Amazon requires services on Fire TV to give it 30% of ad impressions or revenue(streamtvinsider.com) |
Amazon requires services on Fire TV to give it 30% of ad impressions or revenue(streamtvinsider.com) |
#2 Wouldn't this movement be (potentially) a great chance for Plex to better position itself in the legal side of streaming? Because by offering a free hub for streaming (even licensing it for hardware sellers like Dlink and others, like Boxee once did) might generate a good revenue stream for them...until somebody buys the whole team (I miss you Boxee!)
Plex may share Collected Information as expressly set forth in this Privacy Policy, including the following limited situations: [...] With third parties to improve and deliver advertising to you on our behalf.
Plex may also use third-party advertising companies to serve ads, which may, directly or indirectly, collect or use information about user visits to websites and mobile app usage over time and across non-affiliated websites and mobile apps to display advertisements more tailored to users’ interests on this browser or device, and those browsers or devices associated with it.
More in the "Data We Collect" section: https://www.plex.tv/about/privacy-legal/
i'm okay with that. the shows i watch don't need to be a secret. i want advertisers to know what i watch, so more of that sort of TV gets made. If Plex can make money off this information, and give me a good service in exchange for that, it seems like an arrangement that benefits us both. what's the problem?
RE Plex, that's basically what Android TV does, except it's better than Plex (for streaming services and device manufacturers) and has the same model as FireTV
- Customers bought the devices without the 30% rule in effect
- Amazon introduces the 30% rule
- Customers will now be asked higher prices to make up for the lost revenue
The razor-and-blade model is about selling one product cheap to increase sales on a complementary good. It's not about a vendor changing the situation, as is the case here.
You can stream right off SMB shares.
Their is a simple fix - get a contract and don't assume current terms will continue without it.
Hollywood's biggest competitor is content creators on Youtube, Tiktok, etc ... my bet is they will need to compete and many paid offerings will consolidate and become free / less expensive to compete with all the free content creators on YouTube, Tiktok and etc. If you look at where the eyeballs are the majority are on Tiktok. Personally after using Reels, Tiktok and tons more of YouTube i have a hard time watching long form content. I just want to watch stuff here and there in the background while im working or right before bed any other time Im far away from tv screen outside or with friends/family enjoying life.
Further .. i use to watch documentaries on the history channel and or other places ... there's tons of solid and good content creators doing that same thing on youTube.
Free and YouTube are not the same. YouTube either has ads or you're paying. Ads are not free. They take your time, which is in limited supply for everyone on the planet. The use of an adblocker does make it free.
I've never used Tiktok so I have no idea if it has ads and what the frequency is.
> i have a hard time watching long form content
I don't know if this is good or bad. I'm older and think this loss of attention is very much a net bad to thinking, but maybe the new way of devouring content turns out to be a plus. I always wonder if 15 second videos turn to 10 seconds, and then 5 seconds, and then 1 second over the next 100 years. Is the future just a video from the A Clockwork Orange rehabilitation scene and everyone is happy about it?
This is why billionaires who could pay to have someone wipe their ass invest in longevity startups.
Some documentary YouTube channels also clearly just read Wikipedia and regurgitate random online sources. They don’t have the budget to go to the actual source or do any interviews.
Ofc there are a lot of bad TV shows on streaming services too but a world with access to both is nice.
Not more than seven though mmmkay?
It’s the standard business model in this market: sell a streaming device at or below cost and then turn to the streaming services & tell them that if they want access to the XX million people who own your device they’re going to have to pay up. 30% seems to be the going rate.
If they're taking 30% from Netflix, 30% from Max, 30% from Disney, and 30% from Paramount, they're getting over $16/mo. Should it be $16/mo per user?
The problem isn't that they need revenue. It's that the revenue demands seem very high compared to the costs of maintaining those boxes. They aren't looking for $10/year to cover their costs and make some profit. They're looking to get more revenue than those actually creating the content.
- Service providers paying them to have their buttons on the remote.
- % cut for movies & TV shows that users purchase on the device.
- % cut for subscriptions/IAPs from all the installed apps.
- Directly driving subscriptions for Prime Video.
- First party ads all over the interface.
- Selling and monetizing viewership data.
Of course none of this is enough, and so the company must continue to squeeze the ecosystem to placate shareholders.
It's not like amazon is paying for the maintenance of the entire software stack. And the part they're doing they mostly have to do anyway to support new devices.
(Sure, this is a lot of effort, but someone might go for the ol' sideload gag.)
