2022

Opinion/Editorial/Life

State of Streaming in 2022

Ramen Junkie 0Comment

I’ve shuffled around some of the streaming platforms I subscribe to and figured it was as good a time as any to do a little write up on what I use and what I’ve dropped and why. I suppose these are pseudo recommendations, but not really, since frankly, I don’t personally watch a lot of TV myself. I spend all day at my job with a TV going in the background, I have almost no desire to watch TV anymore.

Starting with what’s gone, for now. Netflix has been getting a lot of flack lately for a variety of reasons. One is the announcement that they plan to have an ad subsidized tier. Frankly, this is such a non issue, since it’s very unlikely they will add advertisements to existing tiers. More likely they will make a new tier, or two, with ads included, for less per month. The bigger reason they are getting flack is the recent price increase.

Again.

For what feels like the 3rd or 4th time in the last 5 years. I’ve used Netflix since it was ONLY DVDs. But at this point it’s up to $17/month. It’s considerably more than any other option. Also, while I don’t personally watch a lot, I do keep semi tabs on what my (adult) kids are watching, since they are the ones who use the services the most. Not so much because I care about content, just to know, “No one really watches Netflix much lately” so we can unsubscribe. Of course, I’m paying the bill, so it’s my call in the end to some extent. If they want to keep it, they can pick up the tab.

Another recently dropped service is HBO Max. I actually was not unhappy with HBO Max, and of every service available, this would probably be my personal choice to subscribe to, if I were only picking one. I’ll likely resubscribe again in the future. So why did it get dropped? I got HBO Max as part of my DirecTV package, which was heavily discounted through my job. That discount went away, and I have zero use for DirecTV, especially not at full price (it was a SIGNIFICANT discount.)

I suppose it’s worth mentioning that I also got rid of DirecTV, which I suppose makes me “officially” a cord cutter. Though in the past many years, the only thing we ever really watched on the service was the Super Bowl and the Macy’s Parade. In fact, when we moved in 2017, I moved the dish myself and it almost always needs a slight adjustment when trying to watch anything.

So what is kept and used?

  • Hulu/Disney+ – This one is a package deal, and it’s a pretty good deal. Hulu has an alright selection of shows, but Disney+ includes Marvel, Star Wars, and well Disney. It’s something like $14/month for both combined.
  • Paramount+ – My wife and kids like a lot of the crime drama shows on CBS, so getting Paramount+ seemed like a pretty good add to make up for the loss of Netflix. It’s quite a bit cheaper too at something like $5/month. Though that is with ads. Which I would not mind except the volume on the ads on Paramount+ are like 3x the loudness of the shows. Watching anything is an exercise on using the mute button. I tried to complain but their website feedback form does not work. It also has Star Trek, though I am still barely through what I started trying to watch 2 years ago and I really can’t get into the shitty New Star Treks. They really just do not feel like Trek, it’s too much flashyness.
  • Discovery+ – Why is everything called “Plus”? Anyway, one daughter loves house and cooking shows, the other likes True Crime shows. Discovery+ has both of these. Plus I lost the ability to “log in with your cable provider” when I lost DirecTV for the individual apps like TLC and HGTV. It’s also $5/month I believe.
  • AcornTV – My daughter likes to watch Murdoch Mysteries, and a few other shows on this service. I’m not real sure if it’s British based or Australian based, it seems to kind of be a mix of shows from both. It’s also $5/month. (Feels like a trend, though I may be off on a couple by a few bucks).
  • Peacock+ – We picked this one up for a month so everyone could watch Yellowstone, which is sort of the current trendy hotness show. I was going to drop it after the first month, but it sounds like they may want to keep it for a few shows. There also seems to be a pretty good selection of movies available on Peacock+ as well. Also $5/month.

I am not positive on the pricing on some of these services, but they are close-ish. Some are paid annually as well. I wanted to add them more to stress why I am upset about Netflix. For the price of Netflix, I can essentially get 4 other services, Paramount, Peacock, Discovery, and AcornTV. For less cost I can get Hulu AND Disney+. If I wanted to re-add HBO Max, I am pretty sure it’s either $10 or $15/month. All of these are less than Netflix, for arguably a better product. I actually have never really been able to get into a lot of Netflix’s original shows myself. A lot of them have this weird off-putting-ness to them that I can’t quite put my finger on. In some cases I am glad I didn’t get into them because it sounds like a lot of them get cancelled with no proper resolution.

