View Single Post
Robo
Formerly Roboman, still
awesome
 
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Portland, OR
 
2019-08-23, 14:10

I think subscriptions make sense for music. Nobody I know ever bought every song they wanted to listen to on iTunes for $0.99 or $1.29. People always supplanted that with other ways of hearing music, like the radio or YouTube, and they only bought songs they really liked. But with streaming, you can use the one service for everything. It doesn’t just replace buying CDs – it replaces radio, too. Radio has always been a subscription, it’s just one you pay for with your time (through ads) rather than money. Only now these streaming services are like a magic radio that plays whatever you want, and you pay a small fee to avoid ads. Honestly, the subscription/radio model has been around a lot longer, and it’s probably the “ownership era” of tapes and CDs that is going to turn out to be the aberration.

TV is kind of the same. TV has never been built around buying and owning TV shows; it’s always been built around either a subscription or advertising or both. No one wants to feel like they’re shelling out money each time they plop on the couch to kill some time; that’s why the original Apple TV models (first of buying shows, then of renting them) failed. Apple made a “DVD player for the internet,” but the internet is about Netflix, not DVDs.

Movies, I still want to own in a way I usually don’t with TV shows. I’m not sure why, honestly. Half the time I’ll have a movie on Blu-Ray and I’ll still Netflix it just because it’s easier than getting up and switching out the disc. I think I’m mostly just a collector who likes having a bunch of boxed movies because I love movies.

But I think I’m in the minority, there. I think most people just want to sit down and see the movie, as effortlessly as possible, and they don’t care about seeing it in the best possible picture quality or with the most bonus features or whatever. And if it feels like it doesn’t cost them any additional money for each movie, that’s even better.

I’m an idiot, so I’ll probably buy the inevitable giant box set of all the Marvel movies in the “Infinity Saga,” and I’m sure I’ll use those discs some, but honestly on any given day I think I’d be more likely to actually watch one of the movies on Disney+, even owning the movie on disc. It’s just easier, and I can pull it up on any device.

and i guess i've known it all along / the truth is, you have to be soft to be strong
  quote