Closed ecosystems and walled gardens have all the charm of dental surgery these days but there are all the users.
This is why we need more open standards. Open standards mean open competition and helps reduce monopolies.
soon the move towards mass remote attestation will finally arrive and that'll be the only approved place to install software
They didn't give two shits about it until they realised that it was a major issue of their competitors, now it's become their core features/marketing. But don't think for one second that the protective wall won't spring a leak or two if it can make Apple a profit.
Apple's dominance also comes from them cornering every possible market they can, they want to do everything themselves and monopolise as much as possible, their recent step was designing their own processors, the debacle with them trying to make their own cellular modems etc. Maybe they'll go for displays next but Samsung et al are so far ahead on that game.
They are able to charge 30% of app revenue because they can. They are a for profit company.
Amazon Fire did not do that because nobody uses it. Now that it has some traction, lo and behold, they want their cut as well.
If anything, Roku is the direct competitor (low cost streaming stick) and they take 30% ad revenue. But Apple gets the blame. lol.
The last Windows laptop I bought bricked itself in a week, the Amazon stick needed constant reboots, I don't care about side-loading apps/widgets/software on my devices - I want them to be like my refrigerator and just work. AppleTV devices are much better than others. Once you're in the Apple walled garden things are much easier on me as an end user. There are seamless transitions from device to device if I want, sharing between them is a breeze. Sure other platforms are "open" or might have more advanced features, but I don't want to waste my time doing tech support having the BeenThereDoneThat™ patch.
Edit to add: "open" usually just means you have countless versions of "standards" to try and get things to interoperate. I deal enough with that at work to be turned off from dealing with that at home when I just want to chill and consume whatever nonsense I'm into.
One started a platform with an upfront communicated commission rate that, at the time, was literally received with applause because before that the rates were significantly worse for developers and has never raised the rate in its entire history (instead lowered it for certain circumstances).
The other is a bait and switch, luring people onto the platform under one set of rules, only to pull the rug from under them years after the status quo was established and change the rules to impose a commission that didn’t apply to them until now.
One is hard to argue as an anti-trust violation and the other is pretty much a textbook example.
Pi Hole can help with limiting this:
Here's the 24-hour top blocked domains list for my network (1x Kindle Fire Stick):
Those services get hidden discounts.
Please don't grease the wheels of the attestation hype train.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/netflix/comments/n8ilcz/4kuhd_on_li...
I know that we techies can bypass it fairly easily, regardless of type... but I do understand the argument that 95%+ of people can't bypass DRM even if they tried their hardest, it's just too complicated for them. Which in a sense makes it effective and purposeful?
Ugh.
Like am I taking crazy pills. I got fed up with the madness of all the streaming sticks, and putting in my password with a crappy remote and ended up dropping $300 on an old desktop from a discount computer store. Spent an hour throwing Ubuntu on it, and now bam, works like a charm.
I put the youtube, PBS Kids, and Disney+ (which we later removed) icons on the side so the kids can use it easy.
I can stream Hulu if I had an account, I can watch my Disney+, I can watch youtube, I can watch Netflix if I wanted to. Plus I can play steam games on it, set a fun screensaver. Loads of things.
The best part is I no longer have to try and put in a 12 character password with mixed case, numbers and symbols over a freaking TV remote.
EDIT: Well this blew up more than expected. Many people are pointing out the issues with the quality. I'll be honest I don't care that much about quality, most of the streaming consumption in our house is Wild Kratts, and Bluey anyway.
Beyond that though is that I have to have a slightly worse quality, (meaning orders of magnitude better than the VHS I grew up on) to be able to own my computing device, to be able to have the freedom I want to use it. It's a price I'll happily pay. If they day comes that the streamers decide it's not worth it, then at that day I'll be turning it off and going to the Uncle Ted route of things.
Kind of surprised that Roku hasn't been bought up yet.
Maybe there's a difference between Google TV and an Android TV, but my partner's dad can't buy/rent stuff on Prime Video through his tv, he has to use another device and then can watch it on his tv. He finds it very irksome, to say the least.
My understanding is that this came around by Google insisting on the 30% cut of purchases made in the Prime Video app on the tv, and Amazon told them to pound sand. I could of course be wrong, though.
When I had DirecTV Stream, I bought their streaming device (basically an Android steaming device, but they made it super simple to go into programming, feeling more like traditional cable). They cost $120 each.
