The difficult thing is people don't want to pay for things. Ads are a way to mitigate that so that people/companies can capture some value that they create.
Plex lifetime pass is now over $700 dollars
My dashcam that used to let me use the app to locally pull down videos now requires an account to view the files on my camera that is putting out it's own password protected wifi network, just so the company can harvest more data and track me easier. This device cost several hundred dollars.
Streaming services introduce ads anyway and increase the cost.
You used to be able to buy complete functional software like Microsoft Office and the Adobe suite.
All this is because companies cannot be statically profitable unless they're entirely privately owned. All companies need to constantly increase profit, which means even if you're happy to pay for something, eventually the company will squeeze you hard enough that you no longer want to pay for it anymore.
On my home network? Jellyfin all day except for random encoding issues.
But people also really like to get things for free. And there’s plenty of interest in exploiting this fact to get something out of those people without them knowing it.
You were splitting that cost with the advertisers.
This is not a defence of advertising, just a reality check on this bad example.
In the US, at least, I think the lack of competition (almost monopoly pricing in most areas) has led to exactly the opposite situation - plenty of profits for the cable providers.
Do you have evidence for the claim that the monthly fees are not enough to cover the cost of providing the service?
I tried to find numbers but couldn’t, so I’m left with a macroeconomic argument. Better details would be welcome.
If they are willing do sell you to data harvesters then that won't be the only unethical thing they are willing to do. Be thankful that they have voluntarily outed their publication as untrustworthy and move on.
If you make the kind of content that costs a lot to create but almost nothing to copy, you have a dilemma: Set the price too high, and you aren't getting any money from the poor at all at all, even though they're willing to pay far above your copying costs. Set the price too low, and you aren't extracting as much profit from the rich as you could be.
Ads let you serve the same product to everybody, regardless of income, because they pay for the product indirectly, by buying the advertised products. Rich people have more money and buy more products, so they, in effect, pay more for the same content. poor people pay less.
I think this is a beautiful system in many ways. Ads give us access to all the world's music, plenty of educational content (on Youtube), including from the world's topmost universities, international texting, picture messaging, phone and video calls of unlimited duration, even some movies and TV. And it's all free, which it wouldn't be if not for ads.
If we banned ads, many people just wouldn't be able to afford to talk to their family or listen to their favorite artists every day.
It may be true that if they just put a little bit of fecal matter in the soup that they could give the soup away for free... but why would I want to eat shit soup? Even if you were to tell me that rationally there's so little shit in the soup that I couldn't notice the taste, and that there'd be no statistically significant health risks from it, why would I eat it? "Both rich and poor pay the same amount for this soup" doesn't sway me either.
And never mind that me, looking from the outside inward, I see them cranking up the shit percentage constantly.
If banning fecal matter in soup means the world has less soup, I've already made peace with that consequence.
>phone and video calls of unlimited duration,
Perhaps I'm so old now that I've lost the plot, but my phone calls (what few I make) are paid for explicitly and directly. Them being unmetered has nothing to do with advertisement revenue. Care to explain?
I believe that we should, generally, as a society, discourage communication in bad faith, and ads very, very easily fall into that category. So perhaps in a local sense it is worth it for the reasons you suggest, but I think the mass dependence of our society on advertising makes our lives worse.
The things you list are all free or nearly free to run with modern technology. It's not ads that make it possible. Ads enable market capture that prevents other low-cost alternatives from proliferating. They raise costs to society.
we still have it. WhatsApp video chat is the most widely used video chat app.
> we already had p2p calling with Skype; we've regressed in that area
Skype was barely present on mobile and got acquired by Microsoft before Mobile took off. Then it was as good as dead. So we have in fact progressed massively that anyone in Asia with a crappy handset and a decent connection can still have a video chat with anyone else in the world.
> Music, movies, TV could be mostly free if we had retained the original 28 year copyright period
And world would be so much better if no one was greedy. The fact is that we have not retained original copyright period and the reasons are beyond adtech, so what are you gonna do about it? Also, that doesn't solve the problem of long-tail content which is massively entertaining.
> The things you list are all free or nearly free to run with modern technology
Lol wut? Try running your own Youtube and you will discover massive technical problems (storage, network bandwidth, content moderation, discovery etc).
