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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

#211

Post by chrismarlow9 »

beloch wrote: post #86

"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 mu…

The streaming services are aggregated through fire stick, Roku, Google and Apple tv, etc. The payment model and delivery of content is different now though.

Streaming services are akin to channel packages from traditional cable. You get an aggregate of content for a price per month. The issue is the point of aggregation is meaningless to the consumer for the popular services (Netflix, Apple tv, prime).

In traditional cable it's done by topic (movie package with HBO, showtime, starz or sports package). With these more popular streaming services it's aggregated by production company and other arbitrary things that are meaningless. Leaving me with 8 thousand movies on a service where I only care about 10, but I pay either way.

The Crunchyroll model of "this is an anime streaming service" has it right for VOD in my opinion, as does WWE.

I think a micro payment setup would work better for something like Netflix. Something like pay $1/month to watch stranger things. $40/month gets you 40 shows per month. Free to watch first 5 episodes or something. I can't think of any better way to truly gauge what's popular than to let people vote with their wallet directly.

Right now with these services it feels like we're subsidizing content that nobody cares about leading to a big murky pool of trash content. Just my 2 cents.

Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#212

Post by pdimitar »

88840-8855 wrote: post #133
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…

Can you be so kind and explain the setup behind the youtube-NAS bridge? Are videos being downloaded automatically? Are subtitles added to the local files? Do you have to manually select all videos you want to archive/safe on your NAS? What NAS do you have?

I might have misled you about the complexity of my setup, sorry.

I didn't even setup something like FreeNAS or something. I just setup ZFS and enabled SMB and NFS on top of it. This is on a spare computer that I've setup with Linux.

Then I've setup `cron` tasks that run various scripts that just download various YouTube playlists -- hand-picked and curated by me.

Nothing you'd call an intelligent software. Just hand-picked places on YouTube to monitor and sync once a day.

It's only automatic insofar as `cron` executes `yt-dlp` with a bunch of URLs.

Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#213

Post by jerojero »

Jimajesty wrote: post #59

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.

Bypass paywalls clean is a very good extension to get rid of these subscription annoyances, although, i guess it is a form of piracy.

Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#214

Post by neRok »

quietthrow wrote: post #114
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 all…

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/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.

Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#215

Post by bsder »

bubblethink wrote: post #197
bsder wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I want to push back on calling Uber's methods to avoiding regulations to be unethical, separately from discussing the wages. Nope. Uber doesn't get a pass. Uber could have confined themselves to the secondary cities with terrible cab service. Basically that's any city in the US other than New York and Chicago. People would (and some did!) have greeted them like liberators. For example, taxi service in Las Vegas was…

But why ? You start with the place with the most impact and deal with the long tail later. So NYC should be the first. Several states don't allow direct sales of electric vehicles despite how well it works in other states. It's a pointless legal issue that will drag on for years/decades. If Tesla et al. had the same impunity and legal cover as Uber, they would be selling everywhere, and we would all be better off.

> But why ? You start with the place with the most impact and deal with the long tail later. So NYC should be the first.

Because your "long tail" of poorly functional taxi systems consisted of cities like Los Angeles, Houston, and San Diego. These aren't tiny even when compared to New York. "Most impact" should be the largest city without a functional taxi system. THOSE should have been the focus and then you would have had demand pull into New York and Chicago.

But, no, Uber wanted the "growth hack" of burning VC cash to transfer a bunch of people from the already functional taxi system into the ridesharing system.

> If Tesla et al. had the same impunity and legal cover as Uber, they would be selling everywhere, and we would all be better off.

Laws exist for a reason. Sometimes, such as the case of Tesla, those laws go out of date and should be changed. The medallion system, however, came into existence to avoid malfeasance by drivers. And, as we have seen, as Uber has reduced pay to the drivers, we are getting the exact problems medallions were put in place to solve.

Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#216

Post by j-bos »

bit_savager wrote: post #72

> "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 consum…

- They are disloyal leeches.

Implies there ever was, or should have been any loyalty. Should a child be loyal to a stranger offering candy? Let's even grant the stranger purest of intentions. Should they?

I personally am not friends with any corporation, and I'd laugh at any suggestion of the inverse. It's business, the few businesses that demonstrate and earn trust will have loyalty, but it's all uphill. Because after, they're just strangers.

Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#217

Post by SXX »

MisterBastahrd wrote: post #203
rowanG077 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Epic game store definitely tries to enforce exclusivity. Prime example beeing Square Enix games. FF7 Remake first released on Epic Game Store and only much later released on Steam. Kingdom Hearts still isn't available in Steam and probably never will be. It's one of the prime reasons I will never buy from them. That way lies madness.

Epic even gives away two games a week. Still doesn't make much of a difference.

Epic giveaway tactics is mainly targeted at their Fortnite audience. There are some kids who never had a Steam account before, but who play Fortnite. So Epic goal is to get them on the hook by providing them with a library of free games.

At the same time giveaways mean very little for existing Steam audience. Piracy was always easy on PC and gamers choose Steam over piracy not jusf because of law or moral reasons, but because Steam is more convinient and offer tons of features.

EGS is simply lacking a lot of niche, but importanf features. Most people likely only ever 5% of Steam features, but you soon find how useful are some of them when you try other platform.

Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#218

Post by causality0 »

KiranRao0 wrote: post #85
pdpi wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s important to take Steam DRM in context. In a world where DRM was becoming more intrusive by the day, and you had to contend with every game having its own unique way to mess your system up in its fight against piracy, Steam provided one single DRM system that almost everybody agrees to use. For consumers, worse than no DRM, but miles ahead of the status quo it replaced. Also, Steam does have an offline mode. You…

In some ways, Steam has provided an experience better than having no DRM. I can hop in a friend's computer and download any game I've purchased. Or I can delete old games to free up space and redownload them later (without having to deal with DVDs or external USB drives). The tradeoff is handing over the control of my game library to a company. I can see how that tradeoffs can be compelling to some and not worthwhile…

If Valve ever stabbed me in the back I could just pirate my library back, so I'm not that worried.

Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#219

Post by yardstick »

quietthrow wrote: post #114
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 all…

Try out Channels DVR [1] as your DVR server on a small server/NUC, and HDHomeRun Quattro [2] as your tuner.

It’s a great combo. ChannelsDVR Ad detection always finds just the right spot in my experience (UK, but heard the same from US friends).

One caveat with HDHomeRun is they had supply chain issues like everyone else recently so their may not be in stock or might be easier to find via Amazon etc.

1. https://getchannels.com/dvr-server/

2. https://www.silicondust.com/hdhomerun/

Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#220

Post by winternett »

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…

That's refreshing to read. I thought I was the only one tired of reruns of the office and south park combined with vapid cheaply produced reality and tik tok video clip replay shows.

I really wonder why anyone would dump $100 or more on cable TV any more unless perhaps they need to watch sports channels.

Commercials are dull as well, the way they repeat "accidentally"... ugh.

It will eventually burn out once the pandemic isolation is all over.

It's really going to be a drought for blockbuster entertainment, At least we have plenty of 90s movies and music to fall back on, It's a good thing I kept my old DVDs, Mp4s, Mp3s, and my DVDr drive... No commercials at all unless I want to see them. :)

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