PlayStation To Delete A Ton Of TV Shows Users Already Paid For
kotaku.com
PlayStation To Delete A Ton Of TV Shows Users Already Paid For::Sony says Mythbusters and more Discovery TV shows are going away whether you bought them or not
PlayStation To Delete A Ton Of TV Shows Users Already Paid For::Sony says Mythbusters and more Discovery TV shows are going away whether you bought them or not
If you can’t own digital copies since they’re not property, then piracy isn’t theft.
Easy there on the sound logical arguments buddy, you'll have the lawyers shitting their pants.
You will own nothing, we will bleed you dry, and you will love it.
You will love getting used to less
It's not theft. It's why they named it piracy instead of theft. Because it's different.
It's weird this needs to be repeated so often. Just goes to show how often media corpos repeated the lie that creating a copy of something and sharing it with someone else is the same thing as stealing physical property from someone.
The irony is that I feel like I own my pirated content more than any of the digital content I've actually purchased in the past.
Piracy gives you freedom, whereas paying for content just deprives you of your money
Feel? Without question you have ownership in a way legal distributors no longer allow for. Physical media aside of course, but even that has a hassle to it that pirated content circumvents.
There is simply no downside to having a collection of movies, tv shows and music on your HDD that no one can take away and plays in any modern operating system hassle free.
Buy Blu-ray's then.
I'm occasionally buying used Blu-rays from eBay, ripping them using MakeMKV, putting the content on my Jellyfin server and sharing it with my friends and family over Tailscale. Works like a dream and no one can do anything about it. https://youtube.com/watch?v=RZ8ijmy3qPo
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/watch?v=RZ8ijmy3qPo
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Can you ELI5 why you need/use Tailscsle on your setup?
Because allowing access to your VPS/homelab without VPN is like having a one night stand without a condom. You might be ok one time but eventually your gonna wake up with a nasty virus
To make the server accessible via internet, it's a VPN service.
You could do it without tailscale too, but using it makes things extremely easy.
How much are you paying for tailscale?
Nothing. It's free for 3 users with a limit of 100 devices. The traffic isn't relayed through Tailscale servers, instead, Tailscale just orchestrates the peer-to-peer connections.
That's where all the good pirated content comes from
You're missing the point.
No, you guys are missing the point. If you want to own something buy Blu-ray's, piracy isn't justifiable just because you don't want to buy it.
You don't have to justify piracy like you idiots always tries to do. Who cares?
Calling people idiots doesn't make you right, and trying to make a different point doesn't show that you understood the original point—quite the opposite.
The point is that if a company can choose not to honor its legal obligation to consumers who have purchased content from them, then there is no reason for consumers to honor their legal obligation to refrain from accessing the same content outside the system the company has provided—or in this case failed to provide.
Moreover, if the legal system of your country doesn't require everyone to uphold their legal obligations, then why should we allow it to hold us to the obligations it has placed on us?
Now you'll probably write a reply that reply that shows no understanding of the difference between ownership and licensing, or between theft and unauthorized access, but you can't say I didn't try.
The company did honor its legal obligations.
Whenever it's morally right is a different discussion.
I don't care about your point. I just think the constant attempts of justification are really annoying. Like it or not, I will continue to complain about that.
Cool, keep on bootlicking big companies that underpay their workers and overcharge their customers.
You guys are really cringe.
Why do you need to constantly justify piracy?
Just do it. I have hundreds of movies on my media server and dozens of series. Yet I don't feel the need to complain and whine about something that doesn't affect me.
Keep on crying.
But if buying isn't owning then... why buy?
Because buying Blu-ray's is owning?
Personally I just pirate everything on my Plex server but don't pretend that this Sony news makes piracy justified.
They just want us to pirate everything right? Like, that is the only logical response to this.
Or, you know, buy media you can store on your own devices.
I don't have a house big enough to store a ton of DVDs, and the Playstation Digital Edition solidified that we don't have to buy physical media anymore. So the only option is piracy.
There is this lovely invention called dvd binders, it let's you keep a ton of them in a much smaller space
No, there are plenty of ways to buy digital only media, where you store it on your own drives.
I have a NAS full of media that I own that I bought. None of it physical.
What service do you use that lets you pay for and download the media files in that way?
The only one I know of is Bandcamp that lets you download the mp3s after you buy the album.
