I bought the og battle star series on DVD for $90 in the early 00's. My parents bought most of the MASH seasons and they were a bit cheaper but they were still over $50 per season.
But they didn't charge you $18 a month to keep it in your library, it could just sit on a shelf.
Yet in the past, renting the movie you wanted to watch cost a scant couple dollars.
Netflix played a shell game with people's idea of value. A $18 Netflix subscription might seem not bad, it's less than an hour's work for most people! But that $2k a year?
How many people spent $2k a year buying and renting media? My family spent like $100 a year doing that.
The entire point of the subscription model is to take advantage of the way your brain processes value. I've given Spotify like $8k over the course of my subscription. I definitely do not regularly listen to $8k worth of music. If I cut off the long tail of the weird stuff I listen to, I probably listen to less than $500 of music in my lifetime, and very little of that went to the actual artists I like.
