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

  • Ludrol@szmer.infoEnglish
    11611·
    8 months 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
      432·
      8 months ago

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

      • thisNotMyName@lemmy.worldEnglish
        12·
        8 months ago

        a typical (full subtitle) .srt file for a movie is like 100-200 kb - still not much, but 5 is a little off

        • dan@upvote.auEnglish
          2·
          8 months 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.

      • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        914·
        8 months ago

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

            • LufyCZ@lemmy.worldEnglish
              3·
              8 months ago

              You know what?

              If you gave me a datadump and a docker image, I’d host it, for free.

              Insane I know

          • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            610·
            8 months ago

            If a server costs X and the amount of free users is Y and VIP is Z then you’d need to create an equilibrium where you can make more money to sustain the infrastructure and have enough in case it goes belly up.
            Aka: If 10k users are free, and the income from VIP or ads is Z then you have to limit the capabilities of the free users to sustain the platform which in turn can stay (to some anount) free because the VIPs pay for it.
            Means: Limit API calls.