Mind Readings: Streaming, SaaS, Ownership, and Backups

In today's episode, let's talk about things you don't own. Recently I was using my Netflix account and I went to go look for a show and it wasn't there. It was gone. And I went and looked on you know one of the many websites about Netflix and said, Oh yeah, uh that show has left Netflix. I'm like, well, that sucks.

And then I went over to my iPad. I was looking for the iPad edition of Sid Meyer's Pirates, which if you didn't play it back in the in the late 80s, early 90s was a fantastic uh video game where you were the a pirate sailing the Spanish main. Uh I know the geography of all of the Caribbean really, really well because of that game. Um I may not know the modern names of the cities, but I knew what they were called in the 1600s. And the icon was still on my iPad, but when I tapped it, it said, Oh, um, this game has been removed from the app store.

Just gone. And then went to went to Chat GPT to go do some stuff, and it was it was down. It was down from a uh a service thing. And all of this stuff together sort of congealed into this not realization, because we all know it to be true. I guess just this reminder.

You don't own any of this stuff. You don't own any of these services. We have become a subscription-based economy. We subscribe to our Spotify and YouTube Premium and Netflix and this and that and the other thing. And it feels like we own stuff.

Just open up the app and watch your show or listen to your music or whatever, but we own none of it. Compare that to binders and binders. Those folks who are under the age of 30, us old folks, would have these binders and binders of CDs and of music and stuff that yeah, it's kind of cumbersome. It's kind of a pain. Um, it weighs a lot, it collects dust, they can get scratched, but you own them.

No corporation can suddenly break into your house, not legally anyway, and just take your stuff, right? If that song or that music or that artist leaves their catalog on the music streaming service of your choice, you still got a version here. This is true of all things that are service-based. So, one of the things to think about, particularly in marketing and in business, is what services do you pay for today, and what's your backup plan? What's your what's your version of this?

If it's a vital service, if it's something that there's no good competitor for, what's your backup plan so that you can continue to do business? You have some business continuity. If you're used to using large language models like chat GPT, suppose, oh, I don't know, Sam Altman gets kidnapped by aliens, and uh and and open AI folds. What's your plan? What's your backup?

Yeah, you could use a competitor, but they're not any better in terms of your business continuity. Using a local model, maybe something like Mix Stroll on your laptop, that would be better because no matter what happens to the industry, etc., that open source open weights model is something you run locally that you have. As a consumer, consider buying the DVD of your favorite shows. Because again, streaming service X goes out of business or decides it's not profitable to pay the royalties on that piece of content, it goes away. When it's in your hard drive or in your your your physical disc collection, now you have a backup.

Now you have the ability to enjoy that content whenever you like. And if you decide, hey, I'm tired of paying 9 or 15 or 25 bucks a month for this service or that service, you still have your stuff. Once you stop paying Spotify or Netflix or Hulu or whatever, you don't have access to their content anymore. It's like you never owned it. Once you've paid for a disc, you own it.

And you can listen to it as many times as you want. You can come back to it in three years and listen to it. As long as the physical media is still in good shape, it's yours. Make a backup copy of it on your hard drive and just move it from machine to machine over time. And it is yours.

So the moral of the story is for anything that's important that is service-based, make sure that you have some kind of plan B, some kind of backup that you have control over. Because you don't want to be in a situation where a critical service, a mission critical service, or a service that's important to your your life, your mental health, your enjoyment, if that goes away, you don't want your enjoyment to go with it. Thanks for tuning in. We'll talk to you next time. If you enjoyed this video, please hit the like button.

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