The Subscription Age
When scholars review the stages of human society they refer to “ages.” We have had the Stone Age, Iron Age, Bronze Age, Industrial Age and the Information Age, for example.
But then we come to what I have long referred to as the Subscription Age.
The spark for this article was the fact I could not find a couple movies on DVD. I was trying to find The Siege of Jadotville, released in 2016 from Netflix [1]. This is a six year old movie and not yet out on DVD.
I will be blunt. I am a fan of owning CDs (vinyl before that) for my music and of owning DVDs for movies I like to watch. Other than my cable/internet subscription, I do not have Pandora, Spotify, Netflix, etc. I refuse to subscribe to the numerous and varied network “plus” offerings such as Hulu, Disney+, CBS+ (or whatever it is called.
I don’t save my music and movies to “the cloud.”
What has happened over the last 20 years is that companies don’t like to SELL you an item- they want to LOAN it to you via repeated revenue stream of subscription services.
Note: I don’t include newspapers and magazines and other news outlets and services in my rant. Newspapers and magazines have always been subscription products. Extending this model to their internet variants is a natural progression. I have a New York Times subscription which includes all-access online and the physical Sunday Times newspaper delivered to my house.
Computer programs are another good example. Remember when you had to buy Microsoft Office, got a disc and loaded it to your computer? Then Microsoft would come out with an updated version which many people chose to forgo and continue with their current program until support for it by Microsoft eventually forced an upgrade.
You don’t get a disc anymore. You load it via the internet and pay $7 per month for it. We had to do this because my wife uses Microsoft office on her personal laptop. I, on the other hand, chose to use the free Open Office [3]. It works just fine for me for about 90% of anything I need to do on my personal computer and I avoid the subscription fee.
Something else I noticed about subscription services? They track your usage. Yes, I know. Not really news, but this twist you may find interesting.
I am a big James Bond fan. I do own all the CDs (except for Moonraker which I haven’t got around to purchasing yet as it is my least favorite of the 26 movies released). But for convenience, I would go to my Xfinity/Comcast On-Demand menu and pull up the Bond movies and choose one to watch for FREE. I then began to notice, after I had watched several, that when I went back to those very same movies, they were now available, not for free, but rather, to RENT. It’s as if the system knew I was watching these and turned them all into rental views rather than free views. Gotta love corporate America.
But this kind of thing is what makes me want to physically OWN my music and movies. I do not want to be dependent on cloud services, subscription options, etc., to enjoy what I want to watch and to listen.
So in the meantime, I will have to forgo the joy of watching Siege at Jadotville until such time as it actually gets released by Netflix to a physical DVD. This one movie is NOT going to make me a Netflix subscriber! Do you hear me, Netflix?