Amazon also lets you download music without DRM, and I know Apple did ten years ago before I dropped them. I don't think there's a single legal option for film, though. I think the person you're replying to is full of shit.
Closest thing? Last time I used their stuff, Apple let you download video you buy. It has DRM, though, so if they lose the license to it, it's pretty much moot anyway.
You can't even buy MP3s anymore?? I haven't paid for a digital download since before smart phones. I would be more concerned about downloading digital content from a website that charges for it rather than pirating tbh. Where did the seller get it from in the first place??
That's not a bad black-market business model, actually....
Check out bandcamp, its the better way to support artists
Man, I love Bandcamp, but I hear they got bought by Epic Games which does not bode well...
Oh shit, I had forgotten about that.
What wonderful changes do you think they are going to make?
This seems illegal unless Sony reimburses everyone for the removed content.
It should be. But I would be extremely surprised if everything in the terms of service isn't worded something like "you're buying a license to view this content that can be revoked whenever".
It is, and IIRC you don't even "own" a movie even if you physically have it. You own the physical disc, not the content on it. Granted, it's a lot harder for Sony or Discovery to come kick down your door and take your copy of Ice Road Truckers so you have to rebuy it...
That's not really a big deal with regards to physical items. If you buy a book you don't own the rights to the text either.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the TOS says “We reserve the right to change this agreement at any time in any way without notice and you agree to be bound by all future versions of this agreement”
There's a line in the EULA when you purchase digital media that says they can revoke your access to it at any time that they see fit. Look it up for yourself.
If you don't own it when paying for it then you aren't stealing it when pirating it.
Woah.
this is an ad for piracy, right?
Aye matey. Yarr! 🦜🏴☠️
Ahoy!
Your UN... Gave me a flashback .
https://invidious.private.coffee/watch?v=ptKgRecPi1I
I stopped piraring when I graduated college and streaming started to be wonderful. It is now a bleak hellscape that is more expensive than ever. Time to buy 20tb of hard drives and install Jellyfin I guess :(
Welcome back to the high seas.
Some of us never left ..
On the bright side, 20TB of hard drives is relatively cheap these days if you buy used. They'll pay for themselves in a year if you kill the streaming services.
Happy sailing
A new 12tb costs about as much 1 year of netflix premium.
Might as well just rent a server at that point, more memory and performance for basically the same price.
You're not getting a rented VPS for the cost of a 12tb hdd. You're not getting any space with a server for that cost.
12tb is literally $100 right now new. also my fellow hoarders, save a bookmark to that site it's great.
If you want to hit eBay and buy used disks, you can probably build something with redundancy and 20tb+ for around $300. If you've got a machine laying around and don't plan on downloading everything on every service, you can grab 16tb used for $100, use one drive for parity, and the spend $50 when you run out of space for another 8tb.
I run drivebender and a whole JBOD setup with random storage in it for this purpose. It works great and has been through 3 different homes and over 8 years now. Drives become cold storage when I upgrade a new one.
Yeah, I went a little more overkill. I got a rack for free, and I have a Dell CS24 (that's probably due to upgrade just for power savings at this point) that connects to a Rackable 3016. This runs unRAID, so I end up with the same thing roughly you have - JBOD with parity that I can bring any disk to, and 16 bays to fill before I have to start cycling drives out. So I check disk prices, when something tickles my fancy, I buy a new disk and shove it in there and it just keeps growing. If I had to do it today, I'd probably do it a bit differently just because the drive density, but it's been going strong for 7-8 years now.
Nice, I've got a 24 bay sunmicro box, I tossed old hardware into it just to run it..I have a few 12 tb drives in there alongside with my old 2Tb drives.
Heh, I'm about at capacity with my 20 tb of storage. I think I'm getting myself a Synology NAS for Christmas. I'll probably spend a couple grand on the device and the drives, but it's totally worth it to own everything. No regrets.
Amazon gifted me one a loooong time ago. Useful for storage but apps aren't supported on older models really.
That makes sense. Currently I have my raid split, so 10tb are primary media storage and 10tb are backup. My plan is to set my internal raid to be entirely media storage and use the Synology as just a simple network backup system. This will at least double my storage, good enough for now.
Amazon does the same thing. You don't own digital content you pay for, you're renting it.
