davidlewis54

This is more nonsense.  The US has a very odd way of being the land of the free and allowing entrepreneurs to flourish. When a business has grown, through its own efforts and imagination to make something world class, different and new, it apparently needs to be broken up.  If app. makers want to create apps which work on a particularly platform, obviously, it needs to pay for that.  If you don’t like the terms, do it sign up for it: you know the cost in advance.  Using a platform gives the app. usability, after all. It can also give the app. huge coverage.  If you rent a property for commercial use, you don’t expect the rent to go down if your business is successful.  The same applies to the other companies here.  In Google’s case, without its size it wouldn’t work as a search engine and Facebook wouldn’t work as a worldwide operation.  Amazon is the odd one out here but again it’s success is of its own making.  Amazon does destroy other businesses, often by undercutting the competition which the others do not do, but Amazon has been successful because of its fantastic service.  All these companies do use tax avoidance measures and cheap labour to keep costs down but that is the American way.

The problem Apple has for Apple TV+ is quality over quantity.  I have watched a number of Apple’s programmes and films and they are very high quality.  Unfortunately, most folks seem to prefer quantity, no matter how poor it is.  My family has Netflix and Prime, as well as some other UK based repeat services such as Britbox and none of these provides anything near the quality of the Apple shows.  I am more than happy to pay for Apple TV+ whereas I do not pay and will not pay for Netflix or Prime.

I have subscribed to Apple TV since it first launched in the UK at £4.99 a month.  We have watched at least one series each month which seems good value. Certainly the quality has been very good as far as I am concerned though these things are always a question of taste.

Other parts of the problem are the disposable nature of streaming.  In the ‘old days’ we would buy an LP, cassette or CD and play it all the way through. Some tracks would be better than others, but generally, the order of the tracks dictated what the artist wanted the listener to hear as a whole. Now, a lot of streaming is of single tracks. This defeats part of the artist’s endeavours and to some extent loses the soul of the production. Historically, a recording would be revisited a number of times over many years.  With streaming this doesn’t happen: a new recording arrives, a few tracks are listened to a few times and then deleted.  It hardly makes for an artist to create his or her greatest work. Streaming also produces far less income for the artist.

In the late 1960s I wrote a story for school homework.  This included a data collection device being a small silver disc on which the data was stored.  Can I claim royalties for every CD, DVD and Blu-ray which has been made?