Yo ho yo ho.
I don’t understand how people paying for prime can stand that crappy prime video UI anyway.
- it’s basically fine and unoffensive ui to 99.9% of people
- people see it as functionally free because they bought prime for free delivery
- People don’t know how to pirate
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.
I weighed anchor despite paying for Prime for years. For one, you never know when they’ll drop a show, and two I prefer all my media in my polled interface.
I ended up dropping Prime two years ago because Amazon simply can’t hold up their end of their 2 day bargain. I live in a college town and when the school year starts their delivery time stretches to nearly 2 weeks. The rest of the year it fluctuates between 3 and 7 days. That’s not Prime in any way. Of course, without prime, note they wait 3-6 days before even shipping my packages so everything is a week to ten days. OTOH, Walmart - though having a smaller selection- is being me next day service on about 60% of my orders and two day on the rest …for less than half the annual fee.
My only lament is the weird Chinese electronics/components Amazon sellers stock FBA. It doesn’t take me too long to get to $35, but I do miss the $5 impulse buy of small packs of arduino actuators or pneumatic push connectors when inspiration strikes.
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.
Still a better UI than Disney+ too
I didn’t realize just how good the Netflix UI was until using Paramount+
I can understand 1 and 2, although, for 3, even though, most of my (nontechie) friends don’t know how to pirate, they know how to look up grey streaming sites like 123movies, sflix, fmovies, etc
I’m a shameless sailor but my wife has it for the free shipping.
Their menus are ass but I really like the actual player ui. Love pausing and seeing who is in the scene.
I can’t agree with #1. The interface is that of Amazon’s regular storefront and it often mixes paid media in with the free stuff or has stupid stuff like seasons 2, 4, & 6 being free while 1, 3, & 5 are paid. Maybe it’s different in the TV apps, but the browser version is atrocious.
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.
Yeah if you hate immersion it’s great.
They also have a ton of subtitles and audio options. Like a shit ton.
Meanwhile Netflix most times doesn’t even have subtitles in one or more of the official languages where I live. And for sure they could have more, considering where they operate, they just choose not to.
However prime UI sucks for splitting shows between seasons so they get recommended multiple times. It just makes no sense
Poster might be describing how fucking awful Prime arranges shit on a Fire stick. Search taking you to specific episodes rather than to the show. Seasons split up into mini seasons 201, 202, 203, 204. Kids shows are the worst, sometimes the seasons are split into different show listings.
It’s truly impressive how a huge corporation can build the shittiest UI of them all.
When I still was paying for prime (cancelled it last price increase) I was pirating any prime videos as that was easier than dealing with the shitty prime video UI.
Not to mention the shockingly bad picture quality.
The 4k stuff isn’t terrible, but anything that’s in HD is bloody awful.
I originally started paying for prime for the free shipping. Prime video is a perk as far as I’m concerned. I haven’t re-evaluated it in a long time though to see if it’s worth it. I do order a ton of stuff on amazon since I live 160km from the nearest city.
I hit the high seas when they wouldn’t let me watch the shit i paid for in high def. Fuck that.
I pay for Amazon prime. The only time I watch Prime Video is every once in a while I wonder: is Stargate: Universe as terrible as I remember? And then I try watching it and remember that it is. 
I honestly thought it wasn’t terrible and would have benefitted from fleshing out the rest of the story. It was definitely a huge departure from the styling of SGU and Atlantis but not horrible on its own.
It’s slightly more convenient than sailing, considering it’s attached to my unlimited photo backup
The UI had a “recent” glow up, it was way worse before.
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.
At least they give you a slip button, unlike Paramount+
“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:
- “No action is required from you…” - yes, Amazon hopes we do nothing, but Amazon unilaterally changed the assumptions underlying agreement, so “no action” is an acquiescence to a materially worse reality for us and a better one for Amazon.
- “…there is no change to the current price of your Prime membership” - yes, no additional dollars are required because Amazon is now selling our time and attention, but that is still a new “fee” we are paying.
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!
Hey, I want free money, too.
The enshittification will continue until the demand for profit is removed*
…demand for constant growth is removed.*
until profit margins improve
Lol
What is this mythical profit margin/amount that companies would be willing to accept? There is no limit to corporate greed…
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:
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their delivery misses/delays have gotten consistently worse over the past year and a half
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they screwed up my combined music library when they changed Amazon Music, which was working great before the change
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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)
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Prime Video ads and up-sale “channels”
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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
I went through this a couple years ago. Decided Jeff Bezos does not need any more money, cancelled prime. Funny this was that most things ship the same as always, get them in like 2 or 3 days.
