Apple is quietly pushing a TV ad product with media agencies

Western shows get more formulaic by the day and anecdotally most of my friends that watch anime watch 98% anime and 2% occasional popular show on netflix.

Anime fans will be more likely to drop non-anime streaming services in favor of additional anime streaming services. e.g. trade Hulu for HiDive

(the companies/pricing being customer hostile, not you of course)

She's gotten really good at finding various streams for the games she wants to watch, and just watches those, usually with no ads. To keep the system we had to watch them "legally" was... I think "only" $90/month - $60 something plus more for 'basic sports'. Oh... but you want HD? That's even more. And you need a new satellite dish. That will be an extra $200/installation.

But had we just been a new customer... I'm sure they'd have thrown the world at us for free for the first 3-6 months.

Ah yes, the ol' blame the user.

> streaming services were free then dealing with all the different services would be a mild nuisance

Sure.

> IMHO people pirate primarily because of money

The biggest video games are all free.

> At the very least pay for most of your content.

Because of piracy, all the streaming services operate like free to play games. Disney+ gets $80/yr from payers. Not bad. Compare to Clash of Clans which is closer to $10-15/yr (per payer).

They're doing a good job. I am not 100% sure what the payers are paying for. Lack of technical knowledge to pirate? You're right, nobody who would know how to do this would pay.

Personally I pay annualy for peacock (at a promotional discount price of $20, to watch premier league), prime (also annually because shopping) and Disney (because kids). I also have access to Netflix, Paramount and HBO etc. subscriptions for free- via fnf or promotions. If I badly want to watch something, I either check on Justwatch if it is available on a service I subscribe to, or I just pirate it.

It takes barely any time to rotate services (ten minutes per month max, and you could probably even automate it - I'd pay for that automation, ironically), and it provides an extremely strong feedback signal to studios/services that you're not putting up with the fragmentation.

Piracy is a tragedy of the commons situation that provides the wrong feedback signal (industry will just assume it's because people don't want to pay for things), so it actively makes the situation worse.

People now complain that the services resemble what cable used to be - but there were entire movies and countless sitcom plots about people tryng to cancel service. It was terrible for customers. Free trials of streamers have mostly dried up but rotating can still provide value - and probably better for your own time.

It just doesn't make any sense.. Just sell me an NFT and use that to access ANY quality or media of that publication. Then I can also just resell my NFT, just like we would with videos, dvd, and games

This doesn’t compute. Firstly, multiple companies cannot simultaneously have monopoly power of the same resource. Secondly, there is by just one company who controls the majority or all content. In fact, having to subscribe to multiple services proves that there are multiple companies who provide tv shows and movies.

“There are too many streaming services to choose from and I don’t like having to pay for competing services therefore there is a monopoly”

So it wouldn’t be a monopoly if there was one company that had all of the content you wanted?

> Disney owns about 1/3 of all box office revenue

A third of one channel of distribution is not a “monopoly”

> Something doesn't sit quite right about repeatedly increasing the pricing via anti-consumer acquisitions on products that are contributing a substantial part of how the society collectively feels and thinks

Yes the government must step in for the good of society because having a team of superheroes including a man who turns green when he gets mad is influencing society.

> that are contributing a substantial part of how the society collectively feels and thinks

First of all, I straight-up don't believe this. I had very little exposure to TV/movies/books/the internet growing up, and yet I feel virtually no disconnect with my friends and co-workers - even when I don't understand a particular cultural reference they make, they either explain it and we engage in a fun tangent about it, or we just laugh and move on.

Second, even if that were true - then the problem is that culture is being built off of copyrighted works in the first place. Solve that. Doing otherwise shows that this is just a convenient excuse to secure access to personal entertainment.

In what way does Disney "own" box office revenue. It spends the most and gets the highest return? I know there are some anti-competitive theatre negotiations at the margins, but at the end of the day anyone could invest in their own business and produce good movies - if they had the talent.

Have they? Or perhaps trash media is the bottom of their list of priorities? Maybe they are overloaded with cases and need more support? There are many more possible explanations than "shown they are unwilling"

You can take a look at some recent current and pending antitrust cases on the DOJ's website:

https://www.justice.gov/atr/antitrust-case-filings?search_ap...

In fact there was just recently action taken against Disney, which forced it to sell of major parts of 21st century before it was allowed to proceed with the merger.

https://www.justice.gov/atr/antitrust-case-filings?search_ap...

Some time ago, I saw one friend kick another off of his minecraft server -- and when I objected, he said it was his server, which he paid for, and he could do what he liked. As indisputible as this was, I couldn't escape the impression that the other friend, having invested months of time into building things in that world, in some sense owned those things, and that this was a moral consideration that changed the circumstances and made them different from someone who had spent five minutes in the server.