I suppose I should mention Amazon Prime as well. I don’t subscribe to Amazon Prime for their TV Streaming. It’s there, I use a FireTV, but I don’t subscribe explicitly for that. I am not sure I am going to keep Amazon. My current subscription ends at the end of December, and it’s not currently set to renew. Like Netflix, the price keeps going up and up, and all I care about is the Free Shipping. Everything else is a nice bonus, but I don’t factor into it, and I believe the new renewal rate is $150/year. This is over double what it was when I first subscribed to Prime. This would not be the first time I unsubscribed to Prime either.

Opinion/Editorial/Life

Twitter Drama and Mastodon

Ramen Junkie 0Comment

What a completely non eventful roller coaster the latest Twitter Drama is shaping up to be. I suppose it’s somewhat in the “early stages” and a lot of people, including myself, may be acting a bit over dramatic, but I don’t think Elon Musk buying Twitter will be anything good long term.

Twitter isn’t, wasn’t, whatvern’t that great. It was ok, personally, I’ve been kind of struggling to care about Twitter as a platform for a while. It’s probably just some sort of burn out, I’ve been there since essentially the beginning, in 2006. Back when good ol’ Leo Laporte was the number one most followed user, until Kevin Rose was. Then Leo again, it was sort of a competition. Those whopping follow counts were in the thousands as well back then. Twitter is definitely much larger and much more since then. And I find it hard to keep up with anymore.

I’ve tried using lists, but for some reason Twitter only lets you easily pin 5 lists. How useless is that? I have dozens of lists. Politics lists, tech lists, toys lists, music lists, transformers lists, also split across several sub lists, like “Toys – News,” and “Toys – Bloggers”, “Tech – News,” or “Tech – Cybersecurity”. Segmentation of content makes it much easier to follow and be in the right mindset for each topic.

Over time, it also became sort of a crazy place for politics and the spread of misinformation campaigns promoted by trolls and bots. These are the classic style trolls of the days of Ye Olde Usenet, where one person might be harassing another over something the latter was taking a bit too seriously. These are weaponized trolls pushed by people wish absolutely awful agendas against large groups of people. This was bad during the Obama Era of the US but made absolutely worse during the Trump Era.

It’s not entirely just a Trump thing, or a US thing, there is idiocy going on all around the world, but I’m still going to use the US as a frame of reference, since I am in the US. It’s also a problem across many Social Platforms. Lately there have been a lot of actual efforts to stem the spread of lies and stupidity on a lot of platforms, Twitter included. This is where we end up with more rift and part of Musk’s stated reasoning for pissing away billions of dollars on a platform that isn’t worth anywhere near that.

Free Speech.

Which is the real crux of the issue. Some are trying to confuse it with the idea that people angry over this don’t like that Musk is a Billionaire. How it’s hypocritical because Bezos bought the Washington post. The problem isn’t that Musk is a billionaire, it’s that he’s kind of a jackass. And he wants to open the platform back up to let other jackasses be jackasses. “Free Speech” isn’t at all about free speech to these people it’s about freedom to be an asshole. This is why people are upset. They are tired of people spreading lies and idiocy then just screaming people down when they are called out on it.

It was getting better.

It will be interesting to see what comes out of all this. I don’t think it’s going to be anything good. For one, every discussion about Musk buying Twitter on Reddit, seems to end up locked. Because just discussing the issue, people can’t keep civilized. There have also been a LOT of “Free Speech” platforms pop up over the past several years, and basically every single one failed. Some still limp along, but they all devolve into a bunch of jackasses calling for violence and spouting endless hate speech. They get kicked off their hosting platforms for violating TOS, sometimes the creators realize what a mess they unleashed and close things down themselves, sometimes they just fall apart because they can’t create any real way to financially support the platform.

Twitter may be big enough to survive for a while, but that’s not even real clear. It’s still one of the smallest social platforms in terms of users at around 350million. For comparison, Facebook and TikTok have Billions, with an s. Basically a measurable 25% of the entire world’s population. There is a greater than good chance that at least half of Twitter’s users are bot accounts, either actual scripted agent bots or sweat shop people in 3rd world countries clicking retweet buttons “bots”. Add this in with a lot of people leaving Twitter in disgust, and it will be interesting to see what the user base is in a month or two.

