I honestly find this unbelievable and amazing. You have never rewatched a video, or re-read a book? You've never lent a movie or a book to a friend? You've never used a movie or a book to job your memory and spark a conversation with someone?

There is value in all of those things to me, not to mention the value of being able to watch a movie or read a book whenever I want, regardless of my current state of subscription to netflix/hulu/xfinity/cbs/amazon prime/hbonow/etc.

Having these physical DVDs or whatever really is a very mild burden, but even that mild burden is larger than the mild benefit provided, people just like having their DVDs on their shelf because of the intrinsic value of owning "stuff".

Have I rewatched every video I own enough times to offset the cost of renting it for each time I've watched it? Overwhelmingly "no". Not even close. Rentals of even new things are a couple bucks, DVDs are often $20 or more. I'm quite free to lend stuff out too, but it's still <1 on average and even if you include "every lend == the full cost to buy it on launch day" I'm still in the negative. Most people I've run into who would be interested already have it or have already watched it.

Add in that the stuff I do rewatch is relatively old and rent-able for dirt cheap, and it's even more "no". There are a literal handful I'd buy, that's it.

Same pattern with books, except that odds are pretty good that the library has a copy of it :) And even slightly not-super-famous books are pretty likely to be new to people I lend to because there are so many. (technical books are another matter, they're frequently not in libraries, but there too I've only reread a couple that are meaty enough to actually justify more than one pass)

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Books I still keep buying, especially since much of what I read for fun is somewhat old and available for extremely cheap. But I haven't bought a movie in... a decade? And I feel zero desire to do so.

I'm not sure re-watching or re-reading anything is really limited or granted by owning...

Lets take netflix for example. If there is something on netflix that i want a friend to see and they don't have netflix, i can just bring my phone/tablet over to their house and cast the show to the TV and watch it there or they can pay a few bucks and watch the entire series in a month.

I don't have to collect anything, store anything, remember who borrowed what and quite honestly there is enough content on a few select services that i don't need them all and i'm quite content in having so much new stuff to enjoy that the need for having a favorite to watch over and over is sort of history for me.

I watched the shit out of goonies as a kid becasue it was only 1 of 5 movies our entire family could own. Had we had on-demand everything that habit would have been a non starter for me. That doesn't mean i don't love goonies to this day and that i won't ever re-watch it but i may only re-watch it when it makes a round again on netflix and magically shows up as available - and i think that kind of experience to me is much better than feeling i owe myself to watch it because i'm moving it, storing it, seeing it, shelving it and having it occupy my life in some way.

If we can ignore ethics for a moment, piracy still provides a superior product than rentals because pirated objects don't lock you into particular ecosystems nor does it prohibit you from using the product in any way.

Given the choice, I don't want to have to buy an apple, android, or windows phone/tablet just to download movies to watch while camping or something. I would rather have the freedom to do whatever I want with the things I paid for.

For example, i don't buy from itunes or google store if they restrict me to those marketplaces. But i do subscribe to netflix and hulu because they don't give a crap where i login from.

piracy isn't ownership either... even if i pirate shit, i have to provide a service akin to that netflix provides to be able to watch it on my tablet/tv/phone or on the road

Amazon Kindle doesn't own the content of the books to be able to censure them, they can't legally censor or edit books that weren't censored or edited by the writer/publisher.

Also, there are dozens of ebook stores - a vast competitive market to choose from - not to mention many libraries have ebooks and print books available and interlibrary loans are awesome to get things you want even if not available locally.

Now, services like Kindle or Steam deciding to revoke access to prior purchases is a potential Big Problem...but as of yet, it remains just that: potential. And at least in theory, there are government agencies that are charged with protecting against abusive behavior towards consumers (obviously actual results there are somewhat mixed).

But economic incentives might push the renting model to become the main - or even only - model to use many goods and services in the future. Similarly, trends about the number of service providers seem to point towards consolidation as well.

So if those trends hold true, we might at some point have Megacorp Inc. offering Living-As-A-Service. And then we would have a problem.

"Bird and Lime deactivate scooter services in Santa Monica for a day in protest"

...unless they somehow pissed off Amazon and lost their account. Or the publisher/auther pissed off Amazon and got taken down. Or...

Different strokes I guess?

Likewise, a book's value is not in the paper and binding, but the content of the writing. I concede that I have an attachment to the exact copies of my favorite books, but I don't feel like I should. The important things are the what I take with me from reading, not the physical books themselves.

