this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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I don't get what the alternative is supposed to be. You can't make stuff like blockbuster quality movies on ads and/or donations alone. And between ads vs subscriptions, ads are iffy because you end up with sketchy or unethical advertisements. Plus ad blockers make it hard to sustain a business on just ads.
In an ideal world, nobody would need to "make a living" and we'd be able to offer more services for free. But we don't have that ideal world. Musicians, animators, writers, programmers and more all need to get paid somehow.
It's admittedly annoying how fractured subscriptions get, though. I miss when Netflix was the only streaming video subscription I needed. Now there's half a dozen major services and they all want exclusive contracts to show certain movies and TV.
Personally, I'm happy to pay for the stuff I use a lot. Which includes stuff that I don't even have to pay for (eg, I donated $20 to kbin). It does suck for stuff I only want a little of, though. eg, I don't have any news subscriptions because I only check news sites here and there and it's almost never the same site, too (mostly I get linked from sites like this). I want to see subscriptions become a bit more centralized, spanning multiple sites to account for this.
How about buying and owning things?
Steal everything until we do
When cable TV was first a thing, it was advertised as extra content and with NO commercials. Pay us money, we'll give you a big bundle of channels, and you won't have to see commercials anymore.
Then they started adding more and more commercials in. Nowadays, a half-hour slot is 1/3rd commercials, and probably another 15% of that time is credits and "previously on" or "before the break" or pointless shitty padding
Then Netflix came out. Pay us a monthly fee, you can see all this content whenever you want, no commercials.
Then everyone wanted a slice of Netflix's pie, and now we have a dozen separate streaming services you all have to pay monthly fees for.
The solution is Cable TV 2.0. Compile it all back into one service, charge a higher fee, cut all the ads out (again). Call it Fiber TV or something, idk. Otherwise people will realize it's easier to pirate shit again than to navigate and pay for 8 different streaming services
I just want to own stuff. I wanna pay for the series and music I like once and then have them forever. The problem with subscription gated media is that the subscription will eventually go away, and then so will the media. You will have paid hundreds over multiple years for it, but you will have nothing of it once it shuts down.
for me, it's far more about it being recurring than paying itself. I pay for software and media all the time. I just don't like having to pay over and over when i'm likely only occasionally using these services
Yea I have nothing against selling and buying CDs, Vinyls or DVDs because then you atleast own a copy of the media
If only super intelligent dinosaurs that could recycle things for us and could remove the need for jobs, came in our planet. We'd have more time making Marvel movies too.
I think what would work best in an ideal scenario would be a free and independent platform. Something like Wikipedia or something.
Part of the subscription would be to keep the platform itself up and running, and anyone like Netflix, Disney, Fox, whomever would be able to upload their movies/shows/etc there, with no discrimination.
Payment could be the platform maintenance fee + access to the library of shows (and here more popular creators could get a bigger share of the pie) or it could be maintenace fee + paying for shows individually.