Do you own a PlayStation? Did you "buy" content from Discovery? Sucks to be you!

[thewayne]

Sony is about to remove programs that people 'bought' via their PS from the Discovery Channel, including Myth Busters and Naked and Afraid. All gone, bye bye. And I would say the odds of getting any money back would be similar to playing an XBox game disc in your PS, i.e. zero.

The issue is the merger between Discovery and Warner, apparently Sony got sliced out of the deal and now no longer has license to carry or resell their programming, which means all that Discovery content that people thought they purchased is going away. They bought a license to view it, and not in perpetuity.

This is why you buy physical media, peeps! I will on rare occasion rent a movie off my Apple TV, but I never buy programming through it for just this reason. You can get a standard Bluray player for less than a hundred bucks, no reason not to have one.

https://kotaku.com/sony-ps4-ps5-discovery-mythbusters-tv-1851066164

Comments

[disneydream06]

I have never bought like that either.
Give me a disc any day. :)
Hugs, Jon

[lovelyangel]

Funny thing... I continue to invest in Blu-rays like crazy... and this morning I woke up and had a frightening thought... what happens when I can’t get a Blu-ray player to replace my current one (should it break)? I say this as someone who once collected LaserDiscs (and still owns a bunch – which I think I’ll have to dispose of. I have a LaserDisc player that I’d have to rig some adapters get decent output to a modern day TV. It’s all dead.) As Blu-rays and DVDs are disappearing from places like Best Buy – are the players far behind?

I guess I was angsting as I prefer Blu-ray to DVD – but I realize that I can’t read Blu-ray discs on my computer – but I can read DVDs. Should I be buying DVDs instead? Anyway, I woke being concerned for my personal library.

[thewayne]

When I bought my new PC gaming rig earlier this year, getting a built-in DVD burner wasn't even an option!  I wasn't very happy about that.  I don't know if Apple is even selling external DVD drives anymore.  You can buy external BR drives, I'm not sure how much scrounging that you have to do to find them.

[lovelyangel]

Oh, I have external optical drives - a Blu-ray/DVD drive and a spare DVD drive (set to Region 2 so that I can watch Japanese DVDs). It's just that a Blu-ray drive can't actually play video from a Blu-ray because of copy protection. They don't come with the licensed SW or firmware that lets you watch video. Mainline computer apps (including Apple's) have licensed the rights to watch DVDs. If I could find a decent Blu-ray player app, maybe I'd fret less. But just a Blu-ray drive doesn't do me much good.

I just now looked at the App Store, and there are only two marginal apps (by the same company it appears) each costs $50 or more – and don't work all that well.

I think I've used makeMKV to rip a Blu-ray to disc for a media server, but the files are huge, and I'm not sure how much compression is reasonable. If I'm going to lose a bunch of quality through compression, I might as well buy DVDs. At one time I thought I was going to build a big Plex media server, but I've given up on that idea. It's just too much work.

[silveradept]

I don't have a lot of experience with Macs and macOS, but I have generally had good results from VLC for all kinds of playing media files and media discs. They usually make it available for most platforms. It may not be the smoothest operation, but it may work. (Or it may not.) makeMKV is often the better option for control and manipulation and finding settings that work for you, but that requires having hard drive space enough for the rips. I'm sorry there aren't any easy and obvious solutions for you there.

[thewayne]

I was unaware of the software issue, that makes sense sadly.  I bought into a Kickstarter for a SAN, I'm hoping it'll deliver early next year.  I think I spec'ed a good 30 TB for it, I might bump it another drive when it comes to final delivery.  Most of my collection is DVD, though I should dig out my LaserDisc player(s) and see what I can do to capture them - if I have anything really worth capturing.

[silveradept]

You can hear my grumble about how we never should have let this whole "you got a license to this thing, not a copy of the thing" happen when software was trying to pull that shit, and also how much buying stuff with DRM attached to it is a fool's game, for situations just such as these. (Even though I have a lot of things that have DRM attached to them through Steam, yes.)

Plenty of companies still fail to understand that the reason that all media files aren't being traded over pirate networks is because they're more convenient to watch and use in some situations. Once that stops, so does the incentive not to pirate so as to get a controllable copy of things.

And I suspect we'd buy things on media plenty...if only they would be released on the media we want to buy them on!

[thewayne]

I maintain an old PC with an old OS because it runs a cracker for for some things that I buy.  The program doesn't work with newer OSes.  I don't trade the stuff or post them up on boards, it's purely for my internal library.

[silveradept]

That makes sense. They're are probably a fair number of those kinds of things roaming about, making sure that bought content stays owned, rather than the possibility of it getting pulled back at any time because someone else said so.

[thewayne]

When Amazon yanked that copy of 1984 from Kindle and cost that AP student his application paper, it's like 'I ain't gonna let that happen to me.  I buy ebooks every week and own literally thousands.

[silveradept]

Yeah. The ones I get are not infested with DRM, and if I were getting them, I'd find ways of getting the DRM out of them before allowing them to go further.