[Moved from a Carpenters thread]
That's one of the problems with streaming anything. Yeah, sure, your favorite album (or movie) is available right now on your favorite streaming service, but will it ALWAYS be there. Can you count on that nameless, faceless service to always have what you want? I'm thinking "no", you can't. Someday, the owner of that album (or movie) will strike a deal with some other streaming service for "exclusivity", in order to attempt to boost the new service's subscriber rate. They'll dangle that carrot to get you to sign up for THEIR service too - or instead of your old streaming service.
I've seen this all play out before when cable TV first started getting popular. You signed up with your local cable company to get the local channels crystal clear, and for just $10 more a month, you could add on HBO, which had access to all movies and would show them commercial free - and with all the curse words and nudity intact! It was great. You knew that six months down the road, anything that was in theaters would be on your living room TV.
Then it happened. Not content to let HBO be the only fish in the pond, other channels sprung up. SHOWTIME, SPOTLIGHT, and in my neck of the woods, PRISM. These service made deals with the Hollywood studios for exclusivity for a certain number of years, of all of their titles coming on the market. So if you wanted to see a Paramount movie, you had to have PRISM. If you wanted to see a Warner Brothers movie, it had to be HBO, etc. (Those are examples and not necessarily the correct alignments as they really occurred.)
It's happening all over again with streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon. There was a brouhaha recently about the STAR TREK TV series about to disappear from Amazon on a certain date, sending Trekkies everywhere into a panic, and stepping up their binge-viewing before the deadline. At the last minute, STAR TREK stayed on Amazon. But for how long? When will CBS actually pull their shows from other services when they're trying to start their own CBS ALL ACCESS? You just know it will happen.
I see it as a lesser factor with music streaming. Let's face it, no streaming service is going to sign up for exclusivity to run the KAREN CARPENTER solo album. But suppose music giant Universal decides to start its own streaming service (maybe they already have, for all I know) and pulls all of its titles from the likes of Spotify and Apple? Then you might have to sign with THEM to get the A&M stuff you want.
That's my long story about why I'll NEVER give up owning a hard copy of whatever music or movie that I fancy.
Harry
That's one of the problems with streaming anything. Yeah, sure, your favorite album (or movie) is available right now on your favorite streaming service, but will it ALWAYS be there. Can you count on that nameless, faceless service to always have what you want? I'm thinking "no", you can't. Someday, the owner of that album (or movie) will strike a deal with some other streaming service for "exclusivity", in order to attempt to boost the new service's subscriber rate. They'll dangle that carrot to get you to sign up for THEIR service too - or instead of your old streaming service.
I've seen this all play out before when cable TV first started getting popular. You signed up with your local cable company to get the local channels crystal clear, and for just $10 more a month, you could add on HBO, which had access to all movies and would show them commercial free - and with all the curse words and nudity intact! It was great. You knew that six months down the road, anything that was in theaters would be on your living room TV.
Then it happened. Not content to let HBO be the only fish in the pond, other channels sprung up. SHOWTIME, SPOTLIGHT, and in my neck of the woods, PRISM. These service made deals with the Hollywood studios for exclusivity for a certain number of years, of all of their titles coming on the market. So if you wanted to see a Paramount movie, you had to have PRISM. If you wanted to see a Warner Brothers movie, it had to be HBO, etc. (Those are examples and not necessarily the correct alignments as they really occurred.)
It's happening all over again with streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon. There was a brouhaha recently about the STAR TREK TV series about to disappear from Amazon on a certain date, sending Trekkies everywhere into a panic, and stepping up their binge-viewing before the deadline. At the last minute, STAR TREK stayed on Amazon. But for how long? When will CBS actually pull their shows from other services when they're trying to start their own CBS ALL ACCESS? You just know it will happen.
I see it as a lesser factor with music streaming. Let's face it, no streaming service is going to sign up for exclusivity to run the KAREN CARPENTER solo album. But suppose music giant Universal decides to start its own streaming service (maybe they already have, for all I know) and pulls all of its titles from the likes of Spotify and Apple? Then you might have to sign with THEM to get the A&M stuff you want.
That's my long story about why I'll NEVER give up owning a hard copy of whatever music or movie that I fancy.
Harry
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