I have to PAY to view Escapist videos on the iPad?

[SquidVicious]

Edit: okay I was wrong, you do need to be logged in at least to view videos while using Safari on the iPad. Still, $20 a year to support web series' you watch every week is a very fair price to pay.

 

[General Twinkletoes]

How many bloody times is this thread going to be necro'd?

[HEADING=2]Hey, future people![/HEADING]
Quote me when this next get necro'd again, I wanna see

Back on to this incredibly old topic, if anyone still gives a shit or if this is even still the case:

That does indeed suck, but this is one of those situations where I can't blame the escapist. Having your mobile version a paid version isn't really that amoral or obnoxious moneygrabbing. Just one of those things that has to be dealt with :/

I kind of want a memorial for this thread. How many topics with ~100 posts have lasted for 2 years?

 

[Whitster]

So imagine my surprise, frustration and outrage when I discovered I have to pay twenty dollars a year for the privilege of watching content on The Escapist on my iPad.

Our content, especially our video content, is ad-supported. The reason that we can provide all this content, for free, to anyone and everyone who wants it is because of the ads in the video player and on the site. Without those ads, we couldn't even afford the bandwidth to serve the videos, let alone what we pay the creators and our staff to actually make them.

Right now, HTML5 is a nascent technology. Advertising in HTML5 video is either prohibitively difficult or impossible, and HTML5 video is the only way to get video to play on the iPad. Without the ads to fund the service we would still have to pay for the bandwidth, but we'd get nothing in return. Unlike google with YouTube, we're not a mega-corporation with billions of dollars and unlimited bandwidth, and it's just not reasonable for us to cover that on our own.

The Publisher's Club membership [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/subscription/], as one of its primary features, removes all advertising from the site. Because PubClub members don't have to see ads, we can provide them with a lot of access that we can't give everyone else. HTML5 video, Podcast feeds, full-content RSS. Members can see the video on the iPad because they don't need to see the ads.

So here are the options we're left with:


Wait for Apple to introduce Flash on iOS, so you can see video through our normal, ad-supported video player. Complain to them if you'd like.
Wait for ad serving tech to catch up with HTML5 video, at which point we will roll out an ad-supported HTML5 player for everyone. Trust me, we want people to see the videos, that's why we make them.
Wait for us to come up with some kind of ad-supported device-specific app that will let you see the videos but also cover the cost of serving them. We're a small company and we do a lot, so don't expect this soon though.
Wait for some gigantic company to buy us and provide our videos ad-free to everyone. Also ponies.
Join the Publisher's Club and support us directly, removing the ads and getting all the content in as many ways as we can reasonably provide.


Don't get me wrong. I like the iPad. I own one, and use it, and would love to let everyone watch all our videos on it. If I had my way, there would be no ads on the site at all - they mess up my work and mean I get to do fewer cool things. But I also like having a job, and having all my friends have jobs, and being able to support people like Yahtzee and Shamus Young and the LRR crew. That makes the advertising a necessary evil, and one that we have to keep in mind with everything we do if we want our site to be around next year.

I've only just seen this thread upon trying to watch some ZP vids for the first time in a while and finding out that you don't support HTML5 without a sub.

This argument may have held water in 2010, but now on the cusp of 2013 you guys have got to be the last site left still flying the flash banner. Plenty of sites offer free HTML 5 content now, Polygon, IGN, Eurogamer, etc, some even ad supported. So unless there's a tech embargo to Oz at the minute either you're having us on, or your advertisers are having you on!