Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

ft.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 231 posts

Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#41

Post by ElCheapo »

gonehome wrote: post #28
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #13

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 wan…

> “ 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.

Imagine a world where anyone who wants can set up his little torrent seedbox sharing with the whole globe some content they really like without worrying about getting a nice little letter in the mail. I'm pretty sure if people were free to do so (and cheap and easy commercial options sprung up) we would be able to find any content we desire and download it and (if it's popular enough) even stream it

Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#42

Post by davidgerard »

gonehome wrote: post #28
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #13

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 wan…

> “ 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.

For comedy gold, look through the DMCA notifications that Google links you to, and that's your index of helpful and current torrent sites. Many are very usable through machine translation too.

Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#43

Post by vladvasiliu »

hotpotamus wrote: post #36
vladvasiliu wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I could say a bit about well paid engineers who don't pay for the content they consume That may cover many people, but GP's post seems different. They went out of their way to "digitize their [presumably bought] collection" just to be able to avoid ads. This doesn't sound at all like "not paying for the content", they're actually paying above the content: I don't think the NAS comes from the pirate bay. We've actua…

I doubt the media company lawyers would see it that way. And while they're ghouls, they'd have a point too. What counts as paying? I've got a colleague who would never download a movie illegally; he simply has a constant stream of Netflix DVDs (they're still doing that in case you thought that business was totally dead) that he rips and then sends back. He's paying someone for content, right?

I think the difference is that if you buy the cd, even second hand, and keep it, you're fine because you own it.

At least in Europe, there's the whole "personal copy tax" that's levied on all storage media as well as a "private copying exception" to copyright law.

Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#44

Post by mumblemumble »

pdimitar wrote: post #38

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, t…

> 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.

Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#45

Post by AstralStorm »

pdimitar wrote: post #38

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, t…

Unfortunately your downloads are either not actually legally owned by you, just licensed, and potentially subject to DRM in some cases.

Same with the books. The library asking permission is actually good and what may make it legal. However, that is called a license and may have serious limitations.

Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#47

Post by pdimitar »

mumblemumble wrote: post #44
pdimitar wrote: post #38

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, t…

> 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.

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).

Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#48

Post by pdimitar »

AstralStorm wrote: post #45
pdimitar wrote: post #38

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, t…

Unfortunately your downloads are either not actually legally owned by you, just licensed, and potentially subject to DRM in some cases. Same with the books. The library asking permission is actually good and what may make it legal. However, that is called a license and may have serious limitations.

Thanks for the clarification. Yep I know but enforcing this requires a game of whack-a-mole with tens of millions of moles to whack. I wish them luck.

It's a thin ice, obviously, but let's also recognize the fact that they forced us to walk on ice in the first place. They made up the rules. Had there been any sanity in these people left a lot of money would have never been expended in making examples out of regular Joes and Janes.

Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#49

Post by jcranmer »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #13

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 wan…

> 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.

Well, Youtube's ad problem comes from the fact that it is run by the largest internet advertiser. Netflix--video streaming in general--suffers from the fact that there are very few major content producers, and after seeing the monetary success of Netflix, the content producers decided to create their own streaming platforms and deliver their content only via them.

While there have been attempts to build alternative video game platforms than Steam (notably Epic Games Store and Origin), they haven't been able to enforce an exclusivity deal of the kind that showed up in video streaming. I'm not entirely certain why, but it seems to be a mixture of the lack of centralization in developers (so must-have is much less a factor in video games as it is for movies), the need for multi-platform distribution anyways to reach consoles, and the necessary social media integration (you need friend lists to be able to invite friends) making fragmentation more painful for users.

Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#50

Post by carapace »

fein wrote: post #10
ramesh31 wrote: post #9

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 capa…

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?

I see this sort of thing as a tax on the less-technologically-sophisticated. That's the essence of the whole tech business culture: Morlocks and Eloi.

SPOILER ALERT

> A work of future history and speculative evolution, Time Machine is interpreted in modern times as a commentary on the increasing inequality and class divisions of Wells' era, which he projects as giving rise to two separate human species: the fair, childlike Eloi, and the savage, simian Morlocks, distant descendants of the contemporary upper and lower classes respectively.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_time_machine

Here the "classes" are derived from technical skill and knowledge. It might seem bizarre to us here on HN but just knowing about e.g. ublock origin let alone how to install it makes you one of the elite.

I don't really know how to feel about all this. On the one hand, it seems regressive to me to herd folks into silos and milk them (FAANG). On the other hand, people have to take some personal responsibility for their own education and agency, right? Computers aren't really that hard? No one's holding a gun to their heads to make them use FAANG products and services. Certainly, the options to live a more free and open life are there, eh?

Mickey Mouse finally goes out of copyright next year.

Post reply on HN