Netflix will show generative AI ads midway through streams in 2026
a year ago by abobla to c/technology
There's a word for that: enshittification
Capitalism - and I am the last person to defend it - didn't used to be like this, or at least not as bad. shrug I could probably tolerate capitalism if, say, no company was allowed to employ more than say 15 people.
yeah it’s not like Smith predicted this but yeah … it’s certainly not human nature either.
i’d be happy if shareholders, all of them, were held criminally responsible for the criminal things corporations do - all the way down to wage theft and child labor.
Capitalism didn't used to be like this because it was still developing, but it was always going to become this. Enshitification is not a bug, it's a feature. Capitalism is supposed to work like this. And when it wasn't, it was just because it wasn't there yet, mainly due to technical limitations.
It’s an interesting debate, if what we are seeing now is the natural, inevitable progress of capitalism, or it could have gone a better way, but eg. Reagan fucked it up for all of us in the 70s.
Continued expansion or ever-increasing profits is a definitive characteristic of the system though. Enshittification is just the latest feature it found, for software-based companies.
One could also argue that enshittification is independent to software, like diluting juice or other "innovations" that products received...
That’s like saying eating fatty food never got you obese when you started.
The end goal of capitalism was and forever will be monarchies. It’s the game of monopoly until one player owns all.
There was a lot of pioneering in the 70's. The first home computers, the first video games, the first mobile phones, all right there in the late 70's. Most people ended the 70's living like they did in the 60's but now there's cool shit like the Speak n' Spell. The average American home in 1979 had no microwave oven, a landline telephone and a TV that might have even been color. There were some nerds who had TRS-80s, some of them even had a modem so they could 300 baud each other. Normies saw none of this.
There was a lot of invention in the 80's. Home computer systems, video games etc. as we now commonly know them crystalized in the 80's. We emerged from the 80's with Nintendo as the dominant video game console platform, Motorola as basically the only name in cellular telephones and with x86 PCs running Microsoft operating systems as the dominant computing platform with Apple in a distant but solid second place. Video games were common, home computers weren't that out there, people still had land lines, and maybe cable TV or especially if you were out in the sticks you might have one of those giant satellite dishes. If you were a bit of an enthusiast you might have a modem to dial BBSes and that kind of stuff, but basically no one has an email address.
There was a lot of evolution in the 90's. With the possible exception of the world wide web which was switched on in August of '91, there weren't a lot of changes to how computing worked throughout the decade. Compare an IBM PS/2 from 1989 with a Compaq Presario from 1999. 3 1/4" floppy disk, CRT monitor attached via VGA, serial and parallel ports, keyboard and mouse attached via PS2 ports, Intel architecture with Microsoft operating system...it's the same machine 10 years later. The newer machine runs orders of magnitude faster, has orders of magnitude more RAM etc. but it still broadly speaking fills the same role in the user's life. An N64 is exactly what you'd expect the NES to look like after a decade. Cell phones have gotten sleeker and more available but it's still mostly a telephone that places telephone calls, it's the same machine Michael Douglas had in that one movie but now no longer a 2 pound brick. Bring a tech savvy teen from 1989 to 1999 and it won't take long to explain everything to him. The World Wide Web exists now, but a lot of retailers haven't embraced the online marketplace, the dotcom bubble bursts, it's not quite got the permanent grip on life yet.
There was a lot of revolution in the 2000's. Higher speed internet that allow for audio and video streaming, mp3 players and the upheaval those caused, the proliferation of digital cameras, the rise of social media. When I graduated high school in 2005, there were no iPhones, no Facebook, no Twitter, no Youtube. Google was a search engine that was gaining ground against Yahoo. The world was a vastly different place by the time I was through college. Take that savvy teen from 1989 and his counterpart from 1999 and explain to them how things work in 2009. It'll take a lot longer. In 2009 we had a lot of technology that had a lot of potential, and we were just starting to realize that potential. It was easy to see a bright future.
There was a lot of stagnation in the 2010's. We started the decade with smart phones and social media, and we ended the decade with smart phones and social media. Performance numbers for machines kept going up but you kinda don't notice; you buy a new phone and it's so much faster and more responsive, 4 years later it barely loads web pages and takes forever to launch an app because mobile apps are gaseous, they expand to take up their system. A lot of handset manufacturers have given up so now there are fewer options, and they've converged to basically one form factor. Distinguishing features are gone, things we used to be able to do aren't there anymore. The excitement wore off, this is how we do things now, and now everyone is here. Mobile app stores are full of phishing software, you're probably better advised to just use the mobile browser if you can, mainstream video gaming is now just skinner boxes, and by the end of the decade social media is all about propaganda silos and/or attention draining engagement slop.