You're paying to use their license, piracy or buying the media physically is the only way to own it.
If the button says"buy", ownership is inferred. That's a lie, of course.
You own it as long as they have a license to host and stream it.
They should be offering refunds for this at least, but you literally cannot own something that permanently lives on someone else’s device.
If you want to truly on something, you need to control physical access to it. If there is an option to download the media when you buy it, and you can store it on your own device, then you own it. If not, then you only have access as long as you’re paying someone else for access to their storage.
Which is almost impossible now. You can't even play offline games without internet access because companies force you to use their app to launch it.
I thought I would be able to get around that system with EA by purchasing a hard copy of the game circa 2016, but nope, I just bought a plastic case to throw away. I miss the old days of owning things.
The problem is that what you're buying is a license. Of course it has to be a license, because unlike a physical good, anything delivered digitally could be replicated infinitely, and of course you wouldn't be allowed to do something like open your own storefront to resell copies of it. Nor would you legally be allowed to play it on the radio, as background music in a store, etc.
"Buy" isn't really that different here than if you bought a ticket to a concert; of course you wouldn't be able to attend next year with the same ticket, but you still bought something. The problem is that with digital licenses, they can be INCREDIBLY varied, and sellers don't make even a small attempt to clarify what the terms are.
You use the word ownership, but at least from a legal standpoint, that doesn't really mean anything intuitive, unless it means you hold all rights to the IP (which, again, you don't). It would be nice if there was some widespread legal definition and norms about "ownership of a digital copy", but no such concept exists, and frankly the rights holders are not incentivized to try to create something like this.
“Not incentivized”!
They like using the current word “buy” because people think it means they “own” a digital copy. Since that’s not true what we’re really saying here is that they like lying because that makes them more money.
I think the more honest term is “rent”. A normal rental agreement online is for like 48hrs. This is a rental agreement for a much longer, but unspecified, time period.
You’d think a court case would clear this up. But probably not.
Part of the problem is that court cases don't materialize from nothing. A judge can only rule on a case before them. So you would need someone to bring out a specific complaint against a specific party. So there needs to be a lot of money on the line for someone who actually feels they can win. A class action against all online media storefronts just isn't that.
Also, it's a difficult case because the terms of the legal license that each customer are being asked to read and agree to ARE being upheld properly -- so you either have to make the case that asking a customer to agree to terms digitally that they've pretty please read isn't binding (which kills all digital commerce, because it all becomes a liability nightmare!), or, that the website etc is materially misleading / misrepresenting the agreements; we've talked about consumers maybe being prone to misunderstanding "buy" here, but I really don't believe it's a legal slam dunk.
If anything, the faster path to improve this the way you're looking for would be legislation.
"Buying" media with drm is a mistake.
I buy books from audible sometimes, but I immediately rip the drm out. Use Plex to store your movies and TV shows, it does music ok too now.
Give Jellyfin a try too. I switched to that from Plex after I realised they were trying to charge me money to use hardware transcoding on my own hardware.
Unless your main TV client is a Playstation. Client support is Jellyfin's biggest weakness, and why plex is more popular.
What about DLNA? It works on my 7 years old LG TV.
JF works fine on tons of devices, the ps5 just kind of sucks as a media player.
Im finding a way around this now. Surely there is a way to cast to the PlayStation
Using the web browser, but it's clunky.
Yeah, I've heard of jellyfin, but don't really know anything about it... How is it different?
I'm likely to stay with Plex though, because I have 3 friends with Plex servers and we're all sharing content. It's pretty fantastic, when I don't have something, usually one of my friends does have it. If jellyfin doesn't support content sharing, it's a huge no-go, but just convincing my friends to switch over would be pretty challenging.
Can you please link a good guide on ripping the drm out?
People this doesn't affect are pirates. People who get to enjoy their media without worry are pirates. When pirates are getting the better experience and it's customers who are getting affected what incentive is there to not pirate other than personal morals. Because it sure isn't for a better product.
It bears repeating. Piracy is a service issue first. I've paid for several streaming services for music and video, but they just cannot compete with the convenience and features of self-hosted options. It's not at all unusual for people to pirate stuff they have legitimately paid for just because of the convenience More than once I have bought a an album on the very same day I downloaded a pirate copy, just because it was slightly easier to get it on all my devices that way.
