The Price of Convenience in Media
By Albert Hermo
We live in a society where technology constantly perpetuates our daily lives; from our jobs to our homes, technology is all around us. Gone are the days where physical possession was the norm, nowadays most items and comforts have become digital like our books and movies. Back in the early 2000’s, stores such as Video Ezy and Blockbuster were abundant according to the Australian Video Rentals Retailers Association (AVRRA) in 2001 there were 2600 video stores around Australia. The common idea being that in order to play something such as a video, a physical copy was needed. These stores made a living through renting out physical discs, now fast forward 15 years into the future and there are fewer than 40. Its not that the desire for a physical possession disappeared, it’s that technology progressed and therefore these stores had to evolve to survive. Most shops sell and rent digital copies, you can have an entire catalogue of movies within the palm of your hands. What would’ve been an entire shelf of discs and books is now contained within the size of a small brick.
This idea of convenience and portability is what truly set apart the media of the past from the present. This idea of convenience didn’t just stop there; it progressed further to the age of streaming services. Nowadays consumers rent out movies and music completely without actually owning anything. According to research from Technology Insights Company Telsyte, the Australian subscription video on Demand market (SVOD) has grown like clockwork, 54% every year. Streaming services such as Netflix and Spotify have completely eclipsed the need for physical possession, why pay $15 for a digital copy when you could spend $9.99 every month for an entire catalogue of hundreds of online movies with Netflix. This convenience and affordability are so appealing that for most consumers the choice is clear. According to Carol J Kaufman in her conference paper titled “The Concept of Convenience in Marketing”,
“A systems perspective is adopted to relate the notion of convenience to input-output tradeoffs within the household productive process”.
This meant that convenience doesn’t just provide consumers with better products, it is a tradeoff, an exchange for this product. However just what exactly is this tradeoff that most consumers are paying through this subscription.
Simply put, the price is ownership. Society has moved to a point where possession has become a chain an unnecessary burden both physically with space and mentally with cash and financials. Most people wouldn’t pay extra money for a single movie or song when they could pay a cheaper price for much more content. Long gone are the days where consumers would worry about physical space and now they don’t have to worry about upfront costs of obtaining movies.
While this does present many benefits to the user, there are also negatives that many fail to realize. One primary negative is the very notion that users no longer control what they have, a simple cursory look of platforms such as Netflix and Spotify shows that they have plenty of content. However upon an even closer inspection many users would realize that the content is actually quite limited to whatever’s popular and often it changes every month. The platform affordances of rented content allows for inconsistency to occur due to the nature of streaming services In fact according to Forbes the vast majority of licensed content to Netflix has been steadily decreasing as the company reports further losses to revenue margins.
This perceived notion of control is fabricated when users subscribe to this declining service. In no way do users choose what content is kept and dropped, they are instead left to the whims of the platform and must adhere to their decisions or otherwise unsubscribe.
This important point also highlights another danger, that if the service disappeared or they unsubscribed, the user would lose all the content. Failing to recognize that users own nothing is dangerous, as they truly forget how dependent they’ve become on a service for content. In the past users would invest in physically/digitally owning media, however with streaming services no investment is made. Instead payments are made to attain this conceived illusion of possession when they only have an access right.
Whatever your stance is on streaming services, the choice to subscribe is one that shouldn’t be taken lightly. Each individual needs to determine just what do they want and what are they ready to tradeoff as a result of such decisions, convenience vs. ownership. In the end consumers should always remember that the internet does allow these same options for free, it’s just a matter of convenience.
