I’d seen rumours online but got the email this morning.
EDIT: seems like there won’t be ads for everyone straight away.
- Live events, such as sports, and content offered through Amazon Freevee will continue to include advertising. Customers in the Republic of Ireland, Channel Islands, and Isle of Man won’t see ads in their experience at this time.
I’ve had prime since almost day one. Lately I’ve been trying to reduce my dependency on Amazon which isn’t easy when you’re already paying them in advance for shipping just to keep prime video and a few free games and ebooks. This was the push I needed to finally sever that tie and release myself from their trap. This could be the start of a good thing for a lot of people. Prime has been an effective competition blocking lock-in scheme for too long. It’s end result is it’s ability to keep prices high because they are the sole gatekeeper. Good riddance Amazon.
Options:
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Pay no extra and suffer annoying adverts in all movies and shows.
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Pay an extra £35.88 a year to get the same awful experience you had before.
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Save £95 a year and cancel it. Spend your savings on a VPN, and look into Jellyfin, Radarr and Sonarr. BEST VALUE
How does a VPN give you access to shows on Amazon that require Prime? Or do you mean it’ll just give you access to more shows than you’d have otherwise?
Is there a guide for dummies you’d recommend. PVR and etc are unknown terms for me. I used to torrent under vpn but that was in the Limewire days… hoping for some help in the safest ways to return to the seas.
There’s plenty of guides for Linux, but with Windows you’re a bit more reliant on installers and reading some of the guides about setting all the bits up.
Off the top of my head, you need:
qBittorrent (for downloading, turn on the web interface, and you can configure it to do nothing if not connected to your VPN)
Prowlarr (this scrapes torrent data from websites and collates it all together for the other parts of this system, add some sources once you install that)
Radarr (browse movies and pick which ones you want, link it to Prowlarr and qBittorrent, give it a folder e.g. D:\Movies to download into)
Sonarr (same as Radarr but for TV, again link it to Prowlarr and qBittorrent, give it a different folder e.g. D:\TV to download into)
Jellyfin (an open source Netflix, allows you to play the stuff you downloaded in a pretty web UI, or through a client program you can get for a couple of platforms, add the folders you told Radarr and Sonarr to download to)
Then you tweak everything that annoys you. By default it’s quite happy to grab full 60GB+ Blu-ray releases, which is fine if you’re on a fast connection and have lots of storage, but if a movie is over 10GB or so, it all looks the same to me. Depending on how you watch, you might have to mess with Jellyfin clients to figure out why certain videos won’t play. It’s pretty good but it’s not perfect.
