Right now they are giving the option of a lifetime license purchase or a subscription.

From my email:


Media Composer ® | Software is the NLE that professional film and TV editors trust the most. And now you have the choice to subscribe for only $49.99 USD per month—making it more accessible than ever before.

Only pay for the software when you need it, wherever you need it
Subscription includes tools like Media Composer | Symphony Option, NewBlue Titler Pro 2 and Sorenson Squeeze Lite to expand your capabilities
Instantly access software updates and upgrades at no additional cost
Get online and phone support direct from the Avid dedicated team—included free

Already own Media Composer? Between now and December 31, 2014, you can lock in your perpetual license for $299 USD and get access to every software update plus standard Avid support for the next year—or subscribe for just $39.99 USD per month for the first year.

Buy, subscribe or contact your local Avid reseller and get full access to Media Composer | Software at the most cost-effective price ever. View the Media Composer licensing options.

Subscriptions kind of make a lot of sense.

You can start pushing all your users onto a single version of the software. This makes support easier.

The software company can also focus on creating value for its users, rather than worrying about making the next version sell. Sometimes a software company will try very hard to put sexy features into the newest version so that it will sell. They may neglect not-so-sexy features because of that.

I have no opinion on Media Composer.

Its a model that only benefits the software vendor, a way to obtain ongoing payments for your software.

But it is a bad model for people with limited resources, as they may not be able to afford the periodic subscription.

I for one will be refusing to use any subscription software, I want to know that if I buy it, it will keep on working as long as I need it.

Remember, with subscription models, you stop paying, your software stops working.

my last major project is just wrapping up after almost 2 years in post - that's what happens when dealing with committees and public health. i didn't have a problem since i'd made clear at the outset i only wanted one point of contact, etc...

okay, about every week or so they'd be some change to do, major, minor, whatever. i didn't mind, i'm getting paid for it and the whole schmozzle in a veg, with incremental backups, so if they didn't like, etc.,

that would of meant i would of had to pay a monthly sub for two to five minutes tweaking every couple of weeks... not a business model that would improve my bottom line....

Geebax,

That would be my biggest problem with subscriptions. Right now, if for some reason I could never upgrade my Vegas software, I could always work with projects I have archived. But if I can't subscribe, I can't do anything. And if versions are not backwards compatible for some reason, I would have no old versions to install.

"I want to know that if I buy it, it will keep on working as long as I need it."

I have two items of hardware that I still use and which work perfectly. Unfortunately there has been no updated driver software for some while and they will only work with Win XP. I therefore have to keep an XP box for them and a Win Vista or later (7 in my case) box to run the latest Vegas and other software.

The world marches on whether you do or not.

Likewise, except mine is even more ancient. I have an old sound recording card that uses a form of compression that is not available any longer. Trouble is, the system was built into a Department of Defence system and I have to keep updating it from time to time. The card uses an ISA bus.

So I have a very old IBM computer running Windows 98 that I have to keep running so I can do work on it. I bought several spare machines from a computer recycler to hedge my bets.

There is definitely room for fledgling service to be started by an entrepreneur type to keep older vintage computer platforms running and available for hire.

I have in my backroom, the parts to assemble everything from a computer running Windows 3.1 and DOS to the first generation of Pentium CPU to the current generation of Intel 4770K - enough to build 20 variations of computer platform depending on the parts select.

Granted that the subscription service has a lot of pluses for the vendor to maintain (albeit without the recent downtime experienced by the Adobe Cloud community) - it would be really decent if the platform they build would offer this kind of retrograde support. So say you sign up for the current generation of Premiere - you would be guaranteed as the subscriber to be enable to run any prior version of Premiere and platform that it was supported by in release.

None of the subscription services are Cloud based. After paying the sub the software is downloaded and used on the subscribers own system. Unless internet speeds significantly increase, especially upload speeds, then operating a Cloud based application is a pipe dream.

I'm not sure how students and other people new to film editing and compositing are going to master the software if they need to keep paying a subscription. It can take years to really build up the skills to make any money from this field - if you've bought the software outright then the incentive is there to develop those skills over time but with a sub, when money is tight or the learning curve reaches a difficult stage the temptation will be to drop the sub and try something else. Without fresh input from all stratas of society the film industry could revert to a very narrow and conservative arena that only the well to do can enter similar to what existed in the past.

As a student I bought CS6 Production Suite at a just about affordable discount. I doubt I would have kept up a subscription when money ran tight but I was thankful I'd invested in CS6 as it's always there for me to use. Many people upgrade every second version. In that case the sub model works out more expensive than buying every second version outright. I've been looking at the CS6 updates and since I bought it over a year ago only Photoshop has had what I'd describe as significant updates. Maybe I'm wrong but how much of the CS6 Suite has been updated and were they the kind of significant updates that usually accompany a new version release?

