As a user, I would much rather buy a lifetime license than pay a subscription.
I probably would not have bought AnyDVD or AnyDVD HD at all if there was no lifetime option, and I'd prefer to buy another AnyDVD UHD lifetime license if/when that product exists.
Paying per-disc is absolutely not an acceptable solution to me.
I would prefer a subscription to that.
If lifetime licenses are out, the model that I think would work best is paying an initial cost, say $100, with yearly "maintenance fees" of $20.
That $100 license grants you lifetime access to all films released up to and including the year of purchase.
So $100 today gets you a "2016 lifetime license"
If you want access to 2017 releases, you need to buy a "2017 maintenance license".
That extends your lifetime license to include 2017 titles.
I don't know how you would handle it if someone skips a year.
I've seen companies do it three ways:
- You need to buy every license that you missed. So if I went from 2016 to 2020 it would cost me $80.
- Lapsed subscriptions are more expensive, but have a flat fee. So a lapsed subscription might be $50 - which would encourage people to keep paying $20 yearly instead.
- You can pick up a lapsed subscription at any time, paying the standard rate. So I could go from 2016 to 2020 for the standard $20, because I'm buying a <=2020 maintenance license, not a 2020-only license.
#3 actually seems to work well for some companies, as I've seen people pick up these subscriptions again after 4 or 5 years, rather than not at all.
With these still being "lifetime" licenses, you would still be able to offer an offline database option.
I really hope that you are still planning to release a version of AnyDVD HD which does not require the OPD, or has the option to pull down a local copy of it, because I'm not sure that I'm willing to pay much if it's still reliant on a server which could disappear at any moment.
When the DNS servers disappeared for the OPD, I was left with 10-15 recent purchases that I couldn't access at all because they weren't cached. (either hadn't been in the system, or were titles that AnyDVD doesn't cache)
If that had been it for AnyDVD and it was gone forever, I would no longer be able to purchase discs without worrying about whether they would work at all - even if they were older discs and not new releases. I would probably have stopped buying Blu-rays.