I don't distribute anything. I use a local website run by volunteers that ask permission of publishing houses before putting every scanned & OCR'd & spell-checked book in their online library. Again, not illegal, there's a clause for distribution when you work in something like a library capacity. I use a Twitch client to watch stuff ad-free because I don't use it so often so as to get premium. Or I just download the stream after it ends. Tough luck, Amazon, no money from me. YouTube's service is better anyway. --- The "Black Mirror"-ization of our economy has a very predictable ending but the execs are trapped in a bubble of yes-people and have no clue how the world out there works -- thus everything will continue going exactly as predicted by many. One part of the populace will remain in the bubble but there will be a lot of others -- like you and me -- that will do their own media collection and consumption, grow part of our own food, repair our own tech, craft items to use around the house etc. Corporations know no mercy and they will not stop however. They will keep changing the narrative ad infinitum until everyone is dependent on them at birth. But they won't ever get to that point in the first place and will inevitably fail. Normal people can be swayed only so far. That's the part that they are missing -- which is quite puzzling to me, not like it's hard to figure it out. But I made my peace with the coming events. It's like watching an avalanche: you have a pretty good idea what it does and how far it will go and the damage it will inflict but physics doesn't care that you watch and know what will happen -- the event will happen regardless. The future is this: extreme segregation. Kind of like the big COVID-19 divide that happened even between people in the same family. That will keep happening in other areas of life. It's how people are. C'est la vie.
- mumblemumble 4y ago
  > I have YouTube premium I do, too. And every month I spend a little bit more time fast-forwarding past people awkwardly dropping pitches for NordVPN into the middle of their videos.
  - pdimitar 4y ago
    SponsorBlock helps but yeah, it can't cover everything. Rarely a problem for me though, I quickly filter out the sellouts. And it's still worth it for the occasional how-to video because part of the time I truly get helped. I can stomach some promotion (but like you I do dislike it).
maxerickson 4y ago
Paying a subscription for siloed content was never convenient, and the price increases for the ad free packages aren't that steep. I don't have much of an opinion about delivery apps because they weren't ever viable here.
Jimajesty 4y ago
I feel like clicking the link and getting hit immediately with four tiers of subscription option from the Financial Times was a strong enough case in point that I scarcely needed to read the article itself.
- plonk 4y ago
  The prices are awful too. It's clearly not targeted at random people wanting to stay informed.
  - honkdaddy 4y ago
    I had to go check - $40/mo for a digital newspaper?! Surely this is aimed at a different demographic than mine, because I can’t imagine anyone I know paying that for news.
    - umeshunni 4y ago
      I know many Finance/Wall St and (Financial/Management) academic types who pay for FT. It's high quality, financial news with a European perspective (vs the WSJ which is very US-centric). I assume they keep the prices high enough to support their operations without having to dilute their coverage for the mass market who will want their celebrity news, daily outrage fodder, censorship etc.
    - micromacrofoot 4y ago
      Probably one of the few places that charges what things actually cost when you remove advertising from the equation.
    - carabiner 4y ago
      Noam Chomsky called the FT "the only newspaper that tells the truth."
      - MichaelZuo 4y ago
        They've had a noticeable increase in almost-clickbait titles in the last few years. So it's not like they've remained unaffected by the decline in news media.
rkagerer 4y ago
Well, paywall that this certainly don't do anything to help consumer convenience stick around.
- dymk 4y ago
  At least it’s not ad based. They sell content, and you can chose to pay them for the content or not. A respectable business model by comparison.
  - NoboruWataya 4y ago
    They do still show you ads if you pay them though, which is kind of annoying.
bit_savager 4y ago
> "I'm not reading your site if you paywall it. There are too many other free resources that are just as good if not better." This really indicates what our economy has become. Everybody talks about the two business models companies employ; ad-supported or fee-based. These are the selling models Occasionally, piracy is discussed. While it may be a business model, piracy obviously isn't a selling model. It is a consumer consumption model though. We do have another consumption model that is more difficult to see because it does not include any explicit agreement between a company and a consumer. This emerges from companies that begin using loss-leading (money-losing) models to gain customers, initially. They then expect that they will generate a network effect or be able to rely on inertia (what Malcolm Gladwell generalizes as "sludge") to retain those customers when they later change their model to something profitable. This fails because there is always another business trying something similar. Each of these companies has the same global reach and customers can switch easily between them so they just hop from one unsustainable bargain to the next optimizing their own costs. They are disloyal leeches. I don't say that to be derogatory; it just seems the best description.
- togs 4y ago
  > They are disloyal leeches. Consumers are mercenary, as are companies, and that’s the rational way to be in an economy of scale, where loyalty is “brand loyalty”. If consumers aren’t loyal, it’s a failure of the company’s marketing.
- matheusmoreira 4y ago
