Max Removes 4K Streaming, Other Perks From Ad-Free Plan (droid-life.com) 70
Long-time Slashdot reader Shakrai writes: Continuing the seemingly industry-wide trend towards enshitification of the Subscription Video on Demand (SVOD) marketplace, Max today announced that it will be making changes to the current Ad-Free plan. To wit, 4K HDR with Dolby Atmos will be removed and concurrent streams will decrease from three to two.
In other words, you are paying the same price for less features. If you wish to keep the features you've had all along, all you have to do is upgrade to Ultimate Ad-Free at a 33% premium for the annual plan or 25% increase for monthly. No news yet on a crackdown of password sharing, however, that seems inevitable as the industry races to the bottom.
Meet the new cable boss, same as the old, except, they bring death by several small cuts instead of a single large one.
In other words, you are paying the same price for less features. If you wish to keep the features you've had all along, all you have to do is upgrade to Ultimate Ad-Free at a 33% premium for the annual plan or 25% increase for monthly. No news yet on a crackdown of password sharing, however, that seems inevitable as the industry races to the bottom.
Meet the new cable boss, same as the old, except, they bring death by several small cuts instead of a single large one.
Re:Mainstreaming vulgarity (Score:4, Informative)
So we're mainstreaming vulgarity, now?
The historical definition of the word vulgar was more or less equivalent to "mainstream" or "in common usage," so... yes, hundreds of years ago.
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Origanum vulgare — wild marjoram
Trivia for the day which incidentally proves you have been correct since Latin was the vulgar language.
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Using indecent language on a radio or television broadcast leads to a fine by the national radio and television regulator.
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a good sprinkle of vulgarity can sometimes be very apt. the problem with "enshitification" is not its vulgarity, but that it is just borderline stupid, an infantile and nondescriptive way to describe a phenomenon. which is why it has been only adopted by fad lovers and fad publishers, i guess.
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So I take it this is your first time watching HBO?
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I mean if preventing password sharing is a race to the bottom, clearly nothing can live up to this person's entitlement.
Password sharing was implicitly encouraged by everyone except Netflix, who explicitly encouraged it. Here you go [twitter.com], straight from the source, so, please, do tell me how it's "entitlement" to be pissed off when they later yank away the benefit simply to feed the growth machine.
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wrong. stop. do not continue. you are wrong and have been for months, littering this bullshit all over every Netflix/streaming thread.
Re:Mainstreaming vulgarity (Score:5, Informative)
"Enshitification" is a reference to Cory Doctorow's essay on how platforms end up abusing customers, then users, and finally both, in order to profit themselves.
Personally, I'd be more concerned about the concept behind the term rather than the fact that the term includes the word 'shit'. The former seems far more vulgar than the latter.
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"Enshitification" is a reference to Cory Doctorow's essay on how platforms end up abusing customers, then users, and finally both, in order to profit themselves.
Personally, I'd be more concerned about the concept behind the term rather than the fact that the term includes the word 'shit'. The former seems far more vulgar than the latter.
Not the OP, but I never much cared about vulgarity. Hells, anybody that's read any of my fiction knows that. Some of my sailor characters live up to the reputation sailors who go to sea for years at a time get when they come back home. I'm not even against making up your own words. It's fun to do, and sometimes comes off as clever. But it's only clever the first time. And all the ball-huggers trying to use the word every chance they get when it comes to 'enshitification' make it appear just a little less cl
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"Enshitification" is a reference to Cory Doctorow's essay on how platforms end up abusing customers, then users, and finally both, in order to profit themselves.
Personally, I'd be more concerned about the concept behind the term rather than the fact that the term includes the word 'shit'. The former seems far more vulgar than the latter.
I agree, but for those who find swear words hurt your precious ears, the BBC Two approved term is "platform decay".
Personally I like "enshitification" but I'm a UK/AU dual citizen, vulgarity used correctly doesn't bother me one iota. Also it's quite self descriptive.
For the uninitiated, there is even a wikipedia article on it [wikipedia.org].
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Personally, I'd be more concerned about the concept behind the term rather than the fact that the term includes the word 'shit'. The former seems far more vulgar than the latter.
*WhyNotBoth?.gif*
Re:Mainstreaming vulgarity (Score:4, Insightful)
Shut up shithead.
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Easy there, bud. I once had a teacher who insisted the phrase, "shut up" was overly aggressive, and she flipped out when anyone said it in class.
Then again, that same teacher regularly told us, "Talking is diarrhea of the mouth." You get a lot of mixed messages from elementary English teachers.
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Like people who get upset if you are "disrespectful" to them and complain about you cursing then a minute later are saying "fuck" right back at you.
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So we're mainstreaming vulgarity, now?
Lads, I've found someone posting from 1952.
Vulgarity has been a part of mainstream life for decades now, longer than I've been alive and I'm in my 4th decade on this messed up dirtball.
Vulgarity used correctly has impact. Used needlessly detracts meaning. Vulgarity is like a commodity, when it's rare it's valuable, when the market is flooded it becomes worthless.
Also knowing when and how to drop the perfect C-bomb is an artform.
