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Amazon Prime Video will start showing ads on January 29th unless you pay extra for ad-free
(www.theverge.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I have Prime and have never actually used it. I still watch Amazon shows, but I'll be fucked if I use their shit interface or expose myself to their datamining to do it. Let alone watch fucking ads.
Piracy is a UX issue.
I tried to use their UX. Its bad. And the worst is I fell asleep watching something like Project Bluebook once. And the Prime Reccomendations streamed a SHITLOAD of alien conspiracy content while i slept. It ruined the recs etc. And you cant delete the primary account profile....only the sub-profiles.
Frankly i only go on it to see what I should maybe load into Sonarr/Radarr at this point. fuck em.
So you absorbed a bunch of alien conspiracy stuff while you were sleeping?
Worse. It went off into other conspiracy subjects like 9/11 and all sorts of crap. Theres frankly a lot of weird stuff on amazon prime for free that i would have never seen had i not dozed off.
Most of the other apps (netflix, plex, etc) and even the streaming platform (roku) have measures to combat falling asleep. Whether its disabling auto-play (which amazon didnt have) or bandwidth saver features that will periodically ask if you are still there (which amazon appears to somehow bypass or disable, or did).
These days though i set a sleep timer to shut off the lights and TV at midnight.
That's actually kind of hilarious
Yeah it is in a way. Thankfully it doesn’t leech into my main Amazon shopping reccomendations.
I was watching Yellowstone on Prime back in 2021, before they moved it to a premium tier, and the audio was always out of sync when using Prime Video, so I had to adjust the audio sync latency, and remember to switch it back when watching other content. This was on an Nvidia Shield Pro, too, so not some scrappy TV vendor's implementation of the app on some underpowered SoC.
After a while, I gave up and just watched it on my Plex server instead. I could also use the Watch Together feature to watch it synchronously with friends, a feature not supported by Prime Video.
In my case, the piracy (if you call it that, when I was at the time a Prime member) was absolutely a UX issue, not a price issue.