跟讀練習: Why Owning Nothing Is So Expensive - 通過影片學習英語口語
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272 句
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This printer costs $160, but HP would probably prefer it if you paid $8 a month to rent it instead.
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That might not sound like a lot, until you realize the subscription locks you in to a two-year commitment.
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After two years, you'll have spent $192 — 20% more than it would have cost to buy the printer outright.
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The subscription includes ink, but HP artificially limits how many pages you can print each month.
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Exceed that and it charges you more.
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But it gets worse.
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After those two years, you still won't own this.
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HP's Terms of Service explicitly state you do not own HP device and subscription cartridges was provided,
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even if you complete the entire subscription term.
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Over the past 20 years, subscriptions have taken over our economy.
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You can't buy a car today without — it seems like a half dozen subscriptions.
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I'm powerless.
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I just turn up one day and suddenly I've got to pay more money.
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But the cost isn't the only problem.
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If everything is a subscription, we won't actually own anything. are fed up.
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And some are fighting for the right to own what they buy.
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It's a matter of liberty.
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Am I free to own things or should I rent independently?
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But challenging subscriptions means taking on some of the largest companies in the world.
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A whole bunch of industries that are not trying to make their products or services better.
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They're trying to find new ways to earn money from consumers every month.
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So how did we get to the point where practically everything is a subscription?
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And why is owning nothing making everything so expensive?
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Subscriptions feel modern, but they've been around for centuries.
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Americans used pay-as-you-go for newspapers, magazines, milk, and even fruit.
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Technology enabled companies to turn anything into a subscription.
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Consumers knew they were subscribing to a newspaper because it landed on their doorstep every morning.
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The fact that consumers are paying for services that they're not actually using is a trend that technology has enabled.
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It started with cable.
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For decades, most TV channels were free and there weren't many options.
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Don't miss this wonderful chance to get a Captain video picture ring.
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But that changed in the 1970s.
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Satellites enabled nationwide broadcasting, and the government allowed more channels on the air.
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The first company to leverage this lucrative technology was HBO.
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It realized that consumers would pay monthly to access its curated channel.
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Cable was an early example of paying for a subscription without getting a physical product in return.
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And it was wildly successful.
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is that there's gonna be a huge demand for material very shortly in a couple of years for cable.
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HBO signed up over 14 million subscribers in a decade.
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And by the mid-1980s, dozens of channels had followed its lead.
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I want my MTV!
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The percentage of households with a cable subscription jumped from 7.5% in 1970 to around 67% by 1999.
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But that was just the beginning.
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Starting in the 1990s, internet providers like AOL connected millions of Americans using subscriptions.
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You've got mail.
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And consumers started shopping online.
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Companies pretty quickly understood that this new structure of the relationship with consumers gave them opportunities,
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not for like a one-time payment, but for an ongoing monthly revenue stream.
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Companies took something that consumers used to buy once and instead asked them to pay continuously for access.
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Like software from Salesforce, music from Rhapsody, and online games from Blizzard.
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World of Warcraft.
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Try it for free at Warcraft.com.
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Right in T4T.
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This shift turned products into services.
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There's so many people and so many internet users, and for us this is the beginning.
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This sacrifice, this trade-off of control for convenience, right?
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Improved online payment systems reduced friction.
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And as e-commerce grew, subscriptions popped up for every aspect of daily life.
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But the rise of smartphones is what solidified this transformation in the late 2000s.
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For the first time on a mobile device, you can have the internet in your pocket.
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Using apps had become a daily routine.
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And it didn't take long for some developers to start charging small monthly fees for them.
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The subscription economy has grown from a small set of goods and services to almost everything you can think about.
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Even Sleeping has a subscription now.
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The company AteSleep sells a smart mattress cover that costs over $3,000.
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Most of its functionality is locked behind a $17 monthly fee.
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That subscription is mandatory for at least your first year.
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I probably have 10 to 20 monthly subscriptions.
