After reading I began to think: penny money first, available free time comes next, attention "capacity" and then we end overloaded.
Not wanting to miss the opportunity to express my thoughts and I've spent time, attention... I consider that it was well spent: short article, right to the point, gave me an insight. But when it isn't useful? Sight...
I read a similar article a while back, can't remember from where, that argued:
If you're selling a part-time educational product or service, your biggest competitor is Netflix. Even if you convince someone to do an evening course instead of watching Netflix and then they choose someone else's evening course, you've still grown the market in a way that will probably benefit you.
It is, perhaps, one of the motivators behind self-driving cars. It gives people more time to watch movies or engage in productive work. Any time not spent consuming or creating is bad for the economy.
> Any time not spent consuming or creating is bad for the economy.
Haha, this might be an economic "spherical cow". Realistically, we can't be consuming/creating all the time. People need downtime (you can't argue time spent sleeping is bad for the economy when people cease functioning when they get sleep-deprived enough).
Well, the other confounding factor is that the economy only cares about this quarter. Or, even more precisely, it only cares about the change in stock prices, not their absolute value. Every day, the stock price needs to continue to trend upwards, or it has no value, even if the company is itself immensely profitable or otherwise useful.
Seems like it is often forgotten that the point of the economy is the wellbeing of the people.
Say, during COVID, I think many people suddenly discovered that they do not need as much consumption as they thought they did. Replacing going out or shopping with a walk in the park was a pleasant change for some. And yet instead of learning something from the experience, people are pressured to return to their old consumption habits as if it is some sort of civic duty, because it is "good for the economy". It is the equivalent of breaking windows and fixing them up again to create an economic boom - it is bad for the economy and the people and is just a transfer of resources to a specific trade.
> Any time not spent consuming or creating is bad for the economy.
This sounds horrific to me. Why would we want to avoid bad stuff "for the economy"? Is the economy some kind of god we have to serve by the ritual of media consumption?
This view is only one step away from telling me I'm foregoing my patriotic duties by choosing to just make tea and sit in quiet or talk to people without going to the movies or doing something "structured".
> "gives people more time to watch movies"
Why do you immediately accociate to movies and productivity? How about give them more time to talk to their neighbors or their family or to contemplate their life or whatever else?
> Any time not spent consuming or creating is bad for the economy.
This is a complete countersense toward the etymology of "economy" and I would even say toward its only possible natural goal.
The concept of economy is about reaching goals with the least effort. And the selection of those goals can certainly not be "the economy", that would be circular, an attempt to optimize arbitrary conventions that is completely meaningless.
So having a good economy is certainly not possible by the furious consumption of unneeded things.
I couldn't care less about "the economy" if its goal has shifted toward the selection of our new masters. And that state of mind about "the economy" will certainly not favor neighbourhood stores but more probably megacorps and their (often very few) owners.
I can't seem to find a reference for it, but my memory says that a US Mars Bar had almonds in it. The Wikipedia page[1] seems to indicate as much since it mentions "the American version was discontinued in 2002[10] and was replaced with the slightly different Snickers Almond [...]" Although it lists the contents of the Snickers bar, it doesn't say how it was 'slightly different.'
It's so sad that in the USA candy is dominated by handful of brands that produce more or less the same limited range of cloyingly sweet and uninteresting confections of nougat, caramel, cheap chocolate, nuts, and a few other things.
I find it impossible to believe that this "sameness" is what people really want. I suspect candy vendors have specifically conditioned the candy market in much the same way as the film industry has conditioned audiences into go to see mass-market films-- endless re-hashes of the same stuff, endless sequels, formulaic plots, god forbid an edgy wildly different film gets out every once in a while.
Things are different in most European and Asian countries where you can easily find a mind-blowing variety of candies that are truly distinct from each other.
The awful chocolate! Oh the humanity. Its like a brown candle - mostly wax, flavorless. Done that way so it won't melt on the way to the store in an un-refrigerated truck.
Once you try proper chocolate (I recommend Winans', http://www.winanscoralville.com/), a grocery-store candy bar becomes inedible. I don't want them in my mouth. Its that different.
> Things are different in most European and Asian countries where you can easily find a mind-blowing variety of candies that are truly distinct from each other.
Uhm, in the US it's pretty easy to find boutique candy stores with a very wide variety. Even in grocery stores, the candy isle has quite a bit to choose from.
Don't conflate what's presented in the checkout rack, for impulse purchases, with the wider variety of what's available.