While Gabe's famous line still holds true, I find that repeating it without qualification is increasingly glib, because vendors are making the matter a technology issue instead, thanks to years of investment in DRM techniques. In the long term, either side's ability to enforce its will on the other will come down to availability/control of compute resources, and unit economics.
Keeping corporate at bay is going to require a combination of maintaining the commons, seeing genuine competition in cultural production, improving consumer legal frameworks, and becoming politically conscious of our entitlement to digital rights.
A lot of people are getting back into pirating because of this. If a show isn't on a streaming service you use, you either pay $2/episode and hope that Amazon doesn't drop it, or you pirate it. I went almost a decade without pirating, and now I just bought a 5tb SSD for my Plex server. I'm tempted to fully convert now that I've already set everything up, too.
I am coming back after I get a server set up.
It’s seems everything I ever want to watch is either not available or spread across numerous services.
Just last week I was recommended to watch Knives Out. I find the second one on Netflix which I use a family account and then the first one wasn’t available and I would need Amazon for that. Why would I keep jumping through these hoops when I can just download what I want when I want and watch it whenever I want.
Aye!
Louis agrees with you
NOT OK
OK UNDER THE LICENSE YOU AGREED TO SO IT'S YOUR OWN FAULT
-- Sony
It's an abusive relationship - "look what you made me do"
This is why I buy the physical copies of shows/movies I like and just pirate the rest
Dont trust these guys to not screw you over
Yeah personally I only ever use points or rewards to buy digital media. Rarely do I ever pay actual money.
Looks like enshittification of the internet is really kicking in. Decentralized platforms, and piracy needs to be the new normal
Not enshittification. Just a corporation following through on the inevitable result of these one sided EULAs everyone "agrees" to.
It's been "kicked in" for years.
I remember a long time ago buying the first iPhone model. Eventually, Apple released an update that added an "App Store" that allowed you to download third party apps.
Google released a preview / trailer for a new app called Google Goggles. It was like something from the future, and I wanted it more than anything. However, months and months later, it still hasn't showed up on the App Store.
Eventually, Google released a statement saying Apple was blocking them from releasing it because it competed with Apple in some way, or some shitty thing like that.
It was then that I realized I had paid about $700 for a brand new device which I thought I had owned, but actually did not. I then switched to Android and never purchased an iPhone again.
This has been happening for a long time.
I’ve pretty much switched to streaming and paying for content. This makes me question that decision. This just makes the pirates look right.
Piracy has always been the better choice
Obviously
It's always been a balance between getting the stuff instantly and for a charge or waiting a few minutes and having to look for the item and maybe not being able to find it.
If you're paying for it and you're still not able to find it then there is no benefit to streaming. All they had to do was make streaming just a little bit better and experience than piracy. It's actually a pretty low bar because they've got all the access and the infrastructure to be able to do this but lacking that, well, like my computer science teacher always used to say " information wants to be free "
I went back to mp3s and flacs for my music a few years ago. And quickly followed that up with my own Plex server. Two of the best decisions I've ever made. If you're remotely tech savvy it takes no time at all and having every tv show, film, music, video that has ever released on all of my devices at any time within seconds is pretty sweet, for near-free
I'm leaving Plex for Jellyfin. It's free, and Plex has been pushing bloat for so long, I can't be bothered with it. It used to be great, just open Plex and there's your media. But now it's full of random streaming channels and shit. It takes multiple non-intuitive clicks to get to what I want. I tried Jellyfin and it's perfect, just like Plex used to be.
Meh, it's no extra clicks to get what you want on Plex once you actually configure your home to show what you want. I just pushed all those options down to the bottom of my home list, but you can just as easily remove them entirely. IDGAF about bloat. Those are just features I'm not using. I'm sure I use features somebody else doesn't care for. Besides, the "bloat" you're referring to is mostly just free streaming content from various channels collected in one searchable app I already have. I'd never stream any of that shit if it wasn't on Plex already. Reminding me that a show I pirated is available on a streaming service I actually pay for is actually kinda neat. It means I can go watch it there to support it, while making sure I've got it in the format I want and where I want.
I'm all for diversity in our self-host streaming software and fully support Jellyfish, but let's not pretend that the latest halfbaked option is superior because it has fewer features and is less polished. Plex used to kinda suck, lots of features have gotten better. Saying Jellyfin is just like what Plex used to be is not a compliment.