So what’s the alternative? A lot of people are pushing and moving to Mastodon. Mastodon isn’t quite the same as Twitter but it’s very similar, especially to old Twitter. For starters, it’s Federated, which means, anyone can host a Mastodon server (called Instances), and it can connect to other Mastodon Instances. This means there are many Instances themed around specific topics. It also means that if an Instance becomes full of idiots, then it can easily be blocked by other Instances.

This is not my first attempt at Mastodon either. I’ve used it off and on for a while and even ran a script for a long time that would sync my Twitter and Mastodon profiles, creating an illusion of activity. Now I’m trying to use it full time though. I have wanted to make it work for a while anyway, now, with all of the attention it’s getting, seems like as good of a time as any. I guess maybe it might be best to just treat it more like the “Classic Twitter” days, and just toss stuff out into the Ether and see if anyone reacts.

Currently I’m on the core Mastodon.social, though I may look into moving elsewhere, but if you want to give me a follow, you can find me <a rel=”me” href=”https://mastodon.social/@RamenJunkie“>Here</a>.

Technology

Leaving Google, Part 2

Ramen Junkie 0Comment

I discussed briefly last post, about what’s come up with my GSuite Legacy account. I wanted to mention a few other things that came up, and some additional steps I made. A lot of the other issues were pretty easy to correct. One extremely useful tool in all of this I found, was the Google Dashboard. This lists all of the services used with some generic metrics of how much might be there to look into.

For example, I found I had a few “Saved locations” in Google maps. They ended up being some inconsequential hotels from a trip years ago, but it was good to know so if they were something meaningful, I could resave them to my regular old Google Account.

There is also some useless and even slightly misleading information here. For example Google Cloud Print no longer exists, but it’s still listed. There doesn’t seem to be a way to purge out that data. Youtube lists “112 Purchases”, which isn’t true either, it’s “112 titles synced through my connected Vudu/Ultraviolet/MoviesAnywhere” access.” It’s not something I need to care about.

One, I had forgotten about was Contacts. I could have done a straight import/export, but I opted to take the long road and manually transfer everything to Outlook. This way I could also clean things up. This also meant I had to do some settings changes and shuffling on my phone, so it would use my Outlook Contacts instead of my Google contacts. I was, thankfully, already using Outlook as my email client anyway.

I also remembered that I used my domain account for my Google Analytics and Search Console credentials (Why aren’t these just one service?). Fortunately, these were fairly easily transferred to my standard Google Account. I found 4 services where I was able to do this, so I’ll roughly cover them all together.

Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Blogger, and Youtube, could all be directly transferred to a standard Gmail/Google account. The process is similar but slightly different on each.

Search Console allows you to delegate access to a secondary account. This account can then be made the primary owner, though to do this they need to be re-verified using DNS records.

Google Analytics is similar to Search Console, without the need to re-verify. I simply added my Gmail account as a user, promoted it to Admin, then deleted my domain account’s access.

Blogger worked the same way. I don’t really use Blogger, but I did have an empty blog with a name I’d like to hold on to, so I transferred it over.

Youtube is a bit more complex. Channels have to first be converted to “Brand Accounts”. Then you can delegate secondary users. Also, there is a waiting period of 7 days before a delegated user can be elevated to be the “Primary Owner”. After that period, I made my Gmail log in the Primary, and deleted access from my domain account. I had initially started simply consolidated playlists between accounts, but this was a pain in the ass. Going with the Brand account method, I was able to transfer everything. I BELEIVE, but am not positive, that there may be a way to convert the channels back to personal accounts, but I’m not positive on that one.

I’m am nearly ready to see what steps I need to take to cancel out the Gsuite part of the domain account, which HOPEFULLY will convert it to a Web ID. The only thing left is my Google Play apps. It’s not cleat at all what will happen here. If it converts to a Web ID, the Play Purchases should just continue to be used and licensed to that account. I have documented everything I’ve every bought, free or not, in case I need to “re-purchase” anything I use or care about (free or not) on my Gmail Account. I still plan to use the Gmail account going forward. I do also need to figure out how to transfer my Pokemon Home subscription to my Gmail account.

The whole process has gone surprisingly smoothly, it’s just been time consuming. It helped a lot that frankly, I wasn’t really using many Google Services anymore to start with. The reality is, that consolidating all my email to one (Microsoft) account has been great, because I can better use Rules to manage it before it’s shuffled off to the archive ball on my NAS.

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