They aren’t charging for convenient access to the data though, they are charging for bulk access. The limitations of the new API should not impact people casually pulling in subtitles with VLC when they watch a movie, which is the purpose the API was intended to fulfill.
obnoxious executive pay is its own problem, but even zeroing all that out wouldn’t do much for the financials. if you brought that $50m down to $0 and passed that savings on to consumers, each netflix subscriber would save pennies on their monthly bill
the music streaming platforms basically screw over the artists to make that feasible, with the excuse usually being that artists can make their real money touring and selling merch.
the cost of producing music is also infintesimal compared to that of producing film and television. the whole music industry itself is pretty small in comparison, yet Spotify costs about as much as a streaming TV service.
to scale that model up to film and TV would mean either a much higher base price, or a lot less overall content being made. these are viable paths, but both come with big trade offs.
this doesn’t really answer my questions, though.
netflix was able to afford that much content back then for two reasons
they were flush with capital from investors, spending more money than they were making to promote growth.
netflix wasn’t running new content, they were essentially licensing “reruns” of content that already had its primary run elsewhere.
basically, everyone got used to a certain lifestyle being subsidized by cheap capital and investors misplaced belief in perpetual growth. nobody has yet to explain to me how this could have been made sustainable.
the problem i have, that nobody has been able to really explain to me, is how the economics of streaming should be made to work.
content is insanely expensive to make. even with all of Netflix’s recent shitty changes, their operating margin is still only about 13%. that isn’t enough cash left over to fund production of every single show they don’t have. and it’s important that they actually be able to fund production, because unlike 10 years ago, most productions no longer rely on first runs on OTA or cable TV to make their money
so it seems to me there are three paths here:
the industry puts everything on a single service and dramatically increases the base price (remember cable? my parents paid twice as much for it in 2005 as i spend today on streaming services)
the industry puts everything on a single service and dramatically scales back production (remember OTA TV?) to fit within the budget afforded by a reasonable subscription price
studios branch off into competing streaming services
i’m not trying to start a fight or defend shitty corporate behavior (no one will ever get me to pay for ads), i just want to know how people think this could work in a way that balances out
Let’s put it another way.
When I buy a new product, I’m paying for everything that comes inside the shrink wrap, case included. Once you open that case, the case is used. It is no longer in brand new mint condition.
If GameStop had a reputation for taking care of their open boxes and ensuring that they were in as close to mint condition as possible, I probably wouldn’t care. But they don’t. Every time this happened to me, I got a scuffed up case covered in hard to remove stickers. In some cases, you end up like OP and pay the full new price for a bare disc with no original case or manual. The fact that you are OK with that is astounding.
Why are you so eager to defend shitty behavior that only GameStop engages in? Are you just completely oblivious to the fact that many people who still buy physical games want to keep the packaging in good condition?
Go try selling an open copy of a game on eBay or Craigslist as “new”. You won’t get people paying “new” prices for it. You will get people paying “used” prices. And your prices will be even lower if the case is all grubby and covered in stickers, as GameStop tends to do.
If they want to sell these as “open box”, fine, but selling them as new for new prices is downright shitty and that is what people have a problem with.
This is not a tough concept to grasp. No other retailer is shitty enough to open all their products, sell them at full price, then tell their customers to fuck off when they complain.
Fuck GameStop.
As soon as the case is removed from the shrink wrap it is used. GameStop won’t pay you full price to trade in an open copy of a game just because you say you never put it in your console.
When. I buy a NEW game, the entire thing should be in mint condition, case included. When I pay full price, I’m paying for everything that comes inside the shrink wrap, and it should be unadulterated.
If anything has been adulterated in any way compared to how it came from the factory, then I shouldn’t have to pay full price.
This is so unbelievably shitty, and they’ve been doing it for decades now. The number of times I went in, asked for a new copy of a game, and was told to pay full price for something that came in a grubby open box covered in stickers was infuriating. It’s a big reason I stopped shopping there over 10 years ago.
Other stores figured out how to put games on their shelves without opening the boxes and taking the discs out. In fact, it’s actually less work to not be shitty. Just put the fucking game on the shelf LIKE EVERY OTHER GODDAMN STORE ON THE PLANET.
Fuck GameStop. I hope their CEO gets hemorrhoids regularly.
All the streaming services use DRM, it’s just download stores that are DRM-free. Which makes sense, when you buy an album, you should own it.
DRM-protected music stores went extinct over a decade ago, following Steve Jobs’ open letter to the music industry on the topic. By 2009, iTunes music was completely DRM-free and alternative stores had to follow suit to remain competitive.
That doesn’t really fix the “somehow matches your interests” part of their need. Your torrent software isn’t able to track your listening habits and recommend things that other people with similar habits also liked.
Apple also rolled out a really good seaparate app specifically for browsing and listening to classical music.
Classical music doesn’t organize easily into “bands/albums” the way most works from the last 80 years do. Most music players tend to fall apart when you try to organize a library of classical music in any coherent manner. So they solved this problem by desiging a completely separate UI for it.
A lot of cheap kitchen scales are also just crap. Talk to your local drug dealer about what brand of scale might be right for you.