I'm tired of consumerism, I'm tired of articles complaining about the change of paradigms since the baby-boomer generation. I'm not going to consume media in the same way a middle class worker from the 70's or 80's did. A subscription service lets me listen to any song I can think of on a whim while driving in my car, not limited to the selection of CD's I can jam into a binder. If the apocalypse hits and Amazon Web Services goes down I'll start buying CDs again.

In renting, when you are done with the item, you terminate, yielding access and recouping none of the money. In ownership, when you are done with the item, you sell, yielding access and recouping some money.

High-end hobbyist equipment such as camera lenses and woodworking tools are great things to own; they offer great enjoyment, tend to retain value, and you can typically find a buyer if and when you want to sell.

Things that are difficult to sell and poor at retaining their value are good things to rent.

I've heard compelling arguments for both Renting and Owning of Houses and Cars and it really comes down to circumstances, but it's always good to own something you can use and sell if the need arises.

But you do not control anything any more with those companies. They can revoke your accesses, they can ban you from using their services for any reason, they can change the terms of services, the offers, the rates, whenever they wish.

Unlike you, I would say you lost the control which came implicitly with ownership, and did not regain another form of control. At least not as much, far from that.

Historically everything from the ownership society has died - everything. Do you still buy betamax players? lazerdisc players? minidisc or walkmans? no...

When the hell have you ever been banned from netflix? If the price goes up, i'll just cancel the service. I don't "collect" netflix shows or have any desire to do anything to feel complete so a change of terms of service, rates, offers or even content doesn't matter to me. I only buy the service because it affords what I want and if that stops, i'll choose a different service.

Historically and basing the future on the explosive growth of current trends, our options are ONLY increasing. There are networks just for science documentaries. I paid 25 bucks with one service to watch probably 200 documentaries over 5 months that i could have NEVER experienced anywhere else and would i want to own them? never... but guess what. in a few years as new content is produced and i can pay another 25-30 bucks and re-binge a bunch of stuff and if this service goes out there are already competing services.

I have more control, more flexibility, more content, more freedom of choice, more freedom of how i can consume, more ways to download, stream, watch, play than i've ever had in my life.

Netflix works on my tv, phone, tablet, computer, Xbox, it works on chrome, safari, edge, firefox.

How can you not see how democratizing this is? I'm so glad I don't have to wait 3 years for disney to "unlock their content warehouse and have a special release of a movie that cam out 10 years ago for the great low price of 99.99" - we're you around for those days?

Better example: It's extremely frustrating to be in the middle of an intense movie and have your internet become flaky or go out completely at that moment. On the other hand, nothing would have stopped you finishing that movie if you owned it, save perhaps a power outage.

Granted, movie watching isn't important enough for me personally that I find owning movies worth the costs, as I'm sure is the case for most people, but for some it very well might be—it just depends on your priorities. For instance, when I commuted to work (about an hour each way), I didn't use Spotify because I didn't want my music listening on the train to be at the mercy of my mobile connection.

I mean, I get where you were going, but this statement is incorrect. I'm willing to bet that you consume a lot of content that you didn't get directly from the people that produced it.

To your other points I largely agree. I have a giant box of cd's that I move with me from residence to residence, but never open. At this point it's really more of a burden, far outweighing the value I might get out of it someday if I ever decide to finally open it back up.

Just keep them long enough, one day some hipster will come out and claim that "vintage" technology has something more than modern technology... Just like what happened with vinil disks /s

For example, I recently went through several lists of underrated (i.e. not the megahits like Ghostbusters or Indiana Jones) movies from the 80s and 90s and I'm hunting them down and watching them. Of the seven movies I watched this past couple of weeks (About Last Night, How to Get Ahead in Advertising, Nothing But Trouble, Other People's Money, The Wrong Guy, Top Secret, Used Cars), ZERO of them can be found on Netflix or Hulu. Five of them can be rented individually from Amazon Prime at $4 a pop, but aren't included in their prime subscription that I already pay ~$100 a year for. That's the full extent of how you can get access to these movies from subscription services. I could have just stuck with what subscription services offer, but if it's not something new the selection gets increasingly worse and worse.

Is that what you want the future to be like? Where these movies might as well have disappeared off the face of the earth because no one can get ahold of them anymore? Because that's the direction we're starting to go in with more and more things going digital only and subscription only.