This is very much in the vein of Jobs to Be Done theory[0]. If you haven't heard of JTBD before, I would implore you to check-out Clayton Christensen's famous "milkshake" video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfGtw2C95Ms
It goes into enlightening detail about the same framing of competition as the author here does.
>While we didn’t exactly market directly to kids, we knew that they were buying.
squares with:
>Every time a kid has 25p to spare, they have a choice. They can choose to buy a chocolate bar, or they can choose to buy a ringtone. Our job is to encourage them to buy digital goods, rather than sugary treats.
"It is illegal to market to kids, however it is not illegal to sell products which kids want."
What? I'm pretty sure kids are highly marketed. Toys, breakfast cereal, video games, etc... there are regulations and in the case of vices, outright restrictions... but at least in Europe and North America, advertising to children is very common... much to the chagrin of parents who are currently being spammed by their kids for a Rocket League season pass because they were spammed by the ads on the Xbox.
I only know the UK law (a little), but from Consumer Protection Regulations 2008 it's often technically illegal to directly market to children. No idea whether it's really been applied, but there is also a bunch of regulation and industry guidelines that limits marketing in practice.
This was an implementation of an EU directive concerning unfair practices, so presumably similar laws apply in other European countries.
(Inevitably this is a bit slippery, but as I understand it there are a number of very common marketing tactics that are specifically outlawed. Some countries like Sweden have just banned advertising aimed at children)
The Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations (2008) makes it clear that it is illegal:
> 28. Including in an advertisement a direct exhortation to children to buy advertised products or persuade their parents or other adults to buy advertised products for them.
You can spam kids with ads for things without a direct exhortation to buy or persuade their parents to buy, with zero reduction in effect.
The knowledge that a thing exists and the indication that it has desirable traits works perfectly well (just as it does for adults); children don't need to be told to persuade their parents to get it for them, persuading their parents to get them things they have been convinced they want is what kids are programmed to do.
That regulation is, like, the definition of making a show of doing something about a problem while doing absolutely nothing at all.
I saw it as a two different points in a time line. They knew kids where buying, they were fine with it, but didn't tune their marketing or strategy around it.
Then comes a Marketing person and says "You do realize that your main customer group is choosing between you and a mars bar"
This kind of disgusts me. Products aren’t being developed to complete a task, or give you enjoyment, they’re being made to hold your attention. They’re being made to distract you while you’re used as a product to sell to advertisers
Phrased in a different way, they are developed to entertain you in your free time and help you relax. When they do this, they compete against all other forms of entertainment.
Well, this is true for paid entertainment at least. You are absolutely right about ad driven stuff though.
Except that entertainment would be a vast improvement over the attention sucking hate machine that social media often becomes.
It’s like heroin addiction, after first it feels great, but later on the rush is gone, the great feeling is gone and all that’s left is the desperate need for another hit to not feel like hell.
Correct. I went cold turkey on Twitter some time ago because it was making me go crazy and paranoid (doomscrolling and all). If you have the attention span to watch a full movie without compulsively checking your phone, you're doing relatively well in the general population I think.
Isn't this one of those examples about implicit ideology at play? Like, it's an unquestioned assumption that you need "entertainment" in the form of consuming attention-eating stuff all your free time. That you need to be "doing something", and that in some strange way getting through media is some kind of accomplishment, at least you didn't just do nothing.
I think this doesn't go without saying... People have always entertained themselves in various ways, like having rituals, singing together, playing, fixing stuff (clothes, stuff around the house), creating things like tools and clothes etc. But these tended to be more active "hobbies".
I'm taking issue with the template/implicit model whereby work sucks your energy out, and then you need to regenerate by sitting in front of some media device and consume some subscription content or some media item that has a title, author etc. As if unstructured time were scary. That you just go for a walk without having a podcast in your ears. That you just cook dinner without the TV on. That you eat without watching Youtube. It somehow feels non-productive and "cheating".
I don't think these are the best way to unwind or regenerate for the next day, as opposed to actually letting your brain just be without "content" being fed into it. Also a lot of content, like news and podcasts just work us up instead of relaxing and "entertaining", unless you consider "outrage" entertainment.
I think you are onto something. There is an argument to be made that entertainment is a comfortable rails, which you can use to appropriately guide the population in a desired direction ( propaganda does not always have to be overt ). Unstructured time not only does not result in money changing hands, but could also result in unpredictable thoughts that may be unpalatable to the system. It is no small wonder the default perception is captured by 'idle hands' proverb.
Right. After more thinking it's not that new, it's "panem et circenses" all over again, just way more scalable.
