Amazon Prime Video will start showing ads on January 29th

III_Slyflyer_III said:
So to add to this, I just got an email today that my spectrum account also now comes with Disney+ basic. So it will have ads (unlike HBOmax that is ad free), but still, I see the future of cable being integrating these streaming packages in order to remain competitive in areas where there are options, while still providing normal "cable" stuff.
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I didn't renew prime on the 4th. Wanted to go to spectrum who offered a year free. But have firesticks, and no spectrum app is available for the firestick , oops. Lol
 
Yeah I'm cancelling, I can't do any more of this subscription bull shit. I do one at a time and that's it. It's at the point I'd rather pay for cable and build a PLEX server. My friends and I have massive collections of 4K blu rays, no time like the present to put them all on a server. Tired of being nickled and dimed every where I turn my head. You can't even read a damn news article without a monthly fee, something has to change this just isn't working anymore. I don't understand how consumers aren't at a complete breaking point with everything becoming a subscription.
 
III_Slyflyer_III said:
So to add to this, I just got an email today that my spectrum account also now comes with Disney+ basic. So it will have ads (unlike HBOmax that is ad free), but still, I see the future of cable being integrating these streaming packages in order to remain competitive in areas where there are options, while still providing normal "cable" stuff.
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They've been doing this for a while. Both FIOS and Optimum in my area offer internet with free Disney+, Hulu, ESPN, and Netflix for a number of months. This is just with an internet connection because that's what most people want.
 
The thing I don't get is that supposedly these companies know all about me and my buying habits...yet all the ads they send me...are totally irrelevant to me and my lifestyle.

I think all this data collection is just total BS or they are just terrible at it.
 
daglesj said:
The thing I don't get is that supposedly these companies know all about me and my buying habits...yet all the ads they send me...are totally irrelevant to me and my lifestyle.

I think all this data collection is just total BS or they are just terrible at it.
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I have all "data collection" disabled and supposedly get ads based on my general area. The ads I do get are mostly in Spanish...
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
I never understood why people bother with he complexity and load of Plex. I just NAS/SMB/NFS everything and play back in full glorious bitrate without any experience ruining transcodes.
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Except you're not getting Dolby Vision, so you're not really getting the full experience, are you? I'm not even aware of a way to properly play back all DV content unless you're rocking a CCwGTV and Plex.

Plex is easy. Consolidate your videos with some minimal organization (at least a folder for each show or movie), and there's really nothing else you need to set up. Just download the app on each device in the household, and now you can stream all of your media to any device in your household, instantly. It's a lot less work than doing it the manual way. It also looks a lot nicer, provides instant info (e.g. actors), and keeps track of what you watched and how far you've watched into it.

Usually people watch movies and shows with friends and family, and Plex makes your media a lot more accessible for anybody. If you have a girl over, it's a lot easy to hand her the remote and have her browse the nice-looking list of movies & shows, than have her explore directories on my NAS. Watching through shows through VLC or other ways manually often sucks because it doesn't keep track of anything. Plex is a no-brainer unless you just watch media by yourself, on your computer, with no regard to Dolby Vision - in which case, it probably doesn't matter much.

I'm a Plex nut. I've even gone and re-encoded the majority of my remux Blu-Rays (hundreds of them) to x265, effectively shrinking my media collection down by terabytes with extremely little perceptible loss of quality (and no difference in most cases).
 
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III_Slyflyer_III said:
So to add to this, I just got an email today that my spectrum account also now comes with Disney+ basic. So it will have ads (unlike HBOmax that is ad free), but still, I see the future of cable being integrating these streaming packages in order to remain competitive in areas where there are options, while still providing normal "cable" stuff.
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Comcast used to include Hulu Premium with their cable subscription, but they stopped that a year or two ago.
 
MrGuvernment said:
You need Plex, or Kodi, but Kodi has an annoying audio bug, STILL around TrueHD / Atmos "rips" where audio cuts out for a second randomly...and Kodi doesnt seem to care to fix it...
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Running Kodi here, I have to say this is an issue I've never experienced. Having said that, the fact the devs refuse to address possible problems doesn't surprise me, they seem to run on a sense of heightened arrogance - A handful of log files should be enough when a vast majority of people report an issue, you shouldn't need log files from every single person experiencing the issue, while refusing to look into the problem because you don't have log files from every single person.
 
t1337duder said:
Except you're not getting Dolby Vision, so you're not really getting the full experience, are you? I'm not even aware of a way to properly play back all DV content unless you're rocking a CCwGTV and Plex.

