By Dennis D. McDonald

I was saddened to hear this week that the Alexandria Public Library will be discontinuing its subscription to the Kanopy movie streaming service. The service is a fabulous collection of independent, classic, and foreign films and documentaries. Unfortunately, the price for the Library to continue to subsidize the service — the Library pays a fee for each title viewed by library patrons — keeps going up and has become unsustainable. This is how the library announced the cancellation:

On April 30, 2020, Alexandria Library customers will no longer have access to the Kanopy on-demand film streaming service. The Library began offering the service in July 2018 due to public demand for download movie streaming services. We were offering customers 8 titles per month “free” at a pay- per-use cost of $2 to the Library for videos that played longer than 4 minutes. We soon incurred extremely high costs and in an attempt to maintain the service, lowered downloads to 4 titles per month to ease our budget costs. Kanopy then decided to “package” offerings into specialty groups and increased the price to $5 per download, cancelling any cost savings and overrunning our budget.

Additional and continual changes within Kanopy’s price packaging structure have made it difficult for the Library to continue offering the service.

When the service was introduced and provided access to ten titles per month I was all over it and regularly reviewed titles I had streamed on my own movie review web site. Since the service offers so many obscure and little known films being able to “taste” a film by viewing an initial segment was a great service; even obscure (to us) East German science fiction films were available!

When the service dropped to 4 titles per month my usage also dropped. I could no longer “sample” films in enough detail to decide on watching. Watching just a few minutes counted as a “title” and after consuming 4 per month within less than a week a few times my usage dropped off.

My guess is that it’s not just the total dollar amount that is scaring libraries off it’s the unpredictability when charging is tied to unpredictable viewing patterns. Online database publishers learned long ago that charging by “hits” when searches were conducted drastically reduced usage. I see the same thing happening here a Kanopy seeks to differentiate its offerings from the burgeoning number of streaming services. I do wish them luck!

Note: I have spent my career working in commercial organizations and am a firm believer in TANSTAAFL - There Ain’t No Such Thing as a Free Lunch. Somebody’s gotta pay. Unfortunately Kanopy’s business model is still evolving and public libraries appear to be caught in the middle.

Copyright (c) 2020 by Dennis D. McDonald

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