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

[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.