Comment by eitland
1 year ago
Actually for most part I don't want to subscribe.
And I don't want free ad sponsored.
I just want to pay a reasonable (I'll get back to this) price for the things I actually want.
Netflix was OK with me (and I think a number of others) despite being a subscription service not because it was a subscription.
It was OK because it was
- the only option
- reasonably priced
- and had "everything" one wanted
So what is reasonable?
I'd assume that with all the cost savings given the digitalization of the delivery at least it shouldn't be more expensive than renting a physical dvd, although I'd accept if they adjusted a little for inflation.
So use the Apple TV store (formerly iTunes Store). There you can buy nearly anything from any studio, and you pay per episode or per season. Whether the costs are reasonable or not is in the eye of the beholder but I don't feel ripped off by it.
>buy
Nothing is for sale at the Apple TV "Store". You pay for a license to stream a piece of content, that lasts until Apple or the content owner decides to revoke it.
Has any Apple TV purchase been revoked?
1 reply →
Meh. Videotape wears out. Video discs break. Books yellow and age and rot. No content you have ever bought lasts forever.
9 replies →
That is my current solution.
Still there is a number of things I cannot buy or rent.
> I'd assume that with all the cost savings given the digitalization of the delivery at least it shouldn't be more expensive than renting a physical dvd
I'm confused. A typical streaming service has hundreds or thousands of what would typically be a physical DVD. So how much should they charge?
Also, the vast majority of the cost for most content is in the creation of the content.
The tl;dr is that we've demanded things with such enormous production costs that were basically almost entirely subsidized on a socialized model, where the big appeal of the big ones subsidized the costs of the less successful ones, in a way that would make them not reliably financially viable in isolation.
But the content that is so specific it only appeals to 1-10% of people is both the most memorable and also often the content that is basically guaranteed to not hit for 90% of people. So your math on who's going to pay to consume it changes drastically when the ceiling is so much lower, especially when the effective price required is so much higher that it's going to drive even more people away.
So it's a much larger risk pool to hope you'll make your money back with the error bars so much narrower, and businesses being businesses, they go for the bland thing with a lower risk pool 99% of the time, and then wonder why their returns keep shrinking.