Sony strikes deal with Discovery, will not delete purchased programming from Play Stations

[thewayne]

In an eleventh hour deal, an agreement was made and people's purchases of shows like Myth Busters will not be remotely purged from their gaming consoles in the deep of the night. Over 1,300 Discovery shows were slated to be wiped on New Year's Eve, sans agreement, this is good news to those who bought digital copies rather than physical media.

Sadly, in August of last year, purchasers of Studio Canal content did not receive such a reprieve and lost their content due to a collapsed licensing agreement.

PHYSICAL MEDIA, PEOPLE! THEY CAN'T LICENSE THAT AWAY FROM YOU IF YOU HAVE IT IN YOUR HAND!

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/playstation-will-not-delete-discovery-tv-shows-after-all

Comments

[arlie]

Sadly, they really don't want to sell you copies you can actually keep. Often they try to enforce this by removing the media players from standard model devices. (Apple led that curve, and their various dis-improvements lost a lot of people's purchased music.)

I continue to collect paper books. What music I have is on CD or cassette; Apple purchased and killed the one music streaming service I was willing to use. Fortunately I'm not much into visual media, so my total absence of accessible movies is not a problem. (I can't even use YouTube, due to a conflict between them and my ad-blocking software, which I haven't bothered to take the time to find a way to work around.) Digital games will eventually become unavailable to me; Steam with its buggy forced upgrades was only the beginning; now they + Apple have conspired to make purchased 32-bit games unavailable even on Apple devices kept downrev to support them, as Steam's copy protection disservice will no longer run on those devices. (I have some hope of creating a working setup for the windows/dos versions of some of these games, running via windows/dos emulation, and have had some success with the few that support linux.)

Three cheers for Good/Grand old games (gog.com), which doesn't impose copy protection. Old games that they make available stay usable unless/until one can no longer keep the needed hardware working.

And that gets me to the one correction to make to your post. I don't have physical media for gog games; I just have digital copies. The problem isn't actually physical media; it's copy protection and cloud storage - all you need is a copy that you can use without farther contact with its vendor.

[thewayne]

Quite right.  While I do buy tons of ebooks, I also have the means of breaking DRM so I have the files and I maintain pretty good backups.  While I would like physical copies and do enjoy them now and again, I just don't have the physical space.