It has been said that "Taxes are essentially just a yearly subscription to the country you live in, childhood was the free trial" (Source: Unknown but there is a meme about this somewhere).
Since the beginning of time, life has had subscriptions.
Maybe not the subscriptions you are thinking about or possibly in the same way that subscriptions are done today.
Even back in the hunter/gatherer day there was an unspoken (no language other than maybe grunts?) subscription model, those who hunt/gather were subscribed by the rest of the group to provide sustenance for the group. While the concept of money was more than a millennium away, I can only speculate that other things were exchanged for food.
Where am I going with this?
More towards the modern day and most everything has become a subscription.
Let's look at one of the definitions of subscription.
subscription definition and meaning - Wordnik
Submission; obedience.
Sounds very 1984-ish along with maybe a bit of They Live but these are just a reflection of where we are as a society as opposed to where we could be going. Boldly.
Now we will get the the very current meaning of subscription and the thing that has been irking me for some time.
Subscription business model Wikipedia
The subscription business model is a business model in which a customer must pay a recurring price at regular intervals for access to a product. The model was pioneered by publishers of books and periodicals in the 17th century,[1] and is now used by many businesses and websites.[citation needed]
This, along with the concentration of media companies, not to mention greed and ever higher profit for share holders without regard for what might be good for all, life has become a never ending series of subscription.
Taxes of all kinds, transportation, internet, websites, phone, eBooks/books, hardware, software, clothes, food, coffee and tea, beer, and entertainment are all subscriptions that we have or can have, and there is little room to avoid all of them if not most at some point.
It is the last one that irks me the most.
The "Cord cutting" movement seems to have has some unintended consequences and it is coming to bear. The move to streaming was a little slower for some but it would seem that most media/entertainment companies are streaming now. The cutting of the cord was mainly due to the ever rising price of traditional pay TV without any additional benefit and was not just accounting for inflation. While cable and satellite TV providers are losing subscriptions (but keeping the internet part as with most monopolies, you have a very limited choice), online services have popped up to fill that void. Guess what? They are also playing the same game, raise the price because someone else did. They also have some direct competition unlike most cable/satellite providers where your choice is maybe two at best and only one at worst.
Not naming names, but there is a company that is global and as of 2017 owns 27% of the film industry, probably more by now but that is the number I could find, and they have also started their own streaming service recently and as of December 2020 they were at 86.8 million subscribers at $6.99/month or $69.99/year. That works out to around $607.6 million per month. But wait! There's moar! In March 2021 they are already raising prices by $1/month and $10/year, guessing most who already have it will just pay and carry on.
The other problem I have seen by some of the TV broadcasters, the streaming on their site only works if you have a subscription somewhere they approve of. Many of the OTA (Over The Air) shows that we watch (not that many four at the moment) can be retrieved by different ways beyond the ad riddled web streaming. One of the new shows that we wanted to watch (it has cats) has, as of now, has a TV subscriber requirement (interestingly, I was able to retrieve the latest episode just fine), which will be interesting to see what will happen as the current one we have will go away after the football (American) season is over, the main reason we have it, as their own created TV shows/movies are kind of crap and the DVR function does not allow fast forwarding through commercials and the "normal" amount of commercials is not enough they feel the need to add some of their own in making a 30 minute show 35 minutes with at best 20 minutes of actual content. Double it for an hour show.
From all of this it may sound like I just want all my content for free and while that would be nice, people gotta eat, but if you are going to charge me a monthly/yearly fee I don't want to see any ads on your "exclusive" content. I get that if I am watching a OTA stream I will get ads from the OTA but don't add your own ads into the mix and don't force me to watch ads if I record it.
I guess the bottom line for me on this is a fair product for a fair price. I don't need nor want 57 channels (or 257 channels) with nothing on it for me. Other than football and maybe some F1 and drag racing, I have little need to watch live TV most of the year but other subscriptions will most likely be continued in the mean time.
I guess I could read more this year, after all it is just another subscription I already pay, even if I go the the library, it's a tax subscription.