  Would you read my comment if I paywalled it? Seriously doubt it. It's not like these little journal articles are the ultimate truth we all need to read. It's just a guy publishing his views on some topic. Views likely biased by his stakeholders at that. Views likely manipulated by PR firms if not government entities. Essentially propaganda advancing some narrative. When governments want people to view propaganda, they pay for an aircraft to airdrop leaflets. Yet we're expected to pay for the privilege of consuming their information? Truth is on the internet if they want people to read their views they have to actively go out there and post them. They have to pay money and/or time to make it happen. They don't get to demand payment because opinions are infinite. Paid journals are a relic of the old world and its media where they had printing presses that made literal newspapers with columns on them and that was the only way to get a mass audience. That's over now. They need to deal with that fact or go bankrupt. Hell, I don't even care about the articles posted here most of the time. I come here for the comments. I want to know what the people on this site have to say. The submitted article is just a conversation starter really. Anything notable or important in it will certainly be quoted here.
kaiuhl 4y ago
The irony of the article behind a paywall.
beloch 4y ago
"The money thrown into the convenience economy has also created a crowded marketplace. Couch potatoes can choose between Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney Plus and others, and a glut of ultrafast delivery and takeout services; ride-seekers can switch between Uber, Lyft and Bolt. " Home video and taxi-cab service are very different sectors. Uber has engaged in some pretty "creative" (i.e. unethical) business tactics to muscle their way into the taxi industry while avoiding both regulations and the payment of decent wages. They moved fast, but it was only a matter of time before government regulators (and their own reputation) caught up to them. Transportation is, indeed, something that's going to go back up in price in the short-term, if only because Uber and the Uber-wannabe's were using a business model that was never sustainable. I'd expect considerable contraction of this market as multiple companies fight each other for dwindling profits. Home streaming, on the other hand, is simply coming off of a pandemic boom. When people were stuck at home, surprise surprise, they watched a lot of TV. Demand will correct to no less than what it was a couple years ago. The problems streaming providers face are entirely self inflicted. e.g. Fragmentation. It's going to remain hard for any single streamer to make as much as Netflix did when Netflix was pretty much the only streamer. Expecting consumers to pay five different companies on a monthly basis for what basically amounts to "channels" is not a delusion likely to persist much longer. We might see cable-TV style aggregation of streaming services take over, enabling users to pay a single monthly bill for all their streaming needs. Unlike transportation, there are free alternatives to streaming (i.e. piracy) that consumers will turn to in increasing numbers if streaming providers stay on their current course. This alone dictates that streaming must become more convenient in the near future, not less so. Showing ads on a service that isn't free is outright suicidal.
- armchairhacker 4y ago
  I was going to say, streaming with “gig economy” ride sharing are completely different. Streaming really has no right to not be “convenient”. The only reason it’s reverting to inconvenient is because of beaurocracy and aggressive licensing and copyright enforcement. One can argue that it costs money to make movies and producers need to get that money back, but even older movies which have already been released and made huge profits are no longer available or available on different platforms. Then there is region locking and overlooked movies which are flat-out unavailable. Because of all this, there is widespread piracy, and afaik if you have a good pirate setup streaming is still very convenient. On the other hand, the convenience and low price of ride-sharing and delivery apps was unsustainable, temporary, and didn’t even really exist in the first place. When you get an Uber it costs like $10 for a 10-minute ride on a good day, and the delivery fees are often as much as the cost of your meal itself. Yet Uber doesn’t even make profit (I don’t know how that works and they’re not bankrupt, they have external funding but are allegedly losing money every year on their actual services). You can’t pirate a free ride or meal.
suzzer99 4y ago
I'm the dinosaur that still watches most content on a DVR. The fast-forward button never fails.
- quietthrow 4y ago
  Can you explain your setup a little bit. I have sling and I can record shows that are store in their cloud. however the fast forward is not exactly smooth to skip ads. most of the time Its skips a little too far ahead or too early and I end up fiddling with it going forward and backwards to be in a reasonably right spot (~5 secs before the ad finishes or after it finishes.) 1) Are there any devices available that allow recording effortlessly and then allows skipping adds equally effortlessly? 2) What are the non ad service options - Netflix, Prime Video, HBO, Youtube Premium?..what else?
  - massysett 4y ago
    I used to use MythTV. I even built a PC with a device that could pull video from a cable box. There’s an IR blaster that will change channels on the cable box, and then a little box that takes the component video from the cable box (no DRM on that) and encodes it (to MPEG-2 if I remember?) MythTV will process the shows to flag commercial breaks, which you can then skip automatically. MythTV looks like it’s still an active project. I stopped using it because I just don’t watch much TV these days and I just got tired of maintaining it. Renting the DVR from Comcast is worth it to me for my meagre needs. But if you’re into TV and don’t mind some geekery, MythTV is definitely a powerful and flexible system.
  - suzzer99 4y ago
    I have Frontier FIOS and a physical DVR Box. Yeah you have to get really good at stopping at the right point. But I've never found a cloud FF/RW that's close to as snappy as a physical box.
  - neRok 4y ago
