I’d seen rumours online but got the email this morning.
EDIT: seems like there won’t be ads for everyone straight away.
- Live events, such as sports, and content offered through Amazon Freevee will continue to include advertising. Customers in the Republic of Ireland, Channel Islands, and Isle of Man won’t see ads in their experience at this time.
You don’t actually have to pay Amazon anything. I suggest you consider this.
Exactly.
I canceled my sub when I got the email. I’m going to pirate anything I want to see from them from now on.
Consider: Pirate everything. It’s just a race to the bottom. The average you can charge for an ad tiered service will just continue shifting up as each streaming service gently increases their ad-free prices. If it was ~$15/mo avg before this, now Netflix sees the avg price go to $15.57/mo. If you’re going to increase the price by 57¢ you might as well make it a nice round $1…Then Hulu sees the average go to $16.13 so then they need to increase their prices. So on and so forth until we’re back to paying $60/mo like we did for cable TV.
And here’s the kicker. They’re legally obligated to do this because they could be sued by shareholders for not trying to make more money. And that’s without mentioning that they actually prefer people to watch the ads because they generate more revenue from sponsored advertising. Pirating is ethical and cool. Paying subscription fees to trillion dollar corporations is cringe.
And I just cancelled. Fuck them. This is 1990’s pay TV repeating itself. I’m not playing that part of history again.
Options:
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Pay no extra and suffer annoying adverts in all movies and shows.
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Pay an extra £35.88 a year to get the same awful experience you had before.
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Save £95 a year and cancel it. Spend your savings on a VPN, and look into Jellyfin, Radarr and Sonarr. BEST VALUE
Is there a guide for dummies you’d recommend. PVR and etc are unknown terms for me. I used to torrent under vpn but that was in the Limewire days… hoping for some help in the safest ways to return to the seas.
There’s plenty of guides for Linux, but with Windows you’re a bit more reliant on installers and reading some of the guides about setting all the bits up.
Off the top of my head, you need:
qBittorrent (for downloading, turn on the web interface, and you can configure it to do nothing if not connected to your VPN)
Prowlarr (this scrapes torrent data from websites and collates it all together for the other parts of this system, add some sources once you install that)
Radarr (browse movies and pick which ones you want, link it to Prowlarr and qBittorrent, give it a folder e.g. D:\Movies to download into)
Sonarr (same as Radarr but for TV, again link it to Prowlarr and qBittorrent, give it a different folder e.g. D:\TV to download into)
Jellyfin (an open source Netflix, allows you to play the stuff you downloaded in a pretty web UI, or through a client program you can get for a couple of platforms, add the folders you told Radarr and Sonarr to download to)
Then you tweak everything that annoys you. By default it’s quite happy to grab full 60GB+ Blu-ray releases, which is fine if you’re on a fast connection and have lots of storage, but if a movie is over 10GB or so, it all looks the same to me. Depending on how you watch, you might have to mess with Jellyfin clients to figure out why certain videos won’t play. It’s pretty good but it’s not perfect.
How does a VPN give you access to shows on Amazon that require Prime? Or do you mean it’ll just give you access to more shows than you’d have otherwise?
like the other poster said it doesnt give you access to amazon’s shows on amazon’s site. Helpful pirates all over the world tirelessly upload “amazon’s” content to the grand line. When I tell people about a show I’m loving it’s always an interesting conversation when they ask me ‘what service is it on?’ and i straight up have no idea.
perhaps you already know this, but if you don’t, MOST pirate streaming sites have everything from every service right there in a searchable webpage that looks like (usually a discount version but sometimes superior) a paid streaming site.
It’s not even cope to say they are generally easier to navigate and search than the services you have to PAY for. All you need is ublock origin <—(non-negotiable) and you have access to a superior service IMMEDIATELY.
No disgusting UI trying to make you watch other shite that is clearly a failure.
No scrolling threw pages down to just get down to the “continue watching” section.
No advert between each episode that isn’t an “ad” screaming the same scene for their next original failure.
No shite algorithm recommending me the next show I’m clearly not interested in
The VPN is to shield yourself from DMCA (in the US, of course) while you sail the high seas.
Clean access to content from all streaming services, Ad free and cheaper than a standard Prime Subscription.
Not to mention the broader positive that people getting used to accessing the Internet behind a VPN also screws the Surveillance State we now have in many supposedly democratic nations (remember to switch exit points once in a while).
Even more entertaining, trying to weaken or forbidding VPNs will totally screw lots of really big companies (which use it for allowing their employees to securelly access their networks remotelly) and well as the basis of secure consumer access to financial services, so it’s going to be pretty hard to stop this (notice miserable failure of the UK - pretty much the biggest surveillance state that claims to be democratic - at trying to forbid this stuff over there).
For maximum impact:
- Avoid Amazon like the plague.
I’ve been doing it for years and don’t regret it on bit in light of the regular sleazy behaviours of Amazon coming to light (their removing of ebooks that people bought from their Fire Tables alone is the reason why I never bought any digital media from them except for a single music track in MP3 format a decade or so ago).
that looks to be almost all steaming services adding an ad-supported option, you now pay to not have ads.
Back to the high sea’s to watch anything then
Aye, what a fuckin crew. Everybody knows the noobs don’t know how important seeding is, and bitch about download speeds 🤨
Edit: ignore this. They actually do offer an adfree sub
But Amazon is not doing this. They show ads on the one subscription they have, that they already recently have raised the price for. This is higher price for lower quality and no option to upgrade or downgrade. They leave you the option to stay or leave
I cancelled Prime as soon as I got this email. It was set to renew in February so perfect timing. I also sent them an email to provide some feedback about the change:
I cancelled my membership as soon as I received notification that you would be including ads to a PAID streaming service. I cannot believe that you think asking for more money per month to have an ad free experience is ok. The world is going to shit because of greedy corporations like you. I hope you go bankrupt and Jeff Bezos goes looking for the Titanic in a poorly made submarine.
Exactly what I did too! Sadly, most Americans would gladly continue paying for their lessened experience. When faced with potentially losing a tiny bit of content, most Americans will gladly pull down their pants.
