I first time I see an ad on my ad-free subscription, I will cancel like I did with Prime Video.
It’s like they want us to become pirates.
Product placement is advertising, and as such saying “no ads” while not blurring out product placement would be misselling the service
Reminder that whatever your feelings on copyright law are, stealing from Disney is fucking cool
What a wonderful world we live in - boneless chicken with bones, ad-free streaming with ads, unlimited plans with limits… What’s next, Nestle releasing microplastics and cadmium free water (guess what’s in it!)?
Ad free with ads isn’t new to me. Paramount Plus will sometimes show pre-roll ads. They’re usually ads for other shows on Paramount and you can skip it right away, but it’s an ad nonetheless.
I could go without the unskippable 5 second branding bumper though.
This drink cooler will open and allow you to purchase a cool refreshing micro-plastic free water after a brief ad by nestle. Please stare directly at the screen for 30 seconds to unlock the case.
Looks at UTorrent happily leeching away
Looks at camera
I just cancelled my subscription and got a refund too. Good riddance.
To be fair, it most likely refers to live streams, considering more steamers are offering them.
That being said, I cancelled in favour of the high seas and never looked back
It’s not just live streams. On-demand of Comcast networks will have ads because it’s fucking Comcast and they are gonna force you to watch them as much as possible. At least you can use the live tv dvr feature to record the things you want and skip commercials then.
Comcast continues providing ample evidence as to why they are one of the most hated companies in the US. They used to be THE most hated company, but the founder of an extremely popular battery company, that also makes cars, recently outed himself as a mask-off nazi, so Comcast is gonna have to step it up to keep their hold on #1. I imagine it’s only a matter of time before all ICE vehicles have vinyl wraps on them that boast “Powered by Comcast”, and
concentration campsdetention centers acting as free (fully tracked and monitored) wifi hotspots.
If the no ads and ads free version contains adds then pirating is also not immoral anymore.
I don’t consider it immoral regardless tbh
Call it what it is - copyright infringement. Piracy is the act of robbery on the high seas, but we’ve allowed media companies to take a shit in our vocabularies so we can’t call things by their proper names.
Yeah, but pirates are cool.
Arrr matey, t’was never immoral! Subscriptions only be for landlubbers!
Prepare to make sail! Ahoy!
What words mean?
Grog no like ad. Grog want buy thing? Grog make up own mind. Grog not want ad tell grog what buy, what like. Grog know what grog like.
Writing on the phone … sometimes I should proof read it. What i wanted to write was something like
If the “no ads” and “ads free” version contains ads, then pirating the TV shows/movies is not immoral either.
I think they are pointing out that saying “no ads” and "ad-free about stuff that has ads is not using the words correctly. Could be wrong.
Yarr, matey.
By Lemmy Social Contract that You’ve implicitly agreed to, you must now sail the high seas [email protected] (blocked by lemmy.world instance btw)
Live Free on the High Seas! 🏴☠️
If people would just drop their service en masse they would stop doing this shit. Everyone acts like they can be without a streaming service for a month or two so they’ll just complain as they continue to hand them money.
In other areas, yeah, probably.
But with music, movies, and TV, they’ll just blame piracy, crank up the DRM and bullshit on their own platforms, pat themselves on the back, and raise prices.
crank up the DRM
Which is why so many people pirate. Non-conforming browser, OS, TV, some other missing magic? Too bad. Paid for quality 4K? Here’s some low bitrate 720p.
The reality is there aren’t enough people that care about ads to do that.
You either grew up with TV commercials or you grew up with ads, the conditioning is already there. There is a narrow band of people who don’t watch much or any TV and got on the internet for most content that remember when ads weren’t a thing. They have done studies and reviewed user data to determine how much ads they can play.
They might push users to leave by tickling the ad tolerance while increasing subscription fees, but that is unlikely to happen as the frog is already boiled.
I grew up with ads but I still don’t tolerate them, I’m practically allergic to ads.
Even back then I would just switch the Chanel when ads would start and then so many times just forget what I was watching and watch something else. And even as a kid I already would preference shows running on the public television in Germany because they didn’t have ads, they were played in a different way.
People who grew up with ads were okay with it because the shows and movies were free.
In the antenna days, sure, but cable and satellite sure weren’t free.
I’m from Australia so maybe things were different there, but my parents had cable in the 1990s and 2000s and I don’t remember there being ads back then other than promotions for different shows on the same channel. I haven’t used cable since maybe 2006 so it’s definitely possible it’s changed since then.
I know the US cable channels have a lot of ads these days, but I moved to the USA in 2013 and don’t have experience of how it was like before then.
The antenna days are still here. I’ve got a HDHomeRun and use it with TiviMate and Plex. It’s great for local news/shows and gameshows. I find new restaurants through local shows that review restaurants for example.
There were ads on cable channels as far back as I remember. We got cable in '85 or '86. HBO didn’t have ads during the program, but every other channel sure did.
I cancelled everything but paramount recently. Just cant quit star trek. Until I fix my DNS server at least
Have you ejecting your DNS server’s warp core?
Eh, they just don’t want my money. I had a Netflix account back in the day. Ad-free and most everything was there. They’ve all fallen so far. Storage is pretty damn cheap these days, and torrents are a-plenty.
I’ve got a jellyfin server but I fucked my routing and haven’t fixed it.
Yarrr, matey!
I’d say “sounds like a lawsuit”. After all, you can’t advertise something as no ads, and then show ads.
But then I remember who is in charge for the next four years and realize they’ll just get away with it.
According to a US judge last year, “boneless chicken wings” does not mean the chicken wings don’t have bones in them.
They get away with it with that damned asterisk. So long as you put an asterisk, you could say this comment does not contain English words*
* comment may contain some or all English and / or any other language words
Sir this is 2025 america lol
Our Deep Depression
They’ve literally been doing this for over a decade, at least. There were always some shows on Hulu that the “ad-free” plan didn’t include as ad-free, though they usually only showed ads at the beginning and the end of the show.
Another one that shouldn’t be allowed but is are the unlimited* plans where the * indicates that it’s not really unlimited.
some titles always have had ads on hulu, regardless of a viewer’s plan. they frame it as being ‘required’ by the content provider… which, iirc, is usually them–a disney-owned entity for these titles.
Vertical integration!
I just assumed this disclaimer was for live sports, which include ads whether you want them to or not. It’s not like you can just leave out the commercial breaks in a live broadcast.
Show us the challenge review, show us the mascot relay race, show us the kiss cam.
yes, you can, and I would expect an “ad-free” service to do so, at minimum replace it with a “commercial break” sign and preferably adding extra commentary.
LMAO I’m glad I stopped using Hulu’s service as they are a corpo dumpster fire; streaming was always doomed to become shitty because corporations can’t help but screw up good things. They intentionally waited for the shift in Administration to be as bullshit as possible.