    I was recording TV well over 10 years ago with a Hauppauge TV Tuner card in my PC. I tried MythTV (on Linux), and Kodi and the like, but settled on MediaPortal (on Windows). I controlled the PC with a HTPC remote. I originally used MediaPortal's recording engine, but eventually switched to Argus TV, because it had smarter features (and integrated back into MediaPortal, so nothing was lost on the GUI side). Anyway, the way most of these recording engines would work is basically that they would feed the recorded video through a "script" at the end, and so within that script you could send it to another program to find the ads. This was done with [ComSkip](https://www.team-mediaportal.com/wiki/display/MediaPortal1/ComSkip+Launcher https://www.team-mediaportal.com/wiki/display/MediaPortal1/C...) on MediaPortal and Argus TV. From memory, ComSkip would write a txt file or similar next to the video, and that was like a metadata file letting the playback program know where the ads were. I'm not 100% sure how ComSkip worked internally, but there are many clues in the video stream it could use to find the ads (eg. often the static logo would disappear, or the teletext end, or the volume increase). It wasn't perfect, but it was good enough. I reckon with today's machine learning capabilities, such a program could be written to skip the ads perfectly 99% of the time. But I doubt anyone will, because even I haven't used my HTPC in this manner for over 5 years (I don't even have the TV connected to the aerial any more). Now my HTPC is just a fanless mini PC stick with Win11, a keyboard and mouse on the coffee table, and I stream through the web browser.
polskibus 4y ago
It’s not just about on demand online services. Inflation is sky high everywhere, that will eat up a lot of convenience in daily life. There is a small chance that this will reduce wealth inequality but it may be only temporary.
- jeromegv 4y ago
  Did inflation in the 70s/80s destroyed convenience?
- adventured 4y ago
  > Inflation is sky high everywhere, that will eat up a lot of convenience in daily life. There is a small chance that this will reduce wealth inequality but it may be only temporary. High rates of inflation increases wealth inequality over time. Those working paycheck to paycheck (or anything close to that; ie income dependent) can't outrun it, attempt to hedge against it, or typically even keep up with it. They rapidly fall behind. Their standard of living gets demolished quickly, as they're very sensitive to price increases on staple goods, energy costs (whether heating or gasoline et al.), or rent. The capital / asset classes can keep up with or outrun inflation however. And the impact on them in terms of standard of living is entirely trivial. Elon Musk at $200 billion isn't much richer than Bill Gates was during his peak circa 1999-2000. Inflation adjusted they're quite close. The rich have kept up with inflation because they own assets that are capable of doing so (primarily equities, although other rich-person asset classes have done moderately well also, such as art and extremely valuable real-estate), the rest of the people largely have not kept up (and never will in the case of high inflation). On top of this, the Fed's perma low rate program, required by the US Government's debt situation, bolsters the wealth inequality significantly by artificially inflating assets such as equities and housing. Workers primarily do well in environments of low inflation with a supply / demand imbalance for labor (in favor of labor). That environment existed, most recently, in a stable manner, in parts of the 1990s and from roughly 2014-Covid.
happycube 4y ago
Fittingly, the article behind the link is paywalled.
tobyhinloopen 4y ago
Cookie wall. Choose your subscription. Yep, I couldn’t agree more, title.
pdntspa 4y ago
> all at minimal expense Come the fuck on. This may have been true during the honeymoon phase of these services where everybody was scamming consumers with the bait part of bait-and-switch, but it has not been true for quite some time. Any of these convenience services charge dearly for the privilege nowadays, through fees, hidden menu markups, shitty subscription "deals" (WOW, I can save 30% on each order for signing up for $9.99/mo or whatever... how about cutting 100% of my order fees for your BS recurring lineitem bullshit?), and just plain general price increases.
Nemo_bis 4y ago
This has nothing to do with convenience, it's about business which run large losses to expand their customer base. What Matt Levine calls the "MoviePass economy". https://archive.ph/bHsJV https://archive.ph/bHsJV
zackmorris 4y ago
I don't buy the premise of the article. I think that convenience will get harder because the economic system in the US prioritizes everything but automation. Have a business plan where you can hire tons of people? Great! Here's your loan. Have an asset as collateral or the money itself before you need it? Great! Here's at least that much money. Have an invention to completely solve the problem of delivery because robots grow food in your backyard? Get lost! I often think of the lyric from the Cheers theme song: "making your way in the world today takes everything you've got". Well, Millenials and Gen Z have about half the disposable income that Gen X had, and Gen X has about half what the Boomers had. In other words, it was 4 times easier to make it in the 80s than it is today. I was there, I remember what leisure was. And art and civic engagement and public works and everything else that we've all but lost today. Now our cities don't even have safe drinking water. That kind of travesty was unheard of in the 80s. As the realities of late-stage capitalism crush down on the world harder and harder, the cost of making it will eventually pass what people are willing to pay. I think we're seeing the start of that with The Great Resignation and #vanlife. If my feeling on this is correct, then deregulation and lower interest rates will speed the decline. Stuff like austerity backfires, and half the population knows that through experience now since stuff like 9/11 and the housing bubble popping. So any hope of fixing supply chains powered by low-wage workers in the third world is a fantasy. They've seen the internet, they know that their best shot at a better life is not to succumb to servitude like their parents did. They're all going to organize and demand better compensation, like they should have done a generation ago. Another way to look at this is that the value of things stays the same, but the value of currency falls. In another 10-20 years, currency will be so worthless that a home in some cities might cost $10 million. We're losing the ability to buy things because we can't hedge against that with our own ability to make things.
mensetmanusman 4y ago
Take advantage of your local library’s disc sharing programs.
amelius 4y ago
Convenience will destroy the world.
Havoc 4y ago
Maybe for the established players like Netflix but I’m not convinced VC scene has given up on the subsidise to scale strategy yet