Also, I think Americans are culturally just much more market-thinking and transaction-oriented. In many other places it's a much higher threshold for people to give out money for something. Now, surely this is a function of disposable income as well, but "paying for stuff left and right" is just a basic thing for many Americans, while e.g. Germans would much rather save up. So marketing also has to adjust to local circumstances: Germany has very cheap supermarkets (discounters) because brand loyalty is lower and price weighs in stronger.
This also means that innovative people much rather go to the American market, because there's just more willingness in normal people to try and pay for new things there. It's both good and bad.
It reminds me of the excerpt in Bullshit Jobs (by David Graeber, rest in peace...)
"In a sense, those critics who claim we are not working a fifteen-hour week because we have chosen consumerism over leisure are not entirely off the mark. They just got the mechanisms wrong. We’re not working harder because we’re spending all our time manufacturing PlayStations and serving one another sushi. Industry is being increasingly robotized, and the real service sector remains flat at roughly 20 percent of overall employment. Instead, it is because we have invented a bizarre sadomasochistic dialectic whereby we feel that pain in the workplace is the only possible justification for our furtive consumer pleasures, and, at the same time, the fact that our jobs thus come to eat up more and more of our waking existence means that we do not have the luxury of—as Kathi Weeks has so concisely put it—“a life,” and that, in turn, means that furtive consumer pleasures are the only ones we have time to afford. Sitting around in cafés all day arguing about politics or gossiping about our friends’ complex polyamorous love affairstakes time (all day, in fact); in contrast pumping iron or attending a yoga class at the local gym, ordering out for Deliveroo, watching an episode of Game of Thrones, or shopping for hand creams or consumer electronics can all be placed in the kind of self-contained predictable timeslots one is likely to have left over between spates of work, or else while recovering from it. All these are examples of what I like to call “compensatory consumerism.” They are the sorts of things you can do to make up for the fact that you don’t have a life, or not very much of one."
I think it starts already in childhood with extracurriculars filling up waking hours, always preparing for some test, "making progress" on some axis. Not letting kids roam around aimlessly. At least that's the impression I get about American schooling nowadays. Mindblowing stuff like not even having recess between classes etc. Is it surprising that people take the same template to adulthood? That you need to fill up your timetable with "activities" that have a name, a structure.
Even when travelling, more and more people buy prepackaged, well-defined, "experiences" with titles on AirBnB with a predefined timespan, description etc. You can't just go somewhere and meet up with people, you must tick off an "experience" to feel accomplished. It needs to be "a thing" that can become a line item on your credit card for it to be real.
maybe this is my tendency towards left-wing anti-establishmentarianism speaking, but I feel that this is somewhat blaming the workers for what is really - I think anyway - a result of the capital holders taking most of the profits from the advances in automation, and then using that money to successfully lobby governments to lower their taxes and not close the tax loopholes, resulting in wages staying the same, and people working the same hours
He isn't really just blaming the workers for this, he's blaming an ideological component of our everyday lives that have been engraved in the minds of both workers and capitalists. In his book Graeber goes onto length on how this dialetic of "compensatory consumerism" has been established throughout society, going all the way back to the Protestant work ethic, the labor theory of value, and then the scientific management of Taylorism. He doesn't just critique the phenomenon of bullshit jobs as simply "blame capitalism" or "blame the workers", it's far more subtle than that, and I would recommend reading the full book if you are curious about it.
I am a big fan of what you're raising here. These are issues that I struggle with, and usually lose. It's so easy to get addicted to having something constantly guide your thoughts, whether that is media, drugs or religion
The interesting part is competitors can co-exist as long as the user see them as worth the monthly fee. For instance a user can have Amazon Prime and Nintendo Online, with Spotify, and be happy with the mix. It's not completely zero-sum, even if your attention is finite.
There might be frictions on adding Netflix to this, but Netflix can still be added in with incredibly great content that a user would be willing to pay monthly to keep seeing it (the same way Nintendo Online doesn't need all your attention if you're happy to keep it just for Animal Crossing, for instance)
If find it globally healthier than the alternative advertisement based services, which look to be more cut-throat places.
I totally agree that subscriptions are a lot healthier than advertising, but for me, as a fairly left-wing person, I think that the gold standard is state-funded media
I am not completely up to date on the right/left positioning, but I agree state-funded media is needed as a baseline to at least properly convey any purely factual issue (i.e. it's optimal for official info, like which law passed or who won the elections cough).
Of course it can't be the only media, nor should be trusted that much more than other media for any generic topic. In particular it shouldn't be trusted to be complete nor people focused, so there is still the need to find other sources that complete the picture with different angles that can be crucial.