Now we arrive in the 2020's where we find a lot of sinisterization. A lot of the tech world is becoming blatantly, nakedly evil. In truth this began in the 2010's, it's older than 4 years, but we're days away from the halfway point of the decade and it's becoming difficult to see the behavior of tech and media companies as driven only by greed, some of this can only come from a deep seated hatred of your fellow man. People have latched onto the term "enshittification" because it's got the word shit in it and that's hilarious, but...I see a spectrum with the stagnation of the teens represented with a green color and the sinisterization of the 20's represented with red, and the part in the middle where red and green make brown is enshittification.
I agree with all of that except the end: it's definitely still greed, it's just become easier to other your fellow man so you don't even have to hate him, you can at best briefly consider his existence as you pave over him on your way to whatever absolute moral certitude you're pursuing. That's the true banality of evil: greed makes dehumanization so commonplace that advocating for awful shit to be done to your fellow human being isn't even widely seen as evil anymore.
I’m amazed that ads are so effective that they can make more cramming unwanted video in my face than just asking me for a couple bucks.
Nobody wants to pay for all the little individual piecemeal services and shit, because it’s wildly expensive and inconvenient, and because they keep adding ads to the paid stuff anyway because greed, so what benefit is there to paying?
I have a dwindling list of brands that are not yet dead to me.
The only brand I can think of that is truly not evil is valve, and that’s all cause of Gabe.
exactly, if you want to be an ethical consumer you’d need to be a hermit.
How is showing me ads for things I will make a point not to buy because I implicitly hate the products of people showing me ads more profitable than the twenty fucking bucks a month I already give them?
Imagine if all that misallocated marketing budget got used to develop better products instead.
And imagine if products that couldn't get by on their own merits without ads wouldn't exist at all. How much more productive and happy our society would be if we got rid of useless products and the negative feelings ads induce when we don't have those useless products at the same time.
YAHAR!!!!! HOIST THE MAIN SAILS!!!!
ahoy!
Love death and Robots
Black Mirror
No it wasn't. The show made ZERO sense.
Wednesday running around trying to PREVENT murders? That makes no sense!
Plus, she's being admitted into a school for people with special powers, but at the time of admittence, she has shown NO powers whatsoever. They do come later, but.....when she's admitted, she's just a 16 year old girl.
Plus, that thing where she looks back on her ancestor with the last name "Adams", but the ancestor is on her mothers side? Why would the ancestor have the last name Adams? That implies that if she's both an Adams, AND the mothers ancestor, that the whole Adams family is built on incest.
And before you say the husband could have taken the mothers last name, first off, we know Morticia didn't, and second, it would imply EVERY woman in the family timeline dating back to the 1700s also did this.
Simple solution to all this.....first off, make it so Wednesday has some motivation or reason why she's not the one committing the murders, but also make it a reluctant reason. She still enjoys the murders, but she'll get kicked out of school if she's involved. Then make it so without the degree she can't get her liscense as an embalmer. Which without that, she's forced to get a normal person job.
Then, keep her quirky room mate exactly the same. The only difference is, she's not a warewolf. She's just a preppy girl. Exactly as she was. She can turn into a warewolf later at the hands of Wednesday creating a potion or whatever, but it's not naturally in her DNA.
Now onto the school. It's not a school for monsters. It's just a regular ol' private school.
The preppy girl is the one solving the murders. Wednesday is reluctantly helping her. The rest of the school shits all over Wednesday, but this preppy girl is the one person who accepts Wednesday for who she is. So even though Wednesday LOVES the murders, she also sees the good in the preppy girl. She becomes protective of her. The rest of the town can fuck off, but the preppy girl is different.
So she goes around town with the preppy girl TRYING to stay out of actually solving the murders, while still supporting the preppy girl. The problem is the preppy girl is REALLY BAD at solving these murders. Remember, she's just a regular 16 year old girl. Meanwhile Wednesday has her periodic visions that solve the murders.
And the bad guy makes no sense either. He hates the school because they have magic powers. So to defeat them he creates a cult of people with magic powers?
I say make him just hate the Adams Family, including Wednesday. And his plan isn't to do magical spooky shit. He's just going to straight up kill Wednesday, until the preppy girl drinks the warewolf potion.
See? Now it all makes sense, and doesn't go against the core concept of the character. You can even keep in the viral dance.
I think at least a few of those objections are addressed in the show.
The reason I didn't like it is that all the previous incarnations of Wednesday had her as vengeful to those who deserved it, but basically decent, if a little sardonic, towards those who didn't. Whereas this new one was a colossal B to everyone she met by default; made it kind of hard to root for her.
This is an absolute testament that you can back-of-napkin a better story than 99% of the dirge slop swill that studios pump out because they're all money obsessed banker finance fuckheads with a fetish for being seen as creative. There is a DESERT of dry dead writing rooms crushed in spirit by "what if they're sisters??" meddling corpos who can't be told to fuck off because of reprisals. We really are in the scumsuck bullies-in-control-of-the-school timeline where everything has an implicit fate to suck because of the ego and complacency of corporate media.
in my best Harrison Ford impersonation: — It's not that kind of movie, kid.