At one time I ran a gaming ladder for a small community. And while it was undoubtably mine -- I developed it and paid for it and was central in running it -- as the accumulated history of the community on the ladder grew, as the ladder became central in the life of that community, I couldn't escape the impression that all of that data and history was theirs, maybe even more than it was mine. And indeed, a previous ladder in the same community had been run by someone who saw it (very rightly) as his and ran it how he liked -- and after some unpopular decisions, the community reacted by perceiving him as a tyrant. Is this an odd intuition? I think it's one we've all voiced at some point in this era, even if we couldn't defend the idea logically.

I think this philosophical tension is at the center of a lot of struggles in our age. Facebook was certainly made by certain individuals -- they can certainly do what they like with it. And yet I can't escape the impression that the platform wasn't made by them alone -- that what it has become, both in the larger society, and in my personal circles, is what we made it by use. I don't know exactly what that implies from a moral standpoint, only that the intuition of ownership Locke desribes seems to me somehow to apply, and to be describing something real.

I think the same applies to this issue. George Lucas made Star Wars. Without a doubt. But what Star Wars was in 1977, and what it was in 1997, and what it was in 2017, are entirely different things. Some of that change was wrought by Lucas himself, but a lot of it was wrought by us -- the culture that watched it, and talked about it, and adopted it into the milleu. In 1977 it was cool, but in 1997 it was something much closer to literature, to required reading. (And in 2017 it is something else -- one of the niche kingdoms again, and perhaps yet different rules apply.) Can one person own that? The community seems to have generally rejected Lucas' rightful ownership over the series, which I take as a general consensus that, even if we can't philosophically defend why we think this, even if it's happening on an intuitive moral level, people broadly agree that at this point the world owns Star Wars more than the creator does. That people are looking at its maintenance less like a private estate, where the owner can do what he likes, and more like a public government, where the citizens are right to regard bad behavior as equating to illegitimacy. (And Disney owning it seems like a legal quirk that has nothing at all to do with moral intuition.)

Cultural works in general seem to follow this path, from private to public, from entirely owned by the creator to entirely owned by the community. But the ability of that community to actually guarantee access is different than it used to be. Decades ago, Lego was part of the universal landscape of childhood. At one point it was owned by The Lego Group, but at some point it seemed to be owned by everyone, taken for granted in the cultural landscape -- and no one had the power to tell a kid who was interested that he couldn't play with Legos. But Minecraft fills that niche now, and a hundred other things fill a hundred similar niches, and it is absolutely easy for a corporation to stop a kid from playing -- a power so obscenely socially costly as to chill the behavior of parents. Does that seem intuitively like a tyrannical, if not an evil, change in the world? It does to me. But I don't think the pirates are right, either -- I do think ownership means something. We don't have good rules for this. We have moral intuitions, but no ethical heritage.

I don't know where the line is. I don't know what models apply. I don't know what all this means morally, let alone legally. We need a Locke to tell us. But I cannot escape the impression that Locke has a point here, and that consumption may be its own form of creation, and that figuring out how to deal with all of this in a fair way remains one of the most novel and interesting questions of our age.

Jellyfin FTW. I spent a half-dozen attempts over a dozen years trying to make XBMC work such that I was spending more time using it than messing with it (including just getting lost in their UI with an accidental button press and having to figure out how to get out of whatever unfortunate mode I'd become stuck in) and that anyone other than me was able and willing to use it. None succeeded. Painful set-up, painful UI (the themes don't help because they don't change the way it behaves), and you have a copy of XBMC on some XBMC-capable device attached to every TV you want to watch on.

Jellyfin solved all those problems.

Edit settings in a browser, leave the TV UI to do TV UI stuff. Clients on every major platform (even if the best ones are paid on some platforms—my paid tvOS app was entirely worth the could-find-it-in-the-couch-cushions amount of money it cost). Roku, Android, tvOS, whatever. Stream to any computer, tablet, or phone without installing anything. It's great.

I have no problems paying for netflix, disney, prime, and now paramount plus. I subscribe to apple TV for for all mankind, then I stop when it's finished.

What I won't do though is pay to watch adverts, that was Cable/Sky TV's market, not interested. Sell me the program and I'll buy it, try to include adverts and I'll get it elsewhere.

It's a common belief even on this site. I see it parroted all the time.

This is coming from someone who hates Google products.

This year, I decided to go back to an iPhone. This has been my experience so far:

- When you disable notifications for an app, expect to be asked inside the app itself to enable notifications. Every. Single. Time.

- Expect some apps to hijack control. Spotify is the worst offender. I plug my phone into the car, will be in the middle of setting my course in Apple Maps, then get rudely interrupted as Spotify forces itself into the foreground after connecting.

- In general, everything takes multiple taps to complete in iOS. It's just such a time suck to have to tap tap tap tap away at something that should be just one or two taps, at most.

- Inability to customize apps. I use a third-party app to browse Reddit. The only way I can open Reddit links from the browser is to hold-tap, share, select 3rd party app. Just more tap swipe tap swipe tap...

