Why should the manufacturer raise the price of the camera for you and me just to implement something extra OP wants that they can already do through HDMI?
Why should the OP need to pay a subscription to enable a feature that is build into the camera, that is a standard feature on other cameras and imposes no ongoing costs to the manufacturer¹? This is an example of gouging, pure and simple.
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[1] unless they are forcing the user to use their hosted service for steaming the webcam output, in which case there is some bandwidth and perhaps other processing cost, but that is on them for having not just implemented a standard that enables local-only recording
Getting video into your computer through USB is _not_ built into the camera. Else why is OP downloading an app to do it?
The app is part of the implementation, and it costs money. I have no problem with the manufacturer charging separately for that. The rest of us can use a video cable to get video into our computers.
> The app is part of the implementation
Give other cameras can do it, there has a standard for it since 2003, and there are F/OSS implementations for others, maybe I'm asking the wrong question and instead should have asked “why should the OP pay a subscription for their bad choice of how to implement the feature?”.
If I asked Sony for a power generator to charge my camera's battery, they could charge me a million a month if they'd like. Hopefully that would signal to me that there are better and more standard options.
They can. But that doesn't mean everyone is forced to be happy about it, and doesn't mean it can't be talked about so other people who might not be happy about it can use the information to chose a different camera from a different manufacturer instead of discovering the issue post-purchase.
> they'd rather use industry-standard HDMI
Or the industry standards for video-over-USB, that this manufacturer chose not to implement because they couldn't easily gouge a subscription out of it.
A standard way of doing that is to use a video cable to get video output and plug that into a capture card on your computer. OP doesn't want to do that and would prefer that the manufacturer included webcam functionality out of the box.
Also fair enough! But if that's the requirement, buy a camera that meets that requirement, and understand that it's not a standard feature in these cameras.
I get subscription fatigue, but this is not a good hill to die on. It's getting outraged over expecting a camera to do what it wasn't designed to do, when there are already simple and standard ways of making it do that.
No, it's because Canon didn't sell OP a webcam. There's no expectation for them to provide webcam software.
If someone wants an external camera that doubles as a webcam with no adapters, that's totally fine for them! They should shop with that in mind.
This is common for cameras. My Sony works in the same way. It can be used as a webcam using HDMI and a capture card. Canon clearly states this in their marketing for OP's camera.
OP apparently didn't understand this, but the solution is simple -- get an HDMI cable and a capture card.
And another standard way, supported by at least some cameras, without even single extra charge never mind a subscription⁰, is apparently video over USB.
> I get subscription fatigue, but this is not a good hill to die on.
No users are dying on this hill¹. OP is just stating, in an exasperated tone admittedly, what the state of affairs is with this camera. Some of us are agreeing with him that it seems off, and is part of the ongoing enshitification of the software and hardware worlds. Others can use this information to help guide their choice of camera (or supplier of other equipment), or not, their choice.
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[0] Which implies they could decide to discontinue the feature at a whim later, no matter how much the user has paid between now and then.
[1] I'll refrain² from mentioning that you are putting up quite a determined fight for the “nah, this sort of thing is fine, really” hill.
[2] Oops, I tell a lie…
Subscriptions make sense when you have ongoing costs like significant load on servers that are needed for the service provided. But not for some piece of software you write once and are more or less done with (minus some small patches)
But requiring a subscription is such a blatant “fuck you, we want more profit without doing any work, and you’re going to provide it.”
Drop the fee and that's now baked into the camera's base price.