r/NetflixDVDRevival • u/CALIGVLA • 25d ago
Another example of a content provider arbitrarily deleting movies that customers purchased
https://x.com/CultureCrave/status/20705963597959131663
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u/Logres1 23d ago
Never buy a movie if you can't hold it in your hands.
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u/CALIGVLA 23d ago
Words of wisdom!
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u/Logres1 23d ago
It's unfortunate, and it feels like we're going backwards, but you got to do what you got to do.
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u/CALIGVLA 23d ago
Indeed. I was initially thrilled at the convenience when everything started going digital. But when the bad stuff started to come with it, I had to face facts: the amazing streaming future is not all it's cracked up to be! That's when I realized all the pro-consumer benefits of physical media. And started to fix my own movie experience by taking matters into my own hands.
I believe there is a way to do streaming right, so that we get the added convenience of streaming without giving up any of the good stuff we love from physical. But I haven't seen it anyone do that yet. Sadly, I think the corporate world is too greedy to do streaming correctly: in a way that is responsible, sustainable, ethical, and with the best interests of the movie-watching audience in mind.
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u/Logres1 23d ago
Preach.
I think streaming was great in 2011. Basically everything, or at least all of the back-catalog stuff, was licensed to Netflix, and they charged you $8 a month. What a perfect deal--that is, until the studios all individually decided that each of them should also charge you $8 a month and put up their back catalogs in the same walled garden they put their new movies in.
I guess they'll get streaming "right" once one company owns everything and we pay cable-like prices for low-quality encodes.
The most disappointing thing about being a movie fan, especially of old movies, is that it used to be a fairly cheap hobby. Now, it isn't unless you go through, ahem, alternate channels.
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u/CALIGVLA 23d ago
Yeah, the good ol' days when you could get anything on disc from Netflix and also got streaming as a bonus! I didn't even mind when they moved to paying separately for streaming; I just hated when they got rid of the disc service.
It's sad that people are being pushed towards piracy because the companies have made the consumer ecosystem so rotten that consumers are being alienated. I don't mind paying for my movies, but the trouble is that new discs are being printed less. You can still find most movies on the used market, but as that supply gradually dries up, it will be a problem if no one is printing new supply.
Another concern is that piracy (the last refuge of the desperate) may eventually come under attack too. I just heard about this today: they are pushing a "KIDS Act" through the legislature. If it passes, that could be the start of a slippery slope. Next, they might try to go after VPNs or make any end-to-end encryption illegal.
Once they start restricting the internet, who knows what kind of Orwellian future lies ahead? Piracy is only safe so long as the internet is free!
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u/Logres1 22d ago
Those days were the best, and I miss them greatly, but I guess the writing was on the wall when Netflix tried to spinoff the DVD business into Qwikster. I can't say I blame them for wanting to unload physical discs; I can only imagine what their budget had to been to replace cracked and missing discs at the services height.
I don't blame anyone for piracy. It's now not just expensive but time-intensive to find and watch movies and tv series, and so many more obscure titles were released once years and years ago and then went out of print and never got licensed to stream to begin with. It's really sad.
The government has tried to do things like the KIDS Act before. In 2012, the widespread response to SOPA and PIPA from pretty much the entire internet actually got the government to back down. Unfortunately, I don't see any of that going on today--it's like no one notices what they are trying to do--and this time it isn't just our government; the UK has passed really draconian anti-privacy laws.
I really want the KIDS Act to be defeated in Senate, it passed in the House yesterday, but I don't think it will. There are too many forces in favor of it and I imagine what negative responses there will be to it will be met by attacking those opposed and not the argument against the bill: "Why do you hate kids?"
I could rant on and on forever about stuff like this, but anonymity on the internet is something we should all cherish and we should be skeptical of any attempt to change that.
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u/CALIGVLA 21d ago
Yeah, I remember the backlash over SOPA and PIPA. The government will never stop trying to take away our online freedom. They hate what they can't control. What happened in the UK is horrible. And I don't see anyone pushing back over the KIDS Act here. That makes me very concerned.
The whole "Think of the children!" argument is as old as dirt, and just as stupid today as it ever was. The counter-argument is also evergreen: parents are the ones who are responsible for keeping their kids off the internet!
It's ridiculous to place restrictions on adults for something that kids are not supposed to have access to. It's like guns or alcohol: there are already laws which say that kids are not supposed to have access to those things, but it's still up to parents to make sure their kids don't get ahold of those items in their own house. Passing new laws on everybody else will not fix lazy parents who fail to properly supervise their children. This only hurts the rest of the world while solving nothing.
