Playstation set to remove purchased discovery channel tv shows from user accounts by end of the year
You will own nothing and be happy.
The all-digital future looks very promising.
I used to not see as much of an issue with it in the past. I’ve bought plenty of Steam games on sale and have even bought a couple digital games off PSN for the same reason. The problem with this is as you might’ve already heard from some game preservationist, this isn’t really you buying that piece of digital media so much as it is you just licensing it indefinitely until the site you buy it on decides to take it down for whatever reason they may choose. This is usually due to licensing agreements ending, which was the case here. Steam has delisted games before in the past, namely the Activision Spider-Man games after Activision’s licensing agreement with Marvel ended, however, in this case, if you were lucky enough to have bought them before they were delisted, they didn’t remove them from your account. In that sense, if there was any digital retailer that was better than the others it’d probably be Steam but regardless, they make it very clear as well that you own a license to your copies of the games you have there rather than owning them.
This is all made possible by a software called DRM that is attached to all these digital media whether that be games, movies, or music. Put simply, it is the use of technology to control and manage access to copyrighted material. In the case of Steam, this essentially makes it so you can’t play your games without having to be logged into your Steam account and going through the Steam client.
You also saw this being implemented early on for the Xbox One at release, which was way more egregious than anything you have even today. For one, it demanded an internet connection if you wanted to play your games, even if they were played entirely offline. It also had a policy that prevented users from sharing their games with their friends and family. With this system, if you were hypothetically sharing the same Xbox with a brother or sister and they bought a physical copy of Grand Theft Auto 5, that copy would be tied to their account, and you wouldn’t be able to play it on yours. If you tried to play their copy of the game, you would be prompted by the Xbox to buy it digitally through your account. In that sense, you wouldn’t have been able to sell your copy of that game whenever you wanted and if you lost your account, you wouldn’t be able to play the game. This was of course, very stupid and angered a lot of loyal Xbox fans. Microsoft had essentially handed the win to Sony who had also released at the time their new console, the Playstation 4. People who’d previously thought of themselves as Xbox loyalists had then found the idea of buying a Playstation perfectly normal.
Since 2013 however, all the major game console companies, whether that be Sony, Microsoft, and even Nintendo have been moving towards this completely digital world, mostly as it saves them lots of money they could otherwise lose from producing discs for all these games and movies and not getting enough sales on them.
The promise of digital media is that it can last forever, pristine and undisturbed by the forces of entropy constantly buffeting the material world. Unfortunately, a mess of online DRM and license agreements means that we mostly don’t own the digital stuff we buy, as most recently evidenced by the fact that Sony is about to delete Mythbusters, Naked and Afraid, and tons of other Discovery shows from PlayStation users’ libraries even if they already “purchased” them.
The latest pothole in the road to an all-digital future was discovered via a warning Sony recently sent out to PlayStation users who purchased TV shows made by Discovery, the reality TV network that recently merged with Warner Bros. in one of the most brutal and idiotic corporate maneuvers of our time. “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,” read a copy of the email that was shared with Kotaku.
It linked to a page on the PlayStation website listing all of the shows impacted. As you might imagine, given Discovery’s penchant for pumping out seasons of relatively cheap to produce but popular reality TV and documentary-based shows, there are a lot of them. They include, but are not limited to, hits such as: Say Yes to the Dress, Shark Week, Cake Boss, Long Island Medium, Deadly Women, and many, many more.
“Is there a way I can save this content?” asked one panicked PlayStation user on Reddit. “I use PS4...But I have bought many seasons of shows such as Dual Survival that I do not wish to lose. I was actually under the impression since I owned it, I wouldn’t ever lose it…”
Movies and TV shows first came to the PlayStation Network in 2008 via the PS3. At the time it was possible to transfer the content you bought between devices for viewing on things like the PlayStation Portable. Sony removed that option beginning with the PS4 and beyond. Now, essentially anything you buy on PSN, whether a PS5 blockbuster or, uh, Police Women of Cincinnati, is essentially just on indefinite loan until such time as the PlayStation servers die or the original copyright owner decides to pull the content.
This isn’t the first time Sony has done something like this and it won’t be the last. I’d say just buy your favorite shows on Bluray instead, but Sony and Microsoft also appear to be planning to slowly phase out optical disc drives in the future. Even the new PS5 slim’s detachable disc drive will require an online DRM check every time you plug it in. Fortunately, generic Blu-ray players are cheaper than never. Unfortunately, they don’t really print discs of Pregnant Behind Bars Season 1 anymore.
None of these people are getting refunds or even being compensated with Playstation store credit.
You can’t help but be concerned upon reading all of this. As the Kotaku article itself says, the PS5 slim doesn’t even come with a disc drive but rather you’d have to buy one yourself for 80 USD and it would also require an internet connection to pair it to the console. This of course doesn’t even come with the vertical stand which had you bought the original version, would’ve come included but rather you would have to buy it as well for 30 USD.
What happens when these companies only get more liberal and begin banning users for saying edgy things in Playstation Party Chat or they don’t like a certain scene in a movie because people on 4chan share it and talk about how funny and cool it is? This is certainly the trajectory we’re moving to as these major companies hire more and more liberal college graduates to work for them.
The end of the mainstream trading of physical media is coming closer and closer. Best Buy for one has already been revealed to be cutting out their DVD section in 2024. Pretty soon after, they’re probably going to be removing the section for their video games as well, and at that point, the only big retailers selling physical games will just be Target, Walmart, Gamestop, and I suppose Amazon as well and how long these stores will be doing so, I can’t say for certain. All I can say is it is not looking good for physical DVD and game collectors, so if you wanted to start collecting, now would be the time to do so while you still can. If you play on any modern console, this should be easier to do because there aren’t very many good titles on them anyways and if you have a PS5 you can at least freely play PS4 games backwards compatible with no need for an internet connection, which can’t be said about the Series X/S, which need an internet connection to play Xbox One games. I am sure that when the Playstation 6 gets revealed it will be all-digital.
If you play on PC, however, you thankfully have some options open to you. GOG Games is an online video game retailer that offers DRM-free games that you can backup on a hard drive and reinstall on other PC’s as much as you’d want. Very soon, there won’t be a reason to buy a console over a PC at all anymore.