135 points by RickJWagner 4y ago

neea 4y ago

Paywall

fein 4y ago
Ironic that a site posting an article critical of the end of consumer convenience is sitting behind a paywall.
- brasic 4y ago
  Why is it ironic? One reason all these services are introducing ads is consumers’ learned unwillingness to bear the full costs of the services they enjoy. I might argue that the true irony is grumbling about a news provider very reasonably limiting their product to those who have paid them.
  - fein 4y ago
    It's ironic because it's an upfront inconvenience to read what is ostensibly an article critical of how consumers are being inconvenienced. I'm not reading your site if you paywall it. There are too many other free resources that are just as good if not better.
    - brasic 4y ago
      At the risk of belaboring my point, even if what you say is true this attitude is a root cause of this unfortunate situation. Good journalism isn’t fungible — it costs money to produce. When we actively choose to not pay for media, we have no one but ourselves to blame for the awful biased or clickbait junk that results.
      - fein 4y ago
        We are on a discussion board. I'm not going to pay for every paywall to access every article, and if a journalist wants me to read and discuss their article, it needs to not be paywalled. You could say that posting a paywalled article on a discussion board is just an ad for paywall subs.
  - pdimitar 4y ago
    It's not my fault that 99% of all internet businesses figured that bait and switch is a sound business plan. It really isn't. They should have read some basic human psychology: it's extremely hard or impossible to take something away that was given for free for a long time. That's basic knowledge. My history and psychology teacher shared this tidbit with the class when I was in the 9th grade. Furthermore, me and many others are not closed to the idea of paying for journalism but are not willing to track 20 subs across different services. Bill me through my ISP. I'll pay it. Make an app tracking how much extra I'd pay the next month because I've read 5 FT, 3 WSJ and 7 NYT articles -- I want to know. Even better, put a banner beforehand: "Reading this article will add $0.05 to your monthly internet bill, press OK if you agree". The technical and societal solutions are there. But the unfettered greed and everyone's desire to be the one and only still prevail. Hence: yes, I will expect free journalism until things change.

scrlk 4y ago

https://archive.ph/2hy4E https://archive.ph/2hy4E

Overtonwindow 4y ago

If I am paying for something I am not watching ads. I will cancel the service and find something else to do with my time, but I will never willingly watch ads.

kderbyma 4y ago
agree. Or of I must....it will pirated site ads....on banners around my pirated stream without video ads...
- fezfight 4y ago
  While I realize this is more of a sabre rattle than reality, hopefully in reality youre using ublock origin. You won't see any ads on that pirate stream.
- geraldwhen 4y ago
  ffmpeg -i http://source.m3u8 http://source.m3u8 -c copy out.mp4 Ads defeated.
alexfromapex 4y ago
I knew this day would come and have been preparing. Every company I thought was trustworthy has proven me wrong. So now I’ve decided to provide my own services. I have a NAS and have digitized my movie and music collection and can stream it to any TV in my house. Netflix, Disney, etc can go pound sand. It has to be this way, as long as advertising remains legal, life will slowly approach a Black Mirror episode where things we once owned will become subscriptions ad nauseum.
- amelius 4y ago
  There is a good side to the service economy: the stuff you don't own, you don't have to fix (it's the service provider's problem), and therefore there will be no planned obsolescence, and less waste.
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  I could say a bit about well paid engineers who don't pay for the content they consume - it's something I've observed everywhere I go, and I don't think it's one of our more attractive qualities (I'm in there too). I also agree that advertising is an insidious force that corrupts nearly everything it touches. The funny part to me is that my parents do a fire safety puppet show for children and can keep them enraptured for half an hour with zero budget. For centuries, people have been entertained by Punch and Judy shows. It makes me think that maybe the $20M/episode stuff we do now is impressive, but perhaps a bit over-engineered.