Plex is easy. Consolidate your videos with some minimal organization (at least a folder for each show or movie), and there's really nothing else you need to set up. Just download the app on each device in the household, and now you can stream all of your media to any device in your household, instantly. It's a lot less work than doing it the manual way. It also looks a lot nicer, provides instant info (e.g. actors), and keeps track of what you watched and how far you've watched into it.

Usually people watch movies and shows with friends and family, and Plex makes your media a lot more accessible for anybody. If you have a girl over, it's a lot easy to hand her the remote and have her browse the nice-looking list of movies & shows, than have her explore directories on my NAS. Watching through shows through VLC or other ways manually often sucks because it doesn't keep track of anything. Plex is a no-brainer unless you just watch media by yourself, on your computer, with no regard to Dolby Vision - in which case, it probably doesn't matter much.

I'm a Plex nut. I've even gone and re-encoded the majority of my remux Blu-Rays (hundreds of them) to x265, effectively shrinking my media collection down by terabytes with extremely little perceptible loss of quality (and no difference in most cases).
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i can play DV content direct from ripped files via NFS from my TrueNAS on my Sony TV using Kodi as the player, you dont need Plex for that..

I do agree with everything else, since the Kodi TrueHD audio glitch since still on going, trying to explain to the wife to go here, then here and open VLC and then browse to this map area.... vs Kodi - Open, go to Movies...done! (same as Plex)...just floows and anyon who can use a remote can easily do it)
 
t1337duder said:
Except you're not getting Dolby Vision, so you're not really getting the full experience, are you? I'm not even aware of a way to properly play back all DV content unless you're rocking a CCwGTV and Plex.
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I'm not really familiar with Dolby Vision. My HTPC has been on break since 2020 when I moved, and I haven't gotten my shit together to actually get my home theater room set up since then.

I was using an old Panasonic Plasma from 2010 prior to that, which definitely did not support any form of HDR.

I do recall hardware decode supporting HDR video output using LibreElec and CoreElec with certain hardware but I didn't bother researching it because I simply have not had any HDR capable TV screens. It hasn't really been a priority.

That said, all proprietary standards need to die. I'm all for the likes of HDR10 and HLG, but I hope proprietary standards like HDR10+ and Dolby Vision go die in a fire.
 
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Why don't they just increase the price of prime again like they have for the 500th time? This is quite annoying.
 
Shoganai said:
Why don't they just increase the price of prime again like they have for the 500th time? This is quite annoying.
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I could see a second price tier appearing offering no ads as an extra. Thats how a lot of them do it now.
 
I'm not paying them an extra $3 a month, I'll just stop watching Prime. Something like Tubi can show me ads because I don't directly pay for that, and it's still a better value proposition than watching late night garbage on syndicated TV like I did twenty years ago. But Amazon is profitable yet not making as much as they'd like because they keep spending hundreds of millions of dollars to acquire and develop shit I don't wanna watch? Here's your tiny violin, Bezos.
 
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MrGuvernment said:
I do agree with everything else, since the Kodi TrueHD audio glitch since still on going, trying to explain to the wife to go here, then here and open VLC and then browse to this map area.... vs Kodi - Open, go to Movies...done!
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Let Kodi do the decoding and pass the audio over HDMI as MPCM, there's no difference in audio quality. I pass all audio from Kodi as MPCM to my receiver and believe this is why I've never experienced the TrueHD audio glitch.
 
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Ads aren't the only changes Amazon has in store for their Prime video.
https://www.theverge.com/24071417/amazon-prime-video-no-dolby-vision-atmos

"Amazon has confirmed it’s not a mistake — your Amazon Prime Video subscription no longer includes Dolby Vision HDR or Dolby Atmos surround sound. That’s on top of the ads that Amazon injected into the service on January 29th. Now, when you pay $2.99 a month to remove those ads, you can get Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos back as well."
 
