Ownership in an Age of Streaming Services - Digital Degradation.

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I had a thought recently about the recent trends happening in the current digital climate. Movies, e-books, music and games have in the past and still currently, have been locked under the multiple forms of DRM and copyright protection available. Whilst this has been used to discourage piracy, even though persoms were still able to crack it irregardless, it has proven to less lucrative than having content available upon a streaming service. No longer are consumers making a one time purchase for a license but now are required to pay a monthly/yearly subscription for that same license, with the guise of quantity and affordability (in the short term) for those who decide to make the transaction. While this might seem like a non-issue, the problem arises when companies decide to remove particular content or scenes from the media altogether deeming it to be too problematic rather than putting a disclaimer about the action or due to an expired copyright license.

The question here lies, on what do we really own when paying for these services and why are persons enamored by them despite their potential downsides.
 
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Medulseur said:
You answered your own questions. What do we own? Nothing. Why do we do it? Cheap. We enjoy being treated like filthy cattle.
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FTFY. I am unsure how or why people became ok with sitting on a couch everyday for 4 hours a day consooming endlessly, but "people" who do it "exist" in a completely voluntary prison they will never leave. They are insanely boring and frustrating to listen to as they retell some shitty paint-by-numbers story they watched last night and have the nerve to call that conversation.
TL;DR: unplug your electronic jew and have real experiences.
 
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What do we really own? Nothing, obviously. This isn’t even up for debate. When you pay for a streaming service, you’re getting a ticket through the door. Whatever’s inside is not up to your decision. Once you stop paying, you’re no longer welcome inside.

I think people do understand this. When you pay for a streaming service, you’re not paying for an unchanging historical archive - there’s no expectation of permanence here. Even back when Netflix was the sole top dog, their catalog changed all the time, with stuff getting removed as new titles were added.

Also, if you track media consoomption habits, I bet you’d find that most people aren’t looking to sit down for 4 hours and seriously invest in a TV show’s story and characters - they’re looking for mindless drivel that can be used as background noise.
 
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Reject Streaming, Embrace Laserdisc.
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Jared™ said:
The question here lies, on what do we really own when paying for these services and why are persons enamored by them despite their potential downsides.
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Try something. Find yourself a normie and get into a conversation with him, ask why he doesn't care that he doesn't own any of the media on the streaming service he pays for. His answer will be "I do own it! I can watch it any time I want."

Ubiquitous fast internet, a lack of technology knowledge and the depth of available content creates the illusion that one does own the media that's streamed. The convenience of it gets them in the door; the illusion prevents them from knowing there are downsides at all.
 
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The way streaming services have dropped episodes for ideological reasons and suddenly pulled content because of expired licenses is what convinced me to never do streaming services or so called e ownership if that can even be called ownership.

It's something I've been thinking about for a long time, but I actually went out and bought a Blu-ray player and got half of the movies I cared about for under $10 each including a couple that were used, yet in perfect condition.
The studios have wanted to get rid of the used market forever.

I didn't want to maintain giant warez libraries anymore, though I think for certain things that are completely unavailable in any form you have to go that route. It is nice to just pop in a disc and have it work without having to mess with the crap shoot that is torrent sites.

The only exceptions to e ownership for me is Steam, for some reason it just hits all the right sweet spots and with PC gaming I don't look back from physical media which is completely dead.
 
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BootlegPopeye said:
The only exceptions to e ownership for me is Steam, for some reason it just hits all the right sweet spots and with PC gaming I don't look back from physical media which is completely dead.
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I think Steam is unique, in the way that it's the only way to get the games nowadays, along with you needing to buy magazines of Discs to just install one game nowadays
 
I also think a lot of what I'm saying doesn't apply to music services either I'm not a big music connoisseur, but a lot of the issues with the ownership of e movies and television shows don't seem to apply as much there either. At least from what I've heard.
 
Gone Ham said:
I think Steam is unique, in the way that it's the only way to get the games nowadays, along with you needing to buy magazines of Discs to just install one game nowadays
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Steam's not really comparable to a streaming service though. They let you download the games to your system and if they don't have DRM then they might as well be sending you a physical disc through the internet. I'd take an infinitely copyable set of files on a hard drive over a physical disc for anything, because it's even more resilient.

There is the question of what happens to games when they shut Steam down. If they just pull the plug one day and the DRM servers are now offline and half your games are now unplayable, then that's a problem. But if they update stuff to work offline, then where's the problem? If they say "we're shutting down in X months, download all your shit now or it will be gone forever" there's no one to blame but yourself when the games you payed for disappear.

An actual game streaming service that has all the problems of a streaming service is Stadia. In fact, that one has more problems than any other type of streaming service because the others don't have to worry about latency.
 
Un Platano said:
There is the question of what happens to games when they shut Steam down. If they just pull the plug one day and the DRM servers are now offline and half your games are now unplayable, then that's a problem. But if they update stuff to work offline, then where's the problem? If they say "we're shutting down in X months, download all your shit now or it will be gone forever" there's no one to blame but yourself when the games you payed for disappear.
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While Steam is the best kind of e-ownership, ultimately I want to see a system where you buy a key/license/whatever and can transfer it elsewhere. So Steam shuts down (lol unlikely right now of course), and you take your keys and plug them into whatever the service that essentially replaces Steam is. Or GOG, or wherever you choose.

Platforms of course would fight like hell to prevent this kind of ownership transfer, to them it would be little different than the hated used market.
 
BootlegPopeye said:
So Steam shuts down (lol unlikely right now of course), and you take your keys and plug them into whatever the service that essentially replaces Steam is. Or GOG, or wherever you choose.
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I heard that Valve had tested a dead man's switch update to Steam, that would allow everyone a 30 day grace period to download without limitation everything in their library and then remove the need to be logged in to Steam to run programs with the Steam wrapper on them.

But, yes, streaming is part of the reason today's society is so throwaway. If the service dies on its arse, so does your right to listen to that song or watch that film. If the author becomes an unperson, the service can remove all their work from the library - I was worried this would happen to the heavy metal band Iced Earth when Jon Schaffer was photographed storming the Capitol and they were subsequently dropped, literally overnight, by the band's record label and distro (Century Media doesn't even acknowledge they were ever signed there any more). Either way, if he's convicted of something over this I fully expect Youtube and Spotify to follow suit.

Good thing I've got all their albums on CD, right?

Right?

*hurriedly orders Dark Saga, Burnt Offerings, and The Glorious Burden from wherever has them*

Then there's the prospect of bowdlerising works on streaming services like we saw happen after the George Floyd protests last summer. Anything deemed no longer politically correct was surreptitiously altered to remove the offending content. But of course, that's only minor edits. It's not like they'd memory hole episodes of a series that are critical to the plot or arc of a series, right?

Right?

*nervously checks to see that South Park S14 episodes "200" and "201" and the Xena S4 episode "The Way" and the Fawlty Towers episode "The Germans" are still safely stored on a drive*
 
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