> Ads enable market capture
Google tried YT premium and look at its adoption numbers. It starts at 89 INR in India (less than a USD) and yet its adoption is minimal. 89 INR is cheap for at least a few hundred million Indians. People simply prefer ads over paying up.
Ads don't make it possible for people to have cheap access to movies. The fact that it costs literally nothing (c.f. bittorrent) to distribute them does. Especially for older recordings that were already paid for generations ago. It actually costs more resources to centralize distribution to serve ads.
Yes it is expensive to run a giant worldwide monopoly on video distribution. But that's not necessary. And some of those problems (e.g. content moderation, discovery) don't exist when self-publishing or curating partners.
People taking ads over paying is exactly why they are anticompetitive. They allow below cost services, destroying competition from companies that just want to fairly offer a service, leading to everything having ads and surveillance, eventually driving up costs of everything.
underlying technology doesn't materialize out of thin air though. Google and Facebook have invested lots of dollars and engineering hours into making Youtube or Whatsapp video a seamless smooth experience for billions of users. That's why the technology seems cheap now. Early on, there were big concerns about Youtube profitability.
> it's that even cheap phones are absurdly powerful
Again, thanks to Android which was funded indirectly by ads.
> c.f. bittorrent
That is plain old theft.
> And some of those problems (e.g. content moderation, discovery) don't exist when self-publishing or curating partners.
Curating partners have economies of scale. That's how you get Youtube. And for self publishing, you can see that most of the "self publishers" on internet are at the mercy of adtech giants (Google and Facebook) for distribution.
> destroying competition from companies that just want to fairly offer a service
That's why I cite Youtube premium. Google offered an ad-free option at a fair price and yet hardly anyone wants to pay for that.
Bittorrent does not equate to theft, and the point is it demonstrates that actually distribution costs nothing. The production of most media was paid for generations ago. It can be free or extremely cheap because it's literally free on the provider side. The thing that costs money is monetization.
The fact that self-publishers are at the mercy of ad companies is the point. The ad companies destroy every market they infect. Because they use predatory pricing.
And they exist because of demand from the consumers. All those providers have no incentive to invest and upgrade their offerings if there is no demand. Said otherwise, without the likes of YouTube and Whatsapp video chat (and many other ad-funded social media apps), we would be stuck in 2010-era infrastructure.
> You don't need a centralized service for video calls.
Need is a funny word. You need a centralized effort to enhance the user experience of video calls which is very expensive. And very companies have resources to pull that off and offer a great experience for free. Only 3 I can think of - Google, Facebook, Apple (via Facetime). Only Apple is not ad-funded and they keep it to their devices only which is for rich people. Ad-funded products at least made it available to the entire populace.
> The ad companies destroy every market they infect. Because they use predatory pricing.
I gave you a counter-example to your thesis about Youtube Premium which was offered at a reasonable price. Its failure shows that predatory pricing is an excuse - real reason is that people simply prefer to not pay.
Phone companies are literally a concrete, non-theoretical demonstration that call signaling doesn't need to be centralized for a good experience. There's also already XMPP which works like email: you can add your contacts and just start video calls over it just like you can just send emails. It works today. It scales today. You can use it right now, but the monopolists lock everyone into their networks.
Your "counter-example" proves my point: giving youtube away for free canabalizes youtube premium.
Movies and TV are video, hence they couldn't be free and without ads, just like they aren't on YT. Music seems much more believable.
P2P technology assumes no firewalls, plenty of IP addresses (and no CGNAT), no intermittent connectivity and no energy saving measures. P2p works well if you have a desktop connected directly to the internet via a dial-up modem with its own IP address, it works decently on an always on ADSL connection behind a router, on a cellular connection which mostly stays powered down to save battery life, it doesn't work at all.
Centralized services aren't going to make intermittent cellular connections somehow work for video chat. You need reliable bandwidth to the endpoints for that. AFAIK cellular devices are almost all ipv6 already.
I brought up p2p in that context, but if one wanted to also do movies, my understanding is three's already software you can put on a raspberry pi/SBC/spare computer to act as a torrent->stream relay.
The fact is "implement everything yourself" is already done. There's already off the shelf free software for this stuff.
What is "worth" is ultimately decided by the market.
What should be allowed, like sacrificing children, is decided by the society. Two very separate topics.