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‘My whole library is wiped out’: what it means to own movies and TV in the age of streaming services
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 13 May 2024
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What would it take to get a "Steam but TV/movies instead of games"? I feel like if I could see reviews of movies and I could buy them and download them and have them forever and buy them on sale and all that good stuff, it wouldn't be so bad.
How come none of the streaming services have gone for this model? Steam is swimming in money, surely this method could work?
I mean I hate to say it but if steam closed up shop tomorrow your games are gone too. You buy a license, not a copy, from steam
Yes that is true - although many games on Steam can play offline so because I download the game, I own it in that fashion. They can't take that away.
But compare with GOG then. They sell games, you download them with no DRM so you own the download essentially.
Yeah GOG is a better ownership model. Steam is not ownership
This is the model digital media should take, frankly. Anything less may as well be misleading marketing, as far as I'm concerned.
They've said they have a contingency plan in case that happens. They haven't said what it is, but my guess is some kind of "you have 60 days to download your games without steamworks DRM".
Yeah I don’t trust the good will of corporations, even the ones I personally like
Steam really did try with the movies idea, it didn't last too long though. Licensing is a bitch to maintain.
Why is licensing so easy with games though? It really seems like there's this arbitrary difference in how the video games and streaming industries work.
I think it's like this: if your game is not on Steam, you won't sell many copies. Publishers fight to make sure the game is on Steam.
If your movie isn't on Steam, the company doesn't care. No one goes to Steam for movies. So Valve has to fight to get the rights to distribute (and compete with streaming services).
I'm not who you asked, but my opinion is that it comes down to the types of people you're dealing with and age of the industries. The video game industry isn't that old, especially in its modern, mega blockbuster age. By its very nature, it's something that is on or near the leading edge of technology. This means the people involved are usually (though not always) forward thinking and live in the modern world.
By contrast, the motion picture industry is over a century old. It's deeply established in how it does business and you can see the effects of that entrenchment every time a new technology emerges that affects how people watch film and TV. They went to court to make VCRs illegal. DVDs were too high quality, so they made a self destructing kind of DVD (remember divx before it bizarrely became the name of a codec?). The industry went to war with itself more than once with format wars (VHS vs Beta, HD-DVD vs Blu-ray). This isn't an industry that handles change well, and they've always believed everyone is a lying thief.
All this to say, the video game industry is trying to make money in the modern world, while the TV/film industry is trying to cling to a business model one or two generations out of date because they fear change. There's no technical reason that a game or a movie couldn't be licensed for exactly the same amount of time. It's just how the people with power in both industries operate.
If the movie industry was smart, they'd have looked at what the music industry did and just copy/pasted that. The music industry has 2 kinds of stores, neither of which they involve themselves in running:
Compare that to the TV/film industry who looked at all that and decided to do the opposite. They run their own streaming only stores that are all bleeding money instead of fostering competition by encouraging more places like Netflix to start up. They don't, to the best of my knowledge, run any stores where you can download a DRM free video file after paying a reasonable price. This whole industry is fucked, but it's so massive it can absorb decades of bad decisions because there's enough good actual product that people will pay for. And that insulation from their shit decision making and their fear of change is why TV/film licenses are so much more restrictive than game licenses, at least IMO.
Convincing analysis. I guess the question is, if we assume this is the case, will the industry ever heal?
It's hard to say. Look how long it took for the music industry to stop suing their customers en masse and just adapt to a changing market. The film/TV industry hasn't even begun walking that path. It may never change, but if it does, I suspect it'll take a very long time.
That, right there, is how you can tell the entire premise itself is ridiculous nonsense: if you buy something, there's nothing to maintain because every right associated with the purchase is transferred in perpetuity. There is no licensor left to need to maintain an ongoing relationship with.
If Steam "needs" a "license" to continue to host the files its customers have purchased on their behalf, it means somebody fucked up.
@SorteKanin @thirdBreakfast I guess Amazon and iTunes would be the closest thing, but rights expire for TV shows and movies far more often than they do for games. It’s insane that there are shows from 10 years ago that aren’t legally accessible or are straight-up lost media because the rights expired.
Any idea why there is this discrepancy between TV and games?
Other comments are wrong, its complicated residual structures on tv/movies.
Exactly. The licensing and sublicensing structures in TV and film are way more complicated than in video games. They also intentionally license for relatively short durations for tax reasons and other corporate considerations that have nothing to do with the end viewer or consumer.
Money. It's much better if you can sell the same thing over and over again.
Probably bandwidth. You download a game or five and then you're good for a few weeks, whereas if you are streaming media you could run through several gigabytes a day of data per customer in perpetuity.
Obviously, with streaming media there is a continuously refreshing pool of money to cover those costs as compared to games being a one-time purchase, but even with that it would still take quite a while to expend the entire revenue of the purchased game in download expenses and storage overhead.
The only difference between Steam and the streaming companies is that Steam seems to have managed to create a lasting profitable business. If this changed and Steam faced more challenges, they'd put the screws on the users just like the TV and music services do.
But.. do you pay subscription for Steam that they can just jack up any time they want and there isn't anything you can do about it other than straight up quit and lose all your stuff?
No. That's why.