ramesh31 4y ago

I finally broke down and paid for YouTube Premium. There is literally no other option to watch YouTube on a TV nowadays. It is absolutely mindblowing the level of nonstop ads they shove down your throat in-between (and during) every single video now. Completely unwatchable otherwise. And it's impossible to buy a dumb TV in 2022, so you're stuck with the official Android/Roku YouTube apps that have no ad-blocking capability. Even pihole doesn't work anymore; they've obviously figured out how to get around the DNS issue. It just seems like every day things are getting worse.

fein 4y ago
As far as I can tell, ublock origin still works without a hitch, so just hook up a laptop/ tower to the TV and run YT in a browser?
- gniv 4y ago
  When casting to the TV you get ads, even though you don't in the browser! I just tried it, since I had the same idea.
  - bicdez 4y ago
    Plug your laptop directly in via HDMI/DP. Buy an air mouse/keyboard to control it from your couch. Here's an example: https://www.amazon.com/Wireless-Keyboard-W1-Multifunctional-Projector/dp/B0787Z1C2G/ https://www.amazon.com/Wireless-Keyboard-W1-Multifunctional-... The flexible sovereign combo of a general purpose computer and a user agent. I use a forever-docked ThinkPad x230 under my TV, which can do 1080p and 802.11n (5GHz).
    - fein 4y ago
      I second the wireless mouse/ keyboard and will add that I bought a trackball mouse just for this, and it's a wonderful fit. No worrying about a proper surface for moving a mouse around.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]

TheAceOfHearts 4y ago

Media embedded advertising has already been a thing for years, but companies hate leaving money on the table so they cannot resist the temptation of showing more ads. I wonder why it is that Steam hasn't had any issues remaining such a successful video game platform, while other forms of media have struggled to keep up. You're competing with piracy, but you throw ads in my face. I can download any show or movie I want and have it playing in minutes without having to deal with multi platform bullshit. That's real convenience. Oh, and the show or movie never gets taken away because some execs decided to be greedy. Although at this point I'm so fed up with most modern media that I've lost any interest to watch it, even if it's free and in a convenient format. Most stuff doesn't even seem interesting enough to pirate. The age of mindless consumption is nearing an end. I'm hopeful that the future will be a mix of locally crafted consumption balanced with a healthy mix of content creation.

blibble 4y ago
> I wonder why it is that Steam hasn't had any issues remaining such a successful video game platform, while other forms of media have struggled to keep up. it's privately owned and by someone that loves video games that was already wealthy when he founded the company
bicdez 4y ago
> The age of mindless consumption is nearing an end. How so?
hirundo 4y ago
> The age of mindless consumption is nearing an end I think the only thing that could do that is a degree of general poverty so great that mindless consumption immediately impacts survival. And even then some people would choose intoxicants over food and shelter.
gonehome 4y ago
> “ I can download any show or movie I want and have it playing in minutes without having to deal with multi platform bullshit.” Is this as true as it once was? It seems most of the old trackers are offline or dead now. I’d guess because of the success of streaming services finally meeting the market demand. It’s also possible I’m just old and out of the loop now.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

ssivark 4y ago
If I were to venture a guess, that’s likely what the article is about ;-)

ljsocal 4y ago

Try an ad-free (or substantially reduced) life for a month or two. Stop watching/reading any ad-based content. It can have a positive effect on your outlook.

pdimitar 4y ago

I have YouTube premium and download everything that I like. A home NAS is extremely handy like that. Mine is not even 10TB and I still have more than a year worth of watching. Also it's not illegal because I don't distribute anything. I use a local website run by volunteers that ask permission of publishing houses before putting every scanned & OCR'd & spell-checked book in their online library. Again, not illegal, there's a clause for distribution when you work in something like a library capacity. I use a Twitch client to watch stuff ad-free because I don't use it so often so as to get premium. Or I just download the stream after it ends. Tough luck, Amazon, no money from me. YouTube's service is better anyway. --- The "Black Mirror"-ization of our economy has a very predictable ending but the execs are trapped in a bubble of yes-people and have no clue how the world out there works -- thus everything will continue going exactly as predicted by many. One part of the populace will remain in the bubble but there will be a lot of others -- like you and me -- that will do their own media collection and consumption, grow part of our own food, repair our own tech, craft items to use around the house etc. Corporations know no mercy and they will not stop however. They will keep changing the narrative ad infinitum until everyone is dependent on them at birth. But they won't ever get to that point in the first place and will inevitably fail. Normal people can be swayed only so far. That's the part that they are missing -- which is quite puzzling to me, not like it's hard to figure it out. But I made my peace with the coming events. It's like watching an avalanche: you have a pretty good idea what it does and how far it will go and the damage it will inflict but physics doesn't care that you watch and know what will happen -- the event will happen regardless. The future is this: extreme segregation. Kind of like the big COVID-19 divide that happened even between people in the same family. That will keep happening in other areas of life. It's how people are. C'est la vie.