If you want to complain about Plex at least point to something truly awful, like needing Internet access to access local media because of the way Plex account authentication works or the botched and ill conceived rollout of social media features.
Yes I personally use Emby now, but I would recommend Jellyfin these days instead of Plex.
If you're using an Android TV device like the nVidia Shield Pro, I recommend also installing Kodi for playback. It has much better codec support meaning less transcoding (and further quality loss), and there's a few oddities in the Jellyfin Client subtitle support.
Took me about a day of Googling and faffing about to get everything working and it pumping out all the full quality audio formats to my AVR. Seems that by default it likes putting everything in stereo.
The question I have, because I'm considering self-hosting something like that, is will my non-text have a family be able to understand how to use it? If not then it's not really going to be worth it right?
Ideally I want something that would seamlessly replace Spotify and all video streaming services as well and, if my dreams can come true, also work with Google Assistant.
I haven't tried audio streaming but the video in Jellyfin works just like netflix or any other video site.
I have my music on my server and can stream it like Spotify. The frontend user experience of Plex, Jellyfin and Emby is literally just like Netflix, the untrained eye wouldn't tell the difference.
If they can’t figure it out then it’s a them problem right?
Not really when you are going to be texted about it. I spent 3 hours trying to get jellyfin to work on my phone. Staying with Plex as they have better apps.
What was the issue? My experience was the opposite.. I installed the app (android) and went to my IP, it works. I was surprised how simple and easy it was. Or were you trying to use it outside of your home LAN?
On my lan, get black screen on movies.
Ok sounds like codecs/ffmpeg. Did you get it fixed or still having the issue?
You sound like someone that has never supported a production server.
The main reason I pay for content is that I don't have the time to provide reasonable customer service to my family. If they can't use it, it is without use; useless.
Also, I do plenty enough care and feeding of complex systems at work. When I get home, it's nice to stop working.
I’ve switched to streaming and don’t “buy” anything. If content isn’t available on those few streaming sites I’ll try a different provider but I will not “buy” (eg rent for more money).
It’s all a word game though. I think I actually do have one movie on Amazon. Enough people were over and wanted to watch it that we felt the larger rental fee (“buy” option) was worth it.
ComiXology is an interesting example of this. They have a shitty UI and an odd attempt to emulate the “collector” experience (obviously I think it’s horrible). It’s like a bad drug trip of skeuomorphism. I quickly decided we’d never “buy” anything there either.
This is why we must protect physical media.
Not necessarily. A torrent is more sustainable. Eventually people with physical copies will die or they get lost/broken a torrent can be spread to many more people, making it less likely to die, and new users can get access to it. Just make sure to seed over 1x at leasy so you can spread it.
You just need to read physical media like stored somewhere you have physical control over, without DRM, and there hardly remains any disagreement.
Sure, but generally physical media means a dedicated item for each one. It's usually called digital media if it's stored on a drive somewhere. For example, my computer doesn't have any way to play physical media, or the Xbox series S is all digital.
They can also revoke the licences on the disks.
What does that mean practically though?
Depends, I think (don't quote me on this though) blu rays DRM keys can be revoked for that disk, meaning Blu ray players can reject a DRM.
You can also revoke a key hooked to a Blu ray player - making it possible to stop a player from playing any DRM protected DVDs that the key used to work for.
Nah. This would require an update be sent out to every blu ray player, which is not feasible unless they were all standardized to a single database or service for their license keys.
Even if that were the case, which it's not, the device would need to connect to the internet for this scheme to work.
There are several ways to disable your player.
First, the movies themselves are encrypted with a unique key, that key is then encrypted with another set of keys and stored on the disc. Your player will read those encrypted keys off the disc and use it’s own keys to decrypt the key needed to decrypt the movie. If the blu-ray association determines that your player is compromised, they change the way the movie key is encrypted so your players key can no longer decrypt it. This means your player simply won’t play any movies newer than a certain date.
For blu-ray drives in your PC it’s a bit different. Your software player needs a so called ‘host key’ to be able to access the blu-ray drive. Once the key you are using is found to be compromised it’s put on a revocation list. When a new blu-ray movie is mastered they include the latests revocation list on that disc. If that list is newer than the one in the drive, the drive updates it’s internal list using the list from the disc. If your player software uses a key on that list, the drive will refuse to read any movie. You need a new, unblacklisted, host key to be able to play movies again.
