BORING OLD-SCHOOL ANALOGUE-ERA PHYSICAL MEDIA BUSINESS MODEL
Hello! Thank you for purchasing our product. It is now yours to do with as you like*, but please be aware that if it is damaged, you will have to pay to replace it. Some products may be difficult to find. Changes in technology may require occasional upgrades to the product, and an initial investment in a device that will allow you to use it. Please enjoy this product, and if you like it, consider purchasing more.
*: Please don’t pirate it! Wink wink!
EXCITING NEW-WAVE INTERNET-ERA DIGITAL MEDIA BUSINESS MODEL
Hello! Thank you for purchasing a subscription to use our service, which provides temporary access to a product. You do not own the product, and we will go to great lengths to prevent you from converting into any format in which you might be said to do so. In fact, there is no actual “product”, but merely many lines of code which do not exist in any meaningful way, although this will not keep us from brutally enforcing our intellectual property rights to it*, temporary as they may be. We also do not own the product, but merely license it from another service provider, and it may disappear without warning from this service. Perhaps it will resurface again in the same or a different form on this service or a totally different one, or perhaps it will not. Who can say? Theoretically, nothing is hard to find, and you should be able to have access to any content ever made since the dawn of time, but labyrinthine licensing requirements make this a practical impossibility, and for marketing purposes, we will make it almost impossible to find anything more than twenty years old, if we even bother to make it available at all, which we probably won’t. You need no longer purchase a specific device for accessing this content; instead, you will need to purchase an entire array of them, which are governed by an inexplicable set of presentation standards that seem identical but are essentially incompatible. Also, we have freed you from the tyranny of cable, replacing it with dozens of streaming services which, if you get enough of them to equate to cable, will actually cost more than cable, and may disappear at any given time. Because of the aforementioned marketing and licensing requirements, the selection will also be worse than cable, and will manage to simultaneously have so much content you will be paralyzed with choice and also not ever have what you will actually be looking for. You can actually purchase content to keep, but it will not be in physical form, and you have no rights to it in any meaningful way; we may expunge it from the cloud or even delete it from your hard drive without warning, and thanks to the byzantine complexity of our user agreements, you will have no resource when this happens. We additionally reserve the right to delete or destroy any other content that you purchased from other providers. All subscriptions will require the transferral of your credit card and contact information, making it vulnerable to data theft, which we will respond to with a sincere promise to never let it happen again, followed by a shrug. All content will come equipped with exciting new ‘social’ features that you did not ask for and will result in system slowdowns and technical problems that you will be in no way equipped to understand, let alone solve. Our service is contingent upon high-speed internet access that may not be available in your location, and which can only be purchased through the same huge telecoms that you cut your cable to avoid having to deal with. They may, without warning or recourse, throttle your streaming speed, resulting in a situation whose badness is compounded the more streaming devices you have. If, for any reason, you are unable to access high-speed internet streams, you will not be able to use our service at all, but you do have to keep paying for it. Content may be blacked out at any time, for any reason. Programming is determined by a sophisticated and incomprehensible algorithm that will result in frustration, confusion, and, ultimately, surrender. Changes in technology will require near-constant upgrades, and may render you unable to access content on Monday that you spent all day using on Sunday, even though you are using the exact same service, platform, and device you were mere hours before. The method of compensating content creators for their work, previously dishonest and murky, is now practically occult, and may not exist in any measurable sense. Changes in weather, the stock market, or the general mood of anyone from low-level programmers to the CEO may render the service inoperable. Terms of service on your end are written with acid in solid steel; terms of service on our end are as rainbows against the clouds, and you may find that we are offering not only entirely different parameters, but a completely different business model, from one week to the next. The entirety of our operation is driven by the needs of our capital investors, who may decide to junk the entire thing if it is not profitable enough at the moment they decide it needs to be, but are much more likely to change it into something that is similar to, but significantly worse than, what you signed up for in the first place. Their number one priority is their investment, and we aren’t sure what their number one million priority is, but it’s still not you. Any cultural product old enough to rent a car might as well not exist and can only be experienced in dreams or in the near-mythological memories of the Olds. Curation of content, once done by individuals and later outsourced to masses of consumers, will now be done by a line of code. If you like something, please tell us! We’re not sure how because we have no consumer-facing outreach whatsoever and our numbers are cooked like a Thanksgiving turkey, but if you tweet something at us, our algorithm will happily recommend whatever it was going to tell you to get anyway.
*: Please don’t pirate it! Seriously we will destroy you.