mumblemumble 4y ago
> I have YouTube premium I do, too. And every month I spend a little bit more time fast-forwarding past people awkwardly dropping pitches for NordVPN into the middle of their videos.
- pdimitar 4y ago
  SponsorBlock helps but yeah, it can't cover everything. Rarely a problem for me though, I quickly filter out the sellouts. And it's still worth it for the occasional how-to video because part of the time I truly get helped. I can stomach some promotion (but like you I do dislike it).

maxerickson 4y ago

Paying a subscription for siloed content was never convenient, and the price increases for the ad free packages aren't that steep. I don't have much of an opinion about delivery apps because they weren't ever viable here.

Jimajesty 4y ago

I feel like clicking the link and getting hit immediately with four tiers of subscription option from the Financial Times was a strong enough case in point that I scarcely needed to read the article itself.

plonk 4y ago
The prices are awful too. It's clearly not targeted at random people wanting to stay informed.
- honkdaddy 4y ago
  I had to go check - $40/mo for a digital newspaper?! Surely this is aimed at a different demographic than mine, because I can’t imagine anyone I know paying that for news.
  - umeshunni 4y ago
    I know many Finance/Wall St and (Financial/Management) academic types who pay for FT. It's high quality, financial news with a European perspective (vs the WSJ which is very US-centric). I assume they keep the prices high enough to support their operations without having to dilute their coverage for the mass market who will want their celebrity news, daily outrage fodder, censorship etc.
  - micromacrofoot 4y ago
    Probably one of the few places that charges what things actually cost when you remove advertising from the equation.
  - carabiner 4y ago
    Noam Chomsky called the FT "the only newspaper that tells the truth."
    - MichaelZuo 4y ago
      They've had a noticeable increase in almost-clickbait titles in the last few years. So it's not like they've remained unaffected by the decline in news media.

rkagerer 4y ago

Well, paywall that this certainly don't do anything to help consumer convenience stick around.

dymk 4y ago
At least it’s not ad based. They sell content, and you can chose to pay them for the content or not. A respectable business model by comparison.
- NoboruWataya 4y ago
  They do still show you ads if you pay them though, which is kind of annoying.

bit_savager 4y ago

> "I'm not reading your site if you paywall it. There are too many other free resources that are just as good if not better." This really indicates what our economy has become. Everybody talks about the two business models companies employ; ad-supported or fee-based. These are the selling models Occasionally, piracy is discussed. While it may be a business model, piracy obviously isn't a selling model. It is a consumer consumption model though. We do have another consumption model that is more difficult to see because it does not include any explicit agreement between a company and a consumer. This emerges from companies that begin using loss-leading (money-losing) models to gain customers, initially. They then expect that they will generate a network effect or be able to rely on inertia (what Malcolm Gladwell generalizes as "sludge") to retain those customers when they later change their model to something profitable. This fails because there is always another business trying something similar. Each of these companies has the same global reach and customers can switch easily between them so they just hop from one unsustainable bargain to the next optimizing their own costs. They are disloyal leeches. I don't say that to be derogatory; it just seems the best description.

togs 4y ago
> They are disloyal leeches. Consumers are mercenary, as are companies, and that’s the rational way to be in an economy of scale, where loyalty is “brand loyalty”. If consumers aren’t loyal, it’s a failure of the company’s marketing.
matheusmoreira 4y ago
Would you read my comment if I paywalled it? Seriously doubt it. It's not like these little journal articles are the ultimate truth we all need to read. It's just a guy publishing his views on some topic. Views likely biased by his stakeholders at that. Views likely manipulated by PR firms if not government entities. Essentially propaganda advancing some narrative. When governments want people to view propaganda, they pay for an aircraft to airdrop leaflets. Yet we're expected to pay for the privilege of consuming their information? Truth is on the internet if they want people to read their views they have to actively go out there and post them. They have to pay money and/or time to make it happen. They don't get to demand payment because opinions are infinite. Paid journals are a relic of the old world and its media where they had printing presses that made literal newspapers with columns on them and that was the only way to get a mass audience. That's over now. They need to deal with that fact or go bankrupt. Hell, I don't even care about the articles posted here most of the time. I come here for the comments. I want to know what the people on this site have to say. The submitted article is just a conversation starter really. Anything notable or important in it will certainly be quoted here.

kaiuhl 4y ago

The irony of the article behind a paywall.