Already cancelled (Score:1)
Enshitification is everywhere. (Score:3)
Re:Enshitification is everywhere. (Score:4, Insightful)
The FCC keeps clawing back spectrum from OTA too. It all goes to feed the cellular beast. I like fast/reliable cell service as much as the next guy but I also like OTA, radar altimeters, and the multitude of other users of the RF space that have taken a back seat in recent years to the wireless industry. I'd like to think the FCC would eventually say "enough is enough", at this point densification is a better path to increase cellular capacity than additional spectrum, but the Treasury rakes in billions of dollars from these spectrum auctions and the FCC longer seems to care about the public interest test that used to guide these decisions.
I could also rant about the fact there's no non-shitty way to get broadcast television if you live somewhere (e.g., in a valley) that precludes OTA reception. Back in the day the cable company had a "locals only" package, it was around $5/mo, occasionally less. This was the original use case for cable, Community Antenna TeleVision. Nowadays the closest thing I can find is a Xfinity Tier that allegedly costs $20/mo but is closer to $50 after various fees are added and they won't even sell it to you unless you bundle their shitty (I have access to FTTH) capped Internet service. YouTube TV and other services force a bunch of cable channels you probably don't care about down your throat and go for nearly $80/mo. All I want are the locals. :(
I solved the problem with a DVR tuner at my workspace, where OTA reception is possible, and stream it back to my house, but that is pretty far beyond the abilities of your average person. It's also a gray area legally speaking, even for personal use, and very definitely illegal if shared. Sigh.
Re:Enshitification is everywhere. (Score:4, Funny)
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Will people ever learn? (Score:1)
It says a lot about the power of willful ignorance that people can see things like this happening regularly, and still think that establishing themselves on Threads is a good idea.
So many resolution pixel things!!! (Score:2)
Slashdot was the first (Score:3)
This reminds me of when Slashdot was sold. It's probably the first example of enshitification.
There goes my legacy subscription. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Back to torrenting, I guess.
If you have advice for convincing my tech luddite TV obsessed partner to go along with this, I'm all ears. If it was just me I'd have fired all the SVOD services months ago. The writing has been on the wall for quite some time and it's only going to get worse.
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My advice, don't ask do, set up a media server like plex, automatically download the shows you are interested in in and make it easy to use. If its even slightly difficult they won't use it. That's why netflix gained market share, because it was easier than torrents, all the entertainment you could ever want in 1 place. But now since all the content is spread all over I think torrenting will be easier once again.
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One problem I face is a lot of the torrents omit subtitles and both of us value them. Even going direct to the zero day source -- and enduring the hassle of maintaining a ratio; not easy these days when everyone has a seed box -- I'd spitball a guess that only 1/4 of available torrents have subs in them.
You can add them from other sources but now we're into a time value of money discussion. I have to go find the subs, fire up ffmpeg, play enough of the episode to make sure the re-encode is good, upload i
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You can add them from other sources but now we're into a time value of money discussion. I have to go find the subs, fire up ffmpeg, play enough of the episode to make sure the re-encode is good, upload it to the media server.... It's a massive time suck.
Why would you go through all that trouble? Reencoding?
If your client/player can't read and render subtitles without them being embedded in the video stream you really need to find another server and/or player.
And while I can't speak for what plex can do, I know other similar systems even feature the ability to download subtitles right in the video player.
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You didn’t hear what I said. The source material (torrents) omits the subtitles , as in, there is nothing embedded for a client to display. Many of the torrent sites (including the zero day I'm not gonna name, first rule of fight club and all that) do not regard this as a problem and nobody that I've found has ever made it a priority to ensure all releases drop with subs. Some groups include them but most seem to omit.
If they are omitted, you have to source them elsewhere, and that’s where
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Plex has a number of sites it checks for subtitles automatically, and for everything else there's SubScene.
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I guess it's because you want non-English subtitles, because most "webrip" releases (i.e. from streaming services) include at least English these days. For non-English subtitles I've found it best to look for region specific torrent sites, where you can usually find episodes with the subtitles included.
Maybe look into better playback software too. You shouldn't have to mux anything with ffmpeg, anything decent will load subtitles from a separate file. Usually if the file has the same name but a different ex
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It's pretty obvious what they want you to do (Score:2)
Boy, we sure like that fancy new word. (Score:2)
I think we're overusing 'enshitification' for things that are really just scummy corporate profit grabs.
That said? WB isn't going to stop messing around and screwing up until HBO's legacy is so tarnished no one else will touch it. We still watch a few HBO shows, and some of the older / syndicated content WB has added is nice to watch without commercials (so far??). But I'm almost certain this will be step one in an ever-escalating war with the subscribers. They'll try to find ways to push us all toward the
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No, I believe enshitification describes the dot com culture rather well.
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I think we're overusing 'enshitification' for things that are really just scummy corporate profit grabs.
I disagree. I debated and in hindsight should have included these [theatlantic.com] articles [theatlantic.com] in [theatlantic.com] my summary.
The last one is why I think enshitification is the appropriate term here, article title, "Netflix Crossed a Line", some key snippets, the tl;dr being that Netflix (and others) are yanking features they formerly marketed, for no reason at all except to raise revenue, and I think consumers are right to be pissed off by this.