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Am I allowed to use the word in shittification here?
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Netflix, Hulu.
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Dropbox.
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Vogue.
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HBO Max.
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Google Storage.
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Apple TV, New Yorker.
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Amazon Prime.
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YouTube TV, my local YMCA.
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I do actually pay for Peacock.
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NBA League Pass, you do not get access to local games.
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If I want to watch a Knicks game, I have to subscribe to a totally different service.
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I'm convinced that there's just like a few hiding that I don't know about.
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Oh, Spotify.
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Oh my gosh.
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It's really impossible to have one service that gives you everything you actually want.
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Technology proliferated subscriptions, but the reason they're everywhere is because they make companies a lot of money.
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Subscriptions give companies recurring revenue, something investors love.
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And subscriptions are sticky.
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They're good at retaining users because most are automatic.
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People are four times more likely to cancel when they have to make an active choice.
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That allows them to make more money than they would with more transparent pricing schemes.
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Neal and his colleagues found that companies earn as much as 200% more revenue thanks to inattentive subscribers.
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has figured out that this is a profitable business model and they've been moving towards it to maximize their profits.
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One company doing exactly that is Adobe.
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It's been selling software since the 1980s, typically releasing a new version every year or two.
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But in 2012, the company launched its Creative Cloud subscription.
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Instead of allowing consumers to buy the software once and upgrading when they want, Adobe now sells all of its apps bundled together for a monthly fee.
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So if you want permanent access, you need to keep paying.
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Even after you've spent way more than the software used to cost.
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Adobe faced heavy criticism for its decision.
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But there's no doubt it transformed the company.
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Three years after launching Creative Cloud, revenue was higher than ever.
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In 2024, it soared to $21.5 billion, over five times higher than before Adobe launched the subscription service.
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Adobe really was a pioneer in realizing
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that they can squeeze a lot more revenue out of consumers
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by signing them up for subscriptions rather than selling software and letting consumers keep it and use it however they want.
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Another company that's made a fortune off subscriptions is Apple.
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Since 2015, it has launched at least eight subscriptions.
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Now when you buy an Apple Watch, the company hopes you'll also subscribe to Fitness Plus and Apple Music.
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Of course, you'll also want to protect it with AppleCare.
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Annually, these cost about the same as the Apple Watch itself.
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Apple's been remarkably successful at finding new ways to squeeze money out of its customers.
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services revenue, which includes subscriptions, rose from around $20 billion in 2015 to over $96 billion in 2024.
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Subscriptions, from a company's perspective, is the way to go.
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The real question for me is, is it the way to go for consumers?
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At first, many subscriptions may seem like a good deal for the convenience they offer.
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But the lifetime costs are more opaque.
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Take a look at this subscription from computer hardware company NZXT.
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It lets you rent a gaming PC, with the option to cancel at any time.
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The middle tier costs $129 per month, which might appear like a steal.
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But let's do some math.
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It'll only take 15 months to spend more than the value of the computer itself.
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It's common for a PC to last more than five years.
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In that time span, you'll have paid NZXT over $7,700 through its subscription.
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For that amount, you can buy the PC four times over.
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Other companies entice users with free trials or sign-up promos, hoping they'll stick around even after the subscription outlives its value.
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It's becoming almost anti-customer, where it feels personally, as a customer, that I'm preyed upon.
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And the problem isn't just that the cost adds up over time.
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Many companies purposefully make it difficult to cancel.
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Dark patterns are when a company designs a user interface, like a website, to deliberately trick or deceive customers.
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companies have consumers' payment information.
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Charging people is frictionless.
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Raising prices is easy.
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And canceling subscriptions can be really hard.
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Sam Levine was director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection under Joe Biden.
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What I saw during my time of government is some of
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the biggest companies in the world were some of the biggest abusers of subscriptions.
