‘My whole library is wiped out’: what it means to own movies and TV in the age of streaming services
‘My whole library is wiped out’: what it means to own movies and TV in the age of streaming services
Ownership rights are buried in the fine print and downloading or buying physical copies may be the only ways to keep your favourites
*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. *
She later said Telstra had contacted her and offered a free Fetch box, which she acknowledged was a “reasonable resolution”.
And we have learned exactly nothing here. See you in 2 years when Fetch closes down and you are not getting anything back because you actually did not "buy" those movies on Fetch but on the previous platform.
i tried to get into streaming but i grew increasingly uncomfortable with paying forever as titles appear and disappear at the whim of suits. how could that possibly be a pleasant UX for customers?
i'd take the hassle of having discs or managing a server any day of the week over paying these goons for access to their files which they happily negotiate away for financial reasons. it's just a disgusting paradigm. when netflix was starting streaming, i thought (i was like 15) we were emerging into a great new age, where every show you could ever want was on one beautiful service.
now they won't even let you share accounts or screenshot the fucking show (a pig-headed anti-piracy measure which is mind-blowingly stupid given every single show on there is available for free if you know where to look ANYWAY. what are they DOING.)
fuck streaming, fuck netflix, fuck spotify. crash and burn. topple like the house of cards you are.
What would it take to get a "Steam but TV/movies instead of games"? I feel like if I could see reviews of movies and I could buy them and download them and have them forever and buy them on sale and all that good stuff, it wouldn't be so bad.
How come none of the streaming services have gone for this model? Steam is swimming in money, surely this method could work?
it feels good to host a media server.
It's also a fucking nightmare when shit explodes, but damn do i feel good in every other instance.
The idea that you could trust a corporation, any corporation, at its word is laughable on its face, and yet the courts have been relying on them to "follow the rules" unsupervised for years. Now capitalism doesn't make anything that isn't designed as a piece of shit that falls apart, and everything is a lie that they're also making money from, from plastics recycling (not real and they make money on the chemicals they sell to the recycling industry) to the content you make that they get paid for and you don't.
The whole thing needs to go, all of it.
If purchasing isn't ownership, piracy isn't stealing.
You don't own anything that is not on your own system and/or without any DRM.
There are obvious responses here along the lines of embracing piracy and (re-)embracing hard copy ownership.
All that aside though, this feels like a fairly obvious point for legal intervention. I wouldn't be surprised if there are already existing grounds for legal action, it's just that the stakes are likely small enough and costs of legal action high enough to be prohibitive. Which is where the government should come in on the advice of a consumer body.
Some reasonable things that could be done:
- Money back requirements
- Clear warnings to consumers about "ownership" being temporary
- Requiring tracking statistics of how long "ownership" tends to be and that such is presented to consumers before they purchase
- If there are structural issues that increase the chances of "withdrawn" ownership (such as complex distribution deals etc), a requirement to notify the consumer of this prior to purchase.
These are basic things based on transparency that tend to already exist in consumer regulation (depending on your jurisdiction of course). Streaming companies will likely whinge (and probably have already to prevent any regulation around this), but that's the point ... to force them to clean up their act.
As far as the relations between streaming services and the studios (or whoever owns the distribution rights), it makes perfect sense for all contracts to have embedded in them that any digital purchase must be respected for the life of the purchaser even if the item cannot be purchased any more. It's not hard, it's just the price of doing business.
All of this is likely the result of the studios being the dicks they truly are and still being used to pushing everyone around (and of course the tech world being narcissistic liars).
They could offer a way to download a copy and steganographically tag it to hell with your id so that they know if you distribute it. You can "loan it out" by letting friends stream off your Plex or whatever. If you start selling that streaming service or it shows up in torrents, it has your ID on it.
Boom, you own it forever and you're incentivized not to over share.
Or you know sell DRM free versions and let people do whatever, but that probably has a snowballs chance in hell.
Just another victim of WEF.
Consumers are getting fucked. Media companies will continue to make it worse while trying to improve their bottom line. How long until it is all pay per view at sky high prices that only keep going up?
I try to own my media in physical form as much as possible. But I don't think it will be long until physical is not an available format. Or unaffordable, like vinyl is now.
We should have resisted and stopped the DMCA. We should stop all media being rental only. But we do not resist, we comply. We bend over and get fucked like the sheeple we are.
Until consumers take control of their government they will continue to take it up the ass from corporations. They count on you to comply.
I went the route of a physical collection, but man do they make it difficult unless you get a commercial player that is likely to have ads and doesn’t integrate well into a home theater setup.
I’ve taken to doing everything I can to play things through my computer, but they do everything in their power to make them unplayable. This includes things like adding hundreds of bogus playlists so you don’t know which one to play, adding extra layers of encryption that cause image corruption a few chapters into the movies, and more.
If they just allowed you to easily watch and rip the movies that I pay actual money for, I think a lot more people would be open to a physical collections of their favorites. As it stands, I can’t really recommend it.
I understand that things don't last forever. But and it sounds selfish to say and maybe people might agree, I'd like for these things to last as long as I'm alive to view them whenever I please.
Though I'm really sick of this god damn hot potato shit with the content that's spread across several streaming platforms. As well as unstable services. "Oh, we've shut this down, fuck your purchases" "Oh, we couldn't sustain this platform, go elsewhere".
It means a lot to the customer. Doesn't mean dick to these services.
That's why I'm always interested in self-hosting. I have my own Plex and Jellyfin seedbox server for the private trackers I'm in, with a VPS hosting an OpenVPN to make it look like I'm in a different country, just to make it that much safer. It works damn well.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters Git Popular version control system, primarily for code IP Internet Protocol NAS Network-Attached Storage NUC Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers Plex Brand of media server package SSD Solid State Drive mass storage VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)
[Thread #746 for this sub, first seen 14th May 2024, 01:15] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
My whole library is wipped out
I assumed this was about an actual library and not some shmuck who got suckered into a thinly veiled rental service.
Who’s “we” here ;)
New Lemmy Post: ‘My whole library is wiped out’: what it means to own movies and TV in the age of streaming services (https://lemmyverse.link/lemmy.world/post/15374734)
Tagging: #SelfHosted(Replying in the OP of this thread (NOT THIS BOT!) will appear as a comment in the lemmy discussion.)
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I'm just confused about why people are so mad about it. In other cases where you rent space to put physical things you own so you can still access them later this happens too. Let's get into an example, and you guys tell me if I'm misunderstanding something:
If you have a car and have to change between summer and winter tires and you don't have space at home to store the winter tires during the summer, you can go to a tire-hotel and they will 1. Sell you new tires, 2. switch your tires - a service you pay for - and 3. store the tires for you until next winter - a service you pay for too. Once the company goes out of business (or they focus on a different business) they tell you to get your tires or they will be discarded if you don't. So you have to get them from them and you stop paying for the storage.
Isn't it the same with the movies you buy and store at a place where you then rent storage to keep them there? As long as they allow you to download your purchases I see no difference. You can't make someone else to keep working the same job until the heat death of the universe.
"I grew my garden on my neighbor's lawn, and he mowed it over! I bought those plants!"
I'm finding it hard to feel any kind of sympathy for someone who thinks they have rights to permanent access on any sort of streaming service.
I say that fully cognisant normies don't spend much time thinking about where there data is and who has the right to it. I just don't think many people would think of movies they've watched on their "telstra TV Box Office" as being in "their' library.
That said, self hosting movies isn't for me. For many people it might be. In my case it just doesn't make any sense to have a server with all the tb. I was catch & release torrenting for several years but more recently stremio. Without any doubt stremio has been the most convenient.
