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

[white_aster]

-_- Thus why I have so far refused to buy any movie digitally in any way. Even if they don't decide that my license is void for some reason, I've seen enough services come and go that I don't trust them to be around in 20 years when I get a hankering to watch that movie again.

(that and occasionally buying a pile of DVDs on Thriftbooks for $50 is almost as soothing to my magpie soul as browsing used media stores used to be.)

[dewline]

Damn right, and I'm still sure that there's lawyers tasked at every Big Media Company to find the ways to finally do that to us all.

[thewayne]

I love cruising through used book shops that sell DVDs.  There's two great ones in Phoenix: Bookman's Used Books and Zia's Records and Tapes.  Excellent places for used music and vids.  You never know what you'll find!  I used to go through pawn shops for music CDs, but haven't done that in ages.

[disneydream06]

I feel very happy with my dvd library. LOL........
Hugs, Jon

[moxie_man]

What they'll do is buy-out the technology and shut it down. Then as people's DVD/BluRay players wear-out and there is no way to repair or replace them...

Yes, I can be very cynical about BMC and other corporations.

[silveradept]

Physical media is important, but there's still too much stuff that never gets a physical release, so that you never get the opportunity to hold it in your hands. At that point, it's either let it go or give the finger to the DMCA, and I'm pretty sure enough people have been raised to understand that "keep circulating the tapes" is the correct and moral answer.

[thewayne]

Ditto!  Though I'll have to buy a regionless or second DVD player if we move to Europe.

[thewayne]

And they wonder why they can never fully eliminate media piracy.

[silveradept]

That would require listening to customers and giving them what they want.

[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.

[disneydream06]

That could complicate things. :o

[thewayne]

Meh, not too much.  My receiver has multiple HDMI inputs that are not being used: I only have my Apple TV and my Blueray player plugged in right now, at least two or three free right now.

[disneydream06]

Time to go shopping. LOL............