Plenty of people here don’t make that much but the sentiment is largely true. Lots of hand wringing in a thread a while back about the tragedy of paying like $14.99 so a family of 4 could watch the newest Spider-man movie I think.
Zero sympathy for the companies that seem to be burying content for tax benefits or residual avoidance, just saying the price for someone to watch video content has dropped in a pretty remarkable way, especially inflation adjusted, over the last few decades (theaters may be the exception), though people rarely “own” their copy of content these days.
My DVD collection of maybe 40 movies & shows will last as long as I don’t get rid of my PS3 but in 10 years I haven’t watched any of them.
There need to be legit competitors so the creators of new content can negotiate deals that don’t allow or incentivize the shelving of content. Currently if someone offers someone who isn’t a household name any contract to make their dream project they probably accept it with no redlining. Meanwhile John “Jim from The Office” Krasinski posted 8 episodes of maybe the dumbest, most tone deaf slop to YouTube in March of 2020 before immediately selling the “show” to Viacom and walking away.
The “golden age of TV” ended super suddenly, hopefully this is the end of the re-bundling and we’ll see another unbundling soon!
Contrasting point: lots of non-functional PlayStation games at this point, which despite not being scratched, have suffered disc rot. Buying them is becoming difficult.
Oh snap maybe burned ones last longer than stamped ones? I should rip all of mine but as one might expect I no longer have a DVD drive on a computer hah
You're missing the obvious business model: ad-supported compiler.
You're going to be staring at the compiler output anyway, potentially for minutes at a time waiting for the build/tests to fail. Throw some ads in the progress bar.
$600/year isn't nothing, even if you're pulling in a half million a year. After taxes, it's $300k, and after the cost of life it tends to get chipped away. Insurance and co-payments, food, shelter, car registration, rent or roperty tax+mortgage, clothing, internet, mobile phone, computer, children and their care, pets and their food+insurance+care, utility bills, property upkeep, auto purchase or repair, and on and on. Even without stepping on the hedonistic treadmill, it's crazy how much life today coats compared to a hundred years ago.
Living even a half full life is still expensive before you dump fifty to a hundred bucks a month to Comcast, Disney+, Hulu, YouTube, Spotify, and Netflix for access to entertainment on their timelines.
600 dollars a year isn't nothing, but TV is essentially the number one entertainment / pastime for the average American. It's a good bang for your buck.
And if you don't watch enough to justify 50 bucks, then subscribe to one service. Each one has more than enough content to keep a viewer busy.
It is weird that we are willing to spend $600 a year on something that is essentially a distraction, really a negative influence on our lives (not to get on a soap box, though, I do it too and I also buy alcohol and junk food, similarly bad for you and costly).
What? It’s like the only thing in your entire list that has gone down in price over time (computers & mobile phones probably count as “up” since not everyone needed them 30 years ago when they were expensive as hell).
It used to cost like $3 1999 dollars to rent one VHS for 3 days, now it’s $14.99 for a month of watching as many of hundreds of movies / shows as you have time for.
The prices are going to get weird soon though! Amazon Prime is weird because it’s “free” with Prime shipping, HBO is free with AT&T’s main mobile phone plans, Disney+ (and some others, $20/mo max) are free with AMEX Platinum card.
> It used to cost like $3 1999 dollars to rent one VHS for 3 days, now it’s $14.99 for a month of watching as many of hundreds of movies / shows as you have time for.
The difference is, I picked the $3 movie to watch. The streaming services are limiting what I can watch for $15. If I want something really good, I have to pay for it, individually.
I have long theorized Amazon Prime releases shows that are free on Prime until they are rated enough to decide whether the show is any good. If it's good, it's no longer on Prime and you have to pay. If it's shitty, okay, we'll leave it on Prime. I quit using Amazon's Watch List because I spent a significant amount of time scrolling through shows to add them to my watch list, only to find later that they were no longer on Prime and I'd have to pay for them individually. Fuck that.
Yeah like someone else said earlier. Welcome to HN where everyone makes half a million dollars a year and no one wants to pay $50/mo for content.