In relatively free and somewhat uncorrupt nations, yes that makes sense, but I'm actually largely talking about entertainment. In the UK, the BBC makes all sorts of fantastic tv shows and documentaries that have no reliance on advertising or corporate sponsors
This could be a positive thing though - if people have resources left over after fulfilling everything they actually need then society is doing pretty well, even if that means people will waste their extra resources on unnecessary garbage.
I try very hard (and still often fail) to put myself in the shoes of people who are meaningfully not like me, and one thing that's come from that is understanding how motivation doesn't always track equally for everyone (and trying to come to terms with the fact that this might be okay).
Finding things that give enjoyment and deliberately distract from the things going on in a person's life has potentially immense value, depending on what those things going on in their life are.
The implicit agreement made here is that both parties know what you're saying, and both parties agree to not talk about it -- for the seller, because it's an ethical quandary, for the buyer because they don't want to have to confront the things in their life they're trying to ignore.
It doesn't always have to be so sinister of course (maybe I just want to relax and am otherwise keeping my responsibilities), but it can be sinister, which I think is what you're getting at. My argument is that both parties know this, and it may be the whole point.
My thinking is that there are better ways to do this, even for people that can't afford to pay for their content. I think the BBC is a perfect example. Why can't we have state-funded social media?
I know this is a fairly left-wing perspective, but I feel that the implicit agreement - which I totally agree exists - isn't necessary. There doesn't need to be a buyer and a seller. Once that is taken away, where is the incentive for sinistrum?
What you said is true for some services, but TFA is talking about something applicable to all services: consider all the limited "resources" being asked from customers. Money, attention, a monthly trip to the movies, a meal, etc.
Facebook competes for your time and attention. The ringtone company was competing for a share of a kid's allowance. A local outdoor skating rink competes with building snowmen, even though the latter isn't a company-provided service.
Nearly all products and services compete for a user's time, even if it's only the time spent deciding to buy it. Facebook wants more of our time, but that's because it's an advertising platform. Most services try to cut down user time.
Oh I totally agree that my comment is a fairly tangential to the article, but the last few lines really gave me a feeling of disgust that I felt I had to express
I seem to remember Netflix saying their biggest competitor was sleep as well.
I wonder if there is an economics model for a kind of product that competes against not other products, but against a users needs and behaviour. Kind of like a "radical monopoly" before it gets there.
On designing the products, Nir Eyal's "Hooked," model describes them.
Microtransactions, mainly popularized on smartphones, are super trivial to pay for if you have credit or a payment method attached to e.g. your Apple account. They even give a satisfying 'ding' sound when you've made a purchase. With face ID, spending money is a matter of double-pressing the standby button.
I don't even understand how these kids were paying for these. From what I remember of old ringtones that you could buy for your phone, you pretty much just texted a paid number and got the ringtone sent to you. And that paid number will just go into your phone bill, which kids weren't even paying themselves.
UK '00s kid here.
If your parents weren't the type to to waste money on ringtones (directly), you were probably on pay-as-you-go, you'd buy a top-up from a newsagent/supermarket with your pocket money (or "sorry mum I couldn't reply, no credit" until she gives in).
Then it was up to you whether you wanted to spend £1.50 on a java game, 15 texts, a phone call, or WAP data. Your parents would never have to agree.
There were shops which had ways to get data on and off mobile phones possibly with custom cables, I'm not sure how they did it. I had a Nokia data transferred to a Samsung once.
I think they could also SMS the ringtones to the phones.
This really resonates with me. I realise a lot of people will pay for individual Twitch subscriptions, YouTube memberships, and Patreon memberships, but it can be quite a hard sell in comparison to some of the things you list above.
I wish there was a better funding model as those creators. I'd like to direct more money to that category of creator. However paying one person (or team of people) around as much a year as I pay for my TV Licence just cannot compare in terms of value to me as a consumer.
YouTube Premium is apparently a reasonable compromise from what I've seen some channels report (a decent bump in income for them for each premium view and for the end-user a decent enhancement in experience across the platform), but I wish there was a similar scheme for more niche web/news publications (Apple News+ looks reasonable, but has a limited catalogue in the UK).
Maybe something like an attention based token built into the browser which automatically distributes a fixed amount of money each month to creators that you watched that month. This is already implemented in the Brave browser.
Maybe you could simulate subscriptions based on the token being active in a browser or not. E.g. someone can read a paywalled article if they have at least $10 a month distributed such a way (in proportion to attention).
The better model for Creators isn't subscriptions but SuperChats, it's the digital version of "don't buy the CD, buy the concert".
It's quite common to see people drop $20 for their favorite Creator to read out their comments. It's fun and provides that direct/live link that fans crave.