(a) Meta will insist their apps are sideloaded to enable privacy violations. Right now, they cannot say goodbye to iOS users. They could say goodbye to the small percentage that refuse to sideload (or even just put a worse version in the store to those people with enough new features to push most people to sideload.).
(b) Chrome will be sideloadable. Which means web developers will be convinced "sideload Chrome" is a reasonable fix. Reinforcing spiral and soon Google owns the browser in a way that is the envy of 1990's Microsoft. Keep in mind they managed to turn MS's Edge from a third browser to a Chrome skin. That's bad (see Manifest v3, WEI, etc.).
The list goes on, we could talk about Epic and games and store exclusives.
To say nothing about having to debug malware on my family's devices.
The equivalent here would be Prime offering a free ad-supported channel and Google requiring them to hand over a percentage of their ad revenue for the channel.
Navigating DLNA in VLC isn't great, but better than nothing
* 20 million people watched show X-Episode 5, and
* notatoad watched show X-Episode 5 on 28-July-2023 at 8pm. We can also correlate that that they used UberEats to order Thai Cuisine at 7 pm on the same day, and that a certain group he belongs to was Y% more likely to buy the product placed within that show.
The second kind of information will be used in the future against you, to extract the maximum amount of money from you for services that "you just can't miss", after being bombarded with ads and social media influencers in sufficient quantity.
Some people consider it a problem and some people don’t.
The former is more sensitive to their data being collected and leveraged and the latter “has nothing to hide” or simply prefers targeted ads.
Some are against manipulation attempts with the goal to be parted with their money and others go all in on “personal responsibility”.
They’re entirely incompatible positions and any debate back and forth would be a waste of time of both parties.
Are you sure, even Microsoft had the decency to not extort their business users this much back in the 80s and 90s.
To a techie. The amount of people who find torrenting too confusing and overwhelming or are afraid of legal consequences or don't even know it exists is, once again, the vast majority (unless we are talking about Eastern Europe and third-world countries).
Even if you could prove that the US had, say, 10 million people that torrented actively (which is, honestly, a big stretch in my opinion), the pitch to movie studios is that they should abandon DRM because 10 million people can bypass it and 320 million people can't; and 320 million people don't even know the DRM is there or something they should care about. Not a winning sales pitch there.
My use case: movies and TV shows, streaming from mobile, PC, or smart TV with auto-downloaded subtitles and varying stream quality. Heavy use of the "watch together" feature. (Plex watch together is horrible compared to Jellyfin.)
Could be a mix things from attention spans changing in various demographics to economics to increased spending in travel to other things.
I'm open to attention spans changing. Or demographics changing. Or both. My money, though, is pandemic hangover. I'm struggling to see how anything else comes even close in explanation power to, "we were in a pandemic."
Many VPN services are one click to install and $2-5 a month, and the pirate sites are very resilient at this point, so anti-consumer practices could easily drive a resurgence in this form of mass market consumption.
100% yes.
I’ve been plex for a while but jellyfin looks like I might have a choice of service in future.
Extrapolate the last 20 years of HDD capacity growth (around 300x), and assume that will continue, every single piece of media will fit on a single drive.
I know those assumptions aren't a given, but it sure feels like we're heading towards a world where you can just have a local copy of everything always.
Because most streaming services don't support 4k HDR on Linux. And if I'm spending thousands of dollars for my TV to play 4k HDR content, I want to be able to watch it.
I get running a Linux media server, don't get me wrong. But a dedicated windows machine for my TV seems like a waste of time and money when my TV can already do whatever that box would. It buys me very little.
With your Ubuntu install, was it hard to get it to go above 720p? I see people in this thread saying that's the max.
The larger point though is that what you’re describing is not mass market viable. If the streaming services wanted they could shut off HTPC access overnight and they probably wouldn’t even lose a rounding error in terms of users. In a future world where every streaming service has their own stick with its own ads and own DRM I can absolutely imagine them doing that to force everyone over.
For Linux users wanting a home theatre experience, I feel they are probably more inclined to go the bluray/piracy route. Personally I use my Android TV to stream in 4K with surround sound but am satisfied that I can still play everything using Linux, albeit at a lower resolution.
For instance a given content may be available in glorious 4K only via an app on a TV, 1080p via a windows or mac machine, and dogshit 720p that actually manages to look worse than old SD on Linux.
This is basically true of every service with Youtube TV being the least bad and showing at least reasonable quality. In theory showing lesser quality streams to less locked down platforms is supposed to make piracy harder. In reality popular shows are always available same day anyway.