- The built-in mail and calendar apps are garbage

- Safari is garbage and can't be replaced with a true 3rd party browser

- A buggy Do Not Disturb functionality that will randomly leave itself on outside scheduled hours

The first two points could arguably be blamed on the third-party apps themselves. But I would counter-argue that it's Apple's responsibility to punish companies that actively diminish the user experience by finding ways to skirt around iOS settings. If I turn off notifications, it should mean that the first time I'm asked. An app should not beg me over and over and over again to turn them on. I said no, don't ask again.

Apps should not be allowed to hijack control, either.

If Apple isn't going to focus on improving the user experience, and if they're going to start down the road of advertising, I guess I wonder what delineates them from anyone else in the mobile space. Now they're just a buggy, expensive interruption machine.

Ironically, I had more control over my Pixel (with stock Android) and the way it behaved than I've ever had with the iPhone.

Not saying fake news has no effect on young people but it’s definitely a huge difference.

At this point I can't even go to a sports bar for a drink because being bombarded by that many ads is a legitimately stressful experience. If I'm visiting a family member who leaves the TV on in their living room, I ask if we can turn it off -- or mute it and leave the room. But I don't view these as problems: I'm recognizing a negative thing in my reality and trying to cut it out. I imagine it like a bug problem: I won't go to a bar where cockroaches are crawling all over the walls, or hang out in a room where a bunch of cockroaches are nesting in the corner. Ads are the same thing, but you have to be much vigilant to keep them out of your life because so many people have gotten used to them.

I hope folks start educating their kids at an early age to loathe ads. Middle schools and high schools ought to dissect ads in a dedicated (health?) class that showcases the manipulation tactics companies use to control viewers. But parents can do the same thing, knowing that school systems take literal centuries to adapt to new technology.

That is to say, I don’t see why one would move when the alternative is worse.

There are plenty of whip-smart folks at Apple, surely they know people adopted streaming services due to lack of ads, and have the ability to pirate stuff pretty easily.

Born from WWI's propaganda was the idea of using communication to convince someone of something against their interest or for your policy objectives. For example, all x are monsters and you should risk your life to go fight them, using emotional responses and conceptual associations. “make the world safe for democracy.”[1] After the war it was realized these same techniques could be used to make people buy things they didn't need. Shoes are often now sold by convincing you they will make you more athletic, cool or similar self image. As a result there is now no limit on the number of shoes that a person "needs".

This consumer culture[3], and was somewhat a conscious decision in response to the challenge faced by business from the ability to produce outstripping people's demands or overproduction. Consumers were trained via advertising, in order to keep production and growth humming, at the unseen expense of overconsumption. From Paul M. Mazur's :American Prosperity: Its Causes and Consequences" in 1928,

"Advertising is an educational force. If effective, desires increase, standards of living are raised, purchases are made; purchases create production, production creates purchasing power, and the circle can be made complete if desire is at this point strong enough to convert that power into actual purchases.

Of course there exists theoretically that danger point when consumption has reached its limit. Such a breaking point is probably non-existent.[2]

[1]https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-woodrow-wilsons-p...

[2]https://quoteinvestigator.com/2021/01/21/desires/

[3]https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/a-brief-history-of-consum...

so if ad-based free tiers are profitable at all, then they are going to be more profitable than the paid subscriptions, and ad-free options will go away.

Paramount+ already does this with their "adless" tier, it has ads. Unskippable ads.

Cable TV started out ad-free. The content was paid for by subscribers. But that wasn't enough. Now cable TV is just as ad-ridden as broadcast TV.

Even Spotify will randomly shove an ad in my face when all I want to do is navigate to my playlist, and I'm a paying subscriber. I hate the way it interrupts my flow so much that I'm probably going to cancel them in the next month or so.

Seedboxes are great when used with private trackers, but the trackers usually have very strict rules about which clients you can use, how long you must seed, etc.

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.

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.

This is not the reality of piracy in 2022.

https://radarr.video/

https://sonarr.tv/

https://www.plex.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...

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.

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.

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.

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 :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33177999

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.

I disagree. Apple did this kind of thing with the iPod and the iPhone. IIRC, the iPhone was $600 when it came out, and people paid it, even when there were dozens of other options. There are certainly people who are price sensitive, but Apple’s never really cared about selling to those people anyway.

They definitely will, especially since Meta’s new kit is $1,500.

I tried to watch some of the stuff they were heavily promoting, but couldn't get into them. Shining Girls is really bad. Tehran, a 3rd-party adaptation from Israel, is Netflix-grade trash that strains one's ability to suspend disbelief. Adding Glenn Close, an elderly American WASP, as a Mossad agent, did nothing to make this weird Israeli propaganda vehicle more believable.

Anyway these are all matters of taste but objectively I believe Apple TV+ has very few subs, which was my main point. It doesn't seem like a massive advertising opportunity.