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.
Agree they’ve being easing their way in for a while.
My point was specifically about advertising within the content itself which would be a new line crossed.
Edit: actually yes they did do this with Apple News didn’t they! (Which is why I stopped paying for it).
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 can't wait for the advertisers to start dictating the content of the programming to help sell ads. Because that's coming next. Let's totally wipe the premium sheen off premium streaming TV.
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.
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.
I only see Apple TV+ as a bonus to the Premium subscription.
But if they really fuck it up like this, I will unbundle my subscription and cancel Apple TV+.
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."