Wait… “Ad-Free Subtitles”? I have never even used or heard of this service, but that just feels like an “insult to injury” or “annoy you into paying” abuse? Am I wrong?
Please tell me that this is not some auto-subtitling service that is going to cause ads to be inserted into the subtitles for other ads or something? Like, how do ads in subtitles even work?
They add one ad at the beginning like “visit example.com” inside the subtitle file
But luckily there aren’t many companies that want to be associated with piracy* so in most cases it’s blank a generic “advertise here contact mail@example.com”
I remember only a campaign that lasted over a year, a service that promotes legal streaming services, filmamo.it
note: why I said “associated with piracy”: those files are going to be used with pirated video files and in most cases are pirated too as they’ve been extracted from a DVD or a streaming service without a license from the copyright holders. Once I saw a guide “how to use external subs with Netflix” for the rare edge cases where the viewer is watching a content via VPN and his sub language is missing, but those are very rare. Not to mention that for MPAA there’s no difference between just torrenting a movie or paying a subscription to Netflix in another country via VPN: for them is all piracy and they want to stop both.
Fucking MPAA. Quite possibly the most corrupt pile of dickheads to ever assemble. They blatantly ignored their own raring guidelines for decades until they decided they got tired of being called out on it and changed them to be so vague that they would he allowed to justify any rating, then started accepting “donations” from production companies to get the ratings they wanted.
Exactly. I’m all for hating on subscriptions, but this is more than a fair price. Just eat at home instead of buying out for one day a year and it pays for it lol
They host and serve the data which cost a lot of money, they are not charging for it they are asking for patronage for those who want to. vip doesn’t get you much apart from the feeling of participating (I’m vip). It’s not different from lemmy, instance hoster ask for patronage to cover the costs, even though the data is produced by users.
But the new api is still free, you just have to pay if you want to use the legacy api. This makes sense to get people to switch without requiring them to do it super fast
So what pisses me off in these cases is this: they didn’t contribute with the data. They’re a convenient aggregator, I give them that, but the data came from third parties. If you want to start charging for convenient access to the data you should at least make all data before you started charging available in a bulk download for free.
They’re just doing what discogs did with music. They’ll create contracts with media companies to allow them to claim that all the info in their DB is copyrighted. Eventhough most of it was user created, it is technically mostly copyrighted data. And then they’ll start the legal campaigns to eliminate any competition. They’ll progressively make it more difficult to access and more difficult to update or get things corrected and it will become frustratingly bad but the only game in town.
They aren’t charging for convenient access to the data though, they are charging for bulk access. The limitations of the new API should not impact people casually pulling in subtitles with VLC when they watch a movie, which is the purpose the API was intended to fulfill.
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