Season 2 available yet?
You want Season 2 of Wednesday? I'm still waiting for season 4 of G.L.O.W.
I liked Kaos. Of course, it only got one season.
Really enjoyed One Piece live action
They want the old cable tv days back, but worse
Streaming just waited to roll out unskippable ads so they could win customers early on with an artificially, temporarily better service.
This is the exact same thing cable did when it came out.
For ages the four nations lived in harmony...
Way late to the party cuz im browsing top posts for the week, but you reminded me of how I refused to believe my father when he said cable TV used to be ad free. He said it was the whole point of paying for it back then cuz paying for TV didn't exist yet.
Way late to the party cuz im browsing top posts for the week, but you reminded me of how I refused to believe my father when he said cable TV used to be ad free. He said it was the whole point of paying for it back then cuz paying for TV didn't exist yet.
Youtube is also trying to be more like TV. Apparently, TV wasn’t bad enough.
I never took off my pirates hat but I have had a netflix account for about a year...
...
It wasn't my account. One of my kids friends signed in to their profile on my TV so I used it every now and again until the password sharing option was taken away.
Stremio plus real debrid for the win...
“[Netflix] members pay as much attention to midroll ads as they do to the shows and movies themselves,” Amy Reinhard, president of advertising at Netflix, said, per the publication.
Amy, I want you to be honest with me, are you an alien.
Because on planet Earth we do not, if fact, pay as much attention to the ads as to the things we're actually interested in. Famously our brains even produce this fascinating effect to spare us from the bullshit you're shoving into our eyeballs.
I'm just waiting for it to be like that Black Mirror episode where ads came on, the guy closed his eyes, and alarms went off until he opened them again.
The bad thing about those kind of shows, is that while most people see that as a warning, and something to avoid.
Some people immediately start charting a path to how to make it a reality, and sometimes those people are very very smart and can chart a path that might take decades.
I say this while on the toilet, writing on a device that has cameras both front and back, always on microphones and location sensors, and facial recognition and 3D scanning equipment.
When the personalized condom ads start popping up, I will only be slightly annoyed.
i think in netflix's case, they might actually be paying as much attention to the ads as they do the shows, which is to say none at all
This is exactly how I interpreted that statement. No one is paying attention, who cares if they slip some garbage ads in?
Haha, already there. I canceled my Netflix a year ago or so after the amount of cheap self produced stuff got too much and they removed more and more older quality content.
Now, whenever I want to stream I sign up for a single streaming service for a month or two - but the time where I was just subscribed all the time is over.
Ah one reason also was the sharing crackdown, I had kept the subscription long term as my kids used it when they were at my place or my ex-wife's. Nowadays it doesn't work anymore as (for example) the TV my son has at the ex-wife's place never is connected via my internet.
With added commercials, less quality etc streaming got less attractive. Hey, nowadays I regularly go to movie theaters, again.
And if things get worse, somewhere I still have my captain's hat and the wooden leg for sailing the seven seas...
Netflix will what now? Sorry, I was busy canceling my netflix account.
Kidding, I canceled it ages ago when the $10 version became SD-only with ads.}
Why do we keep paying people like this to enshittify everything?
Cause a lot of times it’s a family account and only one person actually realized how bad of a deal it is.
I mean we keep signing up for services because they're convenient or fun or interesting and every single time they start cutting corners, worsening services, being more invasive with ads, and charging more and more for the 'privilege' of doing whatever it was you were doing there. Why do we keep falling for that and then being surprised when it ends up in the same place as the last 12 platforms or whatever?
i just subscribe to the netflix tier that serves all streams as torrents
High seas baby!
There is surely a recognisable pattern here in which people leave because of this shit and to keep the flow of money going up they then have to further reduce quality by increasing ads.
I deleted my facebook a few weeks ago and signing in for the first time in years gave a look at what it became and it was unrecognisable.
Netflix is the worst of the streaming channels these days.
Always sad watching people complain about ads on free streaming sites which can be easily blocked with an adblocker while defending their subscription to netflix.
It really puts into perspective how 'intelligent' the average consumer is and how seriously their input should be taken, though.
As the old saying goes: Don't feed the trolls.
Replying as if half the comment doesn't exist and putting the word intelligent in quotes is a classic antagonizing move by trolls to make people try to engage them.
Huh?? If a streaming site (or any product for that matter) is free, the user is the product - be it their time, personal info, whatever. It is known and accepted that a "free" service will have a catch that allows the provider to make money.
If a user PAYS for a service it is expected that the payment is enough remuneration for there to be no strings attached. Of course companies will look for shitty ways to do shitty things to make more money, and those companies ought to be punished, generally by a reduction in customers, for their shitty behaviour.
If a streaming site (or any product for that matter) is free, the user is the product
Not necessarily. This is rhetoric peddled by useful idiots to justify spending money on things they could be getting for free.
Companies have a way easier time harvesting and selling your data when you give them your credit card info.
