PlayStation is erasing 1,318 seasons of Discovery shows from customer libraries | The change comes as Warner Bros. tries to add subscribers to Max, Discovery+ apps.::The change comes as Warner Bros. tries to add subscribers to Max, Discovery+ apps.
So they’re taking shows away from people who have already purchased them and moving the shows to other services in order to try to make potential customers subscribe to more services?
Fuck those guys, especially for ripping off people who already paid for the content.
Here we go again. Instead of being forced to subscribe to shitty bundles of cable channels in order to get the channel you do want, we’re being forced to subscribe to multiple shitty services to get the shows we want.
This industry is a one-trick pony. Literally giving the worst service they can to force people to subscribe to more services.
That’s it. I am heading to the goodwill and picking up some media. And I gotta find our old discs too.
I haven’t paid for a movie, show, or song since… like 2005.
Games get my money, but I usually wait a couple years to make sure they’re good lawl
Welp time to start mass-buying dvd box sets and ripping the files, screw not owning shit you paid for
Don’t even waste your time and just go directly to the high seas. You’ll get all the same quality content several orders of magnitude faster.
I have every season of Stargate SG-1 on DVD, and unfortunately one disc already has an unplayable scene due to scratches, but for the most part it’s in-tact.
No streaming service has the HD wide-screen versions available for streaming, and their subtitles are very… Summarizing. In sections.
I have a laptop with a USB connected dvd player, and I’ve been slowly converting the discs to my digital library, but holy shit is this a slow process.
I literally could have been done with every season and special feature of all three shows and the movies in the time it took me to rip the first season alone.
Buuuuut I don’t currently have a Very Pontoony Nautical vessel soooooo… I can’t go sailing right now.
Fuck those guys, especially for ripping off people who already paid for the content.
If either side cared about good customer service, they’d find a compromise. Either Sony would pay for the purchases and make it available under the new home at whatever the new sales-channel is called. Or, Warner Bros. Discovery would switch the licenses and make it available themselves.
Of the two options, Warner Bros. Discovery doing that would make the most sense. For them, it would have zero cost. They’d lose out on the potential to re-sell the same content to people twice, but they’d keep potential future customers happy by doing that. Especially true for people who had bought a few seasons of a show but hadn’t finished it. They’d be incentivized to purchase future seasons using the new store.
The fact that neither side is willing to make these concessions shows just how little they care about their customers. They deserve all the copyright infringement they’re about to see.
Agreed. Streaming services always seemed like gilded cages to me. You can only see what they allow you to see - piracy or old-school Netflix DVD delivery gives you all the options. The promise of being able to stream any content at any time, with the producers and people involved being able to get compensated fairly and justly, just isn’t reality with these ghouls running the show.
The model (in the current form, of artificially restricted licensing) seems like less a way to curate a media catalog, but more like a way to curate the subscribers and culture.
Kind of.
You don’t have yearly contracts and it’s a lot easier to start and stop a particular service at any time.
It’s weird to see this take when I remember streaming started out that this was what was heralded. You could pick and choose what streaming services you wanted and you could change them easily. You didn’t have to buy the sport package or pay the built in royalties of sports teams if you didn’t watch sports.
For now. However, I’m going to pick at something you mentioned about switching when you want - sure, but most services offer a discount for a year’s subscription. I don’t think it’s an insignificant amount of people that might buy in on that. Switching becomes irrelevant when the service already has your money.
Also, services are separating popular shows, unbundling for lack of a better word, to other platforms to force people to subscribe to more services. Effectively that’s making you pay for shows you don’t want (like your sports reference) to get the shows you do.
ripping off people who already paid for the content.
They didn’t pay for the shows. They paid for access to the shows. That’s all anyone gets these days.
They didn’t pay for the shows. They paid for access to the shows.
And, if they had made that completely clear, there would be less of an issue. If the “Buy” button was replaced with “Rent, Long Term” then maybe people would be less annoyed that their long-term rentals were now being forcibly returned. But, labelling the button “Buy” makes them more money.
“long term” is still indefinite and therefore unconscionable. “For at least 10 views” or “For at least 5 years” would work.
Another option would be Sony not entering unconscionable contracts with WB. They can because they’re gigantic and be laughed out of court if they tried to argue that their legal department didn’t spot the issue but their contract should have said that anythnig that gets licensed indeed gets licensed in perpetuity: That is, WB could say “don’t sell any new licenses any more”, but they couldn’t say “all licenses are now invalid, how you fulfil your contracts with your customers maybe buy boxsets”.
Fuck Warner Bros and Sony PlayStation for this.
But it’s not just them, it’s an entire industry. If you pay for media and you don’t get it physically in full, or the ability to download it in a DRM-free portable format, remember that you don’t own it. Only do it in the knowledge that some day you will not have it anymore.
There are other options available for you. BluRays, piracy.
People need to start paying creators to make stuff for the public domain and refuse to pay to access anything that everyone doesn’t have access to.
I’ve given Wikipedia money, I’ll never pay for Netflix.
Considering how much it costs to make the average movie or TV show, a Patreon isn’t going to cut it. If you want a guy talking in front of a microphone with a producer and a writing team of two, sure, you can pay the creators for that. It’s not something most people will want to watch in replacement of the entertainment they’re used to.
The maths are pretty clear though, we know consumers have the money needed to pay for blockbusters and that they don’t mind giving it over to view entertainment because that’s where the companies get the money from - in fact we know that there is excess because a large portion goes to shareholders as profit.
Collectively we could combine community creation, open source tooling and creator funding to make things on a far larger scale than any marvel movie, I don’t really think we should tbh but funding reasonable ventures, tools and resources is something we absolutely can and should be doing.
People were so happy MultiVersus happened, failing to realize the sheer acquisitions and monopolistic behaviour it takes to own so many IPs. How, when weaponised, it commands so many big names.
And now it’s not working for people, because they’re pulling the shows from PS.
Mate, we’ve got it; we understand your position. You don’t need to keep posting it.
I’d be a lot less bothered if the UI for services like Sony didn’t use words like “buy” to describe what customers are doing when they pay for content. It would be a lot more honest to describe it as a rental for an indefinite time period. But of course then very few people would choose that option.
I agree, it feels like this is a place where the law or regulation needs to come in and enforce something like - rent vs lease vs buy.
The average consumer thinks “buy” means forever, and that’s just not the case in these scenarios. It really is more like leasing it.
We don’t fully know what would happen if Steam decided to turn evil. But, so far they’ve been pretty reluctant to remove people’s purchases. Even when something is no longer available for sale on Steam, if it’s in your library you get to keep playing it. The bigger issue is when servers for old games go offline. Especially annoying when it’s not multiplayer games, but DRM-type servers for single-player games.
Fuck this shit.
If buying isn’t owning. Piracy isn’t stealing.
This is so anti consumer, I’m surprised the EU hasn’t stepped in to stop it yet
If we break into people’s homes and destroy their property, maybe they’ll have to give us money to replace what was lost?
Why has no one come up with this business strategy before.
