Kanopy makes free even better

I've taken a machete to my emails in the past 24 hours and whacked 400+ unread down to a mere 47. And those 47 are mostly reminders of things I have to do.

The newest one that came in after that was one of Kanopy's weekly emails about what I should watch this weekend. I noticed Broker was a new addition, and it's just about the only Hirokazu Kore-eda movie made in the last ten years that I haven't seen. 

Now, sending me emails to further partake of a free service is already pretty nice. The new credits system is even nicer.

Clicking in to add Broker to my watchlist wasn't the first time I had seen the new credits system, but it was a reminder that came in at a time I was actually in a position to sit down and write about it.

If you aren't familiar with Kanopy's old system for allowing you a certain allotment of monthly viewings, you used to get five credits per month to spend however you wanted. Anyone who griped about this -- I'm not saying there were, but human beings being who they are, there probably were -- was an idiot. You don't pay a single cent to receive the full benefits of Kanopy, all you have to do is have a library card and have your local library participate.

And yet I have also griped. As you will recall in this post, I was attached enough to my five free credits that I did (politely) report the issue when I tried to watch Things to Come but the subtitles were too blurry to read. They happily refunded me my credit, and also explained why the issue occurred, and also explained the steps they were taking to rectify it in the future.

They didn't have to do any of that.

A few weeks ago, they've implemented a new system, as seen here:

Instead of spending a single credit on something, you spend however many tickets they've determined it requires. 

Such a change in basic paradigm should rightly make a person raise their eyebrows, as if Kanopy were finally trying to close the loophole that had allowed us all these free viewings all these years. 

Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, though I don't know this for sure, it seems like yet another attempt to improve the experience we enjoy as non-paying customers.

I bet you dollars to donuts that some Kanopy user made a complaint -- hopefully as polite a complaint as I made about Things to Come -- that the current credits system was unfair because it priced everything equally. Watching a four-hour movie cost you a credit, but so did watching a seven-minute short film. I don't watch a lot of short films but I did discover this myself when I watched the short film How to Be Alone starring Maika Monroe earlier this year.

So Kanopy decided to respond to this person's complaint by setting up a tiered payment system. How to Be Alone -- which is actually 12 minutes -- now costs one ticket. Broker -- which is two hours and 9 minutes -- only costs two.

And you get a total of 15 tickets per month. 

So in case you are bad at math, this means that instead of watching five movies per month, you can now watch seven -- and still have one ticket left over for a short. Or 15 short films, if you're so inclined.

Look I know there is some business model behind all this that makes it a benefit for the people who run Kanopy to provide this service. Things that are totally unsustainable are not sustained.

But to the naked eye, they just seem generous as fuck, and in today's world, that is extremely rare.