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A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

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Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#111

Post by Sholmesy »

Jiro wrote: post #97
no_time wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The availability of content is still superior to paid offerings. The problem is discoverability. 10+ years ago you could get a well seeded torrent anything by googling "anything+torrent". Nowadays you can still get anything but you have to be way more tech savvy and have to break out of your comfort zone. This could mean invite only sites,Russian speaking sites,Fiddling with baidu download scripts etc. Seeing how muc…

I've literally looked for things that I could reasonably expect to be on the Internet and couldn't find them on the Internet. The newest hot thing is still available, of course, but an obscure 5 years old show may not always be.

usenet is taking off in a big way (does 1979 tech really count as taking off?).

Alternatively, invite-only/private torrent trackers are as good/better than the old days.

Way harder for regular folks to break into the scene, but it's far more "professional"(?) now

Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#112

Post by ChrisLomont »

notsapiensatall wrote: post #99
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…

Among other things, Steam is not operated by a publicly-traded company. They don't need to answer to faceless shareholders at the end of every quarter. They can settle for making whatever they consider to be "enough money" without chasing endless growth.

Steam still has shareholders to answer to, with the same human motives as any shareholder, so I don't think this argument holds water. I suspect they'd try to get whatever growth they can because otherwise eventually someone will overtake them.

And empirically they are still growing at rates [1] not common among any class of companies, so someone there is certainty pushing for incredible growth.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/308330/number-stream-use...

Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#113

Post by newaccount74 »

wongarsu wrote: post #100
AstralStorm wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steam is successful because its advertising is rather low key, showing a popup with offers, and providing a search, directory plus suggestions. Their gain is from consumer analytics too. (They also take a cut for using their platform from the game developers or publishers. It also provides some added value like achievements, basic social media in forms of forums and chat, some (somewhat broken at times) controller ha…

Steam's most important advertising is actually quite in your face, and used to occupy a good part of the gaming sphere for a couple of weeks each year: their sales with discounts between 50-90% (calculated from the current "regular price" which for older games is often already far below original retail price). They've switched it up in recent years, making the summer sales tamer in exchange for more weekly sales, but…

They are really good at it, too. Fallout 4 for just 8€? Brilliant, I've heard so much about it, let me check it out. But just 5€ more and I get all the DLC? And there's a bundle with Skyrim? Before I realise whats going on I spent 30€ on games released a decade ago that I don't really have time to play anyway.

Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#114

Post by quietthrow »

suzzer99 wrote: post #102

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

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?

Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#115

Post by DocTomoe »

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.

There are plugins that work surprisingly well in skipping that bullshit [1]

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sponsorblock-for-y...

Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#116

Post by notsapiensatall »

ChrisLomont wrote: post #112
notsapiensatall wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Among other things, Steam is not operated by a publicly-traded company. They don't need to answer to faceless shareholders at the end of every quarter. They can settle for making whatever they consider to be "enough money" without chasing endless growth.

Steam still has shareholders to answer to, with the same human motives as any shareholder, so I don't think this argument holds water. I suspect they'd try to get whatever growth they can because otherwise eventually someone will overtake them. And empirically they are still growing at rates [1] not common among any class of companies, so someone there is certainty pushing for incredible growth. [1] https://www.stati…

The difference is that their shares are not publicly offered. Their shareholders much more likely to be people with vested interests in the company's long-term health, rather than retail investors and hedge funds who reliably demand short-term returns.

Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#117

Post by DocTomoe »

scarface74 wrote: post #64
alexfromapex wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why is everyone acting so apocalyptic? Netflix is offering a cheaper tier with ads. If you don’t want ads, keep paying for the tier you have been paying.

Because that's how it starts. Eventually, the cheaper tier will be with more ads, the more expensive tier will no longer be ad-free, but have "some" ads.

It has happened before. It will happen again.

Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#118

Post by skocznymroczny »

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…

Steam was at the right place at the right time. Also it was more insidious in its behavior. Throughout the late 2000s and 2010s most AAA games were Steam releases only. Even boxed copies were not much more than a Steam code. This allowed them to build a powerful network effect. At some point gamers were demanding that any new big release was a Steam release ("no steam no buy").

Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#119

Post by zo1 »

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…

Not directed at you, but the DNS thing I have to say something and will keep doing it. We got hoodwinked with HTTPS. We handed over to the tech giants, on a silver platter, a secure and soon to be unstoppable mechanism that allows them to go straight from their servers to our eyeballs. We gave up our ability to control and intercept the content flowing through our networks and PCs.

The DNS and other Pihole stuff is a last ditch effort and a poor hack when really we should be able to inspect and alter all packets going through our networks.

And you see it. Your pihole hack doesn't work anymore. Because that was always a loophole and they're closing it now again with DoH (DNS over HTTPS).

All under the guise of privacy. Because somewhere sometime a long time ago an ISP added ads to your web pages and redirected DNS.

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