vrpicasso which rewards loyalty and deters abuse - the longer you sub, the more you can download per month
First of all, I think you shouldn't support the notion of paying subscribers abusing the site when using it in perfect compliance with the agreed conditions. Considering that the SLR download limits are already significantly lower than what competitors are allowing, it is not abuse to download within those limits.
Secondly, what was called 'misuse' is enabled by the fact that there are two ways of subscribing for just one month: A more expensive way that ends after 30 days or a cheaper one that can be cancelled by the subscriber before it renews for a second month. If you are offering the same thing for two different prices, don't blame the users for being smart. Blame yourself for even offering this option.
Thirdly, a monthly loyalty reward system doesn't make sense in an annual subscription since you have already signed up for an entire year. It would only make sense for the monthly recurring subscription. But why would you want to drive away the monthly subscriber segment (that has already decided against going annual at the price of a higher monthly rate) by further devaluating their subscriptions?
Moreover, loyal customers are not necessarily better customers. Some lifetime subscribers may think they own the place after having made their (admittedly substantial) one-time payment, while in the long run the money sustaining the business is coming from the not-so-smart people like myself repeatedly renewing their annual subscriptions.
I think the real reason behind SLR going against downloads is that it is a way to significantly reduce costs on their end. It was mentioned earlier that people may actually watch on average only like 20 % of a porn scene. For Netflix and the like, it makes no difference if you stream or download for offline use since their content is usually being watched from start to finish. But with porn scenes, 80 % of the downloaded data may go to the bin unwatched. And probably third party content providers will get the full payout for a downloaded scene while streaming payout is based on actual watch time. But as long as I am not a shareholder or on SLR's payroll, this is none of my concern and I will not accept being called names or demonized for my preference of downloading some scenes at the highest available quality before watching them.
The way forward clearly needs to be making subscribers stream voluntarily instead of dictating how to watch:
- Streaming-only features with benefits like AI PT will for sure shift the ratio towards streaming
- Rethink the logic behind bit rate/quality reduction for streaming files. I get it that 30 Mbps is the upper limit but why on earth is it necessary to reduce 50 Mbps scenes to 20 Mbps? Just reduce them to 30 Mbps like all the other scenes and I might stream some of them instead of downloading. Can't be that hard to change the workflow.
- Since the plan seems to be charging extra for additional downloads, think again what could be a reasonable price. 20 bucks for 50 downloads as indicated earlier? Come on! Your own market price for 50 downloads is like $5. If it's any higher than that, it would be cheaper to get a second SLR subscription to get more downloads, which would be as ridiculous as it sounds. But more likely, frequent downloaders would just get their second subscription from one of the competitors that offers even more downloads + exclusive content. So if you want to generate any revenue for SLR from additive download packages, the price needs to be clearly below $5 for 50.
