The incentives go in the wrong direction from a UX perspective
[0] https://www.cordcuttersnews.com/hulu-makes-about-15-in-reven...
Rinse and repeat another year later.
Cable TV was first pitched as a method to get broadcast TV - with ads - in places that couldn’t get broadcast. Cable companies put big towers up and rebroadcasted network TV - with ads.
Then HBO came along as an ad free premium channel and it still is.
Then the “Superstations” like TBS out of Atlanta came along. Which were always ad supported and started broadcasting nationally.
Then the first cable channels came along like MTV, Lifetime, ESPN, USA. Not only dud they have ads from day one, they had infomercials to fill out the time when they didn’t have programming to show.
There has never been a time since the invention of cable TV in the US that it was ad free.
From a 1981 NYT article
> Although cable television was never conceived of as television without commercial interruption, there has been a widespread impression - among the public, at least -that cable would be supported largely by viewers' monthly subscription fees.
https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/26/arts/will-cable-tv-be-inv...
MTV was actually a ripoff of QUBE channel C-1 program "Sight on Sound" which didn't air advertisements the way we think of them. Instead record labels could pay to have their music videos prioritized or to run giveaway contests.
QUBE also lead to the creation of Nickelodeon (Which itself was ad-free for several years). QUBE channel C-3 "Pinwheel" was the first cable channel made for only young children, and was spun off into Nickelodeon when QUBE went defunct.
The QUBE T channels were just cable links to conventional OTA broadcast television channels (T for television).
QUBE C channels (C for community) did not have ad breaks. Instead there would be sponsored giveaways or sponsored shows which eventually lead to the current practice of infomercials. Except with QUBE the segments were live and viewers could push one of 5 buttons on the remote to interact with the program. For example in a sponsored cosmetics segment viewers could vote on whether the next topic would be one of 5 options, lipstick, mascara, etc. Sight on Sound would ask some questions about current viewer demographics (are you male/female. Are you in age group ABCDE. How many people are watching right now), the dj would say it was to play music matching the current demographic, but it was mainly collected to give metrics to sponsored segments or to wait for an appropriate time to play a sponsored segment.
But what most urban people considered "cable" at the time would be the QUBE P-channels. P for Pay. Unlike other pay channels at the time like HBO, the P channels were a monthly subscription (each), not pay per view. Notably, QUBE got into the news several times because of channel P-10, which aired softcore porn.
Also ESPN did not initially air advertisements during programming, only in between programs. But they also only had sports no one really cared about for the first few years. No major sports, no college games. But they did have highlights and some international sports.
The main reason early cable-only channels didn't have advertising is mainly because the subscriber numbers were so small there wasn't much revenue to be made targeting 5-10k viewers. Once subscriber numbers went up, and higher budget programming was in-demand (sports licensing is ridiculously expensive) ad breaks similar to OTA channels were introduced. But many of cable's early adopters bought into it on word of mouth, and word at the time was "no ad breaks!" It wasn't a goal of cable TV, just a side effect of the development.
It was only a few years, but there were a few years when cable tv had no ad breaks for the majority of urban subscribers. It's sort of like someone saying Netflix used to have pretty much every show and movie, and then pulling up stats from 2014 and beyond saying no they didn't.
Isn’t that a form of advertising?
> QUBE also lead to the creation of Nickelodeon
If I recall correctly, Nickelodeon use to fill up late night spots with infomercials.
And yeah Nickelodeon did but that's because the network was "off" during those hours. When it was on it was 12 hours uninterrupted for the first 5 years.
Fair point.
Cloudbox on a rented dedicated server, everything is automatic and things just show up in Plex.
Maybe I'm unusual, but I doubt it.
And to say that it's just an ethics thing, is completely ignorant view. It's perfectly acceptable to torrent something when living in a country that wasn't deemed worthy by the rights holder to release their product there.
Coming from a country where media consumption used the be expensive, the reason people pirated entertainment was mainly due to cost. Not because it was inconvenient to see an ad.
Streaming will still be miles more convenient than piracy. All I have to do is turn on my apple tv, grab the remote and watch whatever I want, whenever I want. I don’t have to dig through some torrent sites, download it, then stream it to the tv.
I'm fairly certain Comcast's cable package they keep spamming me costs less than those combined
Media consumption is expensive again. All we've done is move from the cable bundle with terrible content to a different set of un-/re-bundled channels where the slightly better content lives.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/10/hbo-max-d...
