*What rights do you have to the digital movies, TV shows and music you buy online? That question was on the minds of Telstra TV Box Office customers this month after the company announced it would shut down the service in June. Customers were told that unless they moved over to another service, Fetch, they would no longer be able to access the films and TV shows they had bought. *
i tried to get into streaming but i grew increasingly uncomfortable with paying forever as titles appear and disappear at the whim of suits. how could that possibly be a pleasant UX for customers?
i’d take the hassle of having discs or managing a server any day of the week over paying these goons for access to their files which they happily negotiate away for financial reasons. it’s just a disgusting paradigm. when netflix was starting streaming, i thought (i was like 15) we were emerging into a great new age, where every show you could ever want was on one beautiful service.
now they won’t even let you share accounts or screenshot the fucking show (a pig-headed anti-piracy measure which is mind-blowingly stupid given every single show on there is available for free if you know where to look ANYWAY. what are they DOING.)
fuck streaming, fuck netflix, fuck spotify. crash and burn. topple like the house of cards you are.
And paying more and more as time goes on. The thing that shits me the most is the increased prices but decreased range/quality of content. That’s clearly not a business model aimed at customer satisfaction.
All business models are aimed at company profitability. Customer satisfaction is an expensive early necessity which you can largely do away with as you become entrenched.
Streaming was great when it was just Netflix and had a ton of content. Now it is just cable TV on demand.
I never watch the same movie/TV show more than once, so I don’t see a point in hording this data. So for me the UX of streaming is most of the time preferrable than having a physical media which I need to carry to the new appartment every time I move.
This is different with music, where I listen to the same Albums hundrets of times. There I can deal with vinyl and many files on my computer.
Streaming in general is great. Streaming services are a mixed bag of results, but overall our options are excellent at this point in time. You can have streaming services with no contract, pay for one month and abandon it if you don’t like it. There are also numerous FREE streaming services with lots of great content.
It’s important to understand the above in the context of how it used to be before Streaming was an option. There was basically only the option to have a cable or satellite TV on contract, or use OTA antenna TV, or watch everything on disc / tape. So yeah I think streaming is great.
Having said all that, I buy anything I want to keep perpetually on disc. 4k Blu-ray for movies and CDs for music (I bought 3 albums on CD over the last couple weeks). Games don’t fit on discs anymore so I try to get stuff on GOG when it works out.