I have the cbs news app on my phone. Yesterday I got a breaking news push notification informing me that someone caught a big alligator. I can't imagine the rage I'd be filled with if I was immersed in a show only to be interrupted by a pop up like that.

Or to use the recent hurricane coverage as an example:

• Breaking: Hurricane Project To Hit Florida
• Breaking: Hurricane Projected to be 'Major Hurricane '
• Breaking: Hurricane Strengthens to Category 3 Ahead of Landfall in Florida
• Breaking: Hurricane Strengths to Category 4 Ahead of Landfall in Florida
• Breaking: Hurricane Makes Landfall in Florida
• Breaking: Hurricane Downgraded to Category 2 Hours After Landfall in Florida
• Breaking: Small City Faces Sever Flooding from Hurricane
• Breaking: Hurricane Crosses into Georgia

Etc. Pop up, pop up, pop up, pop up. Id either stop watching Max or have to ask my doc to prescribe blood pressure meds.

Yeah it's just gonna be "breaking news" that turns out to just be fear mongering. Kinda like how pretty much all major news sources have been for the last 20(?) years.

Hard pass.

Yep. Zaslav is a real piece of shit. He was also behind cancelling Batgirl and Scoob before they were released and taking a bunch of animated shows off of Max but not making them available anywhere else.

Yeah, this is just a ridiculous idea that only a geriatric boomer could come up with. If there was breaking news we cared about, we'd get a notification on our phone. Unless we intentionally put our phone on silent because we wanted to enjoy something without interruption.

They're really going to push everyone to running their own home servers to watch pirated content again. For a few years they had a product where for a like $10/mo we could just watch whatever without ads, and it was legitimately better than piracy. They're just hell bent on ruining that.

i wish they had a plan that only had hbo content, most of the time the other stuff just gets in the way and is annoying to scroll past. maybe they could call it “hbo max”

That's why they preemptively dropped "HBO" from the old "HBO Max" moniker.

Among all the other bullshit they pulled, the CEO bragged upon purchase of choking the service with cheap to produce reality show crap.

I had HBO in some form for decades, since I was a kid. They were the best and among the last prestige content creators. I dropped HBOs corpse last year over it. Fuck this late stage capitalism race to the bottom.

Also, if somehow all the shit they pulled upon acquisition wasn't enough to stop paying them 160 annually a year ago, this would have been.

I've had multiple issues with very recently released movies (like Crazy Rich Asians) not playing at all and only giving me pixelated nonsense or the aspect ratios being completely fucked up. Never happened on HBO Max. Only since the forced migration to the new app

The issue is that I can't tell CNN how severe of a breaking news story I want it to be to interrupt what I'm watching. To me, a story worthy of interrupting my show would be like the death of the president or nuclear armageddon or something. But to CNN, breaking news is like so and so celebrity said "Trump bad".

Was there mainstream media that didn't try to sell the war? You had to go to stuff like Democracy Now to hear any kind of critical voices.

Never stopped

True, but not as helpful for the Turner Classic Movies side of the business. A lot of old films are not available via piracy sites because there isn't much interest in them outside of a niche film buff market. I haven't looked, but I'm guessing I'm not going to see too many Dead End Kids or Boston Blackie movies on a torrent site, but I might on TCM. And now they're going to interrupt that with bullshit.

What the fuck is going on today?

Interest rates. Loans just got a lot more expensive so big companies are all scrambling to shake down their customers for every penny they can get so they can get more debt off their books.

"raising PS plus prices to ridiculous levels" Just change to a different company's service, .... Oh, wait.

I just looked up PS Plus prices. Wth. Why does everything have to go up in price? The same service costs $20 more? I used to always get the codes on sale and now that’s harder to get so I was already thinking twice about renewing. Now with the price increase, I might as well just not renew it.

I hadn’t seen the PS+ increase before this and just now looked it up.

Like…seriously?? $80 for the base tier? And $160 for the top one?

There’s nothing extra being provided. The only reason I’ve bothered to keep it is for the 2 games each month since I don’t really online play that much anymore.

It's the latter.