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The FTC sued Amazon in 2023 and Adobe the year after,
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arguing the companies tricked users into signing up for subscriptions and made it deliberately difficult to cancel.
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Let's take a look at Adobe's Creative Cloud.
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It defaults to a plan that looks like it's month-to-month, but it's actually a year-long commitment.
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The FTC said Adobe didn't clearly state that customers needed to pay a fee to unsubscribe early.
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These fees were so big and so important to Adobe's bottom line
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that one executive Adobe described it as being like heroin in how addicted the company was to these fees.
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Adobe declined Business Insider's request for comment.
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In 2024, it told The Verge that the quote was taken out of context
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and said cancellation fees made up only a small part of Adobe's revenue.
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Folks who rely on Adobe services and Adobe products
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and end up getting ripped off by a company that is charging them huge fees and making it really difficult to cancel.
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Adobe appears to be making its subscription terms clearer.
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Screenshots from 2017 show that users had to click into the fine print to learn about the cancellation fee.
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The FTC's case showed that in 2023, Adobe's signup page mentioned a fee, but didn't immediately disclose the amount.
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As of December 2025, it states up front that users must pay half your remaining annual commitment,
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which could cost hundreds of dollars.
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The FTC's case is still in litigation, but others have already been successful.
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It should be as easy to unsubscribe than it is to subscribe, but it doesn't feel like that's the mechanism that most businesses are going for.
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The FTC was working on a rule called click to cancel that aimed to make cancelling as easy as signing up.
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The rule was hugely popular, but earlier this year, the Eighth Circuit, one of the federal courts, struck down the rule on procedural grounds,
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saying that industry should have had more chances to weigh in on the rule.
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And there's no indication that the Trump administration is planning to continue work on the rule.
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Removing subscriptions from your life isn't easy.
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As companies connect more products to the internet, the distinction between owning and paying for access gets blurrier.
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Printers, security cameras, exercise equipment, and even cars all limit features behind subscriptions.
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These are all things that are software dependent, and so when you don't have control over the software code,
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that means you don't have control over the physical product itself.
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Sometimes that means features get added, features get taken away without the consumer's consent.
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It even gets to whether the device continues to operate at all.
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Aaron co-wrote a book in 2016 called The End of Ownership.
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Since then, he's only become more pessimistic.
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I think things are worse than we imagined they would be.
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Our daily behavior is really built around the idea that the things that we use every day are within our exclusive control.
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And I think when we move away from that, what's the model for what a non-ownership economy looks like?
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There's some very smart people out there who, you know, describe this as a kind of return to feudalism.
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A world in which we don't own anything,
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we don't control anything, And the benefits of these resources are sort of,
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you know, hoarded by the handful of technology and media companies that control our access to them.
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Mergers further concentrated this control.
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And with less competition, prices could rise.
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They're in a much better position to sort of eliminate consumer surplus
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and push consumers to paying the maximum price that they can bear.
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That might look good for a handful of companies, but I think ultimately it's pretty harmful for society as a whole.
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The erosion of ownership has already happened to media.
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In 2024, 84% of US recorded music revenue came from streaming.
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Physical sales accounted for 11%.
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It's even lower for movies and TV shows.
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Spending on physical media made up less than 2% of revenue.
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Consumers don't own the majority of media they consume.
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Which means they give up the right to resell it, loan it to a friend, or pass their collection down through generations.
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When Netflix blocked password sharing, it made this imbalance clear.
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When you move to digital, those secondary markets are essentially eliminated.
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And that's something that a lot of publishers, studios, video game developers, that they've been hoping for for a very long time.
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A growing number of consumers don't want ownership to die.
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Take a look at this graph.
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Since 2005, the number of vinyl records shipped grew by over 1200%.
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It's an old idea to physically hold something and look at it, but at the end of the day, it just feels good.
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It's wonderful to be a part of this re-emergence of a physical life
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that I think people are really missing in an age of complete digitization and dehumanization.
