This one?
Or, this one?
I thought you were an old like the rest of us. Netflix didn’t start streaming until 2007.
Yep, that’s the one, thanks much. I never would have guessed MPSIMS, but I guess it makes sense since that’s the current events forum.
EDIT: And of course neither thread has any posts from the 25th or later, and the 25th is when the tentative agreement was reached. So no discussion at all, actually.
I’m 40. We had no cable when I was in college, I think I eked by watching others’ TV. My husband and I did start mail-order Netflix services in college and that was our entertainment for a few years. Streaming services started soon after I graduated. So yes, in my entire adult life, I’ve never had cable.
Huh. So I’m only 12 years older than you, but the comparison that immediately jumps to mind makes the difference feel so much larger: You were a teenager, possibly still in high school, during 9/11. The national disaster from my high school years was the Challenger shuttle explosion. In 1986.
Huge mistake. HUGE. Everyone delivers now, and those that don’t can be Ubered in. Amazon is clearly confused abut why they are worth the annual fee.
Nope, we have to rent the movies.
The amount of movies I would like to stream, but end up only being available to rent from Prime, is infuriating. I have five friggin’ streaming services and yet a solid third of the time, whatever I’m in the mood to watch is only available via rental.
For those interested:
Netflix has closed their DVD mail business recently. If you were a customer, you can ask them to send you some DVD movies…for free and you can keep them forever. Netflix is giving away their warehouse of DVDs (otherwise they’d just be landfill).
I am not sure what you need to do to get those free movies though.
I assume you would just order them normally. I had the DVD service for a good 5 years or so. Depending on which package you get, you get X number of rentals at the same time. My guess is they would just add 10 to your number and then not expect you to send any of them back.
Thats not what the cite says. It says "Members looking for an ad-free option will have to pay an extra $2.99 per month. Most of the streaming players including Netflix (NFLX) and Disney (DIS) have also hiked their subscription plans. "
And you have to pay extra not to get ads on Netflix. Well, the way they put it is that you get a discount if you get ads, but same thing.
With Netflix, the difference in cost is pretty dramatic; $6.99 for the ad-supported version versus $15.49 for the cheaper ad-free version (of the two ad-free options). Hulu is $7.99 with ads or $17.99 without. I think Prime Video is going to be $8.99 with ads or $11.99 without. So the first two offer a steeper discount for the ad-supported versions.
I was a freshman in college. 9/11 was the first or second week. The start of my college career was absolute chaos (and not in the good, Animal House kind of way.)
I think the point is that a lot of stuff you want to watch on Amazon Prime you end up having to rent anyway. I have had a weekly movie night with a good friend going on a few years now, and it’s extremely rare that we don’t have to rent the Movie of the Week from Amazon. So I’m paying Amazon in order to rent its movies… It feels like paying twice.
Remember, Amazon Prime costs $139/year. It already is far from free.
Granted, Amazon bundles a few things into that $139 and video is only one. But they are making the video less attractive by adding an additional fee. And, frankly, their “free” offering right now is kinda shit already. YMMV
The other “perks” for that $139 have been racing downhill too but that is a different thread I think.
Exactly
The amazon rental and amazon prime video service are separate. You can still rent movies without having prime video. Amazon is just uniquely annoying among the streaming services that they mix these two things in the same interface. It’s both a store and a streaming service and they apparently have decided that being incredibly annoying by mixing them is profitable.
I seem to recall a button they put on there that hid the pay to watch stuff but I can’t find it now. Maybe they removed it.
The first season of Rings of Power cost over $700 million.
TNF is costing over a billion dollars per season.
And the hardware unit at Amazon lost $10 billion in 2022 alone, thanks in large part to Alexa.
So all Amazon has to do is sign up about 84 million new annual Prime subscribers and it all pays for itself.
I know that quite well, and to many that fee ends up saving them $$ on shipping.
It used to.
Most merchants have learned they have to compete with Amazon on that. They didn’t want to but have to. Now you get free shipping all over the place. There may be minimum amounts for free shipping but they have it.
And Amazon is often not the least expensive anymore. It seems many assume people never look anywhere else since the Amazon one-stop-shop is so easy.
The last bastion for me was customer service but even there Amazon is falling down…especially since they are not fulfilling a lot of what they sell. Just had this happen…$2,000 item that said it would ship in 5-8 days. Contacted Amazon 24 hours later to cancel…nope. Can’t cancel. Hasn’t shipped yet…will take five weeks to arrive…then I can return…which will take five weeks…then maybe a refund can happen. Not kidding. It’s awful (and I contacted them more than once). Third-party seller so Amazon bows out mostly.
Now they want to charge me for no ads??? Something I never had to pay for before?
Fuck them!