I used to work in the video game industry, but I have almost nothing to show for it outside of some trailers on Youtube, because almost all of those games were released on digital channels and are no longer available to download. I had two games on the Wii Shop and the Wii Shop is now closed and the company is defunct, so those games are gone. Another on Xbox Live for 360, and a couple of Xbox Indie Games that you can't get anymore because they killed the service. The only game you can still get is Neverland Card Battles on the PSP, and that's because it was released as a physical game.

You can still also play my Flash games I did before I got into the industry, at least until browsers kill Flash off entirely. There was a whole thread on HN recently about how we're about to lose a whole decade of culture from Flash and how one guy is trying to preserve it as best as he can.

Not being able to own the media (even if only in digital form) sucks, because companies can't be trusted to always remain solvent, always have license agreements in place, and always care about keeping all the content available for people to get. If you don't care about the content, then you probably don't care that you only get some access to some stuff some of the time, but for those that care about the time and energy that creators put in and want to experience and share those things with people that may have missed it the first time around or whole new generations of people, this current trend is terrible.

That's actually one reason why I shifted gears and started designing board games the past few years. I have perfectly good and playable copies of board games that are 60 years old now, decades after the companies have gone out of business. I won't have to go through extra effort to make sure that people can still have access to my board games long after I'm dead.

Pretty much. Most of the time I am more than happy to watch something on the current rotation of Netflix/Amazon/HBO. It doesn't work when you're trying to seek out something specific, but the streaming world works better when you let the content come to you. I certainly don't want to fill my home with plastic discs of movies and if I ever want to watch something specific I can almost always pay to stream it. If it's not available as a rental I can just watch another movie. There is more content than anyone can ever watch, if it's not accessible to me I feel no need to go out of my way.

It's sort of like having a very well done company cafeteria (a la Google) vs going out to a restaurant. I may not get exactly what I want every day, but it's good food without having to go anywhere and at an unbeatable price. I'll probably choose that over a restaurant 9/10 times.

This means that you'll have a higher quality median (note, not mean) experience at the cost of experiencing any true outliers. The best way it's been put to me is the follows:

* (AI/ML/Algorithmic Recommendation) = 8/10 products you will like, none you'll love or hate

* (Serendipitous Searching) = 5 products you will guaranteed like, 1 you will hate, 1 you will absolutely love

By only having access to the current rotation on Netflix/Amazon/HBO you cannot find the 'diamonds in the rough' that suit your taste.

An issue where the incremental benefits to one individual may have negative externalities throughout the society as a whole,

You and I (but not various other folks on this thread) place a lot of value on not avoiding hassle, and a pleasantly low albeit non-zero price for a reasonable subset of the output of Hollywood.

People who are deeply invested in being able to apply their own personal filter on what media is available seem less satisfied.

I know other people who play out the same disagreement for comedy and music.

For some reason not for dance. Where’s the cheap version of Netflix for the ballet?

Maybe somewhere on YouTube; I refuse to use YouTube so I wouldn’t know.

But I don't think this is a good idea for the world to become like this as a whole. The more things are centralized (stream from one server as opposed to living in a bunch of locations all over the world), the easier it is for parts of our culture to disappear.

The artifacts we find from thousands of years ago are a super tiny handful of many, many, many more that existed (perhaps not exact copies, but the same types of things), and we have lost who knows how knowledge and cultural artifacts from the past, in particular the ancient past, due to things like libraries and museums getting burned down or destroyed, statues being removed, massive wars fought, etc.

Even in our own lifetimes there have been the Taliban that have destroyed ancient Buddhist statues in Afghanistan[1], ISIS destroying artifacts in Iraq museums[2], and looters destroying or stealing artifacts from a Cairo museum while the Arab Spring was underway[3]. Along with many, many other examples[4].

We collectively have the capability to have exact or near-exact copies of all sorts of documents, art, video, audio, etc. The more people that hang on to these things, the more future generations benefit from it. And the more we can benefit from the archival actions of others now.

But again, it doesn't require that everyone do it, or even for each person to try to have a copy of literally everything that exists. Just that enough people own copies of the things they love and share them with people as much as they can, helps insure the survival of our cultural heritage.

BTW, I found an interesting site that chronicles all the various types of media that are known to have existed but are now lost. It's called LostMediaWiki, if you're curious. I was surprised how long the list was just for video games, which aren't that old as a medium.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhas_of_Bamiyan

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_of_Mosul_Museum_ar...

[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-12442863

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_destroyed_heritage

So I don’t agree it’s worse for society.

I do think it would be nice if game producers would put their code and assets in escrow, so once the platform they were built for goes away, and the producer decides to not invest in a succesor platform, the assets/code could be released to the public.