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This neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, sees itself as fighting against that dehumanization.
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Shop owners refer to it as Analog Alley.
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Because within a few blocks, you'll find board games, books, records, and VHS tapes.
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After one night of complaining one too many times, Jess yelled at me to start the store.
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So we started the store.
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Pretty much that's what happened, yeah.
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Night Owl Video's merchandise proudly declares, death to streamers.
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I think the pitch from these streamers when they started was affordability and accessibility of great movies.
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And now it's the complete opposite because they've started making their own movies and and they want to push those onto people,
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removing the titles that clearly people actually want to watch.
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While prices started out low, every major streamer has increased the cost of its subscriptions.
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You're being fed from an algorithm and fooled into thinking that this algorithm is super, super tailored for your particular taste.
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You're probably just going to end up scrolling for an hour and not finding anything you want to watch anyway.
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Jess and Aaron hope Night Owl's human curation reminds patrons they don't have to let an algorithm pick their next movie.
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For your consideration, Spirited Away, this is like, pretty rare.
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Night Owl offers an estimated 8 to 10,000 movies on DVD, Blu-ray, and VHS.
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When I tried to order copies to the distributor too, I couldn't get them.
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They're backordered.
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Young Frankenstein is backordered.
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It's really cool to see a younger generation who didn't necessarily grow up buying DVDs like we did,
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embracing that idea, really enjoying it and enjoying searching through the stacks to find great stuff.
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DVDs and Blu-rays haven't experienced the same comeback vinyl has.
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But for Night Owl, selling dead media has been a success.
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A physical collection comes with tangible benefits.
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Streaming catalogs change all the time as licenses swap hands
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or companies like Disney remove titles to write them off as financial losses.
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Blu-rays can also look and sound better than streaming because they're less compressed.
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The quality doesn't change depending on your internet speed.
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But more importantly, curating a collection is the way Jess and Aaron show their love for their favorite media.
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Everything has devalued art in almost every way.
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I think that it's really important to preserve the films that you love and to really experience them.
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The expressions on a lot of people's faces when they come in, it's like, wow, this still exists.
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It's really a nice thing.
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Fighting the subscription trend became a personal mission for James Kuda too.
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I deeply hate subscriptions, unless they make sense.
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His company, Procreate, has become wildly successful by asking its users to buy its apps once.
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Yes, we would technically make more money if we were going down a subscription route.
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We're all in business to generate revenue, but I think the other part of that story is we're here to generate revenue and provide value to the customer,
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and I think that part is just not being evaluated.
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We're sort of prioritizing revenue generation at the expense of the customer.
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I think that creates quite a lot of brand damage
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because you're not eliciting a feeling of joy or fun when you're interacting with that brand.
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You're creating a sense of aggravation and a feeling of entrapment, which customers don't forget.
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Gamers are feeling the aggravation too.
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Microtransactions, battle passes, and online-only functionality are all too familiar in modern gaming.
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The customer should have more, basically, freedom to own their media.
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Because the more of the control lies with the company that either distributes or creates the ecosystem,
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the more opportunities for unfair practices.
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They are becoming the standard, and no one knows that they're unfair anymore, because they haven't seen anything else.
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The platform GOG is committed to preserving retro games.
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But even with new titles, it offers users an offline installer without digital restrictions.
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That means you can install a game even if the publisher no longer sells or supports it.
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The aim was to solve that for consumers
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and to build a digital distribution platform that would keep the good things about physical distribution,
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but move them into the more convenient digital era.
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You have the files, but they're yours.
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You can keep them.
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It's a matter of liberty.
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It's a matter of whether I can actually own something and whether a company takes something away from me.
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Am I free to own things?
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Is that okay for me to own or should I rent indefinitely?
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We're not delusional.
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I don't think streamers are necessarily going anywhere, but I do think that people are going to become more aware of how they're spending their money on entertainment.
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Consumers should make whatever choices work for them.