DukenukemX said:
Ads aren't the only changes Amazon has in store for their Prime video.
https://www.theverge.com/24071417/amazon-prime-video-no-dolby-vision-atmos

"Amazon has confirmed it’s not a mistake — your Amazon Prime Video subscription no longer includes Dolby Vision HDR or Dolby Atmos surround sound. That’s on top of the ads that Amazon injected into the service on January 29th. Now, when you pay $2.99 a month to remove those ads, you can get Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos back as well."
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Another nail in the coffin frankly
 
Camberwell said:
Another nail in the coffin frankly
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We dropped prime over the weekend. Was nice having it and the shipping but it keeps getting more expensive and the video keeps getting less worth it. And its the only video streaming that seems to randomly downsample while playing and last like 5-10mins. Moving to walmart plus instead of amazon for stuffs. Or i just get back in track with waiting a week for something lol.
 
DukenukemX said:
Ads aren't the only changes Amazon has in store for their Prime video.
https://www.theverge.com/24071417/amazon-prime-video-no-dolby-vision-atmos

"Amazon has confirmed it’s not a mistake — your Amazon Prime Video subscription no longer includes Dolby Vision HDR or Dolby Atmos surround sound. That’s on top of the ads that Amazon injected into the service on January 29th. Now, when you pay $2.99 a month to remove those ads, you can get Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos back as well."
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Well at least it isn't another 2.99 extra.

I am more inclined to drop Netflix, they have very little left that I watch. DVDs are gone, too.
 
The adds are definitely intrusive. Unfortunately my kids actually use Prime video a decent amount and I use the shipping for sending things to my parents who are in their golden years and don’t like to drive all over town shopping. However it’s getting to the break point and who knows maybe spending half a day off shopping in person locally will make a comeback.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
I'm not really familiar with Dolby Vision. My HTPC had been on break since 2020 when I moved, and I haven't gotten my shit together to actually get my home theater room set up since then.

I was using an old Panasonic Plasma from 2010 prior to that, which definitely did not support any form of HDR.

I do recall hardware decode supporting HDR video output using LibreElec and CoreElec with certain hardware but ai didn't bother researching it because I simply have not had any HDR capable TV screens. It hasn't really been a priority.

That said, all proprietary standards need to die. I'm all for the likes of HDR10 and HLG, but I hope proprietary standards like HDR10+ and Dolby Vision go die in a fire.
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You must really love the movie Antitrust.
 
Gonna say the removal of hdr is not a deal breaker at all for me. I'm convinced Amazon's version of it is broken, at least when it comes to darks. I tried watching the Chris Pratt show The Terminal List and all the dark scenes are incredibly difficult to see much of anything unless there is zero light on in the room, which for me means only watching at night with the lights completely off, even dimmed lights make it hard to make out. and that show has a lot of night time scenes making it almost unwatchable, plus there is no option in Prime to turn off HDR. I've also noticed this with othe hdr movies and shows in Prime too.

Now granted I may not have the best TV in the world for HDR content I'll admit but whenever I play HDR through Plex it does look vibrant and good without inky black night time scenes that ruin the movie
 
sfsuphysics said:
Gonna say the removal of hdr is not a deal breaker at all for me. I'm convinced Amazon's version of it is broken, at least when it comes to darks. I tried watching the Chris Pratt show The Terminal List and all the dark scenes are incredibly difficult to see much of anything unless there is zero light on in the room, which for me means only watching at night with the lights completely off, even dimmed lights make it hard to make out. and that show has a lot of night time scenes making it almost unwatchable, plus there is no option in Prime to turn off HDR. I've also noticed this with othe hdr movies and shows in Prime too.

Now granted I may not have the best TV in the world for HDR content I'll admit but whenever I play HDR through Plex it does look vibrant and good without inky black night time scenes that ruin the movie
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I had no issues seeing the dark scenes in that show, but my Samsung TV has 2000 nits of brightness.
 
Once they started adding strings to all of the benefits that used to be premium, the clock was ticking for us. We canceled Prime and have started to lump our orders for $35+ for free shipping. They kick and scream and even try to trick you into signing back up for Prime on every order, or trick you into paying for 2-day shipping instead of the free option by auto-selecting paid 2-day even with $35+ in the cart, then tell you your packages won't come for 4 days with free shipping......aaaaaand then they adjust the delivery date and they come in 2 days anyway. 😂🤣
 
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sfsuphysics said:
Gonna say the removal of hdr is not a deal breaker at all for me. I'm convinced Amazon's version of it is broken, at least when it comes to darks. I tried watching the Chris Pratt show The Terminal List and all the dark scenes are incredibly difficult to see much of anything unless there is zero light on in the room, which for me means only watching at night with the lights completely off, even dimmed lights make it hard to make out. and that show has a lot of night time scenes making it almost unwatchable, plus there is no option in Prime to turn off HDR. I've also noticed this with othe hdr movies and shows in Prime too.

