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No surprise here, but what a bummer that this is "The Way™" Just let me pay you $3-5/ month to never see an ad again. It's worth it to me since the service is
by duckkg5 2y ago
No surprise here, but what a bummer that this is "The Way™"
Just let me pay you $3-5/ month to never see an ad again. It's worth it to me since the service is actually decent.
- gaze 2y agoYeah but what if they took the 3-5 dollars and also showed you ads?
- Waterluvian 2y agoThat’ll never work. Looks at cable TV Looks at streaming services
- consp 2y agoI have neither and my life is better for it. I might pay for a decent streaming service but we've past the point where that is the case. I will never pay again for classic TV, it's a scam since you pay for more ads than actual content.
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y agoWhat could make a streaming service "decent" ?
- aaomidi 2y agoSpotify but for video media.
- jjulius 2y agoWe had that when Netflix first started streaming, then every other studio and media company wanted a slice of the pie.
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y agoAh, so a slow replacement of human created culture by AI feel-alikes, all while almost nobody who creates anything gets paid. Not precisely what I had in mind from the term "decent". ps. I know that for most users of Spotify, the above description of the service doesn't correspond to their reality. But it is an accurate description of the service, nevertheless.
- olyjohn 2y agoYeah we get it, you're a music snob.
- janalsncm 2y agoI feel like this is a bad-faith response, no offense. A person explained why cable TV is a bad deal and wished there was a “decent” alternative. Clearly, “decent” is being used from the user perspective, not the effect it has on society. From the user perspective Spotify is indeed “decent”. On-demand, unlimited access to essentially all music for a flat fee. But switching the definition of “decent” to what its effects on society are seems unfair. It’s not like the price gouging cable business model has avoided race to the bottom reality TV either.
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y agoI'm not switching the definition of decent. I'm noting what the actual effect of Spotify's business model and operations are. If you find it decent a user, and are OK with the long term impact, go ahead and use it. People just need to be reminded from time to time that their individual choices (as "users") have ramifications beyond whether they get decent service. Also, as a side note: HN is a generally US-centric (and more broadly anglophone) context. The word "decent" in english currently has some related but not trivial to distinguish meanings. There's a British english version (now spreading into American english, certainly among younger cohorts) which equates roughly to "quality". There's also a version that is more related to some sense of morality. A "decent person" isn't so much about what they will do, as what they won't. There's the version used in the question "Are you decent?", asked before entering a room. This is partly why I asked what the OP meant.
- xigoi 2y agoWhile Spotify doesn’t have ads if you pay, it still spies on you.
- behnamoh 2y agoApple TV, only when good shows are airing. Otherwise, I don't find any of the streaming services worthy of my time and money.
- dgfitz 2y agoApple TV has by far the highest production quality of any streaming service I’ve used.
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y agoThe streaming services my wife and I subscribe to cost somewhere between $8 and $19 per month. If both of us pay to see a film in a movie theater, we're almost certainly talking an amount in excess of $20, potentially higher than $30 and not inconceivably over $40. From my POV, a streaming service has to provide us with 1 film's worth of "decent" entertainment per month to be "worthwhile". Although all of them occasionally fail to do that in a given month, I don't think any of them fail to hit the "12 film's worth" over the course of a year.
- asdff 2y agoeven though movie pass is dead it created some pretty savory monthly plans from the theater. there are dead months sure but on aggregate you can easily beat their guess at the median user and come out quite ahead if you are into seeing new movies.
- dleink 2y agoWouldn't you want to be loyal to the productions themselves rather than whatever streaming service is exhibiting them? Do you have that much faith in the creative talent at the streaming services?
- mojo74 2y agoI don't know where you're based but I would offer the BBC TV - take your pick of classic shows. Radio - 6 music for me. Education - provides resources for all school key stages in line with the UK curriculum. Sports - a bit sporadic but you can get everything except baseball at some point in the year. Arts - broadcasts the Glastonbury festival. Live shows you can attend and be in the audience. All for £170 a year and no ads.
- chgs 2y agoonly £170 because of the scale, it has 30 million subscribers paying £15 a month. Reduce those numbers and it’s a death spiral. It won’t last much longer, the fee itself has collapsed in real terms - 15 years ago it was 40% higher than today, the political pressure to remove it has never been higher, I’m expecting Musk to start attacking it more overtly soon.
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y agoI'm still unsure why the BBC doesn't make it possible to pay for a "license" outside the UK. At least, it didn't back in 2012.
- chgs 2y agoRights issues. Have international viewers of eastenders or Blue Peter and you have to pay the cast more, and pay more to license the music used in the background, etc.
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y agoBut you know what is being watched when streamed (much more accurately than via broadcast) and you have the revenue to pay those costs.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- imposterr 2y agoYou mean Perplexity Pro? That thing they tried and found that no one was willing to pay for cuz users say they want paid options but then jump boat to the free things always? https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/faq/what-is-perplexity-pro https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/faq/what-is-perplexity-pro
- tomrod 2y agoCorrect. We will always take free and minimize attention to ads. Ads are a bane and attention pollution.
- cedws 2y agoThere’s too much choice for the consumer to charge for it. If not Perplexity then I can just use Phind, ChatGPT, or Claude for free. Google got off the ground because they had magic sauce that made their product noticeably better. LLM-based search engines don’t have that, especially when they’re using an LLM built elsewhere.
- onemoresoop 2y agoI remember at the beginning Google had the most user friendly ads back when agressive pop-up ads were everywhere. But once they grew they changed all that.
- coder543 2y ago"Hundreds of thousands of people" are paying $20/mo for it, according to the CEO.[0] That seems like a very respectable place for such an early product to be. It is extremely far from "no one". [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWPmu_rKxJo&t=185s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWPmu_rKxJo&t=185s
- imposterr 2y agoEven if we say 1M people pay $20/month, that's only $240M/year. That's not enough to continue to grow and support the free users sans-ads.
- FiddlerClamp 2y agoUnfortunately, if you're willing to pay for an ad-free service, I suspect you're far more valuable to advertisers than any reasonable amount you could pay to be exempt.
- preciousoo 2y agoSee: Amazon Prime
- 55555 2y agoCorrect. A US google user's average value is $60 USD/month and ofcourse this is scaled up by those willing to pay who could be worth $200+ USD/month. (Napkin math)
- scarface_74 2y agoThat number is way off https://thenextweb.com/news/heres-how-much-money-you-made-google-by-staring-at-its-ads-for-20-years https://thenextweb.com/news/heres-how-much-money-you-made-go...
- YetAnotherNick 2y agoGP said US, which has the highest ad revenue per user. Your link doesn't have country divide.
- chgs 2y agoThe OP provided no evidence at all.
- tensor 2y agoKagi assistant costs more than your ask, but is a good product and comes with their also good ad-free traditional search.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]