But good job defending corporate abuse with a "saying." You're not a useful idiot.
They said if they PAY to use.. and get ads. They are right, I ditched tv for streaming because less ads. Now they want to go full circle? I feel like I can’t even open up the fridge these days without having some agenda or ad start.
The only limitation on sailing the high seas is that the video and sound quality are not as great as legit streaming. You get descriptions that claim it is ripped full 4k or HD, but when actually looking at the encoding, it is not the case. But what can we do? If we are being made to stream in shit, it is better to sail in blue ocean high seas.
I definitely look at the file size first. Although, as you already alluded to, sometimes it gets cheated with the resolution being cropped to either the top or side. And a major issue with downloading large file sizes is if you are unlucky enough that there aren't many seeders.
You are aware that Netflix et.al. put compression on their streams (usually quite a bit in regards to bitrate) ? It is often the case that BluRay rips etc. are available better on the high seas...
But even so, Netflix still retain good sound quality compared to alternative sources.
Got a link?
atmos and even dts x content are very findable and vlc has the codec information in the tool menu
have a 5.1.4 system hooked up by hdmi to the igpu and the video to the gpu and it sounds just like the theater but be sure to check what is available for the content you are searching because it might not exist
for example Harry Potter just got rereleased on dts x and the news was on the official dts site but also check blu-ray.com to see what formats exists
the green for atmos comes on and the amber for dts does too as well as the white for dolby digital but again vlc confirms this too in the codec information and atmos for home theater will do for dolby digital too
be prepared for enormous file sizes but so worth it and you will have to use the atmos for home theater or the dts x for home theater under the windows spatial sound settings per the content and yes switch back and forth
That's why you do several magnets, to be sure, and discard the ones that are bullshit, if you're worried about that. Haven't had any problems myself, other than theater cam for the newest new movies.
94 million people decided $10 a month savings was worth watching ads rather than doing without. Fuck em. They are the reason many things only have an ad supported tier. Pay for stuff or pirate it, but don't use ad supported tiers when you have a choice.
I will call that a grey area. You still count on the roles as a sub of the ad tier. And probably in all the data it assumes you saw the ads. So it helps perpetuate the problem. But if enough people do it, it will reduce whar advertisers pay, which might reduce the problem.
I guess you could spend time to help make it easier for others to block ads, or straight up help them. That could tip the balance into doing more to fight it than to support it. Or just learn to straight up pirate. Then you are 100% on the fighting it side.
This is straight up victim blaming.
By what leap of logic do you come to that conclusion. We are talking about entertainment here. Not housing or food. Doing without is an option, and there is plenty of competition to use instead.
People rail against the rich for caring only about money. But when they make thier own decisions, they do the same. Money first. You pay for ADs with your time first. Then you pay again when ever you buy anything, because advertising whether you saw it or not is part of the price of everything. Paying for your time back alone, would be worth the price. But people put money first. And we all lose. Well except the wealthy.
So you're angry that the poor are choosing the cheap option (🤔) because it helps the wealthy win? You're righteously indignant because they ignored that "Doing without is an option" and decided to spend some entertainment dollars in a way of their own choosing?
Ok, but I don't really find that very convincing.
Let's be real. Do you really believe it's the poor paying money for an ad supported tier? I don't. And if you really do, fine. I'll give the poor a pass if it will allow us to focus on the real problem. People who could afford to pay the full price, but are always chasing deals. It's also why amazon day exists. Yeah that day. When they raise the price so they can take 30% off and still be charging more than they were before. And then sell out in an hour. It's why airlines that don't charge absurd fees can't compete. A large block of people always chase the lowest price.
Oh shit….I need to go get that!
(Speaking of books …. time to go see if that fancy hardback edition of Cibola**Burn is ever going to get released.
edit: it’s not coming out any time soon 😤
“[Netflix] members pay as much attention to midroll ads as they do to the shows and movies themselves,” Amy Reinhard, president of advertising at Netflix, said, per the publication.
In terms of attention, she's either lying or admitting that members barely pay attention to their content.
They have told writers to dumb things down and have the characters speak aloud what they’re doing because so many people doom scroll while it’s on in the background.
There not making quality. They’re making elevator music for your home.
She is exactly admitting members barely pay attention. It’s a pretty widely known issue in the screenwriting community. Netflix in particular wants more “second screen scripts.” Meaning they need shows that constantly remind you of what’s happening, have tons of expository dialogue—constantly—and that leans hard into the shallow end of story. Because they’re assuming you’re not watching and are on your phone.
They pay for market research
No they won't 🏴☠️
Rejecting Netflix fixes things for you and me, but the article says Netflix has 93 million ad-supported subscribers. I'm really worried about the amount of influence advertisers have on our society, and it's only getting worse. Even if you and I can be above the direct influence of these ads, many people are not, and those people are influencing you and me. This produces a dangerous secondary influence that can reach most of society, and just fills everyone's mind with lies, for hardly any cost.
