09-25-2025, 07:00 AM
Are you guys paying for Prime or watching the ad-only stuff that's also on there? I pay for Prime and use uBlock Origin Lite and never see the ads but I've only watched the Prime stuff so I don't know if the ad stuff (used to be called Freevee I think?) forces them at a higher level.
The only thing that's noticeable is sometimes there's a brief half-second pause but I'm not sure that's not in the video files themselves because many of them are where ad breaks would have been in the original show and I've seen that on cheaper quality produced DVD's before. I also don't know if that might also be moments where my connection is taken up by something else like Steam or whatever and it doesn't want to drop the quality once the cache runs out.
Only other video stuff I normally watch that has ads is YouTube and there the pause is at the start but that's a well known thing YouTube does to ad blockers. A guy I talk to online absolutely despises this but it's like two or three seconds and I once browsed the internet on 28k so my instincts were long ago hard coded to just waiting a few seconds on websites.
From the ethical standpoint of pirating content, feel like if you're paying for a service you should feel fine to block the ads. I know of the old debate about how VCR's were piracy because it allowed you to both watch the content whenever you wanted and also fast forward through the ads. When I hear about how other people are watching streaming content by just sitting in one place consuming whatever it feeds into their gullet endlessly like people used to (and probably still) do with broadcast/cable TV I'm like yeah, whatever, you're not going to make me feel like a pirate for doing this. You're losing fractions of a dollar from me like you have with my now decades of not entirely legal format transfers.
I'm also an adherent of the self-serving Valve argument, considering how easy it is for someone with my knowledge to just pirate everything that could be, that you got me to pay at all is your win. I'm skeptical that this class of customer is ever the threat to profits it's portrayed as considering how small it would be compared to any fraction of normies just slightly changing their habits. I don't think Valve's experience is the main piece of evidence for this, YouTube is.
The only thing that's noticeable is sometimes there's a brief half-second pause but I'm not sure that's not in the video files themselves because many of them are where ad breaks would have been in the original show and I've seen that on cheaper quality produced DVD's before. I also don't know if that might also be moments where my connection is taken up by something else like Steam or whatever and it doesn't want to drop the quality once the cache runs out.
Only other video stuff I normally watch that has ads is YouTube and there the pause is at the start but that's a well known thing YouTube does to ad blockers. A guy I talk to online absolutely despises this but it's like two or three seconds and I once browsed the internet on 28k so my instincts were long ago hard coded to just waiting a few seconds on websites.
From the ethical standpoint of pirating content, feel like if you're paying for a service you should feel fine to block the ads. I know of the old debate about how VCR's were piracy because it allowed you to both watch the content whenever you wanted and also fast forward through the ads. When I hear about how other people are watching streaming content by just sitting in one place consuming whatever it feeds into their gullet endlessly like people used to (and probably still) do with broadcast/cable TV I'm like yeah, whatever, you're not going to make me feel like a pirate for doing this. You're losing fractions of a dollar from me like you have with my now decades of not entirely legal format transfers.
I'm also an adherent of the self-serving Valve argument, considering how easy it is for someone with my knowledge to just pirate everything that could be, that you got me to pay at all is your win. I'm skeptical that this class of customer is ever the threat to profits it's portrayed as considering how small it would be compared to any fraction of normies just slightly changing their habits. I don't think Valve's experience is the main piece of evidence for this, YouTube is.
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