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I'm not here to tell everybody that they're wrong for having a Spotify subscription and everybody just needs to buy vinyl records.
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But one of the things that troubles me is that for people who want to buy tangible copies, that's becoming increasingly difficult to do.
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There are products that many of us no longer want
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and we're still subscribed to and that's generating revenue for those companies
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and it means that a new company which is offering a product that we do want, they may not have an opportunity because our money is tied up somewhere else.
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But the FTC is going to keep playing whack-a-mole unless it actually issues a a rule
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that applies to every company in the economy saying you can't trap people in subscriptions
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and you can't lie to people when they're signing up.
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What worries me is I think the status quo is more desirable to the companies
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that control these markets and I don't think they're likely to yield that control without a real fight.
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Thank you.
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Thank you.
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本片段的口語練習目標
本段影片適合提升說明性口語的流暢度，尤其是如何清晰闡述“訂閱經濟的發展邏輯”這類複雜話題。通過模仿影片中對商業現象的分析節奏，學習者能掌握“提出問題—追溯歷史—舉例論證”的表達結構，提升長段論述時的邏輯連貫性。同時，影片中大量使用的對比句式（如“原本一次性購買，現在持續付費”）也有助於鍛鍊口語中的思辨性表達。
實用短語庫
- lock you in to a two-year commitment：將你鎖定在兩年的承諾中
- artificially limits：人為限制
- take over our economy：接管我們的經濟
- curated channel：精心策劃的頻道
- ongoing monthly revenue stream：持續的月度收入流
- leverage this lucrative technology：利用這項盈利的技術
這些短語適用於討論商業、科技或社會趨勢，建議結合英語影子跟讀練習，模仿 native speaker 的重音和連讀（如“lock you in”的弱讀），提升口語的自然度。
攻克口語弱點：節奏與重音
影片中存在大量多音節單詞（如“subscription、artificially、lucrative”）和長句結構，容易導致學習者發音卡頓或重音錯位。例如，“subscription”的重音在第二個音節（/səbˈskrɪpʃn/），而非第一個；“artificially”需注意中間“fi”的弱讀。通過shadow speak（影子跟讀）訓練，可模仿影片中解說員的語速和停頓（如在“but HP would probably prefer it if you paid $8 a month to rent it instead”中的自然斷句），改善口語的節奏感。此外，影片中頻繁使用的轉折連詞（but、however、and）需重讀，以突出邏輯層次，這也是提升說明性口語說服力的關鍵。
建議每天抽取 5 分鐘進行針對性練習，先逐句跟讀，再整段複述，逐漸縮短與原影片的時間差，最終實現流暢同步的shadowspeaks效果。
影片中的語法
說話人最常用的結構，並附上影片中的原話：
| 結構 | 影片中的用法 |
|---|---|
| 現在完成進行時 have/has been + -ing — 以前開始、現在仍在繼續的動作 | they've been moving · It's been selling · they've been hoping |
| 現在完成時 have/has + 過去分詞 — 過去發生但與現在仍有關聯的事 | have taken · they've been · has enabled |
| 被動語態 be + 過去分詞 — 強調發生了什麼，而不是誰做的 | was provided · are fed · is locked |
| 定語從句 who / which + 從句 — 補充說明人或事物 | people who want · company which is |
什麼是跟讀法？
跟讀法 (Shadowing) 是一種有科學依據的語言學習技巧，最初開發用於專業口譯員的培訓，並由多語言者Alexander Arguelles博士普及。這個方法簡單而強大：您在聽英語母語原聲的同時立即大聲重複——就像是一個延遲1-2秒緊跟說話者的影子。與被動聽力或語法練習不同，跟讀法強迫您的大腦和口腔肌肉同時處理並模模擬實的講話模式。研究表明它能顯著提高發音準確性，語調，節奏，連讀，聽力理解和口語流利度——使其成為雅思口語備考和真實英語交流最有效的方法之一。