This provides a unique monetization channel that's not available to regular businesses while helping Creators circumvent the pervasive "why should I give you $10/month if Spotify is $10/month" narrative.
That doesn't solve the absolutely fundamental unsolvable problem that digital has marginal cost so you make 0.01x revenue if you have .01x the audience.
honestly I find this kinda gross. it feels a little too close to tossing bills around in a strip club. it's not so bad on music streams (eg, here's $5 to play my song), but I also watch a stream where a law student breaks analyzes current events. it's quite incongruous when they stop explaining the legal nuances to read some inane donation message out loud.
Well it's a business model most artist used for centuries before recording and mass production was possible. Busking is still using it to this day.
I find nothing gross in it, it's actually better in many ways because you have immediate feedback so you can develop quicker (whether you want to develop in a particular direction your current audience wants is another matter).
maybe this wasn't clear, but I was referring to a live performer with "music streams". donating to make a song request doesn't have that gross feel. it's mainly the paying just to have your comment read that seems weird to me. in the first case you're paying for a performance; in the second, you are basically just paying for a human's attention.
I get the same "ick" vibes from streamers reading comments too. (FWIW, I don't feel the same way about concerts or VIP tickets).
This may not be a great explanation, but there's an element of "dance, monkey, dance!" when someone pays money to a streamer to say their message. The streamer will usually read the message (barring ToS).
It's similar to how tipping at Cold Stone Creamery (an ice cream chain in the US) means the staff have to sing a short song for you. There might be fun intentions involved but if the people who you are giving money to aren't really into it, it feels wrong.
Isn't that the essential essence of all live entertainment events? Tossing money at people to entertain you? What's the difference between that and a concert: that you prepaid the concert ahead of time?
I see the value in subscribing to streamers, especially if you watch them as much as you'd watch Netflix, but there's no expectation of direct interaction at a concert. As booming of a business model as it is, very few streamers will talk about how they actively exploit their audience into thinking they're your friend. These parasocial relationships are unfortunately a sign of the times and how lonely and isolated individuals have become in the age of the Internet (the pandemic has only worsened this).
Something like Nebula, a group of YouTube creators coming together with their own service that costs less than Netflix, but subsidizes their content. It's mostly education/engineering/science based creators, but it seems to be a decent model.
I read longform articles and journalism voraciously. When I'm not pulling overtime at work, I usually read 20-50 in-depth articles a day. But the challenge is how widely I read. Sure, there's a bunch at NYT (which I subscribe to), and a bunch at open-access blogs and journals around the net, but the middle are tough.
I might normally want to read, over the course of a month, 10-15 articles from each of 15 different paywalled magazines or newspapers. Which is more than the 2-5 free articles typically allowed past their paywalls, but little enough (especially compared to 15 or more competitors) to justify $15-25+ a month per source. Maybe if I was a Wall Street trader the WSJ and Bloomberg are no-brainer expenses, but right now I wouldn't get enough value from them to justify their sky-high subscription costs, but I would like to read a decent handful of articles a month. A few publishers, like NYT or WP, have picked up on this market, and regularly discount to capture various price points, but lots have held onto a 'big subscription or none' model.
What I really want is an (expensive) subscription to something like Spotify Premium across publishers. I'd happily fund the pool to the tune of $50-100 a month, if it could get me access to my top 15-25 paywalls. Everyone gets some, some get close to standard subscription rates, but it'd just enable me not to have to worry about whether I've used up my free articles for the month at each origin. And it'd also let me contribute to lots of magazines and things I do appreciate, just not $25/mo appreciation.
I have a baseline expected cost for passive entertainment at probably about $2-3/hour and judge things based on that whether to keep it when I see the charge show up on my bill.
Some services I have kept for years, others I've started/cancelled several times, many I get some enjoyment from and then move on.
If you aren't afraid to cancel things, and don't sign up for things you can't cancel, I think it's a fairly efficient system that can align your money and time.
As for Netflix I found a great alternative. Many people are selling their DVD/BluRay collections on eBay as bundles. With the rise of streaming services, there is usually not a whole lot of competition on these auctions.
I somehow managed to get 30 pretty decent movies/series on DVD and 20 on BluRay for 25€ including shipping.
Sure, these are usually not very new movies, but I like to watch older movies and its a lot better than subscribing to dozens of streaming services just to watch one specific movie.
As for comfort, sure DVDs are not as comfortable as clicking on Netflix, but if you have a decent NAS at home anyways, Plex still makes a great experience.