Ultimately if you want creators to get paid and to enjoy the highest quality on Linux you need to both pay for and pirate the content and watch for instance on jellyfin.
For my needs (random videos I search on an ad-hoc basis) I can get 4K with no issue on Firefox on Linux.
I admit this isn't a domain I'm particularly fluent in. As a matter of fact, I thought that was already the case with all the talk about "GPU acceleration" of desktops. I think there was an HN post about Windows a few days ago, with people commenting on how all this changed between Windows 95 and 8/10.
Also Youtube is the most used streaming app followed by TikTok ... how many are watching for free? See Google results for this data https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=are%20people%20using%2...
My thoughts are based on the data above, other similar data Ive seen, my own shortening attention span and these years lackluster box-office compared to 2022 (movies from 2022 that opened above and or well above 100 million https://www.boxofficepro.com/the-top-10-movies-of-2022-at-th...)
To me Hollywood needs to worry even more so the writers, actors and etc ... a younger demographic the future's attention span looks to be elsewhere and they aren't paying to watch their media.
This will be true for basically all markets. There was an obvious shock during the past few years that is already explanatory for so many problems. No need to hunt for others.
But, even the article you linked is about how the market "continued its recovery in 2022." By the accounting, with the record breaking weekends we just had, this year seems set to be larger than last. Sure, it isn't larger than the past two combined, but that is hardly damning.
in a few years we will see many streamers Consolidate and to compete against the biggest streaming apps YouTube and TikTok more free offerings will be available and or cheaper ones. Hollywood 'S push to go AI is a smart money saving one
In case any confusion remains these latter are available at tv.youtube.com with a subscription.
The purpose of youtube for most consumers is to consume video content. Much of the professionally produced video content is TV shows and movies which obviously remains popular. This includes by reference content originating from a range of platforms HBO/Showtime/Starz/Paramount/AMC and so forth
EG you select HBO and Showtime as part of your package and can view the same content as is on MAX or showtime in the singular unified youtubeTV interface. Kind of a mixture of TIVO and netflix with a better interface.
I literally end up doing this for things I'm actually paying for when I want to watch the high quality version on a PC. I haven't owned an actual TV in years.
This infographic is a bit out of date, but you get the idea https://i.imgur.com/IrxoHI3.png
It's overall a vastly superior experience.
Stop spreading misinformation.
There is a significant segment of the internet that thrives in the gutters between paid services, straight up piracy sites, and actual "dark web" sites that require TOR or other specialized access. The restreamers that live in those gutters are questionable at best, straight up illegal at worst, and fund themselves through fraudulent ads, or legit ads for sketchy or dangerous services and sites.
It is entirely possible to use those sites safely, just like it's also possible to navigate dark alleys in major urban centres in the late hours, but that doesn't make it a low-risk activity.
The only danger involved here is in the actual downloaded content. There have been a few codec/filetype vulns for video files in the past, sure, but one that deploys through the browser through a local Plex instance would be pretty interesting, to say the least.
I should also ack that I do actually subscribe to some twitch channels. I have no problem saying that these things are growing. Most evidence I am seeing shows not that they will supplant the old guard movies, but will grow along side them.
This is not much different to video games as entertainment. I remember concerns that they would somehow replace physical sports. If that is still a concern, it is hard to take seriously. Traditional sports have continued to grow to unheard of sizes.
Does this mean that hollywood and the like have nothing to fear? Not really. But licensing on movies and broadcasts being what they are, they have quite a moat on things.
TLDR summary Hollywood's biggest competition isn't between themselves but YouTube and Tiktok and how they are shaping and changing media consumption habits and thus the media landscape. To me the data I pointed out already shows this including 2023 lackluster box office results compared to 2022.
Yes, YouTube and the like have more viewers than some of the paid services. They aren't, necessarily, making more money with those viewers. And even odds on whether they could keep the viewers as they try to make money. My bet would probably be no, all told. Consider, radio has been free for ages. Even broadcast television was free. This did little or nothing to prevent paid services from growing.
They have an associated aggregator that has no ads on it, it's just a search bar and "What can we hook you up with?".
I pay $20 a month for it. Some may question what the point of paying for a torrenting service is, instead of paying the streaming sites. However, I used to pay for netflix and prime video, and I only went BACK to torrenting after things started happening to enshitify the product (like struggling to get full res videos because I run linux). The answer is simple: Ease of access.
