*What rights do you have to the digital movies, TV shows and music you buy online? That question was on the minds of Telstra TV Box Office customers this month after the company announced it would shut down the service in June. Customers were told that unless they moved over to another service, Fetch, they would no longer be able to access the films and TV shows they had bought. *
Pretty straightforward. You need to host your stuff on your own hardware, ideally. You need good backups. You obviously can pay someone to do it for you but it does add complexity. In any case, streaming services are dead men walking by this point I think.
This is worse than a streaming service dropping a show. They are removing the ability to play digital files that people purchased.
Its happening for quite some time now. Recently sony did that on the playstation. Thats why we need to go back to self hosting the files (without drm).
Subscription streaming where you don’t “own” anything probably has a future, but I think you’re right that the writing is on the wall for digital media purchases.
I dont think streams have a future either. Look at the amount of abuse potential by companies and how far enshittification already progressed. If you have prime, you now get ads in prime video. Its disgusting.
What’s funny is that’s how it started. Apple sold movies as early as 2007 before Netflix or Amazon video or whatever and expected you to host the files locally either on your computer or your AppleTV (which had a hard disk drive at the time) and stream it locally over iTunes. If you lost the file, that was supposed to be it.
Of course, you still had to authenticate your files with the DRM service, and eventually they moved libraries online and gave you streaming access to any files you had purchased.
I remember that time. I rented a couple of apple movies when netflix wasnt a thing.