No shit

What doesn’t make sense? You get the sub at a lower cost. They need to make up that revenue, so ads.

Well yeah, but that’s because HBO and several other premium channels were at a tier you paid more for. You were paying more for the benefit of ad-free content.

You’re pulling that assumption out of nowhere though. The service is $15 a month, so yeah, I can see cutting off a third of the price as appealing to some consumers. You can downplay the significance of $5 a month, but it’s not an insignificant amount of the monthly fee.

I mean, it provides a benefit of $5 a month less a month to the consumer. To some person, that might be the difference between subscribing and not. As to it being exploitative (?), the details are all upfront. People can make their own decisions whether or not it’s right for them. 

Will we ever learn?

They aren’t adding ads to a service that you pay for though, they’re offering a lower tier plan that includes ads.  It’s a minor distinction, but different enough because I never had an option to pay more per month to get Comedy Central ad free when I had cable.

The benefit is a 33% cost savings per year to the consumer. That is significantly cheaper.

The entire point of all of this is for the company to make money. Ads make sense for streaming services in the same way that they make sense everywhere else, because they work in making them money. This isn’t a library, you can’t expect them to give you everything they have for free when people will pay them for it.

You’re subscribing already to their service and the content is monetized that way. Moreover, older content - say The Golden Girls or Smallville - has already been monetized when it was on traditional linear ad-supported broadcast tv.

Alt alt title: HBO Max offers cheaper tier with ads like competitors Hulu, Paramount+, and Peacocok and for some reason I’m outraged at HBOMax for trying to capture more subscribers because click bait funds my terrible takes!!

People weren’t criticizing them a few days ago for not having an add-supported level. Now they are adding a level that people are free to take advantage of or to ignore completely. If you don’t take advantage of this, it’s no different from them not offering it at all as far as you are concerned. Anybody who wants…

Yeah, this is sort of a nothingburger story. I’m not surprised that this costs more than Hulu given the content on HBO.

It’s weird to complain about this when it’s only adding options, not taking them away. For some people it will be worth it to save $5 a month and watch ads. I’ll keep spending $15 a month and not having them /shrug. 

Yeah I am no fan of SNL but it’s weird that like, the main critique here is “you didn’t make the specific muppet parody I wanted you to make that touches on the meta struggles of the muppet brand today.”

IMO, SNL is still coasting on Tiny Fey’s appearances as Sarah Palin when it comes to their reputation for political humor. Other than Melissa McCarthy’s Sean Spicer, I don’t think there was really any standout recurring SNL sketch of the Trump era. Alec Baldwin’s Trump was death. It doesn’t help that so many other…

Funny, I thought this was one of the best skits all season; it was… raw? You rarely see Kenan lose character, so you know it must mean something. Wouldn’t be surprised if that extreme beating was improved

That the old man was a puppet is what made it hilarious.

Counterpoint: yes they did and this sketch was hilarious.

I often find it difficult to watch even Update now given Che and Jost’s tendency to break after almost every line.