PlayStation is erasing 1,318 seasons of Discovery shows from customer libraries | The change comes as Warner Bros. tries to add subscribers to Max, Discovery+ apps.::The change comes as Warner Bros. tries to add subscribers to Max, Discovery+ apps.
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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.
Oh no, here I go pirating again!
Krombopulos Michael, the early years.
Games, movies, TV shows, doesn’t matter. I just love pirating!
I haven’t paid for a movie, show, or song since… like 2005.
Games get my money, but I usually wait a couple years to make sure they’re good lawl
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It’s probably not about getting the legitimate version rather about supporting the creators. Don’t scrounge a penny for work that you love. Eddit: better support a creator throu a donation instead of buying the song on Itunes or something.
Pay for a legitimate copy and also download a DRM-free one. That way you support the creator but don’t have to worry about it being stolen from you.
That’s it. I am heading to the goodwill and picking up some media. And I gotta find our old discs too.
No need, search for movie web and use it on a vpn for all the media you want for free
Welp time to start mass-buying dvd box sets and ripping the files, screw not owning shit you paid for
Don’t even waste your time and just go directly to the high seas. You’ll get all the same quality content several orders of magnitude faster.
Personally I don’t mind paying for content I legit get to keep, so long as the cost is reasonable. Yeah, overpriced old movies or stuff you can’t find, sure. Hoist the flag, my friend.
I have every season of Stargate SG-1 on DVD, and unfortunately one disc already has an unplayable scene due to scratches, but for the most part it’s in-tact.
No streaming service has the HD wide-screen versions available for streaming, and their subtitles are very… Summarizing. In sections.
I have a laptop with a USB connected dvd player, and I’ve been slowly converting the discs to my digital library, but holy shit is this a slow process.
I literally could have been done with every season and special feature of all three shows and the movies in the time it took me to rip the first season alone.
Buuuuut I don’t currently have a Very Pontoony Nautical vessel soooooo… I can’t go sailing right now.
Are you ripping and encoding them with Handbrake? You can at least speed it up a bit by just ripping them with MakeMKV and then leaving them in the full quality format to skip the long encode. This will take up more HDD space but save a ton of time comparably.
ripping off people who already paid for the content.
They didn’t pay for the shows. They paid for access to the shows. That’s all anyone gets these days.
They didn’t pay for the shows. They paid for access to the shows.
And, if they had made that completely clear, there would be less of an issue. If the “Buy” button was replaced with “Rent, Long Term” then maybe people would be less annoyed that their long-term rentals were now being forcibly returned. But, labelling the button “Buy” makes them more money.
“long term” is still indefinite and therefore unconscionable. “For at least 10 views” or “For at least 5 years” would work.
Another option would be Sony not entering unconscionable contracts with WB. They can because they’re gigantic and be laughed out of court if they tried to argue that their legal department didn’t spot the issue but their contract should have said that anythnig that gets licensed indeed gets licensed in perpetuity: That is, WB could say “don’t sell any new licenses any more”, but they couldn’t say “all licenses are now invalid, how you fulfil your contracts with your customers maybe buy boxsets”.
Ok, a technicality that still leaves the access removed. Regardless of whether they paid for it or the access to it.
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Woah… What a deep and original thought… Oh wow…
Fuck those guys, especially for ripping off people who already paid for the content.
If either side cared about good customer service, they’d find a compromise. Either Sony would pay for the purchases and make it available under the new home at whatever the new sales-channel is called. Or, Warner Bros. Discovery would switch the licenses and make it available themselves.
Of the two options, Warner Bros. Discovery doing that would make the most sense. For them, it would have zero cost. They’d lose out on the potential to re-sell the same content to people twice, but they’d keep potential future customers happy by doing that. Especially true for people who had bought a few seasons of a show but hadn’t finished it. They’d be incentivized to purchase future seasons using the new store.
The fact that neither side is willing to make these concessions shows just how little they care about their customers. They deserve all the copyright infringement they’re about to see.
Agreed. Streaming services always seemed like gilded cages to me. You can only see what they allow you to see - piracy or old-school Netflix DVD delivery gives you all the options. The promise of being able to stream any content at any time, with the producers and people involved being able to get compensated fairly and justly, just isn’t reality with these ghouls running the show.
The model (in the current form, of artificially restricted licensing) seems like less a way to curate a media catalog, but more like a way to curate the subscribers and culture.
piracy or old-school Netflix DVD delivery gives you all the options.
Netflix cancelled their DVD service in September. In an entirely unrelated move, I have recently cancelled my Netflix service…
Kind of.
You don’t have yearly contracts and it’s a lot easier to start and stop a particular service at any time.
It’s weird to see this take when I remember streaming started out that this was what was heralded. You could pick and choose what streaming services you wanted and you could change them easily. You didn’t have to buy the sport package or pay the built in royalties of sports teams if you didn’t watch sports.
