Go to any garage sale and you’ll find piles of DVDs for sale. Everyone’s getting rid of their collection. With streaming being so commonplace, no one’s turning to their hoards of disks for entertainment, so now getting a dollar or two for them is the way to go. Obviously, clicking play on Netflix is easier than finding the disk on the shelf, turning on the DVD player, zipping through the menu, and then pressing play, but that really only works when the movie you want is on the streaming service you have. What happens when it’s not? We’re at the mercy of whatever deal(s) the movie studios have with the streaming service(s). Yet for the sake of convenience, everyone’s giving up ownership.
And this isn’t unique to DVDs. Subscription models are popping up everywhere, and it’s resulting in a world where people don’t own anything anymore.
I’m not against the concept of subscriptions as a whole. Do I think that people should own a hard copy of every single movie they ever want to watch? Not at all. Netflix and Prime and all these other platforms are a great way to access media in a way that makes sense for the average person’s budget, physical storage capabilities, and viewing habits. But clearly, streaming has influenced consumer culture so much that stores aren’t even selling hard copies anymore. Best Buy, for example, announced recently they’d be phasing out the sale of DVDs and Blu-rays, and I completely get it.
But as I said, then we’re just relying on streaming services to provide us with that content, and now we’re seeing that not only is physical media disappearing, sometimes digital media is too. Streaming services can just fully wipe content off their platform. Disney+ is doing it all the time, which is angering fans who now have no way of legally watching the Disney content they want to watch. And yeah, I said ‘legally’ because there’s always a good chance it was downloaded and put on some pop-up-riddled illegal hosting site, but some people (not me) have morals.
And since we’re on the topic of illegal activity: 90% of the music on my iPhone was ripped illegally from YouTube over the past 15 years. Those mp3s are stored on a hard drive, so no matter what happens to music streaming platforms, I own them. I use Spotify for free all the time at home, but my personal library is too precious to put behind a paywall.
We’ve seen even the most successful companies go down in flames over time, and I don’t like the idea of being left with nothing but credit card statements to show that I at one point had something. We can trust in companies and longevity and whatever you want, but when you don’t actually own anything, it’s a risk.
A subscription model for something like Netflix makes sense. You don’t need to actually own most movies to watch and enjoy them, and if you ever find the library unsatisfactory, you can cancel without disrupting your life. But when it comes to many other things, the loss can be significant. No productivity or access to files if you lose your Microsoft Office subscription. No family photos if you lose your cloud storage subscription. No ability to print stuff if you lose your printer ink subscription. Because yeah, printers now come with subscription services! It’s so fun!
Companies realized that they could make more money and over a longer period of time with the subscription model over a measly one-time payment so now everything has a monthly fee to keep you locked in. It all comes back to corporate greed!
So we’re just left owning nothing and figuring out which of the hundreds of possible monthly payments are worth it.
Of course, maybe it’s a good thing we don’t own anything. No one has a place to put our belongings in anyway. My generation can’t afford a house, so we have to rent…and what is rent if not a subscription service?
Look at me, bringing the post to a close with the mention of rent, when the post title is from a Rent song. Who caught that reference?
That’s all for now!
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