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Comment by Overtonwindow | Hacker News Reader

If I am paying for something I am not watching ads. I will cancel the service and find something else to do with my time, but I will never willingly watch ads.

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I knew this day would come and have been preparing. Every company I thought was trustworthy has proven me wrong. So now I’ve decided to provide my own services. I have a NAS and have digitized my movie and music collection and can stream it to any TV in my house. Netflix, Disney, etc can go pound sand. It has to be this way, as long as advertising remains legal, life will slowly approach a Black Mirror episode where things we once owned will become subscriptions ad nauseum.

I could say a bit about well paid engineers who don't pay for the content they consume - it's something I've observed everywhere I go, and I don't think it's one of our more attractive qualities (I'm in there too). I also agree that advertising is an insidious force that corrupts nearly everything it touches.

The funny part to me is that my parents do a fire safety puppet show for children and can keep them enraptured for half an hour with zero budget. For centuries, people have been entertained by Punch and Judy shows. It makes me think that maybe the $20M/episode stuff we do now is impressive, but perhaps a bit over-engineered.

Yeah I agree, you should still pay for the content. I buy the music off of Bleep and 7digital and own all the movies no torrenting. If I could do it over again I’d build the NAS myself to save some money since that was the most expensive upstart cost.

It isn't the over engineering that's the problem*. It's that if you're spending $20m it needs to appeal to everyone, not offend anyone, and you end up with blandness that doesn't say anything to anyone.

That kind of budget suggests lots of cgi which is its own problem, but that's a different rant.

> I could say a bit about well paid engineers who don't pay for the content they consume

That may cover many people, but GP's post seems different. They went out of their way to "digitize their [presumably bought] collection" just to be able to avoid ads.

This doesn't sound at all like "not paying for the content", they're actually paying above the content: I don't think the NAS comes from the pirate bay.

We've actually seen this in practice: when Netflix was the only game in town and carried everything ad-free, piracy cratered. Now that all the paid providers are beginning to show ads, and you have to have 50 different subscriptions to watch what you want, piracy looks better again.

I don't watch many movies / series / videos, so I'm happy with what I get with my Prime subscription, which I'd have either way.

But now that more and more of my Spotify tracks are "not available in my region" anymore, I'm seriously starting to investigate alternatives. Spoiler: it's not another streaming provider. Rather, looking to buy a bunch of hard drives and dusting off my old cd player, so I can rip whatever CDs I can get my hands on at second-hand stores around me.

I doubt the media company lawyers would see it that way. And while they're ghouls, they'd have a point too. What counts as paying? I've got a colleague who would never download a movie illegally; he simply has a constant stream of Netflix DVDs (they're still doing that in case you thought that business was totally dead) that he rips and then sends back. He's paying someone for content, right?

I think the difference is that if you buy the cd, even second hand, and keep it, you're fine because you own it.

At least in Europe, there's the whole "personal copy tax" that's levied on all storage media as well as a "private copying exception" to copyright law.

In Finland you are not allowed make a copy if you need to bypass a strong copy protection. According to decision from 2008 from appeals court (supreme court did not grant appeal) DVD's CSS is considered to be such. Given that it's not very strong from technical point of view and that pretty much all CDs do contain some form of copy protection it's hard to say if you are allowed to make personal copies of most of the commercial CDs.

Fair enough. I don't really care for movies, so I wouldn't go through that trouble, but I don't recall having encountered any audio CD with copy protection. Would those work in a regular, old-style cd-player, like, say, in a stereo?

There has been various ones over the years. These include e.g. key2Audio, Cactus Data Shield & Copy Control. They generally played without issues on normal CD players, but I did hear that especially car stereos did sometimes have issues with them. The way most of them worked were by attempting to hide the audio tracks from computer CD drives to make the ripping harder.

I haven't really used audio CDs for ~15 years so I don't know what the situation is these days. At least the technologies I mentioned are no longer being used to according to Wikipedia. One way to tell if the disc has these kind of copy protections or not is to check if it has the Compact Disc Digital Audio logo. It's trademarked and Philips does not allow using the logo for CDs that break the specification. They do however allow setting the "no copy" bit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bozo_bit). No clue if that would be strong copy protection or not in Finnish courts.

Advertising corrupts even the things you pay for, but more importantly than that I did pay for Netflix and currently do pay for Disney+, but the amount people expect you to pay for their content is way out of the value you get out of it. Typically even the lowest levels you pay for on Patreon for a single podcast gets close to what you pay for Netflix for a month, which doesn't make sense from a consumer perspective.

There is a good side to the service economy: the stuff you don't own, you don't have to fix (it's the service provider's problem), and therefore there will be no planned obsolescence, and less waste.

Why is everyone acting so apocalyptic? Netflix is offering a cheaper tier with ads. If you don’t want ads, keep paying for the tier you have been paying.

Apocalypticism is in vogue now. Everything is coming to an end.

Humanity has often been preoccupied by the impending end of all things.

https://www.britannica.com/list/10-failed-doomsday-predictio...

Because that's how it starts. Eventually, the cheaper tier will be with more ads, the more expensive tier will no longer be ad-free, but have "some" ads.

It has happened before. It will happen again.

HBO has been ad free since the 70s. There hasn’t been a cable service or streaming service that started ad free and then didn’t offer an ad free offering

All cable networks started ad-free because they charged a monthly subscription fee, then almost all of them gradually started introducing ads in addition to the subscription fee. HBO is one of the few exceptions. The fact that cable networks let you pay a second monthly subscription fee for HBO hardly constitutes an "ad free offering."

Where does this myth come from? Cable was first used to bring network broadcast TV with ads to places with no reception. Then came the “Superstations” like TBS and WGN. That were rebroadcast of local stations over satellite. Then came ESPN, CNN etc. cable TV always had ads except for the premium channels.

agree. Or of I must....it will pirated site ads....on banners around my pirated stream without video ads...

While I realize this is more of a sabre rattle than reality, hopefully in reality youre using ublock origin. You won't see any ads on that pirate stream.

ffmpeg -i http://source.m3u8 -c copy out.mp4

Ads defeated.

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