I have no idea why a person would pay for a VPN to trickle torrents when they could pay the same to get usenet and download 1080p movies in a couple of minutes, or 4k in ~10.
> I have no idea why a person would pay for a VPN to trickle torrents when they could pay the same to get usenet and download 1080p movies in a couple of minutes, or 4k in ~10.
I don't know what services you're using, but I can download 4k in sub-10 minutes from my seedbox. My understanding was usenet did not have as many options.
I don't really watch TV anymore, but when I did my experience was that Usenet was very good for anything English-language (movies, TV shows), but I had to torrent same-day anime releases.
Don't torrent at home. If you're going to share Linux ISOs (because that's all p2p is good for) pay for a dedicated seedbox. You don't have to worry about cutting into your own bandwidth but for downloading once. It's more expensive, but it's cheaper than Netflix.
openvpn on a vps you already run, or some dirt cheap box. If you're buying dvds and cds every year you're more than likely spending more than you would on a vpn setup, or just use safer trackers. You could probably use nothing and any fines you eventually probably won't get would be less than the cost of the hard media anyway.
I don't know how the used market affects the creators' pockets, but let people who want to pay, pay. Enough people still need to pay to make it worthwhile for the creators to publish the content.
I only made my comment because they were already in the used market and I don't think most people who buy movies do so with an eye towards the resale value, so there is minimal impact on the creators' pockets at all.
I’m not sure that follows. Someone bought the content new. When someone else buys their old stuff, this gives them more money with which to buy new content. I suspect this is a very small effect, but I doubt it’s zero.
> I suspect this is a very small effect, but I doubt it’s zero.
As I said, minimal. If I save money by pirating content and then use that money to pay higher tips to service workers, then maybe they'll turn around and buy more content - helping content creators. These are very tenuous links.
The more clear link would be the used market shifting the demand curve for the new market outwards due to the resale value. I think this is a real effect, but a small one.
The reason to switch from resold to infringed is that infringed is a superior substitute. However, these are not the only two substitutes in the market, and given that the consumer is consuming a stream of items over time, it is the case that by switching to infringed that the consumer will have less reason to ever buy, either at all or in the same quantity, the substitutes that make money for the creators, such as paid streaming or new discs, and so it is plausible (and for many individual consumers likely) that the impact on creators will be non-negligible.
There is definitely a huge secondhand DVD market. Also your local library has a selection of DVDs. I was just at mine yesterday and I saw lots of titles that aren't available to stream on any of the big subscription platforms.
Plex doesn't even require an NAS. I run mine off an old laptop. 100gb of storage is plenty if you have a DVD or are willing to burn one, since you don't need to keep stuff you don't watch in your library if it's backed up to optical media.
My guess is that they're talking about ripping DVDs and storing video files on the laptop HD. It's functionally equivalent to a NAS as far as Plex is concerned.
I understand that, but the process seems to be rip, watch, delete due to limited storage. I’m sure I’m missing something but I don’t know what benefit this process adds over just watching the DVD.
Do DVDs in the last (~10?) few years still have non-skippable adverts at the start? That could be one potential benefit.
But otherwise, I don't see any real plus. Unless you have such a large collection that the search/recommend features are useful. You still have to take the DVD out, put it in the computer, run some program, etc.
Truthfully, probably it would just be easier to watch the DVD for watching on the TV, but Plex lets you watch on all devices.
I really don't need instant access to tons of movies, but my kids watch a lot of the same ones over and over, so I keep those on Plex, rather than paying for Disney plus or whatever.
After ripping I usually increase the crf a little to reduce the file size to host on plex. Movies that we are watching a lot live on Plex, but if we stop watching something, or it seems like a one-time thing, then they can be removed from the library.
The burned DVDs are really more of a personal archive. Those movies could get added back to Plex someday. I don't need all of Lost or Breaking Bad on my Plex server, because I've recently watched them, so they'll live in the DVD drawer for a few years.
Ah, that makes sense, thanks. I’m past my days of the same episodes of The Wiggles over and over (although I still know all the songs), so didn’t think of that aspect.
Once you get past a particular point of number of movies management becomes a problem. For awhile I was using carousels from sony. But kodi/plex have a decent interface with ease of management. You usually only need a NAS if you get past a particular size of files.
I run a Plex server. My question isn’t about the value Plex adds in general. It’s about the value it adds if you are regularly removing things (and potentially re-ripping in the future) due to limited storage.
