Corporations don’t want competition, they want monopolies. If the good they are selling is in unlimited supply, like music or shows in digital formats are, they create artificial scarcity through exclusivity deals.
Theharpyeagle@lemmy.world 8 months ago
The EUIPO speculates that financial pressures, like inflation, means that people have less money to spend on entertainment. This can be seen in the way that fewer people are signing up for Netflix or Amazon Prime – and some are even cancelling their subscriptions altogether.
Ah yes, that’s the only reason. Not that streaming services are offering less content and functionality for more money, that can’t be it.
Karyoplasma@discuss.tchncs.de 8 months ago
baked_tea@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Netflix has +9 million users in the past quarter
NoSpiritAnimal@lemmy.world 8 months ago
That’s not enough growth. It’s never enough. It literally can’t ever be enough.
So they raise prices and pay for astroturfed articles blaming everything but the executives charged with infinite growth forever.
viperex@lemmy.world 8 months ago
First thing that came to mind. I want to see back to back to back quarters of falling subscribers
craigers@lemmy.world 8 months ago
As someone that went initially got back into piracy for the “no you just raised your prices for this one service I only use for this one show anyway, I’ll download it instead” reason. I have significantly increased my piracy because it’s honestly a much better user experience. For me to easily set sonarr/radarr to grab what I want and have a beautiful and customizable UI/UX like jellyfin to consume that content, which works on all my devices. Fucking Hulu, Disney, Amazon, peacock, max all suck in comparison from a pure UX perspective
Dazawassa@programming.dev 8 months ago
I’m sure that economics is part of it. But I think the larger issue is the fact that you need 9 streaming services now just to see the shows you’d want. And then these streaming services are starting to remove the things people paid for. I set up a Plex server and just use that to watch things now.
kadu@lemmy.world 8 months ago
And that’s only talking about streaming.
Everyone wants to be Netflix now: Microsoft Office? Monthly subscription. Adobe? Monthly subscription. A simple weather app? Monthly subscription. Cloud backup? Monthly subscription.
I_Miss_Daniel@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Fair enough for cloud storage as it costs real money to keep rust spinning. The rest not so much.
kadu@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Yes, kinda. But take Windows for instance - the native backup tools got deprecated and are pretty much hidden, the systems constantly wants the user to use OneDrive.
So yes, it makes sense to pay for cloud storage - but many people didn’t even need it before, and now it’s another new expense.
whofearsthenight@lemm.ee 8 months ago
I think with quite a lot of software, monthly subs are really the best way to do it, and I think if you look at the history of things software is cheaper than it’s ever been. Aside from the obvious things that just cost monthly money to operate (cloud storage, even weather apps don’t keep working without servers) the reality is that we expect software to stay up to date and keep getting better. Aside from the fact that prior to sub fees for this type of software, the “one time” purchase cost used to be several orders of magnitude higher, and you would still basically end up “subscribing.” Meaning, you didn’t just buy Office in '95 for $300-$500 and keep using it until even 2005. MS would change a file format or upgrade a thing or something, and suddenly your $400 Office suite needed an upgrade, so you paid another $400 in '97.
People have never liked paying for software, but I think this is the most equitable, true model of the actual cost. I like it less with the bigger companies, but especially with smaller devs, the software I rely on I’m happy to pay a monthly sub on because I know that’s a much more stable model and will encourage the dev to keep the software up to date and releasing new features.
Theharpyeagle@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I think perpetual fallback licenses hit a decent middle ground. Pay a subscription to stay up to date, but have the option of stopping and retaining the current version. Of course, FOSS is better, but we have to take what we can get.
Malfeasant@lemm.ee 8 months ago
Well, we’ve been conditioned to expect that… Just because that’s how it’s been doesn’t mean it has to stay that way. It made sense in the past, applications were limited by the hardware’s technical capabilities, which kept improving over time - but we’ve reached a point where for the most part, the hardware is good enough to meet the needs of the software. That’s not saying it won’t continue to improve, but it’s not the limiting factor it once was. At some point, at least in theory, a product should be able to be “finished”, as in it has all the features it needs, possible exploits have been found and patched. Compare to buying tools - you don’t need to buy a new hammer every two years, well, maybe you do if you abuse the shit out of it and break it, but you don’t need to because of ongoing development in the techniques of building hammers.
Obi@sopuli.xyz 8 months ago
I like how my music DAW (bitwig) does it. You buy your lifetime license with one year of updates. After the year is up you keep the latest version you have and it keeps working “forever”. If you decide you want another year of updates you get a discount. I usually don’t need new functions so I let it lapse, I bought the updates once because there was a function I wanted.