What do you get when you buy something? The thing, of course—a Big Mac, airline transit t
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I don't think this particular case with Max counts as enshitification. It's just a price increase, You can still get all the features the article is talking about, you just have to pay more.
As for Netflix, for at least 6 years their TOS have said that password sharing outside your "household" is not allowed. When I signed up maybe 4 years ago, I knew it wasn't covered, although I shared my password anyway. And you can still share your account, you just have to pay more, which is what I do now.
I do think ens
Time for some Popcorn? (Score:2)
/hint /hint
Same cycle over and over (Score:3)
It's the regular MO of most corporations these days. "We're different and better! Come to us!"....."Okay well we're profitable, so a few changes....."We're doing fine but, it's like their is a finite population or something so we need something else since "growth" has stalled. We're going to implement the same things you ran away from to come to us anyway since we're the only choice now / so many of you are here we're hoping it's not the worth the hassle of switching'.
It doesn't matter the product or the thing. They always start open and great, then once they think they 'got' you, they put the crappy money scabbing practices in place. It's like governments, kings, etc. People rise up, demand to be free, put heads on pikes, revolt. Things get worse for a bit, but then things get better for awhile. Eventually the troubles of the past begin to fade a bit, and someone shows up to enshittify things again. Confident that "This time" they'll do it right and have completel control over everyone, locked them down and oppress them for their own gain...
and the cycle repeats, same with companies/. "This time, the shitty thing will work". Ye old bait and switch.
Re:Same cycle over and over (Score:4, Insightful)
it's like their is a finite population or something so we need something else since "growth" has stalled.
Here's a thought exercise, are these "growth" strategies really business, or are they just the result of hollowing out actual productive businesses to make financial
games work?
Part of the entire conceptual model of disaggregation and unbundling is that there's a ton of dead weight in the sales channel - the so-called "middle men" - and by eliminating this dead weight, everything will be cheaper and easier to acquire... once a few markets did this, like airline tickets through travel agents vs. buying your own on CrappyAirline.com, it looked like a golden rain of cashflow to the investment folks. They expect _every_ business to be able to find some middle-man to cut out, and thereby increase profit. They are so wedded to this idea that they keep funding endless "Web3.0" companies who's only model is to eliminate some middle-man somewhere, and expect automatic profit. Now every other business, including established old line things like cable companies and car manufacturers, are held in comparison, but are not remotely comparable. If you are an old-line business like a TV company, cable company, etc. you've _already_ eliminated most if not all middle-men, and so the _only_ way to increase profits is to gouge both your suppliers and your customers.
The result is an endless set of rotating hammers, powered by fisc, destroying trust, loyalty and quality of service. *sigh* talk about a bummer.
That's not what "race to the bottom" means (Score:2)
"Racing to the bottom" means cutting corners to offer the lowest possible price. Curbing password sharing isn't a race to the bottom. It's not even ethically objectionable, because a subscription company has every right to make sure that the people using the service are in fact paying for it. The free ride was nice while it lasted, but nobody complaining has a leg to stand on.
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The free ride was nice while it lasted, but nobody complaining has a leg to stand on.
Except TFA is not talking about password sharing, the entire point is repricing, rebranding and re-selling something you already thought you were paying for, kind of like BMW setting "heated seats subscription" ... its entirely immoral and unethical to bait and switch by taking an established functionality that was part of the marketing campaign which convinced you to sign up for a service tier, and then arbitrarily change the tiers. That used to be called false advertising, but its not like everyone didn't
Torrent is a good streaming service. (Score:2)
New boss? (Score:3)
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I think they were referring to the fact that since HBO was bought they have gone to shit. Cancelled most of their good content, made their streaming service unattractive, a shell of what they once were.
The Future is Back (Score:2)
Today I saw a billboard for the "first Netflix, Disney+ and Discovery+ bundle." All three services for one price! Brought back bad memories of cable packages.
What about cable TV subscribers? (Score:2)
What about cable TV subscribers who get HBO Max through their cable TV subscription? Are they affected by this?
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What cable system do you have with 4k channels and HBO with advertisements?
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Your question makes no sense.
Cinemax? (Score:2)
Is this Cinemax?
It's probably obvious to people who keep up with the TV hobby, granted.
I'm about to... (Score:3)
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ATT pays for Max (Score:2)
FireTV + bflix/9anime/fmoviesz (Score:1)
Welcome to inflation (Score:1)
I don't see any point in being mad about this, it was inevitable.
Prices are rising all over for everything. It costs more money to stream 4k video... so just like the shrinkflation in grocery stores, the way they keep the prices for the service the same for most people is to charge more for the larger content, thus saving enough they can keep pricing the same for base service for a little while longer.
So because costs rise people will be more selective and buy fewer services... just like they are doing wit
Good reason to cancel (Score:1)
Ad-free subscriptions (Score:2)
It seems all ad-free programs go this way. They can't stand that they exist and will squeeze them, limit them, price them into oblivion until everyone is getting ads crammed down their throat.