beloch 4y ago

"The money thrown into the convenience economy has also created a crowded marketplace. Couch potatoes can choose between Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney Plus and others, and a glut of ultrafast delivery and takeout services; ride-seekers can switch between Uber, Lyft and Bolt. " Home video and taxi-cab service are very different sectors. Uber has engaged in some pretty "creative" (i.e. unethical) business tactics to muscle their way into the taxi industry while avoiding both regulations and the payment of decent wages. They moved fast, but it was only a matter of time before government regulators (and their own reputation) caught up to them. Transportation is, indeed, something that's going to go back up in price in the short-term, if only because Uber and the Uber-wannabe's were using a business model that was never sustainable. I'd expect considerable contraction of this market as multiple companies fight each other for dwindling profits. Home streaming, on the other hand, is simply coming off of a pandemic boom. When people were stuck at home, surprise surprise, they watched a lot of TV. Demand will correct to no less than what it was a couple years ago. The problems streaming providers face are entirely self inflicted. e.g. Fragmentation. It's going to remain hard for any single streamer to make as much as Netflix did when Netflix was pretty much the only streamer. Expecting consumers to pay five different companies on a monthly basis for what basically amounts to "channels" is not a delusion likely to persist much longer. We might see cable-TV style aggregation of streaming services take over, enabling users to pay a single monthly bill for all their streaming needs. Unlike transportation, there are free alternatives to streaming (i.e. piracy) that consumers will turn to in increasing numbers if streaming providers stay on their current course. This alone dictates that streaming must become more convenient in the near future, not less so. Showing ads on a service that isn't free is outright suicidal.

armchairhacker 4y ago
I was going to say, streaming with “gig economy” ride sharing are completely different. Streaming really has no right to not be “convenient”. The only reason it’s reverting to inconvenient is because of beaurocracy and aggressive licensing and copyright enforcement. One can argue that it costs money to make movies and producers need to get that money back, but even older movies which have already been released and made huge profits are no longer available or available on different platforms. Then there is region locking and overlooked movies which are flat-out unavailable. Because of all this, there is widespread piracy, and afaik if you have a good pirate setup streaming is still very convenient. On the other hand, the convenience and low price of ride-sharing and delivery apps was unsustainable, temporary, and didn’t even really exist in the first place. When you get an Uber it costs like $10 for a 10-minute ride on a good day, and the delivery fees are often as much as the cost of your meal itself. Yet Uber doesn’t even make profit (I don’t know how that works and they’re not bankrupt, they have external funding but are allegedly losing money every year on their actual services). You can’t pirate a free ride or meal.

suzzer99 4y ago

I'm the dinosaur that still watches most content on a DVR. The fast-forward button never fails.

quietthrow 4y ago
Can you explain your setup a little bit. I have sling and I can record shows that are store in their cloud. however the fast forward is not exactly smooth to skip ads. most of the time Its skips a little too far ahead or too early and I end up fiddling with it going forward and backwards to be in a reasonably right spot (~5 secs before the ad finishes or after it finishes.) 1) Are there any devices available that allow recording effortlessly and then allows skipping adds equally effortlessly? 2) What are the non ad service options - Netflix, Prime Video, HBO, Youtube Premium?..what else?
- massysett 4y ago
  I used to use MythTV. I even built a PC with a device that could pull video from a cable box. There’s an IR blaster that will change channels on the cable box, and then a little box that takes the component video from the cable box (no DRM on that) and encodes it (to MPEG-2 if I remember?) MythTV will process the shows to flag commercial breaks, which you can then skip automatically. MythTV looks like it’s still an active project. I stopped using it because I just don’t watch much TV these days and I just got tired of maintaining it. Renting the DVR from Comcast is worth it to me for my meagre needs. But if you’re into TV and don’t mind some geekery, MythTV is definitely a powerful and flexible system.
- suzzer99 4y ago
  I have Frontier FIOS and a physical DVR Box. Yeah you have to get really good at stopping at the right point. But I've never found a cloud FF/RW that's close to as snappy as a physical box.
- neRok 4y ago
  I was recording TV well over 10 years ago with a Hauppauge TV Tuner card in my PC. I tried MythTV (on Linux), and Kodi and the like, but settled on MediaPortal (on Windows). I controlled the PC with a HTPC remote. I originally used MediaPortal's recording engine, but eventually switched to Argus TV, because it had smarter features (and integrated back into MediaPortal, so nothing was lost on the GUI side). Anyway, the way most of these recording engines would work is basically that they would feed the recorded video through a "script" at the end, and so within that script you could send it to another program to find the ads. This was done with [ComSkip](https://www.team-mediaportal.com/wiki/display/MediaPortal1/ComSkip+Launcher https://www.team-mediaportal.com/wiki/display/MediaPortal1/C...) on MediaPortal and Argus TV. From memory, ComSkip would write a txt file or similar next to the video, and that was like a metadata file letting the playback program know where the ads were. I'm not 100% sure how ComSkip worked internally, but there are many clues in the video stream it could use to find the ads (eg. often the static logo would disappear, or the teletext end, or the volume increase). It wasn't perfect, but it was good enough. I reckon with today's machine learning capabilities, such a program could be written to skip the ads perfectly 99% of the time. But I doubt anyone will, because even I haven't used my HTPC in this manner for over 5 years (I don't even have the TV connected to the aerial any more). Now my HTPC is just a fanless mini PC stick with Win11, a keyboard and mouse on the coffee table, and I stream through the web browser.

