[pb7]

Funny that you talk about greed when one of the reasons everything went the way of subscriptions is because of piracy. Even here and today, people defend pirating movies when you can rent one for a few bucks in 4K HDR with Dolby.

Nothing but greed by people making top 1%-10%ile incomes.

[sosodev]

I get pretty annoyed paying $4 to rent a movie that was released 40 years ago. It used to be that I could pay $4 to own a copy of that movie I picked up out of the bargain bin.

I still pay it though because I prefer to support companies that at least make their media available.

[gremlinsinc]

or you'd pay $4 for new releases, $1.88 for older movies. We'd maybe rent a new release if it was a really good one or wait 6 to 8 months.

I honestly kind of miss those days, I mean I love Netflix and chill like the next guy, usually without the chill cause we have toddlers and no energy, but it was like an event.

My aunt or grandma would be like hey let's get a movie and I'd be like yay! it's a blockbuster night! We'd often get cassanos pizza and/or popcorn and treats and watch the main movie, and the cheap ones the next day.

I kinda miss libraries too, but no clue how any programmer could work without Google, and six months in maybe gpt4, etc...

[amatecha]

No, the invention of subscription models is not because of piracy. It's because you can keep extracting money from customers "forever", rather than just once, and continue funding your business instead of having large gaps of reduced revenue when a product has not been recently released. A moment of consideration easily reveals that SaaS was inevitable with cheap hosting/networking and readily-available worldwide payment processors.

Sources which are speaking solely about the increase in revenue (and related benefits) and not a peep about piracy:

https://hbr.org/2023/04/the-rebirth-of-software-as-a-service

https://bebusinessed.com/history/the-history-of-saas/

https://smartbear.com/blog/the-pre-history-of-software-as-a-...

https://www.bigcommerce.com/blog/history-of-saas/

[pb7]

Two things can be true at once. Piracy was a huge contributor to adoption of subscription based models.

[amatecha]

How do you know? My experiences and knowledge of the subject indicate otherwise. I'm not convinced. (btw, the burden of proof is on the person making the claim of the existence of something, as one cannot prove that something doesn't exist)