On the 5th February, Amazon will be adding adverts to Prime Video in the UK. Something that unfortunately seems to have become a theme, as Amazon will join Netflix and Disney + in charging extra to remove adverts from their streaming service.
So while not officially a price increase, having to pay an additional £2.99 on top of the £8.99 a month (£95 a year) for an Amazon Prime subscription. This does feel like a price increase, especially as Amazon are now charging extra to remove something that they have added.
However as Prime Video is included as part of Amazon Prime. If you take into account all of the services that have bundled with Prime. Prime Video is perhaps the best value for money when compared with the other streaming services. So we have decided to sacrifice one of Amazon’s rival streaming services, in order to keep our Amazon Prime and Prime Video subscriptions.
Building your own media streaming server
As streaming services continue to rise in price. We may start to see a return to physical media, and perhaps more interestingly, people having a media server at home. So with this in mind, now might be the perfect time to ditch online streaming, and consider building your own private streaming server.
While building a private streaming server is not all that difficult. After you have built and configured it, you will need to rip all of your physical media, into a format that your new server can read. Which is actually the part that will be the most difficult and no small undertaking. So to help you get started, please take a look at our beginners guide on how to setup a Synology NAS.
The main advantages in having a private media server are as follows:
- You will have a backup of your physical media
- You will centralise all of your media into one place and format
- Everything will be organised
- You will have multi-device support
- You will have no adverts
- Only the content that you like will be on your media server
Where having a break
As February is usually the shortest month of the year. Traditionally we like to take February off in order to recharge our batteries, reorganise, and start preparing for the new year. So while this will mean that this month, we will not be posting any new content. We will be returning in March, to begin posting to a new schedule.
However, this is not to say we will not be working at all in February. Instead in the background we will be using this time to build up our stock of long form videos, get an internet upgrade with Full Fibre to the Property (FFTTP), and fix a number of issues relating to this website.
As we intend to shift to a new schedule, where we will be releasing only two videos a month. These videos, will be long form videos that will be between 10 to 20 minutes in length. So as these videos will take longer to create. We need to build up a reserve in order to avoid any disruptions to our schedule.
Our aim being to try and finish up our Beginners Guide to setting up a Synology NAS, in the next 6 months. Which will allow us to shift onto newer topics like setting up VPN servers, Docker or configuring a Asustor NAS.
New early access content
For anyone who is a site member, you may have seen that we recently created a new video on how you hard and soft reset a Synology router. So yes sometime later this year we do intend to release a remake of our Synology router series.
Then sometime later this month you will also have access to a video on how you update a paid SSL certificate on a Synology NAS. Along with a video on how to install and configure Synology Photos. It is our hope that we can then move onto new topics, like upgrading RAID and power management on a NAS.
Changing the website’s domain name
When we originally built this website, we were unable to get the domain name we wanted. So we decided to compromise and take my-doodads.com. However years later as the mydoodads.com domain became available. We decided to buy it with the intention to rebrand our website and YouTube channel.
The only problem was that our website started to take off, and we did not want to stifle its growth with a sudden rebranding. However, as the website is no longer performing as it once did. Now is the perfect opportunity to finish that rebranding and basically start again with mydoodads.com
So you may have noticed we have already migrated to a new domain name, and have been tinkering with the site to better optimise it. While this should mean that accessing content will be faster, we are already experiencing side effects. So not only do we now have to make additional changes to our website. We also have to resubmit the site to Google Adsense and update numerous Search Engines.
Hopefully this disruption will not be too much of an inconvenience, but we are going to apologise in advance for any problems this may have caused you.
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