Eh, people are dumb as bricks. If it's not ads it's some fake news, social media nonsense, ai bullshit. It's really pointless to worry about. You can either accept that you are sharing the planet with Trump voters and suckers who fell for NFTs or you will just go crazy.
YoHoHo Arrrrghhhhhh!!!
They will. We just won't see them when we watch their shows.
Either they have great technology, or they have great entertainment,” she said. “Our superpower has always been the fact that we have both.
Please. Your software is an image carousel and a video player.
Sadly I think you're a optimistic with those numbers. It's probably gonna be a few thousand. The numbers can feel skewed if you only look at Lemmy.
I think it'll be somewhere in the middle. Quite a few people have not had to deal with ads in streaming for many years now, if it's suddenly forced it'll piss off a lot
I don't think they're all going to suddenly pirate again, I think many will just switch to other streaming providers.
If they all start doing the shitty ads, we're fucked.
Nah, my cousins are normies. Every time I'm at their place and the TV is on, you almost can't tell if the ads get more play than the content they actually wanted to see. Their TV is treated like an old FM radio where ads are just a part of it. They complain, but they'll never actually do anything about it.
That absolutely won't happen.
Everybody on Lemmy and Reddit were saying the same when they banned account sharing and price increases. In reality their subscriber numbers went through the roof and so did their profits.
Pirating has never felt so good. Normally I'm indifferent to it but now I'm enjoying it.
Is this feature coming to Sonarr/Radar + Jellyfin? /s
Nostalgia.
Honestly, if it was all like the funniest ads of all time, it wouldn’t be that bad.
So the dead Internet extends to streaming.
Also anyone else interested in just crazy an ai add what will be.
Something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMuookENY90&t=137s
Wow that's fucking horrendous. I feel terrible for little kids growing up on this shit that will start to feel like normal art for them.
That video in particular is particularly grating because the source material-- a Bradbury short story-- is so beautiful on its own.
no ads on blockbuster movies!
I was looking to cut down on subscriptions and picked Netflix as an experimental one. I haven't missed it at all. Things like this make me less likely to occasionally reactivate for a couple of months as I was originally planning.
I wonder when they'll see a big enough effect to break their current run of fucking over their customers.
I also thought I'd miss Hulu and Netflix a lot more than I do. What used to irk me so badly was how utterly shit Netflix is when you just want to sit down and find something new to watch. Their front page would be list after list of things like "Hot New Comedies" "Best Independent Films of 2025", "Classic Action Flicks" and somehow it always felt like the same 30 or 40 movies randomly shuffled together. So I'd spend 15 minutes scrolling through the same slop in different orders, get frustrated and search for a movie that I remembered wanting to watch, only to find that it was on none of the services I was subscribed to, and cost $8.99 for a single watch of a 20 year old movie.
We had been Netflix subscribers since the very start when they delivered discs through the mail. Kinda sad how they went from having virtually anything you could think of to watch (and having a halfway decent recommendation algorithm to boot!) to where they are today.
Kinda sad how they went from having virtually anything you could think of to watch (and having a halfway decent recommendation algorithm to boot!) to where they are today.
They're not entirely to blame - once other companies saw that this streaming thing actually made money, they pulled all their stuff and put it on their own services, leading to the cable 2.0 we have today.
Everything else that sucks about them now, though, yeah, they're to blame.
My kids have missed it more than me (which I don't) but they're easy to distract with one of the other streaming services I still have. The last price hike did it for me.
Soo... the ad income is higher than the energy costs of gen. AI? They lied about the pennies per visit? 😢
Also, 🏴☠️
Netflix showed time and time again that they are shit at counting money. I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out they're losing money on those ads but will do them anyway because managers eat the worst possible hype for breakfast.
I'm sorry, did you say Netflix is going to be pirated aggressively for the few shows that aren't complete slop?
It is intresting to see if we go that way, or if our future will be more Orwellian in its nature. Might go ine way or another.
Well piracy is the only way then.
I recently setup my own Jellyfin server with qbittorent search plug-ins and its so easy. Netflix is really playing with fire here cause people will leave when pushed enough as it's becoming so easy to switch. You can just hop on your friends server too
While I am in the same boat as you, you severely overestimate the tech-affinity of the average Netflix user.
Pirating content safely, setting up a media server for it, share it with other people... it is all possible, there is good documentation out there. But aside from having the drive to do this, you also need to invest time to keep it running and maintain it.
The average person out there is happy to pay Netflix money so they don't need to do that.
Edit: add to that also the fact that it is technically illegal in many countries. This is probably also a deterrent for the average person.
If you have a friend who is invested in this, sure. How many have one?
And paying some shady dude on the net versus paying a "reputable" company... I don't think the average person will go for that either.
I think you underestimate people's drive for a bargain.
