The most money I ever made in the music industry was being part of a class action lawsuit against MTV. Record sales and live shows are nothing.

You should watch the film, it’s great!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_M_uvDChJQ

Since it was completely server-hosted it was incredibly fast. You’d open it up and boom, everything all up to date. The search was fantastic. (Say what you will about Google but they’ve always been great at search. Very fast and very good results.) The site layout was clean and minimal. It was just a really good implementation. Of course they murdered it.

If you used Gmail in the early days, and ever used something before it, you probably had a moment where you said “wow, this is what email should have been all along”. Reader was the same.

That’s what I did! Over time I stopped looking at Feedly though. I replaced it with Reddit and Twitter mainly. Now that those sites have become Pure Evil I switched over to Apple News. I already pay for the Plus thing as part of the family bundle so might as well use it. The “Following” tab works like a personally-curated RSS feed list. If you want an algorithmic approach, you can use the “Today” tab.

The one main feature it’s still lacking that I really want is a pure chronological list of everything from my Following sources/topics. I sent them feedback so I’m sure it will show up any time in the next 5-15 years.

netflix has a plan with ads! https://help.netflix.com/en/node/126831

amazon uses prime video as a hook to get you to sign up for prime membership (which itself has been steadily increasing in price).

i’d be shocked if HBO didn’t introduce an ad-supported price tier at some point in the future. that totally seems like zaslav’s MO.

“buy your software and have it forever” was not really true other than in the very early days. everything that was in active development like office, photoshop, all the pro music software i used, was updated regularly and had an upgrade cost. my music app had a paid upgrade every year like clockwork for $150. it was essentially a subscription in all but name. yeah i could stop paying and stay with the last version forever but operating system and hardware advances would make it so those versions would stop running on newer machines eventually.

you can view pretty much the complete history at groups.google.com. if there any usenet group still active they would show up there as well but it’s a wasteland as far as i can tell. pity, i spent billions of hours on it back in the day.

here’s a group i was active on back in the day, if you can filter it by just stuff from the 1990’s you might have an idea of what it was like to use it. (of course, it was mostly terminal/console based text readers back then, web browsers were new and scary.) https://groups.google.com/g/rec.music.synth

I read the book but my wife didn’t and she did not get the tape thing at all. The TV show barely mentioned it, and the only clue it’s even important to the last episode is a very quick shot of Allison’s suit being taped up in the opening recap. Also the “it’s better in supply” thing made no sense to her.