I think I might cancel. I’m not watching ads and I’m not going to pay the extra $3/mo to opt out. I don’t know if I’d end up paying more than the subscription cost in shipping though…
Are other online retailers so hopelessly sucky that you can’t live without Amazon over in the states? It just blows my mind because Amazon honestly sucks compared to the more local stores where I’m at in the Nordics.
I’m in the UK but I’m largely housebound. Prime is life changing for disabled people like myself. I won’t cancel my subscription but I’ll probably pirate anything I want to watch on prime video in future, which isn’t much now they don’t have the tennis rights in the UK.
Some products are only available on Amazon, altough there’s always an alternative on another shop.
I try to avoid Amazon because of how many bad products are on their platform. Other shops also list third-party sellers, but by avoiding those platforms and only buying on proper non-marketplace shops the products usually meet a minimum quality. At least my experience with shops that actually specialize in a specific categorie (pc hardware -> mindfactory.de, electronics -> reichelt.de, …) is generally better.
I hate Amazon but there are several reasons I use them. Wide selection, free shipping, easy returns, and typically low prices. Every time I have tried avoiding Amazon for everything, I’ve run into annoying issues before long.
Also, sadly there are a lot of less common products that aren’t super available elsewhere. And even when they are, I feel like it’s a risk buying from some random website I’ve not dealt with before.
I wish others could/would compete with these advantages but most don’t. And no I don’t buy everything from Amazon but it is a safe fallback for the items I can’t get at better retailers.
I’ve found Walmart+ and Sam’s+ to be better for my needs lately. I only have prime when I can get it for free for a month. I only care about free shipping. I can give a crap about anything else that comes with prime
Ebay for stuff, because you are usually dealing with a person that has some care for your order. Ebay doesnt wait 2 weeks to ship my stuff. Amazon now waits to ship so they can combine my orders. So in the past few months my ebay use is way up and my amazon use is way down. As far as content goes, piracy is still an awesome thing. I pay for physical books and music from bandcamp, the rest is acquired. I think people get lazier and dumber the closer you get to the equator. Thanks for your comment. a guy at 59.9n.
The real trick is you cancel AND shop elsewhere. We get most of our necessities locally now at normal retail and I’ll occasionally put an Amazon order together when I need something specific and I’ll spend enough for free shipping.
I missed shopping there at first, but so much of their inventory is junk now; I feel like I actually get better quality from traditional retail. The $140/yr for Prime feels like free shipping but it obviously isn’t.
It really depends on where you live.
Between living in a smaller town and never ending supply chain/distribution issues: If I need something I can’t get at the local store, it is a bare minimum two hour ordeal. I can usually justify that on a weekend but if my mouse dies and I need one now? Suddenly I need to figure out what else I can grab to get free shipping or if I need to just eat the costs and overnight it.
I have been doing the math and will likely stick with amazon prime. Admittedly, I increasingly don’t bother to even watch the amazon shows I like (the boys and reacher) because I have increasingly become spoiled by a proper blu ray or UHD (… ripped to my plex).
Oh, your computer mouse. Anyway, I just paused my membership in the hopes that my spending habits improve. We’ll see how “emergencies” get handled without the shipping benefits.
140$? Why is this so expensive in the us? We pay 90€ (~100$) in Germany. So brake even is with like 20x 5€ shipping orders per year. Which I sadly do pretty easily. Getting the stuff I need locally is sadly not that easy.
Don’t forget their tax.
Base is 139.99 (140) + tax on top.So even more expensive.
Same here
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Unthinkable!! How will Jeffey-Bear survive without his nightly molten gold enema?
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This is such a weird way of announcing/implementing a $3/month increase for Prime video by Amazon, and a lot more destructive PR-wise too.
Lol needlessly downgrading all the customers instead of increasing their price. Can we just make subscriptions track inflation metrics so I at least know how fucked I am on average?
Lemmy needs a DataIsBeautiful community, they’d make that graph.
Right? If it just went up a bit I wouldn’t have blinked an eye. Ads on something I (technically my dear husband) already pay for just pisses me off. It feels like they’re holding ad-free viewing hostage
Right? For how much companies seem to love bubblewrapping anything they do in PR, they sure do suck at it sometimes…
I wish I could just get Prime shipping and drop the video service. I may still drop the whole thing.
Nothing quite like paying an annual fee to ensure that stuff you can’t be bothered to go to the store for are handled by a multitude of people who are systematically abused by their employer.
I don’t know where you live, but around here stores only carry what most people buy. If you want something other than plain vanilla, you have to find it online.
Then take a look at the manufacturers website and see what retailers they use.
Many stores will also let you order items for pickup that they don’t normally stock at your local location. Ask a clerk or again, check their site.
Have you ever actually even tried to do this? All you can tell from the manufacturers website is where you can find a company that carries any of their products. Oh, you want that specific scent of antiperspirant? Good luck on calling all this retail stores that don’t actually have staff anymore. If you’re truly lucky you can search walmart.com for it and then target.com for it maybe you’ll find it. Honestlywalmart.com is about their only competition but pricing there is completely at the whim of their own privateers.
I have actually, quite a bit. Finding products and store’s that sell them really isn’t that hard.
The only thing I use amazon for is a general catalogue of items; once I find something I’d like, I buy it elsewhere.
You got hit with a bunch of down votes but it’s not incredibly hard to avoid Amazon, it’s just a little less convenient. Of course, it’s going to depend and vary based on where you are located.
