Netflix, once a pioneer of ad-free viewing that offered a break from traditional TV norms, is now contemplating launching free ad-supported versions of its service in markets like Europe and Asia, Bloomberg reported.
The plans to offer a free ad-supported tier, albeit in select markets, suggests that pivot towards monetizing user data, in other words — making users and not the extensive library of award-winning shows a product, might be well in the pipeline.
still gonna stick to torrents for my media netflix cause i wanna actually have control of them
Do it!
Ill cut subscription to free tier let adblockers do the rest. Profit.Streaming is just cable
The difference is that my ad blocker is quick and painless to set up, where TiVo involved some capital and planning.
Didn’t some cable companies get all butthurt that you could fast forward through the recorded commercials?
For now. YouTube is already starting to dedicate serious resources to anti ad blocking. I’m sure other streaming services aren’t that far behind.
but more more inconvenient since now you have about ten different apps instead of everything in the same place.
There is one benefit, at least for now. You aren’t locked into long term contracts like cable has/had.
Imo that’s pretty much the only benefit these days. But I’m also waiting for those 1 year, 2 year, etc “deals” where they offer $1/mo off or something
Don’t they already do that? I swear I saw a streaming service that offered 20% off the price if you agreed to pay 2 years in advance or something like that. That is already a thing on SaaS subscriptions.
I know Hulu has an annual billing option where they won’t prorate your bill if you cancel mid term, but I don’t know if there are any that just flat out won’t let you cancel.
I expect to see this soon as a way of combatting people who join one for a month or two, binge, then switch to another provider.
It might not come in the form of contracts at first, maybe they will just jack up the price of month to month high enough that people will voluntarily buy into a contract or yearly pre-purchase.
Trust me, there is always a way to make more money if you’re OK with being anti-consumer. It’s just a matter of time.
Great for piracy!
Piracy it is then…
Enshittification? ✔️
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Netflix, once a pioneer of ad-free viewing that offered a break from traditional TV norms, is now contemplating launching free ad-supported versions of its service in markets like Europe and Asia, Bloomberg reported.
Greg Peters, Netflix’s co-CEO, recently told The Verge that they view ad sales as “a new muscle” for the streaming giant to “build” and then apparently flex.
According to a recent Madison and Wall survey, cited by Bloomberg, Netflix currently ranks around ninth or tenth in the online video advertising space, all while lagging far behind not only YouTube, but also Disney and Paramount, and struggling to catch up with Amazon and Roku.
Maxine Gurevich of Horizon Media argued that as long as people find the service valuable and the ads are minimally intrusive — that is, highly relevant and engaging — they should not detract from the overall user experience.
For example, Netflix’s intention to show ads during the NFL’s Christmas games to all subscribers, including those in the ad-free tier, is a tad disconcerting.
Only time will tell what happens with Netflix’s subscription tiers, and whether we’ll see moderately priced ad-supported options alongside premium ad-free versions that will be generally out of reach for regular consumers.
The original article contains 589 words, the summary contains 201 words. Saved 66%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Ads provide a much needed break so I can check my phone without missing anything.
/s
the ads are minimally intrusive — that is, highly relevant and engaging — they should not detract from the overall user experience
In what universe do ads, no matter how “relevant and engaging”, ever not detract from the overall experience?
Cerveza Cristal?
I hate ads, but sometimes prime puts 2 minutes of ads at the beginning of a show or a movie and then no ads, I’m ok-ish with this, much better than imdb or tubi that play the same commercial every 15 minutes
If I start a stream and it shows that it will have several breaks I stop it and get it from the high seas
I would be fine with that if it was free and didn’t reply the ads if I stop and resume.
If I am paying money, then ads are unacceptable.
Included with this, promoting one of your shows before the one your watching starts should be considered an ad and not happen on ad free tiers, looking at you HBO and Paramount.
I wish they wouldn’t do that. If i have to hear about Southern New Hampshire University again I’m gonna hurt somebody.
If I agree to free thing and have to watch ads, aight fine.
But at least make them different man, i hate that they play the same one over and over again. It does not make me want to buy your product.
I was sitting in a diner the other day and one of their TV’s was apparently, for lack of a better word, tuned to that Samsung TV Plus service. I watched it play the same Kia ad four times, back to back. Not in separate commercial breaks. All in one commercial break where the same ad was played four times consecutively.
Just like you, I have to say they found no success in making me want to buy a Kia.
But you are telling us about kia, so maybe it did work
When is interrupting my viewing experience to show me an ad ever actually relevant?
Those ads that are now inserted during the program on us tv shows are annoying as fuck Banner at the bottom or side… Goddamnit.
I’ve been watching Monk recently, without ads, and it’s very interesting how television shows used to be written and edited for commercials. It’s dead obvious where the commercials used to be, and even that detracts from the overall experience.
Its painfully obvious when watching Star Trek TNG.