For now. However, I’m going to pick at something you mentioned about switching when you want - sure, but most services offer a discount for a year’s subscription. I don’t think it’s an insignificant amount of people that might buy in on that. Switching becomes irrelevant when the service already has your money.
Also, services are separating popular shows, unbundling for lack of a better word, to other platforms to force people to subscribe to more services. Effectively that’s making you pay for shows you don’t want (like your sports reference) to get the shows you do.
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.
I agree, it feels like this is a place where the law or regulation needs to come in and enforce something like - rent vs lease vs buy.
The average consumer thinks “buy” means forever, and that’s just not the case in these scenarios. It really is more like leasing it.
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We don’t fully know what would happen if Steam decided to turn evil. But, so far they’ve been pretty reluctant to remove people’s purchases. Even when something is no longer available for sale on Steam, if it’s in your library you get to keep playing it. The bigger issue is when servers for old games go offline. Especially annoying when it’s not multiplayer games, but DRM-type servers for single-player games.
Steam already tried to argue before EU courts that they’re leasing, not selling, and it’s not flying not because any wording but because they sell stuff for fixed rates, not recurring fees.
They’re still appealing that “you have to let players sell games” decision, maybe another two or three years until they have to cave. Not sure how much of that is steam wanting to do that vs. steam wanting to look good in the eyes of publishers who of course dislike the 2nd hand market much more than stores, those can earn a buck off it by being a middleman.
Not sure how much of that is steam wanting to do that vs. steam wanting to look good in the eyes of publishers
Or knowing that it’s essentially impossible to do with 99.99% of games currently on Steam. So, it might just be that they want to avoid the massive headache of having to renegotiate deals with thousands of publishers over millions of games.
The publisher wouldn’t be able to enforce that stuff, doing that would be illegal for the same reason as Steam not allowing sales. Neither is permitted to keep end user licenses hostage.
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Still pissed I can’t play Mercenaries 2 anymore since I don’t have the correct console to play offline, since playing online freezes the game when it attempts to connect to servers.
I tried all the workarounds on the 360, too. None of them worked so I just resigned to disconnecting my Xbox whenever I wanted to play. Which wouldn’t be a problem now, but back then it was the worst to have to get up and unplug something and be unable to talk to my friends while I play.
Also that option is always like 4 times more expensive for no real reason
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.
Planned obsolescence is the preferred method (and doesn’t require breaking and entering).
Pay us protection or we’ll smash your business.
Wait a minute, I’ve heard this before.
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.
I’m just surprised there are over 1,000 seasons of shows on discovery Channel… once you get past the gold mining, crab fishing, Mythbusting and sending people out into the wilderness naked, what’s left?
Storage wars and trucks on ice.
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I think WB is counting on people blaming Sony even though it seems like WB is the one who decided not to play nice.
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Um, what? You think removing 1,318 seasons of shows only affects 100 users? They’ve been selling these since the PS3 era and it’s hundreds of millions of devices.
…did you possibly think it meant 1,318 total purchases? 😂
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1,318 seasons means 1,318 seasons, not 1,318 total sales. Click on the notice in the article for a list of all the seasons of different shows if you still don’t understand.
Each season could have been bought by 100 people, or by 1,000 people. Seasons of popular shows like Mythbusters might have been bought by millions of people. We have no idea how many customers are affected since it doesn’t list that information.
Bro your reading comprehension is something else.
If buying isn’t owning, then piracy isn’t stealing.
Oh, so theft?
If this isn’t theft, then the inverse isn’t either. Raise your flags, it’s time once again to sail the high seas
If paying for something dosent mean I own it, then piracy isn’t stealing!
It never was.
You’re copying, not stealing. When you steal something, it is gone from the person you took it from. When you copy something, both of you have it.
“Piracy” being stealing is exactly the same as “stealing” someone’s ideas. It’s a lame excuse so people richer than us can be even richer.
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.
Yeah, it’s not like the Servarr application suite has made piracy literally easier than using streaming services.
The caveat is that it’s still mostly just for moderately tech savvy individuals. It’s easier for the people who have the knowledge to set it up, have access to decent trackers, a VPN, newsgroups, and hardware to run the suite on.
Piracy isn’t hard, but there is a barrier of entry that most people won’t overcome.
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?
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.
surely entice those people to sign up for that Max/Discovery+ subscription.
That’s the sad part. It will. These people already have more money than sense, or else they wouldn’t be subscribing to streaming services at all.
Yo Ho, Yo Ho, A Pirate’s Life for Me 🏴☠️
We download torrents, we use VPNs
Drink up, me hearties, yo ho!
Copyright law can kiss our rear ends
Drink up, me hearties, yo ho!
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Two companies though, one with multiple business units under various names. Warner Bros. Discovery owns Warner Bros., HBO Max and Discovery.
You will own nothing and you will love it.
They’re gonna start feeding us bugs next!
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.