But it is on demand now, which is a great improvement.
And people can also pick and choose. I can buy individual episodes or seasons, or I can pay for one service per month and then cancel and pay for another next month. Or people can pay for everything all at once if they want. Or they can watch YouTube for free or pay to have fewer ad breaks.
I see lots of improvement compared to the previous situation.
Can you, though? By this I mean, what does "buying" an episode/season look like? Have you simply paid for a license to watch the content via the provider you subscribe to as long as the provider continues to hold onto it's agreement with the rights holder that allows them to host the content, and you continue to pay said provider a monthly access fee? Or do you possess a physical copy, or a digital file, of the episode/season, un-DRM'd, on a device that you own?
I would not be surprised to see this go away. Some services have shows released regularly one episode at a time, which mimics broadcast TV (although that doesn't really bother me, and can be a good thing).
But I would be willing to bet that they begin restricting access to these shows based on subscription length or something (can only see a show with a 1 year subscription or something).
The goal is 100% to retake control from the consumer (well, it is to make money, but they will do that via controlling what a consumer can see).
The great thing is the unnecessary middleman that used to restrict how sellers can sell is now out of the picture. Or in Comcast’s case, merged into one entity.
But that is a separate problem of government not designating fiber internet as a utility.
You don't have to do that these days, either. There's software out there that will happily keep tabs on your favorite shows and films and download them as soon as they're available via torrent/newsgroup/etc., and then drop it directly into Plex, Kodi, or wherever, automagically.
Just like streaming, but without the cost.
So I can avoid them, of course.
This is not the reality of piracy in 2022.
Downloading a torrent client and VPN is seen as confusingly complicated for many of them. Once I help them get past that, I also have to train them to search safely and parse the file names of what they are trying to find. More than just informing them that a movie is not a 25 MB exe file, but that there is a convention around encoding/file type, bit rate, and how episodes/tracks are named.
It is understandable, but I think there is a huge mental barrier for most non-savvy computer users. I think that unless there is some friendly and non-sketchy all in one service to facilitate piracy there will not be some widespread upswell in piracy among the general public.
A small-scale solution could be setting up a Jellyfin or similar server for all your friends + family members. Curate it with what they ask for, maybe give them access to a Sonarr instance so they can add content themselves. There are client apps for smart TVs, phones, and a web player. Maybe they'll like it so much they tell their friends, or want to set up their own :)
I anticipate some version of family and friend supported distributed services to continue growing in the near future.
It used to be that either one required a bit of know-how, but I've personally seen cases where the barrier to entry is lower for just obtaining the media. Safety isn't just an afterthought as much as total ignorance.
In the most alarming case I witnessed, an acquaintance of mine had a friend who "knew enough to be dangerous": they were sideloading an app on their settop box for them that just pulled from some site. I'm sure it would work to watch rips of new movies or whatever, but I doubt it even used TLS.
I had to explain to my acquaintance that not only would it be easily visible by their ISP (and why that's bad), but that it was almost certainly illegal in the first place.
Getting a movie for free sounds obviously sketchy to most of us, but think about the number of gadgets and services that have been advertising exactly that for decades[0]. Understanding the difference requires some technical knowledge.
[0]: The catch usually being that "free" really means "after fulfilling some other obligation", such as signing up for a free trial of something.
I've heard that paid Plexshares are more or less this. You pay to access a private streaming server that has all the content you could ever want. No VPNs, no torrent clients, no parsing formats, no viruses, no running an HDMI cable from a PC to your TV. It's as easy as any other paid streaming service, without exclusive content restrictions.
Want to watch the new season on x? Oh even though HBO has all the old seasons, the new season is on another service.
Want to watch x movie you saw on netflix two months ago? Netflix doesnt have the rights anymore now and you'll have to dig through your streaming services to see where it landed or hope whatever, "Where is this streaming?" website you land on is accurate and up to date.
Clicking a mirror link sounds less difficult than this. If you're going through the trouble of setting up some system its going to as simple to type in a show name and click a link... Even to a non geek.
Now everything has moved to private trackers, invite-only Discords and more and more outside of the clearweb. That's a far worse UX IMO.
But once you do go through those trenches, it can be quite amazing to see how simple everything can be if things weren't exclusive to a dozen different streaming services.