I understand that it's not free to produce TV shows, no free lunches and whatnot, so I understand why stuff I watch for free has ads, but if I'm paying for something I draw a line that I don't want my shit interrupted by advertisement.
It really annoyed me that Prime decided that they would just impose ads on me unless I pay them an additional $4 a month. I already pay for Prime, I already buy many products on Amazon, I don't want to pay an extra $50 a year just to watch your mediocre shows without you trying to indoctrinate me to buy more shit.
Companies seem incapable of imagining a world where they don't double dip, since they've built the whole house of cards on the cable model and they want nothing else than to recreate it.
A newspaper recently published an article stating that if you wanted to watch every NFL game, you'd need eleven streaming subscriptions.
So if they stopped letting you watch their new content because you had an old no ads membership would that be ok?
ETA:
I mean, I'm sure there is some exception to this, but generally speaking everyone hates ads. Part of the reason that the whole "cable cutting" thing happened was because everyone hated paying a lot of money to some cable company just to be bombarded with advertisements. At least that's a big reason as to why I did it.
Now all these media companies realized that they can start shoving ads at us again and people will keep paying.
Obviously I'm not entitled to having media at a specific price indefinitely, but I'm perfectly allowed to not like it when companies engage in rent-seeking bullshit.
Cynicism aside, I wish there was a happy medium where companies could just _make money_ and not always have to make _even more money_.
I suspect once the heat on this settles down, every streaming service is going to start forcing ads on us at all times, and then the only way to fight back on this will be bittorrent.
We have to educate them again that taking our convenience means them loosing money.
I can't sign a contract with you for $10/month for no ads and then start showing you ads.
Remember when Netflix inttroduced ads they added a lower tier to go along with it.
And actually some subscriptions can include unilateral price increases in the contract (a subscription is a contract) with early termination fees. It just isn’t commonly done because word gets around and you will lose business. You typically only see this in predatory industries where there are few alternatives and the service is necessary, like local waste management.
If the contract is unfair enough you can usually escape it in court or arbitration, but nobody wants to go through that.
Also you aren't agreeing to pay to renew the contract. It isn't a rent payment in a structured contract. You can cancel at any time.
(And it's not even that: the X you're charged is subject to change upon renewal!)
I'm not arguing that this is a good or bad thing, just pointing out the reality of every single subscription agreement I've signed up for online.
But doing so would mean risking to loose customers who were just too lazy to cancel. So most Businesses don't like it. (Spotify did cancel their old contracts though, for people who had not agreed with the recent price hike)
But what I don't understand and find the most stupid is when you are forced to watch ad for the internal content. It gives me an aweful experience instead of pushing me to watch more. So makes me want to stop using the service.
The worst offender is Disney+, not only the app is the shitiest one with great pain to seek in content, but you have systematic 30 or 40s long as for content of the platform you don't care like the last woke show. The worst of the worst in that case is that they will not care to show you 100 times the exact same ad as for the same movie or show sometimes. It has no good effect except totally wasting your time and frustrating you!
And now they simultaneously added ads and raised prices. I haven't dropped the subscription yet but am sure thinking about it.