They are the worst streaming service. They looked at cable TV and said "this is perfect" while being apparently oblivious that most people who pay for streaming services HATE cable TV.

The only thing that made Prime worth it was shipping, but then Amazon decided they wanted to own the whole shipping process and stopped using reliable shippers and brought it all in house and now its a dice roll if you are going to get your package or if its going to be lost, and half the time its damaged.

I order anywhere else now and canceled prime.

at the cost of destroying the global economy, it was never worth it

I quit prime after the last prime day and have saved so much money. It's really something how much influence that subscription had on me, and how cancelling it changed my buying habits.

The unlimited full resolution photo storage is what keeps me subscribed. Everything else is just extra.

The Prime shipping I don't really care about; it's easy enough to just wait until the cart hits the free shipping spend. Prime streaming was fine, previously. We like a few of their shows, but it's just as convenient to pirate then now that they're adding ads.

Is there a better option for cheap off-site unlimited photo storage?

Yeah, been thinking about canceling my Prime membership for a while now. Thanks for the tipping point Amazon!

Hey hey hey HDDs aren't recently free!

I just spun up three lxc's on my proxmox server and they all end in arr

We are the minority though. 99% of people will happily drop their pants and bend over just to not lose their streaming services. Look at Netflix and their ad tier and cutting of sharing.

It's even easier than that, now. For like $20/6 months, you can get a debrid service account that will host everything (that's not obscure) for you. Hook it up to an app like Stremio and you basically have Netflix for all media. It even has panels for show/film discovery, sorted by genre categories.

The only big difference is that you select the quality of stream you want each time you start playing something.

I was going to set up my own system, but a debrid service is cheaper than buying the hard drives and a lot easier to set up.

The average user is a complacent meat bag ready to take whatever corporations want to shove down their throats. So for anyone capable I highly recommend torrenting absolutely every piece of media you consume, and simply buying a physical disk if you want to support said media. If the media doesn't have a physical way to buy it fuck them, just steal it

Got any links to help me learn about building media boxes?

I remember back in the day, they at least inserted the commercials by hand and usually put them in during a scene transition or something to not fuck up the pace.

The Internet and streaming services are fucking lazy and just insert ads every X seconds or whatever, which can often lead to an ad being played mid fucking sentence. It's so much worse than watching a movie on public access cable with ads and censorship. At least those ads are carefully edited in, and not thrown about willy-nilly. And the censorship can be just as funny (this is what happens when you find a stranger in the alps, Larry!).

Ha! If you think that any of that money will go to actors and writers, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.

I might just go back to blu-ray at this point. HBO still has my money because they generally seem to give a shit about quality at least.