The GUI is nice to use. Plex and it brother KODI have a nice skinning/metadata system. That metadata looks very nice. They are one of the better players out there. Even if you have to rotate. You could use something like VLC or mediacenter but the user exp is just not as good. For my setup I could get away with a VLC and a folder of stuff and just drag and drop it. But that 10ft aggregated view is why I use it. If you just want to watch stuff and then blow it away then it would not be worth the hassle of setup.
Only tangentially related, but I recently tried Plex to see what the fuzz is about, and the UX is horrible. Both on the smart TV side and on the PC side.
It always takes me forever to find out anything in the GUI and I can never find out how to do the simple things I want - that is - put bunch of files into one end and watch them on smart TV on the other end.
It used to be a lot better. Over the past year they started to prioritize internet content, and your personal server is under a submenu instead of front & center.
I've been running Jellyfin on the side. It isn't perfect (yet!) but it matches up with what I want, which is something that can play files on my network with a TV Remote-friendly interface.
> As for comfort, sure DVDs are not as comfortable as clicking on Netflix
I'm starting to see this as an advantage because it forces me to get up and do something - actually move, even if not very far.
Working at home since March I've also returned to much more frequently listening on CD (I have a modestly large CD collection, with maybe 500 - 600 albums, accrued gradually and over many years, much of it second hand). A big advantage (apart from sound quality vs. streaming)? Most albums fall into the 40 - 60 minute range so I have to get up and move around to change the music at least that often, rather than sitting essentially motionless for hours on end at my desk or on the sofa.
Many of these are either optional or compete with one or more of the other services. Podcasts are either completely free or they should go under Spotify/Patreon. Twitch/Youtube subscriptions and Patreon are entirely optional. And I don't see how you can justify both Youtube Premium and Spotify at the same time or all three of Netflix/Disney+/Prime - I just wouldn't have the time to make any use of all these subscriptions in a month.
Individual podcast creators might be via Patreon, but larger podcast networks can and do have their own donation systems. Same principle and probably a similar amount of money, they just aggregate it between multiple shows and don't want to pay a cut to Patreon.
I know Relay.fm and Radiotopia are both set up for that, presumably there are others.
All of them are optional as you don't need any of those. The thing is that at the end you have to choose, of course some combinations are better/make more sense than others, I'm not saying you should have any.
By optional I meant that you can use the service with or without paying. (Example: donating to Patreon or subbing on Twitch is optional; paying for Netflix isn't optional since you have to pay in order to watch anything on Netflix). Obviously using any of them in the first place is optional too.
We subscribe to all of those things. Netflix as the primary streaming service. Disney+ because the kids love Frozen. Youtube so the kids don't get blasted by ads on their iPads. Spotify because it's the only real music streaming option. And Amazon Prime, not for entertainment but 2-day shipping and free grocery delivery.
You're talking about $52 a month. For easily 20+ hours of entertainment (or time savings in terms of Amazon Prime). In terms of quality of life, it's much more impactful than say upgrading from a Subaru to a Mercedes. Despite costing an order of magnitude less.
Yeah, that's a great point. I have a raspberry pi that I've been meaning to setup for a while now.
Though the other advantage with Youtube Premium is that you can cache videos offline in the kids app. That's super-helpful for long trips. (Not that there's been many in 2020.)
Being from Eastern Europe I can assure you, people lose all their learned helplessness surrounding technical stuff and become proficient torrent users if that's what separates them from their favorite movies and TV series and music.
People are "computer illiterate" when they dont care, are lazy or think they can make someone else do the work instead of them.
Many decades ago, when I was a young adult, I probably spent around $30 a month purchasing music (CD's and, before that, vinyl records), $30 a month on newspapers, $30 on magazines, another $40 a month on books, $20 a month on cable TV and maybe another $30 month on video movie theaters/VCR/DVD/rentals. All up, around $150 to $200 a month on various entertainment media. With inflation, that's probably $300 or $400 a month these days. For my income range, this was not at all extreme. For this, I got much much less than what you can get for $300 a month these days.
And the undisputed beloved incumbent. People will be annoyed by your attempt to unseat it. It's like trying to persuade alcoholics to switch from boxed wine to vintage bottles.
It's like trying to persuade alcoholics to switch from boxed wine to vintage bottles.
So switching to something 10-100 times more expensive that doesn't actually perform any better in any of the areas you care about? Yea that does sound like a lot of enterprise software I've seen.
Indeed. Even when the wine is objectively superior in many respects, are those the issues you really care about? How marked is the difference? Your fine bottle might have taken decades to nail a specific tone or quality, but if you are just trying to get sloshed and tomorrow you'll have forgotten everything about it, the boxed stuff will do just fine. That's the challenge for business software - to be so much better than Excel that people will be willing to move on.
