alt Hacker NewsA friend and I were talking about this. What would you pay for it?
When iTunes + came out, you had 2 options, you could buy a song for $0.99 or you could be the plus version for more, I don't remember but it was like $1.35 or something. Plus had a higher bit rate and it wasn't encrypted.
Suppose you could buy a movie for $12.00, how much would you pay for the forever version? $30?
Replies
If I buy a DVD, it costs a fixed price.
Why should it be variable, if we talk about digital media? Storage and content streaming is cheaper than embracing a whole logistic (producing DVDs/BlueRays, packaging, shipping).
But here we are again: if you buy something digital, you just pay for a "usage license", you don't own anything at all. After all these years or decades, I am still surprised that people expect to own digital content, forever
Depends on what those $12 "buy" me. In Sony's case, "buying" meant "renting until Sony's license expires", which they could have displayed on the product page.
I very rarely re-watch movies within a few months. So if I buy one, I want to know that I can watch it again in one, 10 or 30 years (if the format can still be played). Which is not guaranteed even with blu-rays mostly thanks to DRM. But what I'd be buying is not having to think about any deadlines.
If I'm okay with a deadline, I might as well rent the movie for a weekend, in which case I expect it to be less than $12.
You'd pay for it what you paid for it. Did the "Buy" button specify that you were buying the movie or did it say you were simply leasing the film and that it can be removed at any time due to licensing agreement over which you (as the buyer) had no control over?
I would pay what I used to pay for DVDs.
On a similar scale, if I am paying 35% more for the plus on music, I expect the same for movies around $15 or up to $18.
Terminator 2 is currently $8 for a bluray on amazon. $10 for a DVD. This is reasonably a forever version.
I would pay zero. I would just use torrents.
Right now, I won't pay a fucking cent.
I'll pirate it off of Usenet or Torrents.
I get a strictly better experience if I pirate. Whereas I'm treated like a criminal and sold a much worse experience if I pay.
So, fuck paying. I'm not going to pay for abuse.
I feel like you're kind of making this more complicated than it actually is, either because you're overcomplicating it or because you're trying to tee up some rhetorical point, but the answer to your question is really quite simple and objective: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=movie&rh=p_n_format_browse-bin%3A...
You don't need to ask a hypothetical, the market has an answer.
To the extent your reply is "but that's not exactly what my question is", my point is that the market is already pricing all sorts of situations and the market would have no problem pricing just one more possibility into the already complicated market. Including "piracy", and people like me who are treating the vast majority of DVDs and BluRays as just a delivery mechanism for streams rather than "discs".