Consumer slavery- How many market demands do you live with?

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Marketing forces people to change their buying patterns. Consumers have no real choices. Like it or not, people are inflicted with new demands on their time and money using most forms of media. Operating systems, media players, TV reception, there’s a virtual encyclopedia of things you need just to use the things you buy. Widescreen, for example. There’s no real hassle in just getting a TV to read the diagonal and fit an image to a screen, but here we are with letterbox images, because some wonderful person decided to make some money on the hardware. The market image is supposedly of a genuine movie theatre screen, but who needs it? Who asked for it? Regional coding was never needed. All DVD players can be made to read whatever code is put in. Again, paying for something useless. Media players. Who needs them? Who ever needed them? Basic AV files are just that, and they all start as standard formats. Some are better than others, but all computers can read data if it’s formatted for them. All media players do is create and read a new code. So here we are, getting loaded up with a lot of add-ons we didn’t ask for, to use our own computers and media, and paying for the privilege? In practice, it’s anticompetitive, and lousy marketing, depriving people of the opportunity to use products if they don’t have the systems. You could also call it a form of anti-trust, too. If Microsoft is considered to have breached a law for not sharing operating system info, what are these guys doing? I think all digital product should be standardized so we don’t have to pay for the mere ability to use our computers and other media.