You’ll have to pay more to go ad-free.
I got a message earlier today saying my subscription would now include ads. I immediately cancelled the subscription out of principle.
They won't though. People will complain, but not do anything about it.
i know quite a few people that started pirating after netflix went downhill, anecdotally.
I remember when Netflix first introduced the ad supported plan and a lot of people were like this is how they make you pay extra to not see ads, and a lot of other people called that fud because it's an additional tier and the normal tier isn't impacted.
At the time I was yelling that it was just the first step - create an ad free plan, wait for people to calm down, then slowly raise the prices until the ad supported plan costs as much as the ad free one used to. And there you have it, they charged extra to not see ads, just with extra steps.
I quit Netflix back then and I'm so glad I did. $10/mo in electricity gets me every streaming service on my Plex, that's like a $100/mo value and I get to share it with all my friends.
When it has a show that I want to watch, I much prefer Netflix - e.g. solid streaming, captions, etc. The servers also don't just randomly disappear over time. I may need to reevaluate just what amount I enjoy Netflix though...
That's the thing: it will take me more time and attention to figure that all out, plus either a hardware purchase or even more time and attention to spin up an appropriate VM - e.g. I wonder if Netflix ads can be bypassed if my router itself is running a blocker specifically for them - and if so would it be like a minute of empty space at the start of each show (I could totally live with that), or randomly 5 minutes of such every 10 minutes (possibly depending on the show, and maybe more frequent if it keeps trying bc it knows the ads weren't previously delivered).
I haven't done such for over a decade, and the landscape has entirely changed. I was hoping that a couple of shows that disappeared from Netflix when Disney+ came out would get me by for like a year. And it might actually.
Anyway, Netflix knows all this, and is counting on people not willing to put in the time & energy to bypass it. Which is fine - it is a service they provide after all - so now it's a matter of how much pain they can get away with causing before the other alternatives start to look more attractive...
i've never bought netflix and went to visit some friends who had it. since they sleep until noon i had the morning to kill so i tried the netflix-- reminded me of the old days of flipping through hundreds of tv channels trying to find something to watch and finding nothing. "people pay for this shit?" was the initial thought
There is so much fucking nothing on Netflix.
There was something called Car Crash: Who's Lying on the list the other day, and from the description and image, it genuinely looks like a police training video that accidentally made it's way onto a mainstream streaming service.
Their documentaries are all utter dogshit as well, designed for people with an IQ of 80.
The only things still going for it are Mike Flanagan's stuff, 15 seasons of Taskmaster and the odd horror movie that I otherwise wouldn't have heard of. As good as Jellyfin is, it doesn't really have much in the way of recommendations.