Rather than encouraging developers to put a lot of effort into a new release I suspect the subs model encourages them to sit on their hands and offer piecemeal changes or superficial features that might sound intriguing but only the few find useful.

Almost all of my non-video graphics work is done in a 15+ year old software suite from a long defunct company that still runs under XP, but doesn't function under Win7. It annoys me greatly that Microsoft couldn't be bothered to make their compatibility modes robust enough to keep older software running. So, for now, on my Win7 machines i have an XP emulator running so that i can keep working with the archive of 10's of thousands of files i have created over the years.

Even if i can keep XP running, my printers and scanners don't last forever. Finding drivers for new peripherals that can still work under XP is getting difficult. Fortunately, for now, i can still export my drawings as bitmap images which i can then print through Win7, but this is more tedious than it should be.

My step-dad can still buy spark plugs, headlights, and mufflers for his late 40's Ford. The auto industry long ago decided that long term standardization was good for the industry and their customers. When will the OS & software industry figure this out?

What will eventually happen is that we'll finally have intelligent meta-OS systems. They'll be smart enough to examine the code we try to run under them, figure out what the program needs, and supply it. We'd be able to take any program written in the most obscure language under long obsolete processors and OSses, and run them on any hardware. It will happen, someday. But for now companies like Microsoft would easily make backward compatibility a lot better than it is now.

They don't want backward compatibility because they sell more hard & software forcing people to upgrade and transfer old files to new formats or just leave them in limbo and start afresh.

Where I think we might be heading is much cheaper software or a modular approach where the base product is free and we're charged for add on features or content. I think the phone and tablet market are driving this trend. It'll get to the point where a generation are so used to free or really cheap apps that even a subscription model will seem too expensive or too much of a long term commitment. The desktop software industry has a problem, competition forces them to innovate and reduce prices somehow, especially when other software industries have already established this marketing strategy.

They don't implement backwards compatibility in some cases because it's technically challenging and it takes a lot of work.

In Windows 8, there are multiple compatibility modes for old programs. There are technical reasons why there has to be multiple modes.

Generally speaking, Windows has done a wonderful job of backwards compatibility... much better than the Mac OS.

So if the Adobe subscriptions thing is a simple download-on-demand service, what is it they are apologising for nobody being able to work for the last 24 hours thing about ?

geoff

Geoff, I was able to work with my Adobe CC Illustrator and Lightroom over the past 24 hours.

/jerry

Maybe they mean no logging into Adobe accounts or auto updates? The software is initially downloaded and installed once and doesn't require internet activation every time it's used so I'm not sure what Adobe mean. New subscribers would've been locked out while the servers were down though.

Wait for it... It get's worse...

I just got an email from GenArts:

We would like to invite you to join our Sapphire Subscription Pilot Program. As a recent trial downloader, we thought you might be interested in additional pricing options, making it more affordable to incorporate Sapphire into your work.


So now imagine that you use Adobe, and Avid, and Digital Juice, and dozen plug-ins like GenArts they all want a $500 annual rental fee from you. How many of us can afford to pay 15 x $500 or $7,500 a year in rental fees for software and plug-ins? That's $650 a month. That's rent money for some people. This software subscription thing is out of control!

As others have said, the rental business is a cash cow for the company offering it and always a bad deal for customers who always wind up paying more in the end.

~jr

This subscription process of these software companies is getting thoroughly
out of hand, to the point of being absolute ridiculous.
And anyone who doesn't have a problem with it, is in for a shocking wake up call
further down the road. Trust me on that!

For large companies it's probably cost effective.

For the like of me who is just a very keen amateur, it's bad. I Vegas never goes that way.

I would think that companies with multiple seats might be not excited about it either. Considering the monthly cost vs. outright purchase.

Getting the efficiency out of subscription plan as Digital Juice wants to begin with is just baffling to me - here is the scenario - If I am the executive producer of a small television station outlet in a regional market - I seek Digital Juice to supply my graphics for using as station Id's, intros to programning etc.
But under subscription plan I have to spend time carefully selecting the exact order of graphics on-line, dedicate a high-speed connection and a PC workstation to constant very long down-load times of each graphic I select, double check with checksum and write to DVD data library, then cross check library to see I am not duplicating a previous effort, make certain I have good data integrity in the DVD write, and then a backup copy. Wow! this is costing me to maintain a subscription, provide labor and equipment for monitoring the download, requirment in redundancy for labor and data backup.

Whatever happened to my just paying for a library, receiving via Fedex the next day and putting the library upon the shelf in the creative's room???

"This subscription process of these software companies is getting thoroughly

Well, an obvious solution is to stop doing business with the companies going to the subscription method. Now ... to seek acceptable alternatives ... that's the trick.