Now granted I may not have the best TV in the world for HDR content I'll admit but whenever I play HDR through Plex it does look vibrant and good without inky black night time scenes that ruin the movie
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Probably just your TV settings, or the TV itself handles HDR poorly. If you're not playing it directly from the TV's built in app it's more likely to be messed up settings because that device doesn't know your TV's capabilities with contrast, peak brightness, supported frame rates, etc.

But that being said, Amazon does like to get a bit wacky in some of their home made content to sort of show off what a high end OLED TV can do with HDR.

In The Man and The High Castle there's a scene where they have the camera looking at people sitting in front of a window with the sun blasting directly through it at the camera. This is the first thing they teach you not to do in photography, but because it's HDR you can still make out their expressions and everything just fine on a capable high end TV, even though it hurts to look at.

There were several other things I've seen them do like that and it's basically this:
1707852843610.png
 
Wait. "Dolby Vision HDR" is missing. Is that just one form of HDR missing, or all HDR?
 
The Mad Atheist said:
TBO, I was a kid back then, if there were, then they were few and far apart.
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I fondly remember the amazing 80s commercials that were on TV when I was a kid. TV commercials started back in the 40s. They weren't as rampant and obnoxious as they are now though.
 
sharknice said:
Probably just your TV settings, or the TV itself handles HDR poorly. If you're not playing it directly from the TV's built in app it's more likely to be messed up settings because that device doesn't know your TV's capabilities with contrast, peak brightness, supported frame rates, etc.
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Like I said my tv isn't the best when it comes to HDR I'm sure, Samsung q70 I believe... but didn't even think to play it through a native TV app instead of through Roku. Maybe I'll give that a try and see if it does anything.

Edit: Ok, going through Samsung's Amazon Prime app didn't change anything, dark scenes are still super dark with very little contrast making them unwatchable, checked LotR 4kHDR scene where Nazgul hunting hobbits at night, and yeah it's dark like it should be but I can easily make out all the shapes of everything and actually see it for what it is.
 
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Shoganai said:
I fondly remember the amazing 80s commercials that were on TV when I was a kid. TV commercials started back in the 40s. They weren't as rampant and obnoxious as they are now though.
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Part of the point of cable TV was that it would be ad-free originally. They put ads in more and more as time went on though. Broadcast TV pretty much always had ads.
 
I think cable went to regular ads by the early 80s with only the extra monthly fee channels being ad free like HBO etc.. Streaming has just gone the same way, inevitably given costs and how much ad revenue can bring in money wise along with its influence.
 
GoldenTiger said:
Part of the point of cable TV was that it would be ad-free originally. They put ads in more and more as time went on though. Broadcast TV pretty much always had ads.
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False. Cable TV was never intended to be ad free, premium channels like HBO and so forth did tote ad-free movies as a selling points yes (with "ads" for movies they also offered in the time between the movies) but the vast majority of other channels were never ad free. The thing is cable never owned the channels they showed, they simply rebroadcast them so how could they say they were ad free? And even if some channels started off as ad free (I'm thinking ones like weather channels and so forth), them putting ads in is not the fault of the cable companies. Broadcast channels always had ads so those obviously would not have been ad free, and those "bundled" channels (things like ESPN, A&E, Discovery, etc) also had ads to increase their revenue, so there is no way they could be ad free unless they had dead air in the space where commercials were inserted (some satellites, pre-DirecTV, did this), not sure if that would be an improvement though. Now sure some unscrupulous cable salesmen may have used HBO's format as a selling point and mislead people that everything was like that, but it was never supposed to be ad free TV.

So I'm not sure why this narrative of "cable was originally ad free TV" keeps getting pushed, cable originally had two main purposes 1) the ability to get broadcast TV stations even if you couldn't get the signal at your house with an antenna or needing a complicated antenna setup that had a motor that physically had to rotate your antenna to get a signal (I had one of those growing up) and 2) getting more channels to you without needing to build up a bunch of infrastructure (i.e. transmission towers all over the place) hence being able to market/sell more channels to people for relatively cheaply.
 
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