#advantage of being a vidder is HAVING to acquire stuff to work with it

[t-eyla]

“streaming services are untrustworthy now”

THEY ALWAYS HAVE BEEN

THEY. ALWAYS. HAVE. BEEN.

You want to own your media. The music you love, the TV you love, the shows you love, the fic and podcasts and fanworks and books you love, DOWNLOAD THEM. I don’t care if you pirate or buy them (though the smaller the creator, the more I’d suggest you buy, or at least donate to them through whatever means available), but if you want to be sure that you’ll always have access, you need to physically own this stuff. Yes, even if it’s all digital.

The thing that streaming services offer is called SVOD. That means “subscription video on demand”. You’re subscribing to a provider, and you do not get a choice what the selection of content is this provider offers. Think of them like a TV channel. You can watch what’s on at any given time, but there is no guarantee that what you’ve seen will ever be shown again.

Back in the day, people started to use VHS to record television content and keep it. Tons and tons of academic writing has been produced on how much changed when people could finally OWN THEIR MEDIA. Do not give that up. Make sure you have this stuff. Turn off your wifi and mobile data and figure out how much media you’ve still got access to. If there’s something you’re dearly missing, go and make it accessible to you offline right now.

Here’s what happened at HBO Max (as far as I understand): they spent money on the merger with Discovery, and then figured out that they’d acquired shows, or now had shows in their catalogue, that they didn’t expect to make money off of, because the shows either didn’t fit their brand or their desired target audience or whatever else stupid reason they had. There’s this tax thing you can do where you can declare an expense a loss, essentially, if you can be sure that you won’t be making money off of whatever you acquired with that money. If it’s declared a loss, you don’t pay taxes on it. Now that they’ve declared the money they spent on these shows a loss, they cannot be found out to be making money off of them. This is why those shows are getting purged. And because nobody ever produced any physical media of these shows, or offered them for paid download where you got to keep the files, they’re just GONE. (And this is why art and capitalism don’t mix, sigh.)

This will happen again. We’ve got so many streaming services now that the smaller ones are starting to get bought by the bigger ones. A streaming platform isn’t a particularly profitable business, and since we have a few big names bouncing around the market, these big names are each going to have to develop their own specific brand in order to be unique enough to warrant a subscription (if they haven’t yet). So we’ve got mergers in an industry that’s struggling to stay out of the red and whose big players are desperately trying to develop individual, distinct profiles. Shows that don’t fit into this silo structure will be dropped and purged. Just like it used to be on TV, anything that doesn’t bring in subscribers (i.e. that doesn’t have broad mass appeal) will not find a place anymore.

Streaming is still better than traditional TV. At least they’re now trying to appeal to the people watching rather than advertisers, and there’s more leeway in regards to the kind of content that can be run. But the creativity is going to narrow. So any show that you love, anything that is exactly the kind of thing that you’ve wanted to see for years but that never got made because it doesn’t have “mass appeal” -- download it. Make sure you own it any way possible. They can take it away at any moment, and they will, because money beats art when you’re running your creative industries for profit.

#soapbox moment #i don't practice what i preach either #but i try #hbo max #advantage of being a vidder is HAVING to acquire stuff to work with it #but man it's gotten so much harder to buy stuff to own #just sell me a fucking bluray! #i am happy to pay money but then i want to OWN it not RENT it #sob and digital storage media deteriorates so quickly #if i could i'd print my favorite shows #you wouldn't download a car NO BECAUSE I CAN PHYSICALLY BUY ONE ffs argh