To be fair, the service they provide isn’t hosting the videos, it’s making them, which I assume costs a bit more
Yeah that competition really did demonstrate what an awful service all those media monopolies provided.
aidan@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
As per Das Kapital our industrialists always move to capture regulation and seek to eliminate competition, which are the two aspects that can make capitalism work for the public. Then you have what we have today, late stage capitalism which is about tiers of rent, so everything is both shoddy and expensive.
That’s how Disney and Warner Brothers (Warner Sister too!) end up owning all the franchises. It’s how Sony owns all the music and sues to take down dancing baby videos.
The EU and California have both made in-roads to slowing down the steady takeover of regulatory bodies and the mulching and mass merging of megacorps into monolithic monopolies, but they can’t stop it, and both are seeing the bend into precarity that is symptomatic of late stage capitalism.
That said, true post scarcity communism is realistically a pipe dream well beyond a few great filters we’ve yet to navigate, but we will see small victories, of which piracy – what is essentially crime against ill-gotten gains – offers more than a few.
aidan@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
To be fair, the service they provide isn’t hosting the videos, it’s making them, which I assume costs a bit more
Cosmicomical@lemmy.world 1 week ago
To be fairer nobody asked them to produce content. They decided to create it because it’s cheaper that lixensing the actual good stuff.
aidan@lemmy.world 1 week ago
eh some of it is good
uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
Hence why copyright was originally in the 10-20 year range.
Movie star isn’t supposed to be a dream job that makes you fabulously rich, but a decent living.
Interestingly, musical artists who work off the web will do exactly that: Tour and make hundreds of thousands instead of millions (in the aughts and 2010s, so pre-inflation), rather than rolling the dice with the record labels.
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Netflix service started as hosting only.
MeThisGuy@feddit.nl 1 week ago
correction… Netflix started by mailing DVDs, even before Redbox was a thing
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Ah. Analogue hosting. But they definitely didn’t start producing content.
aidan@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Yeah, imo it was also a bit more difficult then. But yeah as others said, the licensing was hard too
uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
The service they provide (from a perspective external to obligatory capitalism) is less about making them, but providing a framework by which people engaged in artistic expression and development get paid and permitted to survive.
As the COVID-19 Lockdown furloughs demonstrated to us, art manifests so long as people are fed and need something to do. Healthy humans can’t couch-potato for two weeks without fidgeting and whittling wood into bears. And the great resignation that followed showed that enough people were able to make it lucrative (that is, work out marketing and fulfillment enough to make it profitable enough to quit their prior job) that it lowered worker supply that we were able to contest the shit treatment, low pay and toxic work environments that were normal before the epidemic.
It gets worse in other industries like big pharma in which the state provides vast grants for R&D of drugs and treatments, but the company keeps all the proceeds. Contrast the space program, which is why memory foam (the material) is in the public domain, as is a fuckton of electronics and computer technologies.
aidan@lemmy.world 1 week ago
If it is art that other people value then that framework already existed(and there are many others who created similar tools for it) so I don’t see it as particularly valuable.
There is a compelling argument that tens of billions of dollars being used productively to research anything would have at least some useful results. Memory foam, cordless drills, etc could have been developed much more cheaply than the Apollo program, GPS is extremely valuable, but Apollo wasn’t a necessary precursor to geostationary orbit.
uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
If it is art that other people value then that framework already existed
From Wikipedia on Vincent Van Gogh: Van Gogh’s work began to attract critical artistic attention in the last year of his life. After his death, Van Gogh’s art and life story captured public imagination as an emblem of misunderstood genius
The art we get from pre-made frameworks emerged because people figured out they like art, and then someone capitalized on that. Or in cases of monarchs and governments, they created a fund to allow artists to do their thing instead of waiting tables.
There is a compelling argument that tens of billions of dollars being used productively to research anything would have at least some useful results.
For every $1 spent on the moonshots, we got $14. Feel free to look for other investments, but big science really has proven itself.