Why streaming isn't the future

We've often heard about how streaming media is the future. We can see, though, that there's a massive downside: they, not you, get to decide what you get to watch.

It started years ago actually: in 2012 a woman's Kindle was wiped of books she had already bought. Keep that in mind, this will be important later. The infamous game "Hatred" (which I have a copy of) was removed from Steam. It was later added back in.

With the latest round of hypersensitive media companies banning media works that aren't "woke" enough, it's getting even worse. Gone With the Wind, The Dukes of Hazzard, and a large number of TV shows featuring blackface jokes have been recently removed from streaming services.

Now it's true that streaming services add and remove programs all the time, and while annoying its not the worst thing in the world. But remember the Kindle event from earlier? When the Too Human video game was ruled in violation of copyright Xbox 360 removed the game from the hard drives of users who had already bought it. We've already established that you can buy it and then they can electronically take it from you if you bought it digitally.

They can't take your physical media, of course. They also hilariously can't take your illegally pirated copy. In yet another blow to the "discless future" of media the fact that their servers decide whether or not you have access means that owning digital copies only works when you can independently manipulate them away from their database (which most modern DRM will not allow).

Tucker Carlson and Mark Steyn talked about this last week: (just ignore how Mark at 2:54 gets confused by Tucker not explicitly stating his thesis earlier)


They can't take your physical copy of a book or the ebook you downloaded off of µTorrent. They can take your copy from Kindle. Remember this power you give them when you let them decide if you get to watch in return for them letting you decide merely when and what you watch.