Making a free tier.
I don’t know what makes you think this would be a “free tier”; it’d just in all likelihood be an even more enshittified, slightly-less-money-flushed-down-the-toilet-for-an-inferior-product tier. https://archive.ph/mwfWY
It’s never just a “free tier” unfortunately. Most times these headlines pop up, it’s “We’re increasing our base subscription cost, but don’t worry! You can keep paying the old price if you’re ok with ads.”
Paying for ads is a terrible idea companies have forced into the narrative, without users really caring.
I choose not to pay for ads.
Your daily reminder that by paying for streaming services, you’re receiving a worse product than the alternative.
I refuse to pay for any streaming services. I am in the 1% of consumers taking a stand, and have had zero impact in the trajectory of video streaming the entire god damn time.
Content advertising isn’t “on brand” for Apple, so this would be a bold move.
Advertising in general has been a growing revenue stream for Apple from my understanding. That “anti-tracking” they added a few iOS versions back also conveniently increased Apple’s ad revenue because other advertisers didn’t get the same data that Apple would just have by default.
I’ve lost count of the volume of times I’ve been downvoted for stating that Apples transition to a services based company guaranteed they would become the enemy of every users privacy, regardless of all their virtue signaling about privacy.
Meanwhile, in the 2020’s you can not longer do offline dictation at all, on a several thousand dollar machine, without agreeing to sending PII and transcripts of all your dictations to Apple servers… You could do completely offline dictation a decade ago, on a machine that was about 1/10th as powerful.
I think we passed that point after the ads in the App Store,News app, Books app, and Music app.
While there’s a bit of a focus here on what it’d “mean” for Apple to do this … more broadly, which streaming services don’t have ads by now? Prime and Netflix do, I know that much.
Basically it seems the industry has done exactly what cable did IIRC … once they’ve got you by the balls they’ll squeeze you as dry as they can.
Apart from finding a local hardcopy rental shop (I have and am trying to use it as much as possible), or you know, just not watching, “reverting” back to piracy is likely the only way to react here.
The problem is mathematics.
Capitalism requires that profits always increase, but we live on a finite planet, with a finite amount of land, a finite amount of resources, and a finite number of humans… always, eventually, the ONLY option to continue this dichotomy is to squeeze your existing customer base, and extract as much value from them as possible (by devaluing your product). Unfortunately customers do not hold unlimited value, so the house of cards will collapse one way or the other.
Clearly, the only solution is to wage a war on mathematics.
Finally!