I don’t know if this was true in all markets, but in the Indiana market when we were kids, TNG would play a sort of mini-version of the theme when it went to break and now when a show or movie fades out or it’s an old show and goes to break, I annoy my wife by singing it.
modern shows frame things differently to account for people watching on tiny phone screens and we might be bothered a few years down the line when we get holodecks or
mind controlimplantsI don’t mind those breaks… It feels like going to the next chapter in a book.
But actual ads, yea, not for a service that costs.
Though this whole thing is funny - they collect even more user data than they did with cable or broadcast, and now want to show you ads too.
Can’t wait to finish my media server setup.
Some shows we’ve watched spend their time “recapping” after the 'ad breaks", playing same scenes we just saw. Drives me nuts, wastes my time and feels so dated.
That was a trope of real tv shows especially , and also a way to fill time with less filmed content i.e cost cutting. Often you’d see many shots 5-7 times throughout the show. Opening montage , before ad tease, after ad recap, thr event itself, end of show montage summary etc. Also drives me nuts. Even back when ads were between. “Yes I know what happened two minutes ago!”. And then there were so many shows you could tell the edit project file was a template and they just replaced the footage. Same exact structure every episode.
Reality tv shows took this the farthest its so bad
One of my favorite skits for that: https://youtu.be/7MFtl2XXnUc?si=i6He7wklxdSt8gpn
Anime was bad for this too, especially the dubbed kind and one piece.
Monk doesn’t go that far, and it’s still obvious. “Here’s a joke before commercial!” Pause. Fade back in to a new scene. Pause. “Here’s a little cliffhanger before commercial!” Pause. Fade back in to a new scene. Pause.
Ahhh, I suffer from this with old animes!
I’m gonna be king of the recaps! 👒
There are also shows that based jokes around the fact that they were going to or just came back from a commercial break and now you don’t have those in those shows. And now, I guess, they’ll go back to editing shows for ads.
What a weird modern landscape we’ve made for ourselves.
What a weird modern landscape we’ve made for ourselves.
Every generation ever. Well, maybe since inventing the wheel
Same, been watching Dead Like Me and Xena: Warrior Princess and it’s pretty distracting when it happens.
we were not he consumers… we were the product lol…
yeah it hurts, so let’s stop allowing ads into our lives as much as possible…
the fact that netflix wants to offer it for free is telling what their core business i turning into…
I’m not streaming it, it’s on my media server, so there are no ads. I don’t pay for any services except Shudder because it’s still cheap and niche.
good, same here but we are a very small minority…
half the population still pays for cable haha
Their core business is lost, IMO. Once they stopped offering movies in favor of their own content and tv shows, thats when it was game over for me.
I agree I stopped with them mid 2010s… their OG content is just low quality engagement slop. I prefer spytube for that.
Futurama had some jokes based around the commercial break times.
The Simpsons as well.
Engaging is the last thing I want from an ad
You engage with the skip button
The advertising ouroboros continues to devour itself
I won’t support any streaming service that has a sub+ad tier. Ads with no sub or sub no ads, anything else is incredibly greedy and the same as cable TV.
If they aren’t going to charge for access otherwise then I don’t think being ad supported is such a bad thing. Much more honest than subscription pricing and ads in my opinion.
yeah, imo it’s either ads or paid. not both. both is scummy
Life is stupid. What are we even DOING here???
That’s a broad leap no? Giants rise and fall. Look at betamax, BlockBuster, Kodak, etc
There’s always going to be something better out there, as long as you’re still looking and leaving the old post. Chin up!
…betamax as a giant? They entered a format war, and died in their first few years of existance.
The others I get. Kodak was around almost 100 years, blockbuster nearly 40, both at one time the dominant leaders of their industries. Both fell to failing to adapt to change.
But betamax? It came out around the same time as vhs, and vhs was cheaper.
Same with 8-tracks and cassettes.
I mean, my point still stands but if we want to talk about semantics - are you saying betamax wasn’t a giant?
Obviously they entered the vhs war and lost, but after that it was pretty much downhill for the rest of their company and products. They were a big name brand and crashed out by entering a war they ultimately lost. That’s all I’m tryin to get at
They want to squeeze out that extra bit of profit and get the users that never subscribed on there so they can boast about improved numbers.
There’s no better ad for piracy than the greed of corporations. Don’t let ads shit in your head. They disrespect you, you disrespect them.
I have hardware dedicated to blocking ads on my home network.
What hardware do you use? I have a pihole. Unfortunately it doesn’t block ads on Youtube except in the web browser.
For a long time my pihole was able to do it with some regex entries, but Google was pretty persistent about not letting that work, so for Android I just started doing Revanced.
Like you said, the web browser still blocks fine.
That will only go so far unfortunately. And network level ad blocking won’t protect you from their ads if they’re served from the same servers the content is.
uBlock will manage :)
Not when they are part of the same stream
And not when your client is a Netflix app on your smart tv.
Ublock is not network level ad blocking.
But it helps in addition for the annoying stuff that is not possible to filter on the network.
“People are taking the piss out of you every day. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.”
Banksy
