All of these services reverting to ads just makes me feel like we’ve gotten such a bullshit corpo rug pull compared to cable. Cable was nice and bundled and it was like a pipe of shows. It was super convenient with a unified interface. But we switched to streaming because in every other way it was better. Especially that there were no commercials. It makes me really angry when I start talking about it because it just feels like a betrayal of the benefits of these services. It felt like the consumer had won, like a battle had been fought that we’d gotten past marketing and advertising controlling media. But it’s just more of the same. Amazon and these other streaming services just can’t cast the ring into the fires of Mount Doom. The temptation of money is simply too tempting.

At this point I’m never giving up my PLEX server, especially for my children’s sake. Primarily because I control exactly what they get to see (mostly shows from when I was growing up). Also a funny side effect is they get really confused when they see advertisements.