[lmg643]

I am also heartened that the #1 and #2 comments on here retain the voice of sanity.

I think this piece and the pitch it references are borderline abuse of the history and context of subscription businesses.

I see the current trend in subscriptions as largely a revolution in pure technology service businesses, where subscriptions are a rational way to pay for them (dropbox, github), along with software producers and their customers maturing to the point that they can mutually acknowledge the need for up-to-date and evolving core capabilities, such as Windows and Office, which can reasonably be seen to require recurring support which has value. (But you can still get a lot done with non subscription versions of Word 2003 etc).

Newspapers, telephones and cable TV have long been subscription based. Subscriptions alone obviously were not able to save newspapers from crushing deflation in their ancillary revenue models of classified ads, which they lost to craigslist and others. Cable TV to date has been much more successful in evolving and preventing disruption in those ancillary lines (pay per view etc) and has maintained a subscription model.

As an aside - everyone thinks Netflix is so wise with their current subscription strategy, I am a paying streaming customer myself, but the number of times of late that Netflix does not have the movie I actually want to watch, but Amazon's pay-per-view model does, makes me realize there are limits to the subscription approach as well. Netflix's model of creating content to justify their subscription is going to stop working eventually, content is a "long tail" type problem and their strategy of self-funding content is going to be increasingly unworkable within a few years.

[ponyfleisch]

> Netflix's model of creating content to justify their subscription is going to stop working eventually, content is a "long tail" type problem and their strategy of self-funding content is going to be increasingly unworkable within a few years.

How so?