Content Ownership in the Age of Streaming

The Guardian has an article from yesterday that dicussses the fragility of content ownership in the digital age. Specifically it looks at how “My whole library is wiped out” after a streaming service stopped streaming content. It told people “pay 200 USD to move to service B”.

I encountered this issue eight or more years ago. I was using Spotify for a year or two, and one day realised that I was spending 300 CHF when I never spent more than 90 CHF in music on a single year. I stopped my membership and for my loyalty I found myself with nothing. I paid for a membership and from one day to the next I was left with nothing.

The article above discusses how people actually paid for content and can no longer access it unless they move to another service, which, to some degree is even worse. People should not be penalised, especially when they have bought for content, because a service stops being available.

In my opinion, in this situation, people should have the option to download and strip the DRM from the content they own, to keep for their own personal use. If we cannot do this then there is no motivation to buy content.

Apple and Youtube, among others, give the option of paying for renting, or buying content. If you rent it you have 24 hours to watch something, from the moment you start watching. If you can’t remove the DRM and keep content locally then it makes no sense to “buy” films and television series.

The solution offered in the article is a Fetch box of which there are three models. It’s like most “tv boxes” that are available with different streaming providers acrosss the world. The box with TV recording is 449 Australian dollars.

Not Tempted in Switzerland

Years ago I considered buying videos from Apple, Google and others, but then when I found that English content was available in French, German or Italian, but not in its original language I lost interest. It took such a huge effort to find English language content in English that I gave up.

That’s why I use streaming services, and with streaming services you watch what you want to watch, and then pause the membership until you have more content that you’re interested in watching.

Free to Air Channels

In the old day “free to air” channels were free and easy to receive. You would place an aerial port in every home and you’d get free to air content. In modern homes there is no free to air aerial connection, and you can’t place a satellite dish. The result is that free to air channels, as are available via Swisscom TV and others, cost money, despite the content being free, if we weren’t in densified apartment buildings.

Telecom operators should not charge anything for us to get all the channels that are availabe to get via DVB-T, especially since we already pay for that content.

VPNs Won’t Work

While writing this post I looked at VPN options to see whether it would be cheaper to spoof the IP address than pay 10 CHF per month via Sunrise or 15 CHF per month via Swisscom and the answer is “nope”. so it would still be cheaper to get a satellite receiver and flat aerial that is easier to hide.

We shouldn’t pay anything to get free to air television. Maybe that’s why they now add more channels and 30hrs of recording time.

And Finally

I enjoy that we have so much choice for videos on demand, and that we no longer need a satellite dish to receive content. It’s great that rather than having to buy DVD, VHS or BlueRay disks we can buy or rent content online and have it available within seconds.

What is a shame is that we no longer “own” content. We have access to it for as long as the service is around. One the service goes bankrupt we lose access to plenty of content.

This really frustrated me with music, but I don’t care with video streaming services, because once I have watched something I usually don’t watch it a second time. In other words volatility doesn’t matter.