polskibus 4y ago

It’s not just about on demand online services. Inflation is sky high everywhere, that will eat up a lot of convenience in daily life. There is a small chance that this will reduce wealth inequality but it may be only temporary.

jeromegv 4y ago
Did inflation in the 70s/80s destroyed convenience?
adventured 4y ago
> Inflation is sky high everywhere, that will eat up a lot of convenience in daily life. There is a small chance that this will reduce wealth inequality but it may be only temporary. High rates of inflation increases wealth inequality over time. Those working paycheck to paycheck (or anything close to that; ie income dependent) can't outrun it, attempt to hedge against it, or typically even keep up with it. They rapidly fall behind. Their standard of living gets demolished quickly, as they're very sensitive to price increases on staple goods, energy costs (whether heating or gasoline et al.), or rent. The capital / asset classes can keep up with or outrun inflation however. And the impact on them in terms of standard of living is entirely trivial. Elon Musk at $200 billion isn't much richer than Bill Gates was during his peak circa 1999-2000. Inflation adjusted they're quite close. The rich have kept up with inflation because they own assets that are capable of doing so (primarily equities, although other rich-person asset classes have done moderately well also, such as art and extremely valuable real-estate), the rest of the people largely have not kept up (and never will in the case of high inflation). On top of this, the Fed's perma low rate program, required by the US Government's debt situation, bolsters the wealth inequality significantly by artificially inflating assets such as equities and housing. Workers primarily do well in environments of low inflation with a supply / demand imbalance for labor (in favor of labor). That environment existed, most recently, in a stable manner, in parts of the 1990s and from roughly 2014-Covid.

happycube 4y ago

Fittingly, the article behind the link is paywalled.

tobyhinloopen 4y ago

Cookie wall. Choose your subscription. Yep, I couldn’t agree more, title.

pdntspa 4y ago

> all at minimal expense Come the fuck on. This may have been true during the honeymoon phase of these services where everybody was scamming consumers with the bait part of bait-and-switch, but it has not been true for quite some time. Any of these convenience services charge dearly for the privilege nowadays, through fees, hidden menu markups, shitty subscription "deals" (WOW, I can save 30% on each order for signing up for $9.99/mo or whatever... how about cutting 100% of my order fees for your BS recurring lineitem bullshit?), and just plain general price increases.

Nemo_bis 4y ago

This has nothing to do with convenience, it's about business which run large losses to expand their customer base. What Matt Levine calls the "MoviePass economy". https://archive.ph/bHsJV https://archive.ph/bHsJV

zackmorris 4y ago

I don't buy the premise of the article. I think that convenience will get harder because the economic system in the US prioritizes everything but automation. Have a business plan where you can hire tons of people? Great! Here's your loan. Have an asset as collateral or the money itself before you need it? Great! Here's at least that much money. Have an invention to completely solve the problem of delivery because robots grow food in your backyard? Get lost! I often think of the lyric from the Cheers theme song: "making your way in the world today takes everything you've got". Well, Millenials and Gen Z have about half the disposable income that Gen X had, and Gen X has about half what the Boomers had. In other words, it was 4 times easier to make it in the 80s than it is today. I was there, I remember what leisure was. And art and civic engagement and public works and everything else that we've all but lost today. Now our cities don't even have safe drinking water. That kind of travesty was unheard of in the 80s. As the realities of late-stage capitalism crush down on the world harder and harder, the cost of making it will eventually pass what people are willing to pay. I think we're seeing the start of that with The Great Resignation and #vanlife. If my feeling on this is correct, then deregulation and lower interest rates will speed the decline. Stuff like austerity backfires, and half the population knows that through experience now since stuff like 9/11 and the housing bubble popping. So any hope of fixing supply chains powered by low-wage workers in the third world is a fantasy. They've seen the internet, they know that their best shot at a better life is not to succumb to servitude like their parents did. They're all going to organize and demand better compensation, like they should have done a generation ago. Another way to look at this is that the value of things stays the same, but the value of currency falls. In another 10-20 years, currency will be so worthless that a home in some cities might cost $10 million. We're losing the ability to buy things because we can't hedge against that with our own ability to make things.

mensetmanusman 4y ago

Take advantage of your local library’s disc sharing programs.

amelius 4y ago

Convenience will destroy the world.

Havoc 4y ago

Maybe for the established players like Netflix but I’m not convinced VC scene has given up on the subsidise to scale strategy yet