IoT and home usage of it is the same boat. They always like to sell turn the lights on and off from my phone (for a small monthly fee of course). When a 2 dollar toggle switch still does the job for decades and does not need the internet.
That was the preferred tool for our finance people at a Fortune 600 sized corporation. I think it was an example from a MSDN article on using ActiveX controls to embed Excel. Give the people what they want...
I think some IE version upgrade killed it and we had to spend over a million to get an enterprise replacement that everyone hated
I still have fond childhood memories from getting new ringtones on my Nokia 3310 and buying "oplogos", where you could replace the operator logo with custom pixel art, like dragons and stuff. It was cool and fun and my parents only let me buy a limited amount of these, not like every day a new one.
How do you think about toys for example? Are they the baddies? I mean, I can see how digital goods don't have real production cost, but someone turned a song into a midi or a Nokia compatible ringtone. I actually made a few myself in the ringtone editor based on music sheets I found online, but they weren't as good. And it's not like these were expensive things.
I mean, this is capitalism and its relentless. If she wasn't doing this, with so many others, then she might not be able to pay her bills. Its hard to argue ethical life when capitalism is so demanding of us. I imagine if we looked at your financial life, and mine too, we'd see us doing or at least being part of some things that seem unethical to others. No need to pick just on her. We're all guilty of this unfortunately.
That's the problem and a sort of inadvertent way he actually justified my argument. There really aren't much "ethical" for-profit endeavors in capitalism. I can criticize near anything with valid criticism. The fact that he casually chose a mass-polluter, anti-union, low wage, government subsidized mega business as "normal" says a lot of the normalization of oppression, or at least extreme apathy for workers, under capitalism. Not to mention its not good for customers either as the level of quality you get from the cheaply sourced Walmart-like inventories isn't good and if it is good, its also good at a certain level of planned obsolesce.
I think from an ethical perspective being a marketer who helps keep a business afloat by convincing people to sign onto low-cost monthly subscriptions for a service and keeps white collar professions with good jobs employed is vastly more ethical than a low-wage, anti-worker, no benefits, etc retail monster like Walmart.
I thought this was going to be about people remote working during the pandemic not getting enough exercise and eating candy.
According to a cross-sectional web-based survey taken on 995 people between August 15 and August 30, 2020 across various cities, towns and villages in India:
"Almost nine months of the pandemic marginally improved people’s eating behaviour, yet a third of participants gained weight as physical activity declined while screen and sitting time increased, a study conducted by AIIMS researchers to evaluate Covid’s impact on lifestyle changes has found. Mental health was also adversely affected and quarantine-induced stress and anxiety showed an increase by a unit in nearly one-fourth of the participants."[1]
Even pets are getting fatter, according to a Kelton Global survey of 1,021 U.S. dog and cat owners and 257 veterinarians between November 23 and November 30, 2020. 33% of those with an overweight pet said their pet became overweight during the pandemic.[2]
> It’s the same for most services. You’re not competing against the other players in your industry. You’re fighting for attention with Minecraft and Mario. There are only 24 hours in the day – who does the customer choose to spend it with?
I went to PAX 2012 and they had a panel literally called, "Free-to-Play Games: Brilliant, Evil, or Brilliantly Evil?". I directly asked the question of how they were going to deal with attention being the currency and competing with each other. Especially given that there was a limited amount of attention, while money can be easily spent in parallel.
I don't remember receiving any kind of satisfactory answer.
Maybe that was true for kids in 90s and ringtones, but how many people do you know that stopped buying chocolate bars or coffee because they subscribed to Netflix?
Reminds me of "The Ride" from the Sopranos, where Tony is mad at Paulie for being cheap with carnie rides, and that they're competing for peoples' attention and that they can't afford to fuck things up.
The book Blue Ocean Strategy basically brings up a similar concept. When running a business, you need to think of the bigger purpose your potential customers try to fulfill by spending money.
Say you're a high-class italian restaurant, you'll find that you compete
- not only with high-class italian restaurants
- not only with all high-class restaurants in general
But in fact with all businesses that allow the customer to spend the same order of magnitude of money in return for the same high-class treatment, leisure, and relaxation.
It may sound daunting, but it in fact also means that your potential market is much bigger than you might initially believe.
I’m not sure this is true. People are much more willing to buy a coffee/pastry rather than spend £2 on an app. It seems to me, that people definitely compartalize their spending, with most consumer software and apps expected to me free.
Not wanting to miss the opportunity to express my thoughts and I've spent time, attention... I consider that it was well spent: short article, right to the point, gave me an insight. But when it isn't useful? Sight...
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