Renting for physical goods has scarcity involved. To make a new item, you have constant expenses, thus when you rent it, avoiding that expense allows lower price.
With digital goods, you have fixed expense, which after it's paid off has no constant expense involved. So the above renting logic isn't applicable. The remaining reason for renting to be cheaper is artificial, i.e. its limited nature, that prevents you from making backups and etc. That crippling of the product makes it cheaper, but the whole crippling is artificial to begin with.
> How much would you be willing to pay for all the content you can get on Netflix, Hulu, etc.
Depending on the film, may be different prices. Definitely more for something I'd watch more than once.
> Does that mean every single software as a service company business model is invalid?
I'm OK with someone offering digital renting, if there is an option to buy the same thing (though I wouldn't use it if it has DRM). I'm not OK with it, if renting only is mandated.
Software as a service isn't exactly the same case as buying books, films, music, games and etc. For instance Web search is software as a service and I'm OK with it running remotely (though decentralized search is a way to improve it in theory). But when I listen to music and the like, I want to have a backup of it and run and use it on any device I want, and not on what some DRM authorized it for on condition of some existing account.
How is Netflix, Hulu, etc. not the same? You pay $10.99 a month and get unlimited access to an entire library of content. What device that you own can’t play Spotify music?
As I explained above, their problem is offering renting only video which you can't buy.
> What device that you own can’t play Spotify music?
Anything they didn't think about? DRM-free formats can be accessed anywhere, you can re-encode them in any codec and etc. For example I can take my audio files and play them in RockBox on my portable Sansa player. How would Spotify help for that? Benefits of DRM-free are quite self explanatory.
They are getting paid. I've never suggested pirating media. The streaming media companyed pay the creators. Netflix alone pays billions per year for Netflix.
All purchased digital music has been DRM free for a decade.
Netflix says we watched about 60 hours last month and my son watched 5 seasons of "Everybody Hates Chris" on Hulu - combined price of both services was $23 a month. How much would that cost to buy?
Price usually depends on many factors of the market. But if it's not available at all, it doesn't matter how much you would be willing to pay - you can't buy it, period.
> All purchased digital music has been DRM free for a decade.
So if music can be sold DRM-free in parallel to renting services, what problem is there with video that prevents it?
Commercial video for the most part has always been copy protected even in the analog days with Macrovision.
From a historical reason, the only reason we have DRM free music sells is because of Apple. In 2008, the music industry was trying to pressure Apple into licensing its DRM scheme so that competitors could sell music compatible with iPods. Steve Jobs countered saying that if the music industry would sell all of their music DRM free, there would be cross platform compatibility [1]. The movie industry didn’t make the same mistake the music industry did. They allowed multiple companies to buy and rent movies so Apple wouldn’t have the same power they had over music over movies.
As far as the cost to buy movies, you don’t have to guess. Most popular movies cost $14.99 to own and the less popular movies are $9.99.
The box set for “Everybody Hates Chris” is $110.00 on Amazon. So to buy all of the content we watched between Hulu and Netflix would be at least $700 - as opposed to $24.
We are talking about buying DRM-free digital films. Who sells them now at scale? I doubt you can draw pricing parallels with sales of physical legacy media (optical disks).
And there is no valid reason for them lacking, all reasons are invalid and crooked. The last major push for that was from GOG, and it didn't go far because of backwards thinking lawyers:
We are talking about buying DRM-free digital films. Who sells them now at scale? I doubt you can draw pricing parallels with sales of physical legacy media (optical disks).
Why do you think that making them DRM free would cost less? Today the cost of digital movies is between $9.99 and $14.99 and the cost of a season of Everybody Hates Chris is $20 on iTunes.
Digital product should cost less than physical, since there is no expense of printing physical disks. But if it already costs so for DRMed digital, then sure, price won't likely be less.
Digital product should cost less than physical, since there is no expense of printing physical disks. But if it already costs so for DRMed digital, then sure, price won't likely be less.
Renting for physical goods has scarcity involved. To make a new item, you have constant expenses, thus when you rent it, avoiding that expense allows lower price.
With digital goods, you have fixed expense, which after it's paid off has no constant expense involved. So the above renting logic isn't applicable. The remaining reason for renting to be cheaper is artificial, i.e. its limited nature, that prevents you from making backups and etc. That crippling of the product makes it cheaper, but the whole crippling is artificial to begin with.
> How much would you be willing to pay for all the content you can get on Netflix, Hulu, etc.
Depending on the film, may be different prices. Definitely more for something I'd watch more than once.