perpetualstudent wrote on Jul 11
th, 2019 at 1:49pm:
They seem willfully ignorant about what the consumers will do. If CBS couldn't milk the star trek geeks (myself among them) to buy their streaming service while holding a new star trek series hostage, the rest of them don't stand a chance.
I've heard that Disney is also planning on ending DVD releases to force you into their streaming service. Eh. It annoys me. But the real thing they don't seem to understand is that if they push the price and convenience too high, a very large segment of consumers will simply return to piracy.
It's interesting because I follow the video game industry pretty closely and they are doing the same thing. It's all about watering down the idea of ownership. Both the film and game industry HATE second hand selling. In their minds it's people making money off of their property which is why they've tried cracking down on it in the past. By adding sign in codes and having games be always online, by moving everything onto digital platforms and ceasing production of physical media entirely, they stop you owning a film or a game. Now they sell "access" to their property. If at some point they don't want you to see it or want to force you to watch something else, they'll just take it away from you. This has happened with some video games that required online servers that no longer exist, even games that didn't have online multiplayer, so the games are literally unplayable now. They effectively have ceased to exist despite the fact people paid money to own them and that's exactly what these companies want. They're selfish, they'll wring out every penny from the intellectual property they own and don't even like the idea of someone else owning a copy. It's going to get very hard to document the history of film and video games and TV shows (which as a title of a genre is losing all meaning) from this point onwards.