This was a decade back, but the satellite paytv system here was not cheap. $50/m for base, up to $150/m for full. A technical crew worked out how to pirate it by hooking the verification card up to a dongle on a PC and sending the verification requests from each set-top box over a VPN back to their master device. They sold access to the system for about $100 (for the dongle & setup) and then $10-20/month for full access to the Fox-based service. Went on for years before loose lips sunk the ship, and their were thousands of users when it got busted. No marketing, no Internet presense, just word of mouth "I know a guy".
The modern Internet-based streaming pirate services that people can buy cheap devices for on ebay preconfigured, and pay $5-10/m for access to all movies and TV? Cheaper and faster access, all online, nobody has to visit your home. Everything is easier and the barrier of entry is lower.
If Netflix and others don't stop being so greedy, they'll be reminded that people only play by the rules when the terms are reasonable.
Of course getting real data here is very difficult but I really do feel its becoming very easy to be a pirate.
I can only share my anecdotes that I see right now - if I type in "iptv" to the main e-commerce websites here in Thailand (Lazada, Shopee, tiktok) all have hundreds of listings and thousands of monthly sales. Iptv piracy tech UX is very similar to Plex or Jellyfin tho the latter is more expensive to run and more legally challenging but the UX from the customers pov is identical. Buy a subscription, get account details and app install instructions, connect and watch. So UX is not the barrier here imo.
There are also tools inspired by popcorn time like Stremio + Torrentio which is basically pirate netflix with no UX overhead at all - click and play - but the quality still isn't great there due to lack of p2p supply and the install process is not accessible to grannies.
As an ancient pirate myself, this does worry me a bit as it's becoming too easy and corporate services are really pushing the consumers which brings way too much attention to piracy and might result in more DRM shit being added everywhere.
For $5/m, I'm your friend!
The normies can't do this argument never sat well with me when it comes to tech, as if their ignorance somehow diminishes the software or process for everyone else.
I also appreciate them. If more people pirated, we might have a tighter crackdown from world governments over it, luckily the streaming services get enough pleb bux to keep the peace.
🤮 Glad I deleted my account years ago and use kodi to host my own library
I wish Kodi could host the library from outside your home. So I could be at a friends house, and I just log in to my library from his house, and we watch season 6, episode 14 of the simpsons. Random episode, but whatever. You get my point.
Instead, I tried setting up JellyFin, and I couldn't get it to work. So I said "Fuck it. I'll delete this and try from scratch, and reinstall JellyFin."
Instead, it deleted 32 terabytes of videos. It deleted the "media" folder, which I set as JellyFins home directory. Every dvd I ripped, every tv show, every movie, every wrestling show, every comedy special. All of it. Gone.
Luckily I have a backup, but that was 2 years ago, and I'm never even home enough to WATCH the stuff, let alone try to restore these files one by one which took literal decades to assemble.
Somewhere is a folder called "N-Gage videos". Which is episodes of TV shows that in 2003 I formatted to fit on an N-gage screen size. Useless now, but it shows how old some of that collection is.
There are ways to recover deleted files, at least partially. Especially if all you did was remove the directory and not the files themselves.
Re-downloading 32TB would take a while but you'll probably download it faster than you can watch it. Usenet downloads are typically faster than torrenting.
Plex is much easier to setup than Jellyfin and much more user-friendly in general, though it's not free for some of the more useful features like watching from outside your home.
It asked me "Would you like to remove this path?" I said yes, thinking it meant the program using that path within the program. No, it meant delete the whole damn folder.
Luckily I haven't paid for a streaming service in years.
Bye Netflix, hello plex.
Edit: hello Jellyfin, as helpful users have mentioned the enshitification of plex to me.
I was! Thanks for the info, I’ll be checking out Jellyfin instead.
Eh, tbh it still does the core basics of streaming my content and Metadata management, so I don't really care about enshitification of 'extra' features that I never use. It's still the easiest way to share media
You think the enshittification will stop at the extra features you dont use?
Yes, because the core mechanics of their platform is media metadata management and streaming. As long as those work, and my users don't have to pay anything (because I have a plex pass lifetime already), then it has no effect on me or my users.
All that extra stuff can just be turned off.
They absolutely destroyed the iOS app. Barely usable now
I have some bad news for you
These ads will most definitely not be generated on-the-fly; too risky and too costly. They'll be pre-generated and pre-approved AI-generated videos.
Imagine a collection of videos like that AI Coca Cola commercial (but for a soon-to-be-cancelled Netflix series instead of a soda), with a dozen different versions of it made for each "user archetype" Netflix identifies. That's going to be how Netflix implements this.
the tos will be updated to cover their asses
Is there a way to poison the well so badly and so irrevocably that corporations won't dare use generative AI for anything? Can we somehow trick these overgrown chatbots to speak ill of their masters in the form of direct-to-stream advertisements?
And canceled my sub
Annnnd goodbye Netflix subscription
I can't tell from the article what the AI side of this is? Are Netflix offering to make adverts for customslrs using AI? Are they just showing adverts in general from customers, including AI generated ones?
