Exciting news for who? Only the site owner is excited that a free resource now requires a subscription

“Yay! Now I have to pay another subscription! I’m so excited! Let’s celebrate with them!” - nobody

  • ɔiƚoxɘup@infosec.pubEnglish
    2481·
    1 year ago

    I have no skin in this game but I think it sounds like they need to change their name from “open subtitles” to “closed captioning”

    Edit: stupid STT

  • ilega_dh@feddit.nlEnglish
    16412·
    1 year ago

    Gather all the worlds subtitles under the guise of being “open” and then bait and switch when you’re the largest subtitles database out there.

    The free API had a limit of 20 subs/day, you’re not going to tell me those server costs were significant.

    • entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      1218·
      1 year ago

      The new API has the exact same free limit. They’re just dropping support for the old API soon and people who want to depend on the old version will need to pay for its continued support because they want to push everyone onto the new site/API

    • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.worldEnglish
      252·
      1 year ago

      And yeah sure, server costs and all. OTOH, subtitle files are tiny, so there’s only so much money you can ask for it realistically.

    • MonkderZweite@feddit.chEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      Gather all the worlds subtitles under the guise of being “open” and then bait and switch when you’re the largest subtitles database out there.

      MS did something similiar 2007 already.

  • Ludrol@szmer.infoEnglish
    777·
    1 year ago

    REST API docs

    Your consumer can query the API on its own, and download 5 subtitles per IP’s per 24 hours, but a user must be authenticated to download more. Users will then be able to download as many subtitles as their ranks allows, from 10 as simple signed up user, to 1000 for VIP user.

    I think it’s reasonable move. They have Legacy API that cost them a lot of manhours to maitain and they decided to cut on costs and replace it with a new thing. Sadly they decresed amount of api calls from 20 to 5 [needs citation]

    I think they don’t have good PR guy to better communicate the change

    • Honytawk@lemmy.zipEnglish
      321·
      1 year ago

      Subtitles are like 5kb text files, why even limit their downloads in any way?

      • jayandp@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        233·
        1 year ago

        The overhead isn’t the storage but the request. Processing a request takes CPU time, which can get expensive when people setup a media server and request subtitles for dozens of movies and shows. Every episode of a TV show is a separate request and that can add up fast when you scale it to thousands of users.

      • ricecake@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        111·
        1 year ago

        If they’re storing them in something like Amazon s3, there is a cost (extremely low, but not free) associated with retrieving data regardless of size.

        Even if they were an entirely free service, it’d make sense to put hard rate limits on unauthenticated users and more generous rate limits on authenticated ones.

        Leaving out rate limits is a good way to discover that you have users who will use your API real dumb.

        Their pricing model seems fucked, but that’s aside from the rate limits.

        • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          Agreed, they could have done this much more gracefully. Same as the reddit API. Average user? Who cares. Sending millions of requests? Okay we’re going to clamp down pretty hard on you

          • ricecake@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            6·
            1 year ago

            Oh, I’m pretty sure it’s close to trivial. $0.0004 per thousand requests is $400 per billion, or $0.40 per million.
            That’s as close to insignificant as you can get and still pay attention to. Caching solutions are probably going to end up costing you more in the long run. An HA setup that can handle a billion requests a year is going to cost you at least $100 a month, and still provide less availability than s3.

            You don’t want unmetered access, but their pricing is unlikely to be based on access rates, and more likely on salary costs and other infrastructure costs, like indexing and search.

        • dan@upvote.auEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          If it’s all text, it’d compress quite well, especially since there’s likely lots of repeated words. Not to 5kb of course, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it had at least a 3x compression ratio with zstd.

      • azertyfun@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        61·
        1 year ago

        Subtitle are like 1h worth of content, why even download more than 10 a day?

        They could make it 20 and it wouldn’t change much I guess, 10 does seem a bit low, but if they make it 1000/day (which you could argue is “no heavier than one JPEG”) they’ll have Kodi addons or whatever attempting to auto-download an entire library’s worth of subtitles. It’s not about the throughput, it’s about the processing time of establishing connections, negotiating cyphers, processing a request, hitting a search indexer, etc. All those small costs add up if every day you have thousands of users downloading hundreds of file without giving anything back.

        • SendMePhotos@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          Just start downloading them and using them to create a new platform. Bam!

          (I am saying this with 100% ignorance)

      • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        712·
        1 year ago

        Electricity aint exactly free. Even if the data they store is minuscule. Servers will pull >300w if you store 10gb or 2000gb.

  • Zoidberg@lemm.eeEnglish
    532·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • Stumblinbear@pawb.socialEnglish
      201·
      1 year ago

      You just need to move to the new API, which is free, the old one is still available temporarily if you pay

        • Stumblinbear@pawb.socialEnglish
          101·
          1 year ago

          Yeah but the basic “give me my subtitles for this specific movie” very likely still works just fine, because… that’s like the whole reason they exist

    • beefcat@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8·
      1 year ago

      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.

    • irotsoma@lemmy.worldEnglish
      51·
      1 year ago

      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.

    • dellish@lemmy.worldEnglish
      32·
      1 year ago

      So… They’re following the Reddit business model? Let’s see how that works out.

  • voxel@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    413·
    1 year ago

    well it has been deprecated for a few years, and they’re basically asking you to play for continued support.
    they have a new REST api, but you still need the old one, pay up because otherwise there’s no motivation to keep it around.

  • macniel@feddit.deEnglish
    391·
    1 year ago

    contribute to a greater cause

    For the greater good, that is their pockets.

  • marx2k@lemmy.worldEnglish
    33·
    1 year ago

    lol I got that emaik and read that exactly the same.

    Someone should hire that author for a large corporation’s pr department

    • lemmy_get_my_coat@lemmy.worldEnglish
      52·
      1 year ago

      Same here. I didn’t understand why I was euphoric after reading the email until I went back and read the words.

  • plz1@lemmy.worldEnglish
    281·
    1 year ago

    Site owner and whomever in marketing wrote that. Pure psychopathy, IMO.

  • Tetsuo@jlai.luEnglish
    23·
    1 year ago

    I had issues in the past with opensubtitles serving malware through fake download buttons on the site.

    You had like 6 different buttons to download with only one legit.

    Sent them an email and they removed them…

    I hardly trust this site and really don’t appreciate they use open in their name and pull up shit like this.

    I wish we had some sort of P2P sub hosting… So we don’t have to deal with sites like opensubtitles.

    • Moonrise2473@feddit.itOPEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Well, the fake download buttons that give you malware is all part of the experience. This very email continues later with this:

      Unlike non-VIP users, who might face offers, installers, and redirects before accessing subtitles, VIP members have a streamlined and hassle-free download experience.