Technology

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.

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.

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.

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.

Seems like piracy is going to become fashionable again

Maybe I am underestimating the amount of people buying seasons of TV shows on PlayStation, but this seems like a lot of PR pain for very little potential upside.

If buying isn't owning, then piracy isn't stealing.

Oh, so theft?

Damn. Maybe we shouldn't have downloaded cars. It's only fair that the capitalist collective should be able to delete our vhs and DVDs etc in return right?

Streaming services: if we take the shows they purchased away from them, then they HAVE to subscribe to our service! There's nothing they can do if they want to watch their shows, piracy is soooo 2008.

This is Warner Bros being the bad guys, but also Sony for not refunding people. Either way it doesn't matter consumers lose out, all the more reason to pirate.

Im still trying to understand why this is legal. Is there more to the story that I'm missing?

Keeping the money and yanking back the content it was used to purchase will surely entice those people to sign up for that Max/Discovery+ subscription.

Only an out of touch corporate stooge would see a logical through line there.

Maybe more people would subscribe to discovery if the content wasn't so fucking abysmal. There's like 2 good shows on there, Mythbusters and how it's made

Yo Ho, Yo Ho, A Pirate’s Life for Me 🏴‍☠️

You will own nothing and you will love it.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

If you purchased any Discovery shows from the PlayStation Store, Sony has some bad news for you to discover.

The company recently announced that all Discovery content purchased on the PlayStation Store will be erased before 2024.

But there were users who had already purchased stuff from the PlayStation Store and, believe it or not, expect to be able to watch it when they want, since they paid money to buy (rather than rent) it.

Shows getting axed from user libraries include Wives With Knives, An Idiot Abroad, Evil Twins, and Body Bizarre.

But there are also plenty of more well-known titles on the list of purchased content being revoked, including American Chopper, Cake Boss, MythBusters, Shark Week, and Say Yes to the Dress.

That means there's a good chance numerous users will be affected by Sony's announcement.

The original article contains 332 words, the summary contains 138 words. Saved 58%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

So AOL bought Warner Brothers and initiated a paroxysm of "new media" hype way back in the 1900s. They had no fucking clue what to do so they sold it. AT&T bought it more recently and pretended like a technology company should own content until they too realized they had seriously fucked up.

Now right-wing "libertarian" David Zaslav is in charge of "Warner Brothers Discovery" and he could not give a flying fucking shit about content unless it's time to destroy wokeness at CNN again, which he's all about.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/15/magazine/david-zaslav-warner-media-discovery.html

I'm starting to think Warner Brothers is cursed. Like, Monkey's Paw cursed.

Never buying a TV show or movie I can't download ever again. Never have, but still, never again.

This is why anytime I buy content like this, I mirror it locally. DVDs, CDs, videos, music, whatever. GoG and Steam both allow local offline copies. Storage is cheap and not only can I continue to play these items if the store goes away, but I can also access them where and when I want thanks to things like Plex and Jellyfin.

Thermocline trust inversion, perfect example of why customer trust continues to erode and corporations continually lose credibility. Albeit Sony's not the only bad actor here, it's the overall agreements in place that were poor to begin with between businesses. The end result is a negative customer experience with all involved brands.

When the industry fails like this, we go back to incentivizing torrents.

Just let companies keep doing shit like this. They're only leading people down the path that is piracy.