I don't know if I'm doing something wrong, but I've read the article twice and still don't know 😂
I dunno at some point I’m just gonna stop watching tv and find other ways to entertain myself.
There are plenty of options.
You don't even have to stop watching videos. There are free streaming sites such as https://hydrahd.sh/ that have greater selections than netflix at no cost.
I shouldn't have to say this, but make sure you have an adblocker. For some reason, laymen get mad about the ads on streaming sites while pretending ads don't exist anywhere else.
yeah i recently stopped watching sports for similar reasons. cancelling the $84/month youtubetv sub and getting back hours and hours of my life every week. gonna try to learn drums or something.
I’ve been learning drums for a bit. It’s a lot of fun. I’d recommend sticking with it.
Sure, but they have a crazy large amount of data and an army of Data Science PhDs who sat down and calculated they'd make more money increasing their margins on people who'll put up with it, than they'd lose pissing the rest of their customers off.
All the rest of us can do is leave our Torrents running and keep our ratios up...
oh they can do the math of short term gains because they dont stay long term and move on to the next company to short term gain
they never think about anything but their own gain
make number go up > get a bonus for meeting profit gain goals > leave company before shit hits the fan to repeat the same pattern somewhere else
Yes. This is basically the core of why capitalism eats itself.
You don't have to be evil or short-sighted to be a CEO, but if you don't do evil and short-sighted shit to pump the share price there's a high probability the board will replace you with someone who will.
This is why I believe the government should hold stock and sit on the boards of any company that gets publicly listed. Much easier than tying yourself in knots with an adversarial system of complex regulations.
Are you high, kiddo? Their customer base is steadily growing by tens of millions each bloody year. Netflix is a publicly traded company, everyone has access to all of their financial information, including the customer base.
Just think the CEOs of Netflix get $60 million a year to fuck it up while we work 1-4 jobs actually providing goods and services to barely make it.
If I down vote this does it show my disappointment of netflix or the OP? 🤔
Ahhhh, man moving away from corps just keeps on giving (or in this case, doesn’t enshitify while proprietary ones do).
Enshittification marches on
I used this service in a rental for the first time in a few years. It sucks compared to other streaming services. I don't even know what people are possibly watching on this thing.
I started using it right after they launched their streaming service. Back then it was awesome. No ads, nice UI, and lots of great content, so for a good price.
But that was a long time ago.
I cancelled my subscription several months ago. And I should have done it much sooner. The difference between what is was way back in the day and what it is now is jarring.
I think a lot of people keep paying for nostalgia reasons, and because of a futile hope that Netflix might somehow go back to that earlier version. In retrospect I think that was a big part of why I kept my subscription for as long as I did (which was obviously a mistake on my part).
I seem to be the rare person that notices that something has changed slowly and completely (ship of theseus or frog boil style) over time.
I've cancelled and renewed Netflix a couple of times over the last decade but it's really a shadow of what it was at the start like you're describing. Occasionally, they have a single show worth pirating or binging over the course of like a year.
I think a lot of people keep paying for nostalgia reasons
I think you're talking shit. Netflix had 21m customers in 2011 and they have over 300m today. They're getting tens of millions of new customers each year and at least half of them are choosing to watch ads. Ad subscriptions have grown to be 1/3 of all subscriptions. Everyone loves ads and Netflix.
Jellyfin
Aside from 🏴☠️ there are simply too many legitimate pay streaming options in 2025 for Netflix to think they can do this. This will end like an arrogant urban cowboy being flung off a mechanical bull and I'm all for it.
Haha, the kicker is that it's pure greed. With their prices they don't need it and could improve it with what the community wants, but $$$, hey... been away for nearly 2 years now, thought of tipping my toes in again but with that they can f... right off.
Got rid of netflix when they started their ad tier. NEVER going back.
!piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com Piracy ftw!
I haven't had streamslop subs in years.
Been sailing the seven seas ever since, and I'm watching it all burn from the crow's nest.
Everyone. This is what being above average really looks like.
Use your brains before your wallets. Most people immediately jump to the 'money option' because thinking is legitimately too difficult for them.
Don't be a useful idiot, even if it's what's popular.
Soooooo fucking glad I spent the last 3 days re-re-re-re-making and reworking my NAS into a proper homelab made out of my old gaming PC, holy shit
A year of depression and shame at not finishing it suddenly ends right before the enshittification hits harder, nice
Now if my new HDDs could show the fuck up
Half of new Netflix subscribers opt for the $8 per month option rather than ad-free subscriptions, which start at $18 per month, the company says.
Damn, when did it get so expensive? Assuming that's USD. That's a decent amount more than Disney+, right?
Haven't had Netflix since the password debacle. Never even missed it. 🏴☠️
If you see Netflix as part of a bundle, get the bundle without it. You having no choice to get out of the subscription is feeding into this.
Is your egg too expensive?
Look no further. Our egg is much smoother and can be worn with most garments.
