Streaming media services are a racket

That title is a strong statement, but I stand by it. Streaming services are a corporate racket that steals from you as a consumer and diminishes our culture. It may be convenient for now, but it has unfortunate long term side-effects. I myself use streaming services myself for music, but it is bad for both the individual consumer and cultural preservation, in ways that physical media of old wasn't.

When you buy a physical copy of something, it is yours to keep. It is of course possible for the work, whether in the form of a book, DVD or record, to go out of print. In fact, this happens all the time. Most books that were ever written are now out of print.

But in that case, the work still survives in the form of existing physical copies or through piracy. The copy you bought is still available for you as long as you can personally preserve it. Your copy might break. but you are legally allowed to make copies for your own personal use. Spreading those copies can be illegal, but you shouldn't really care about that. Piracy of Out-of-print or otherwise commercially unavailable works is absolutely no crime from a moral perspective. It might be illegal, but it is often the only way to make such works available to a new audience.

With streaming, you don't get that. The consumer continually pays for access to a collection of works over the internet. And it is the corporate owners who decides what is included in that collection. They can take away anything of what you paid for, and there is nothing you can do about that. You pay and you pay the corporations and in the end you own nothing. Streaming media is inherently impermanent.

It is especially bad with streaming film and TV. Film and TV shows disappear all the time from streaming services, often because of expired license agreements that were not renewed. And if a work is removed from a media streaming service, it will ordinarily not leave a copy behind.

This is terrible for the individual consumer, who will lose access to the work despite making regular payments for it. And it is frightening from a cultural preservation and accessibility perspective. Films and music are art and as such should be preserved. Artistic works of the past provide invaluable insight on our past and are capable of inspiring us today. Streaming will hamper our future ability to preserve and access artistic works.

If you want another but similar perspective on this problem, I recommend the video essayist Kyle Kallgren. He speaks far more eloquently that I about the preservation aspect and the general problems with streaming media services in his vlog on the demise of the film service Filmstruck. 

DVDs are still made, but they're a dying medium. It is increasingly common for some works such as TV-shows to only be available via streaming. When they get removed from those services, they will leave no physical copies and perhaps only exists as memory or in some corporate vault.

Sure, some of the losses of works that for example Netflix have suffered from is due to the media conglomerates wanting to put their works on their own streaming platform. Disney has done just that and created Disney Plus. Other corporations are doing the same. But that is also bad from an accessibility standpoint.

Cinema and DVD stores show and sell movies from a variety of producers. The consumer can pick and choose the movies they were interested in and don't need to care which studio made them. You buy individual movies in such a market. You can't do that with streaming.

In the streaming future that will soon be a reality, you'll need to buy access to an entire streaming service in order to see any single film offered. No picking and choosing from multiple studios, unless you're prepared to pay multiple subscriptions. This will have the sinister effect of encouraging consumer loyalty to the corporations whose services they use. Not that some kind of streaming monopoly would be any better. Private monopolies are terrible for the consumer for reasons I don't even need to explain.

And there is still many examples of works being removed from the market and put in a corporate vault. That word "vault" might sound safe. At least the work is preserved for a future return to the market, right? But those vaults are not safe at all. The hard truth is that corporations don't care about preservation of the works they own the copyright to. Preservation can be costly and it seldom generates immediate profits. Most corporations view things like preserving film reels and music tapes as a drain on their resources. This leads to carelessness or even outright destruction of what they deem valueless. The 2008 Universal fire is a dramatic example of what such carelessness can lead to.

The only bright spot is that there are ways to make copies of streaming film or music by recording it. The streaming services try to prevent it, but frankly you should record things. Record and make copies of everything you want to keep. In the future, piracy of such recordings might be the only way the works are still available. Pirates are often doing the preservation work that the actual copyright owners won't do.

There are plans from gaming companies to make streaming video games a thing, such as Google Stadia. And that is terrifying, for there is no way to make copies of a streamed game, for you won't have access to the code. A game that is only available via streaming will eventually be unavailable completely, for you won't be able to pirate it. The consumer won't even have any personal purchased to pirate.

There are existing cases of games that no one can play any more because of so-called always-online DRM. Video creator Ross Scott is probably the expert on this unfortunate phenomenon. He started with his video on the dead game Battleforge and his videos on this topic eventually culminated in his very long video essay on why "Games as a service is fraud". Go watch him, but I'll give a short summary of the problem here.

Games with always-online requirements require the player to have a connection to a central server in order to play them. This is in order to prevent piracy. And when that server is shutdown, the game is completely unplayable. Such cases are sobering hints of a future where artistic works can be lost forever due to corporate greed.

I don't think streaming media is inherently bad. It is a technology that can be used for good or for evil. Sadly, in the world as it is, it is a tool which enables corporations to further harm our culture in the pursuit of profit.

Yet, it doesn't have to be like this. If we use it with care, the internet and streaming can be used to improve access to art and culture, without harming its preservation. In a sensible world, the preservation of art and culture should be a task given to publicly funded institutions such as libraries and museums. They should be given all the funding necessary for such a monumental task.

And our artistic and scientific creations should be made as freely and as widely available as possible, including via the Internet and streaming. The arts should also be publicly funded instead of left to the whims of the market and the corporations which control it.

It may sound utopian, but such a world is entirely possible. Libraries already provide literature, art and education for free. This has enriched the lives of many who can not otherwise afford such things.
Classical music and opera in Europe are already heavily dependent on public funding. For if the market decided such things, we would not be able to hear Mozart performed live.

The creation of such a world will of course require serious reforms. We need the political will to take back our culture from the death grip of the market economy. We must reform copyright law, so it doesn't hamper the ability of libraries to provide digital materials. And it requires money, money that must be taken from those corporations that now control our lives and will fight fiercely to keep that control. It will be difficult, but if corporate rule is not resisted, they will eventually create a cultural wasteland. Fighting that hard struggle against them will be our only hope of preventing it.