In fact, most other online retailers offer similar free 2 day shipping to stay competitive and I usually find stuff of Amazon first.
Same.
Should have done it sooner.
I can wait a few extra days for the things I need to order
Amazon’s already provided that. Their delivery went from stellar to shit.
I don’t stream much but being disabled, I can’t get to the store so I do order stuff from Amazon. What I’ve seen in the last few years is an influx of Chinese sellers with tons and tons of garbage and all of the reviews are completely worthless, of course.
This has been my main observation with Amazon over the past few years. It’s just cheap knockoffs that have gamed the system. It’s frustrating to shop there and a dice roll whenever you order something.
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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 not enough to make money, they have to make all the money. They have a requirement for perpetual growth.
Yes, which is impossible in a world with finite resources. Utter madness.
Attempting to squeeze more money out of everything is only making the world worse. Everything is disposable, service-bound and overmonetized, and they keep pushing more and more ads and psychological trickery at us to try to sell it.
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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.
Yeah, if I need something next day, I’ll go buy it today. :)
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.
wow, wtf. what a scam.
You can even get a free week of prime for 2 dollars by just not giving-in which you can then immediately cancel and get ovre and over and over and over again.
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.
I did a review on Amazon yesterday that said I was shocked to receive a quality product because everything on modem Amazon is post war recycled tin toy quality.
They have not approved my review.
It’s like a second golden age of internet piracy, and it’s happening because streaming over saturated itself just like cable lmao
The cancelled Coyote vs ACME movie might only be available on the high seas, matey. It be my current white whale, yarr.
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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?
Are their profits going down?
It will be like the Netflix exodus, the reddit exodus, etc. They’ll make more money. The best you can do is be true to yourself and not participate if you don’t want to.
Sadly, this. Average consumer, and I don’t mean it as an insult, will not look for an alternative to streaming. All these giant streaming companies are gauging how far they can go to increase the profit margins.
I’m a technically savvy average consumer. I’ve just been accepting the enshitification. It feels like every month a different company is raising prices.
I’m about ready to put on an eye patch and fly the Jolly Roger at this point.
Yarr
Clever
My prediction is that it all goes back to Netflix when they decide it’s not worth the time and expense to run their own services. They had a nice passive income thing going on there for many years and can have it again if they just license their IP again.
streaming has absolutely no future.
Streaming isn’t going anywhere, and if anything will likely continue to grow for as cable dies off. It’s just going to consolidate and get shittier (ads) as basically things move back to a model more cable-like. Piracy will probably ramp back to like levels for music in the early 2000’s, but it will remain a niche. Amazon specifically will see blowback for this, but it’s unlikely to move many off of Prime since it’s sort of a tertiary benefit to having a Prime membership, and even if it’s all you got for your Prime membership, it’s still one of the cheapest streaming services.
We need open source streaming or something… Ya kno?
Ppl should make their own YouTube Amazon / Google companies or else we shall all perish do to advertisements
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.
Gotta love phantom rules, just make it up as you go along.
It’s fun to watch people react and move on rather than stop and consider.
I don’t see that in the rules
Then you didn’t look too closely. !technology@lemmy.world’s first rule is to follow the lemmy.world rules and links to the mastodon.world rules page. The first server rule there is “No illegal content.”
Chitak is Swedish - no laws broken.
It’s more about where the host server is located. Server owners in the US can lose protection from law suits if they don’t actively moderate.
Nobody wants a cease and desist from the MPAA or RIAA. Least of all Lemmy admins with no money for lawyers.
oooh yay more content to collect from torrents. Bye Bye Prime.
Yeah, streaming services are losing the plot. I’m good lol.
Give it time and we’ll all be back on Netflix with all the catalogs available there.
Jellyfin
Planning a build with my friend, we are going 50/50 in for a dedicated Jellyfin server + NAS to preserve all our media.
I’ve got the next week off, migrating from Plex to Jellyfin is on my todo list, but I really like the pipeline I have set up now for … my sailing habit. arrr
I’ve been trying, but for some reason, it will not recognize my HD. I’be reformatted my drive…tried different drives…I don’t know what else to do.
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Pirate services are cheaper and have better apps
Pirate “services”?
Servarr Suite. Netflix interface, piracy backend. Operates over Usenet. Can handle movies, tv, music and ebooks. I’ve been told there are viable workarounds for televised sports, specifically F1.
