The Christmas season has got off to a distinctly unfestive start for users of the PlayStation Store with news that the service will not only be losing more than 1200 of the video titles it carries by the end of the month, but that nobody who has bought any of these disappearing titles will be entitled to any sort of refund.
On December 1 some PS store users received an email from the service that simply and starkly stated the following:
“Dear PlayStation Customer.
As of December 31, 2023, due to our content licensing arrangements with content providers, you will no longer be able to watch any of your previously purchased Discovery content and the content will be removed from your video library.
Click here for a full list of affected titles that will no longer be supported.
We sincerely thank you for your continued support.
Thank you
PlayStation Store”
If you didn’t get the email, you can find confirmation of its content on the PlayStation website, where it appears as a Legal Update Notice.
Sony introduces you to the concept that digital content you paid for can be taken away without … [+] refunds at short notice.
Photo: Sony
The message from the PlayStation Store may be short, but it says much about the state of content ‘ownership’ in 2023. In particular, it provides consumers with another stark reminder that even if you ‘buy’ (rather than rent) content from a digital-only service, you don’t truly own it. Rather you’re just purchasing a license to watch the content – a license that often isn’t entirely in the hands of the service you’re buying it from. So if a service provider loses the license for a bit of content for whatever reason, then anyone who’s paid for their own personal use license loses access to that content too.
It’s important to note as well that there’s no mention in the PlayStation Store’s message about its loss of Discovery content of any solution to this problem. So no system is provided, for instance, for, say, downloading affected shows that you may ‘own’. When December 31 ticks over into January 1, that’s it: all the Discovery content covered by the ending licensing arrangement between Sony PlayStation Store and Discovery will no longer be available to you watch via the PlayStation Store.
Nor is there any suggestion in PlayStation’s announcement that you might expect any refunds for the content licenses you bought but are about to lose. This is because the PlayStation Store and PlayStation Network’s massive set of terms and conditions include riders such as condition 15.5.1 of PlayStation Store rules, which states: “You can use a Product in the ways described in the licence, but do not own the product.” And there may also be more specific phrases included in the T&Cs you have to agree to when you buy a specific title.
Of course, few if any typical consumers take the time to read an online service’s full terms and conditions, and so instead merely assume the usual rules of consumerism apply: As in, if you’ve bought rather than rented something, you own it. Until, at least, you yourself decide you no longer want it. But this just isn’t the case – or, at least, cannot be taken for granted – with content purchased digitally.
It’s not clear from the PlayStation Store Legal Update Notice who is to ‘blame’ for the loss of Discovery content with just a month’s notice. It could be Sony was no longer prepared to pay whatever Discovery content owner Warner Bros wanted to be paid for continued access to Discovery content, or it could be that Warner Bros just no longer wanted the PlayStation Store to have access to its Discovery content for some commercial reason of its own.
Christopher Nolan recently talked about ‘evil’ streaming services potentially removing content from … [+] their libraries during an introduction to Oppenheimer in an LA theater. PHOTO – PARIS, FRANCE – JULY 11: Christopher Nolan attends the “Oppenheimer” premiere at Cinema Le Grand Rex on July 11, 2023 in Paris, France. (Photo by Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images)
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This is all kind of besides the point, though. All that really matters from a consumer perspective is that this PlayStation Store news is just the latest confirmation that even if choose to ‘buy’ a piece of digital content, you likely don’t truly own it and it could, depending on the terms and conditions for it that you almost certainly didn’t read, be taken away from you potentially at any time at short notice and without any compensation for your loss.
While this may be a rude awakening for people who’ve bought digital content from Discovery through their PlayStation Store accounts, though, it’s another gift for fans of physical media. For while I guess it may be technically possible for any device that’s connected to the Internet to potentially remotely remove your right to play specific DVD, Blu-ray or 4K Blu-ray discs, the system for doing so is much more complicated; establishing the rights to do such a thing are much harder to argue people were aware of when they bought a title on disc; and it simply has never happened yet.
It’s worth recalling director Christopher Nolan’s recent words on this subject, where he said during an introduction to his Oppenheimer film in Los Angeles that “we put a lot of care and attention into the Blu-ray version… and trying to translate the photography and the sound, putting that into the digital realm with a version you can buy and own at home and put on a shelf so no evil streaming service can come steal it from you.”
Sadly, of course, it’s becoming increasingly common for both video and, especially, game titles to only get digital releases, with no physical media option available. (In fact, there may well not be physical releases for many of the Discovery shows leaving the PlayStation Store.) Or, in video’s case, it sometimes happens, as with the recent home entertainment release of Kenneth Branagh’s A Haunting In Venice, that the best version of a title – 4K resolution with HDR – is reserved for a studio’s streaming service, rather than it coming out to the same (or, actually, better) standard on a 4K Blu-ray disc.
I also understand the convenience appeal of streaming and digital versions of films, TV shows and games versus filling your home with disc boxes. If nothing else, though, this latest news from the PlayStation Store proves again that unless you can physically hold a particular title you’ve bought in your hand, you can’t consider it yours forever.
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