Amazon Prime Recommendations Thread

That's not really how anything has ever worked though. You pay money for your physical newspaper / magazine whatever, it's still chock full of ads. F2P trappings are now common-place in full-price games.
Companies will always try to maximize profit, that's their whole purpose.

Magazine and newspaper ads didn't intrude on the content, though. Paper ads are very passive and, often, part of a section that was broadly within a service remit.

Unskippable adverts that interrupt something you are watching, at random points, for something that is far more costly than a newspaper, is a different ballgame.

And maybe audiences are no longer willing to put up with it?

True that.

Aye, I've always been a bit of a dirty warez monkey, but Spotify and the like put a stop to that for music. Consoles by their nature and the convenience of Steam put a stop to it for games.

If there was a single consolidated platform for most of the stuff I want to watch at a decent cost, I'd probably be kissing goodbye to my NAS or at least downsizing it drastically for personal backups.
Fragmentation and fuckery like this is just pushing me away from them.

If audiences weren't willing to put up with it then the ad-tiers on Netflix and Disney+ wouldn't be such a success and others wouldn't be falling over themselves to get in on the action.
I don't think we'll see Spotify-style consolidated services, the costs of production are too high compared to music. More likely we'll end up with satellite / cable style bundling of services for a small discount, which we're already seeing from the likes of Sky.

You pay a TV licence and still have ads on most channels. When you rented or even bought VHS tapes there were trailers and ads on them.

It's a bit of a straw man argument to say that if you pay it equals no ads. That's a recent development that Netflix and Spotify pioneered and neither made a profit for well over a decade. Spotify only made a profit when they started doing podcasts and that's because they have ads. These services bled money to increase user base which increased their shares, which is the end result for most of these companies, and now it's peaked it's unsustainable for TV/film streaming without ad revenue. Or upping the price.

It was always going to end up with ads as part of the model, there's no sustainable model that doesn't work without it long term.

True.

Personally, I find ad breaks quite useful to pop to the toilet or make a quick cup of coffee, as I remember my parents doing back in the days when terrestrial tv existed and had ads.

Back in the day networks paid attention to where to put ad breaks (and TV shows were probably edited with ad breaks in mind), and you'd roughly know when one was coming up.
Can't picture it working as well with ads automatically getting shoehorned in in the middle of a show now.

I'd much rather just press the pause button at the end of a specific scene if I want to take a piss or make a cuppa.

Ads at cinema are why I always turn up about 15 mins after the alleged start time. A good shout is asking the usher what the advert length is. They're usually a standard 20 minutes from curtain open.

Yeah we're the same. Try and time arrival to avoid sitting through ads.

Avoiding intrusive ads is increasingly becoming a modern whack-a-mole game and I appreciated many people just can't be bothered and have a higher tolerance. In some ways that's ideal as it means corporations are more likely to ignore the smaller percentage of us that try and circumvent them.

I run adguard on our network, use vanced & smarttube, download/record tv programmes to skip ads, and only listen to podcasts with ads at times I know I'll have my hands free to judiciously press the skip forward button.

Occasionally I'll intentionally permit ads on websites that I want to support and I have no problem with non-intrusive advertising in general. For example, I don't care about subtle product placement. If the deal was no price rises but one short advert before each programme that would be ok with me, but I hate to have constant interruptions and distractions.

Watched a film on Amazon this week, which had an ad break during (as well as before), and I was not impressed. I was already thinking of canceling as the hours we spend watching Prime are minimal, and I don't really need next day delivery on everything. This has made that decision easier.

We pay for Disney, Amazon and Netflix, and also use iPlayer and Channel 4. In the past I've occasionally had a MUBI sub on top. I have a Plex server which contains films ripped from disks.

I use Letterboxd to keep track of my film watchlist, and that tells me when something gets added to one of the services. I use JustWatch sometimes to look things up. But it's all a faff.

I think what's missing the most from streaming for me is a consolidated front end. Plex does it, but not very well.

We watch quite a lot of TV/film - probably 3hrs a day on average, so 90hrs a month for which I pay about £35. I'm paying about 40p an hour, or around £1 per film - those seem decent enough prices to me. If they doubled I'd be in the territory of a Sky sub with Sports and Cinema though.

The ideal for me would be a pay as you go model, from a provider who has everything (or as close as). Let me pay £2 for a catalogue film stream, maybe £4 for a new release and give me the first episode (or two) of a series for free, then charge me a sensible fee for the rest (number of episodes and length dependant).

Or that consolidated front end, which let's me see all my subs rolled into one browsable and filterable list, with genre groupings and recommendations, and the option to pay one off fees for additional titles (or, for free with lots of ads).

Content needs to be paid for, but as others have mentioned, it has to be easy to access. Lot's of separate services, with their own limited catalogues, own front ends and increasing prices or ads is not what customers want.

Thanks, will take a look, always good to have options.

I used to be XBMC/Kodi, but then I started having some periodic issues with drive mappings and external devices and it all got a bit messy. My Plex server is super stable (well, the software is, but the PC has a failing OS drive I need to replace) and I can then watch things casually from the built in TV app, or if I want a tad better processing and all the sound formats I can use it on the Nvidia Shield. In theory I can stream anything outside the house too, but I never do.

I assume they have quite a lot of influence otherwise that’s several trillion pounds being wasted every year.