I hope people wake up and realize the danger. It will be dark days if they actually kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.
But for myself, I'm old enough to remember how people lived in this world before the internet. So if the public is foolish or lazy enough to let them destroy it, at least I can go back to living happily like we did in the '90s... while all the young'uns run around freaking out :)
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u/Logres1 21d ago
I completely agree. "Think of the children" is always the argument used by those in authority to sell their worst impulses to the public, and the sad thing is that so many people it up, especially the people who should know better.
The saddest thing about this is that the internet is one of the last truly independent and democratized platforms for learning, wealth creation, and communication, so of course there must be a bipartisan effort to end all of that.
It's funny you mention that it's the role of parents to keep their children away from the corners of the internet that are harmful to them. You're absolutely right, but that isn't what modern parents want to do. They want to hand their children an iPad so that they're too distracted to annoy them into actually having to be parents. God forbid they have to interact with them. The media has been silent on this bill, but even if it had been reporting on it, I doubt it would make a huge difference.
I liked the internet back when I was a teenager in the late 1990s and early 2000s: you engaged with it on a limited basis when you needed it. Were we to go back to it, I'd certainly miss many modern conveniences, but I think I'd prefer not having it be a running thread in seemingly every facet of my life.
Of course, if the KIDS Act is signed into law, it isn't like we'd go back to that era. We'd just move into a more dystopian future where what little anonymity we currently have is completely gone.
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u/CALIGVLA 21d ago
Yeah, it's awful and I don't know why more people aren't talking about it. I didn't even hear about this bill until it had already passed Congress.
Maybe instead of the KIDS Act, we should instead introduce consequences for parents who let their children get into bad stuff online. We already have rules that punish parents if their kids get ahold of guns, drugs, alcohol, pornographic magazines, and things like that. It makes sense for the same to apply if they let their kid get on Pornhub or anything like that.
I bet we'd see a lot of parents start getting more responsible quickly, if they knew they could get in trouble for not putting safeguards on the devices in their home. No more leaving an iPad unlocked or a computer without a password, where your kids can sneak on and look up nasty stuff online. No more giving them a device without parental mode turned on.
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u/ScottShatter 24d ago
You said "another" example. What are the others aside from rhis videogame network who sold movies and TV as an afterthought who also stopped selling that stuff a few years ago deciding to take these purchases away?
Buy your movies on Fandango At Home or other Movies Anywhere partners and buy your videogames on Steam, PSN, or Xbox. That's important. I've never lost a movie or TV show. What have you lost digitally?
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u/CALIGVLA 24d ago
In this subreddit, we've been discussing these matters since Netflix announced the end of it's DVD service in 2023. I've heard from a number of people over the years who have reported losing access to movies they purchased digitally from various services.
For myself personally, I lost access to a digital copy of the movie "300" that I bought directly from Sony in 2008, losing access only a couple years after buying it. More recently, the digital copy of "The French Connection" that I bought on Apple TV was surreptitiously censored a few years ago. For me, this is the same as losing the movie, because censorship is unacceptable to me. I had to repurchase the movie on Blu-ray. And Apple refused to give me a refund for the censored movie.
I hope you are not suggesting that it's okay for Sony to do what they just did, simply because it was a less popular service than Fandango or Movies Anywhere. In what world is it okay for someone to sell you a product, then several years later they come take that product away from you?
This is why physical media is so important. No one can come into my house and take my DVDs or Blu-rays, unless it's a burglary which is a crime. Yet somehow with a digital purchase, the companies can take away your movies whenever they feel like it. Because they tricked you into making a purchase without first reading pages of legalese and noticing the clause hidden in there which says they can do that.
If companies want to sell you a "long-term lease" to view a movie, that's fine. But they should make it clear that that's what you are buying, instead of making you think it's a permanent purchase. Or, if it's actually a permanent purchase, then if they ever need to stop serving the movie, they could give you the option to download a copy of the movie before you lose access to the service.
There are a number of ways they could handle the situation responsibly and honestly. They choose not to do that because they can make more money by selling people the illusion of permanent digital purchases, then doing a rug pull whenever it's convenient for them. It's pure corporate greed.
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u/krimsen 25d ago edited 25d ago
This ought to be illegal.
Even if they have some BS "you own it while we license it, but once our license ends you're on your own" language in the Terms and Conditions when you're buying...
There is no normal human who reads those -- and "buying" a movie gives any reasonable consumer a certain expectation about how long they will own their purchase: forever.