Odd… This reply didn’t show up (in the thread or in my notifications) until just now.
Amazon – If you get a pee bottle your order is free!
This is essentially what’s happening, but instead of them lowering the prime fee and removing videos, they’re adding the additional fee to remove ads from the video service
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Oooo good call. Thanks.
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This and the rising costs plus adding ads to ‘basic’ tiers and attempting to create limitations (resolutions, “screens”, offline downloads) is what might push me to build a nice, large NAS. We don’t want Cable again.
Jellyfin + Synology NAS was a great investment for me! ;)
Wouldn’t go back.
I appreciate the advice! I am thinking of Synology or perhaps DIY with either TrueNAS (Scale likely) or Unraid. Synology would be cheap, small, easy on power and thermals too though and I’ve been looking at the latest and previous gen DS2XX lines.
Also I appreciate the Jellyfin mention. I’ve been using Plex so long and was thinking about something else like Jellyfin especially but I’ve never worked with it before.
The nice thing about Jellyfin is that you can point Jellyfin and Plex to the same media folders and both will work, to try it out.
I would get a Synology with intel Quicksync if you go the Synology route for hardware transcoding. Unfortunately, a lot of the new models don’t have it.
I just have a 220+ but would maybe get a 4 bay model if I did it again.
i do this with jellyfin and kodi. the media library is standalone. they both get read-only access to all the metadata which i manage with a different tool (mediaelch)
I went the DIY route a month and a half ago and it’s been great. I opted for a larger case so I could add a bunch of HDDs and not be limited to the 2 or 4 that’s the standard in a syno, and I’ll keep adding more over time. I got carried away with the CPU and went with ddr5 so it’s been quite more expensive than it should have been and it cost about 700 euro without the spinning disks, but it’s been great with proxmox + a truenas VM (plus a bunch of extra vms for the arrs, tinkering, media servers, web stuff, pihole, nginx, some game servers…)
Pretty much sounds exactly like I was thinking of doing for the DIY. miniATX/ATX for all the expansion potential + SATA ports + large case to handle it + a CPU with 6 to 8 cores at least. Case would probably be a rack form factor but it doesn’t really matter. Probably 32 GB of RAM + a Quadro GPU/Some cheap AMD GPU or something cheapish like that strictly for encoding + Proxmox + TrueNAS or perhaps just unraid. Probably no desktop environments unless something really needs it for some reason. Not sure if I’ll go with a motherboard with an ILO/IPMI with its own NIC + vlan or not.
I was going to mix SSD/NVME for performance (if I mix these two, it’d be two separate performance tiers) and HDDs for capacity. Probably two 1+ Gbps NICs bonded and maybe a LACP port channel down the line. VPN with killswitch of course.
I could def. go cheaper on the hardware if I just wanted to use docker/podman mostly but I want VMs too. I’ll probably manage updates and backups of what I really care about off network via ansible + rclone + restic repos. I might would use zram + lz4 for most of my VMs because why not.
Yeah, sounds good. My proxmox is installed in a couple of raid0 SSD for redundancy and the VMs are in a 1tb nvme. All the remaining data (media, files, Arma/other game mods, backups…) is stored in spinning HDDs. I’m using an Intel CPU so I didn’t bother with a dedicated GPU and it’s working without a problem, but I still have to stress test jellyfin when transcoding multiple streams.
If I was to do it again I’d downgrade to ddr4 and get much more RAM though, 32gb it’s not that much when factoring in truenas, VMs and a couple of gameservers.
To add to this. Look in to the Arr apps. Sonarr Radarr and prowlarr work all nicely together.
Lidarr.
Overseerr.
I built an unRAID server using an i5 desktop and it’s the best experience ever.
No ads.
Content never gets removed.
I can watch everything I have remotely and can even share my library with friends/family.
And the price will never go up yet I can watch anything from Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Apple TV+… you name it.
We won’t get cable again. Video streaming is already much worse and declining rapidly.
Regarding the shipping cost:
Just collect things to buy until you are over the treshold. Helped me with overbuying stuff I don’t even really need.
If you are moatly in it for the shipping: Just stop. You give them more money through that than paying for shipping.I canceled Prime in 2021. The expedited shipping is nice and all but it really just felt like paying rent to someone I don’t like nor want or have to pay rent to.
Same here
Announced just after Christmas, a time when I assume a lot of people sign up for Prime so they can save shipping on presents.
Seems like that would backfire as people recently remember signing up.
Depends on whether or not they signed up for monthly or annual, and many get it in November so things they order show up in time before the xmas postal hell.
It seems like it would work because people wouldn’t think they got their value out of their prime membership yet and are reluctant to cancel after such a short time.
I’d already decided to cancel Prime when they cancelled The Peripheral after renewing it. Had I not, this decision would have made the choice for me.
They canceled that!?! Man, they really hyped it up. I planned on watching it. They cancel as soon as viewership drops. 🙄
Right? Such a good show.
Everything worth seeing can be torrented anyway. I canceled a year ago and haven’t noticed a loss of anything as long as any orders are over $35 for free shipping.
Scamazon
The people on your man o’ war
Are treated worse than scum
I’m no flogging captain
And by God I’ve sailed with some
Come with me to Barbary
We’ll ply there up and down
Not quite exactly
In the service of the CrownTo lay with pretty women
To drink Madeira wine
To hear the rollers thunder
On a shore that isn’t mine– Mr. Knofler Privateering
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I will totally check out Alestorm.
And I continue adding primevideo’s content to my Jellyfin server
