Not really, no. Those keys are more or less equivalent to a browser’s user agent, difference is you don’t choose your own but get them from OpenSubtitles. Motivation probably ranges from “that makes it easy to reject random crawlers” to “we’d like to know the people writing software against our API, or at least have a way to contact them”.

You’ll also be able to find examples of such keys in repositories in the future in case you don’t want to request one of your own but frankly speaking that’s a dick move.

To an extent, but it’s only really relevant to developers. End users don’t see or interact with this at all and aren’t required to provide further info.

For 99% of people, this change makes very little, if any, difference. The way it’s been worded makes it seem like no one gets to use opensubtitles anymore unless they start shelling out cash.

THEN ASK PEOPLE TO DONATE, how tone-deaf can you be about your own community?? What the fuck do they think Wikipedia is doing?
I’ve found pirates & FOSS enthusiasts are FAR more likely to donate into something they use regularly and appreciate, this is a blatant slap in the face to those people.

This unfortunately helps sets a precedent for what the internet is going to look like in the future. Even the most basic things will be behind a paywall.
You cant even read a fucking news article from New York Times, who made 173.91 million dollars last year

But it’s been free for a really long time

Of course it has. You need to offer the world a useful service for some length of time before you have dominated the market to such an extent that you can cut the quality and jack up the prices without there being any meaningful competition to worry about.

Every service that disabled or limited the API has seen an increase in running costs, because people turn to scraping, which costs them more resources overall, and cannot be controlled by the site owners as easily.

Let’s be honest, though, hosting text files with a search bar isn’t that much expensive to justify a response like this.

It’s fine if they want to earn money, but then they should be upfront about it, and not making up stories about fluke running costs. I’d rather see a donation button.

They host incredibly tiny text files. We are talking in the single KB range. Even serving millions of these a day is minor load to current hosting environments.

Most modern webpages load the equivalent of 1000s of subtitles to every user on every page load, including small sites like personal blogs.

I would be surprised if their hosting costs were even in the $1000s/month instead of $100s.

Thats the likely reason they don’t share the costs. It’s that cheap to run. Even asking for donations might be pushing it. Demanding payment? Bullshit.

Does anyone know which scenes are best for subtitles. I hate watching a movie and there is a foreign language and I know there’s supposed to be text on the screen but I get nada. I have to use context clues.

They weren’t gaining anything with the free service, now they might get a bit of money from it.

IDK, if I was contributing subtitles for an open provider free of charge who shared them free of charge, I’d be glad my subtitles were helping people who needed them. Now that labor has been turned into capital and that rug has been pulled with no back-dated compensation or provisions for free subtitles for hard of hearing or something. It’s a shitty move across the board for everyone but the owner.