EggEgg. For your egg.
I like that they give everyone an exact date to cancel their membership.
I canceled Netflix, and then soon after moved from Verizon to t-mobile. I got Netflix "free" through t-mobile, so I logged back into my "cancelled" account like I'd never left. Netflix raised the price and t-mobile passed it on, so I was paying $4.50 for Netflix. They raised the price a couple of more times, I think, and then a couple of months ago they raised it again, and I was paying $11.00 for Netflix. After I finished watching Kaos, I cancelled Netflix. I only kept it because it was so cheap, but I rarely watched anything.
All the time I had Netflix, I also was a sailor, because I want to watch things not on Netflix. I should have dropped it the first time they raised the price.
I've had Netflix on-and-off since the DVD in the mail days. I tried Amazon Prime for the shipping years ago, when they first started playing with streaming. Those are the only two I've had.
I have neither now, and if it turns out I can't get the few shows I want to watch through other means, then I just won't watch anymore. Passive media isn't especially valuable to me. I have other forms of entertainment, including games, and the old stand-by, books. Outside is fun, too, when the weather isn't crap.
Not to me.
byeeeee
One use for AI would be to eliminate all ads. The AI giveth and AI can taketh away. Lol
Hey Netflix, the amount of Ads people are willing to endure for a paid subscription is ZERO and it will always remain so. In fact even the stupid games advertised on the top of the landing page made me use Netflix less and less, and now that they stopped password sharing I don't use it at all
To be honest I don't watch a lot of Netflix myself, I paid the service because my mom liked watching it, and stuff like stremio was a little too complicated for her to use; But eventually Netflix got so bad, she had to learn to use the small Media PC i setup for her and stremio as well!
Not that it means anything here, but I'll definitely not partake. Hard pass.
Torrents are great btw
The only reason I have netflix is because I stayed logged into my moms account after moving out. Once she dies or decided to stop paying it is when I will no longer have netflix. Im fine with losing it. I dont watch it much anyways. But now AI ads? Fuck no. They’ve been bad enough on youtube. Im considering getting a lyfetime membership to nebula and ditching youtube all together
Canceled two years ago. Not coming back.
I'm not familiar with how Netflix's ad tier works and am almost afraid to ask, but could someone ELI5?
If a company wanted to push an ad on Netflix, wouldn't it be up to them to decide whether to use AI make the thing? Or is this sort of the equivalent of a small business sending a script to the local radio station to have the DJ read it (i.e. rather than producing their own ad), except they add some AI-generated visuals?
I never subscribed to netflix because I'm not an idiot and just used free streaming sites for over a decade.
My peers would tell me that there are different pricing models and you can pay more to get rid of ads.
It's all fucked by design, but this generation is too stupid to realize it or do anything about it.
Hate to see it but... it makes sense.
It's wrong, sure, in many ways (privacy, ecology, ethically depending on the dataset) but if there is 1 application where generative AI ads would make sense is through a personalized stream. So... yes it's bad, consumers might reject it, but it's not the actually dumbest way to use a terrible technology.
To be clear, again, I 100% hate it but if I was a greedy Netflix stakeholder I'd think "Hmmm yes, maybe!".
Annnnnnnnnnnnnd it’s gone
Quit netflix ages ago, but is add blocking not going to work here? I addblock on hulu no problem.
Stremio plus real debrid. All the services easily on any device.
Netflix peaked when it was supporting shows like Dark and Mindhunter and drove off the cliff since. My wife will subscribe for a month to watch a new season of a show like You and then cancel it again. That's versus back in 2017 when I just had the subscription all year.
YAR HAR HAR HAR
Amy Reinhard sounds like an asshole
I’M HERE FOR IT. This is the future, and I’m genuinely invested in this (I’ve spoken to marketing industry people about how cool this could be).
Ads are ads, who cares if it's AI generated?
Great point.
You gotta remember, this generation of idiots actually enjoys watching ads. Every year they gather around to watch the most egregiously expensive ads and debate which one is the 'best' while children starve.
at least with human made ads, people got paid for their work.
At least with hand weaving, people got paid for their work.
You realise your statement could have been made about literally any labour saving invention in human history?
Counter argument: advertisement is shit, except it is less than shit because shit can fertilize a field. It is neither improved nor depreciated by human involvement. Every moment of human effort expended in producing advertising could be better spent on anything else.
They are substantially cheaper to make and therefore have a greater profit margin because they can charge more for the advertising space.
These types of comments from companies are for investors and not a warning to consumers of what is coming.
My point was, fuck Netflix for their shitty business practices anyway. Ads are bad, AI ads aren't any better or worse.
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I'm all for services making a reasonable profit and being able to fund new shows and such endeavors...
But we're rapidly getting into an environment of "soaking viewers for all we can get out of them" simply to feed the fucking shareholders ever larger payouts.
Thank you Milton Friedman. 🖕
🙄 🤡 🖕
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