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Comment by bruno207 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if we are going to get to the point where people no longer "own" any traditional media, such as movies, music and games, and rather pay monthly subscriptions to have access to a giant library of all these things.

It's certainly in both the consumer's interest (massive library of content) and the company's (revenue generated for dated content).

I worry about the implications of this, ie. exclusive content released only on certain platforms or just the lack of control over the media you're paying for (titles removed, modified, etc.)

Interesting to think about.

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This feels more broad than digital media.. Car sharing of expensive autonomous cars means nobody will own a vehicle, the 'capital class' has purchased most of the housing as investment so far fewer people will own homes, all of the fiber and most of the WISPs use expensive proprietary equipment so to access the internet you need to rent their devices, etc. etc. is there any area where ownership is actually increasing?

I guess the other way of looking at this is that people are freed from owning non-investments. Where previously you had to own if you wanted to use, now there's an alternative.

But (and big but) that does rental-trap those who can only afford to rent, with no surplus income to invest. And makes monopolies even more dangerous (PS: #&@+ Comcast).

This might be a kind of a tangent but the reduction of brokerage fees and index funds has actually increased "ownership" (as in investment in) almost all sectors of the economy. Perhaps this analogy is incorrect; would love to hear the refutations :).

> It's certainly in both the consumer's interest

I have to disagree. I dislike subscriptions for several reasons, especially in an area like video games where there is replay value. (I, at least, don't re-watch tv/movies the way I re-play video games.)

A) Subscriptions give me anxiety, a feeling that I have to maximize the value I'm getting from the fixed cost. B) As a direct follow-on, it makes me feel rushed. My game play style is slow, I like adventure games. But if playing longer/slower costs more then I have pressure to hurry, rather than to enjoy. C) For casual play, I can buy a game once and enjoy it in small bursts over a long window of time. With subscriptions, I have to pay $X/mo even if I only spend an hour in a given month consuming the subscription. D) I have subscription overload. I still have cable, for a variety of reasons (including its attachment to the internet service I'd buy anyway), and Amazon Prime (mostly for the shipping). But I don't subscribe to anything else. If I did I'd feel like I need to subscribe to Netflix, and Hulu, and Spotify, and Google Music, and PS Now, and Xbox Game Pass, and .. and .. and ...

I actually thought about this in the context of magazine subscriptions last year. I wondered whether anyone would open things up so you could subscribe in either of two ways:

1) The "digital" way - you've got access to every issue of the magazine, from the very beginning of their publication - but only for the duration of your subscription. If you quit, you're locked out.

2) The "print" way - you've got access only to those issues that were published during your subscription. If you cut off your subscription, you don't get any new issues but you can still log in with your account and see those issues that you were "subscribed" to.

(Granted, it adds complexity to people who are likely just thinking "I just want to read this month's [X] magazine, why are you making it so hard?".)

It sounds like Microsoft is doing a decent best-of-both-worlds option here - if you play it and like it, you get a discount to purchase it.

It's already the case for just about all main stream media. I try to avoid it like the plague. As long as there's nothing stopping people from releasing bits and code the way they want, there will always be DRM free and open source options, those are the ones I'll try to embrace.

> It's certainly in both the consumer's interest (massive library of content)

Until the company drops things from the library, pushes an "upgrade" that changes the nature of some items, the consumer wants to modify the product in some way that the service won't allow, or the consumer wants to use it on a platform that the company doesn't want to support (but which would've been possible with the "owned" version of the product).

I wonder if we are going to get to the point...

Going to?

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