There is no need to connect to the internet for any of these schemes, the updates are simply distributed through the blu-ray discs themselves.
So that's what happened to my Blu-ray drive on my PC! I had to flash the firmware to a custom version for ripping to get it to read anything.
That is incredibly shitty behavior. I'm putting the disk that I purchased into my own hardware. The studio already got my money from the sale, why the hell do they care?
They care because:
There would be no problem if you used a licensed software player to simply play back the disc. The problem is you’re trying to rip it with an illicit host key. They don’t want you ripping the disc and spreading it over the internet. You’re only allowed to play it from the original disc using a certified player.
Oh wow okay, so it would fuck over a lot of people but not everyone. I knew about blu ray but I was thinking everyone with DVDs would be safe. If that happens, though, VHS tapes will probably be popular again
For DVD’s it only applies to new movies, old movies will still play but if your player is blacklisted it won’t play any new movies.
The way it works is as follows: The movie data is encrypted using a key, this key is unique to the movie. The key itself is then again encrypted with another key. Since the keys themselves are tiny (especially compared to an entire movie) it’s possible to put hundreds of encrypted copies of the movie key on the disc. Each DVD player manufacturer has their own key(s). When you put in a movie, the player will look at the list of hundreds of encrypted keys, and decrypt the one that can be decrypted with it’s own key.
If a DVD player is considered to be compromised, new DVD’s will no longer include a key that can be decrypted by that player in the list of hundreds of encrypted copies of the movie key on new disc. Alls your old discs still have a key that can be decrypted by your player, so those still work, but new movies will refuse to play.
I wonder if the studios understand how much they are going to be shaking confidence in digital purchases by doing this. I know I'm going to think twice before I pay money for another digital copy of a movie or TV show.
Maybe they are fine with that? As in they prefer the streaming deals / subscriptions, specially if they have their own platform.
That's almost certainly what's really happening. They regret selling media to you permanently so now they're trying to claw it back and make you pay them again.
That is literally always what is going on.
Seeing how many scandals the big media companies have been in and literally nobody cares because the world is horrible and all we have left are these artificial dopamine sinks they call franchises which we desperately cling onto despite fully knowing that we are making rich assholes who caused all this even richer, don't hold your breath.
I am even over Netflix, let alone relying on digital purchases, lol, when BLM happened they pulled 2 episodes of community and as we all know since then, no black people have been brutalized by police in the US, true heroes Netflix are...
I know about the dungeons and dragons episode - which other one did they pull?
oh I guess it's just 1 episode, but that's one more than should have been removed
Then shocked pikachu face when everybody goes back to the high seas.
I named my Emby server Shocked Pikachu.
You guys left?
Remember, kids: When you pirate a show, you're intentionally abusing the cast and crew by withholding revenue from them! (Even though the majority of them do not make royalties from it and even those that do make peanuts compared to how much money the publisher just pockets.)
But also remember, kids: When the publisher decides to strip you of a show that you paid their explicitly specified "forever price" for, that's 100% their right and they would never do anything without the complete and uncritical backing of the people who made the show. And if you have any negative thoughts about that, you're also intentionally abusing the cast and crew by wanting to watch it when they have clearly spoken through the publisher that they definitely never want you to watch them again, and their only wish is that their media legacy will be randomly erased from people's access at the drop of the corporate hat.
It's all about creators here at our humble multi billion dollar publishing company and digital rights brokerage!
At least when Microsoft was pulling the plug on their music streaming service, they gave everyone the ability to just download all of the songs that you owned.
That's the right thing to do
It should also be the only option for them if our consumer protection laws were even half effective.
Microsoft may not be the best company, but it's moves like this that make me trust them more than just about any other company.
They prefer the subtle evils most people won't notice, like mass surveillance, intentional backdoors, obliterating competition with unethical business practices, rather than the obvious evils of stealing from their userbase.
So pirate the shows. Easy peasy.
This is why I only watch my VHS copy of Space Camp. Do you really own your media if you didn’t get Space Camp out of the 99¢ bin following the Challenger crash when movies about launching kids into space were on sale?
Underrated movie.
Classic sony move. Remember Linux in ps2...
I think that was the ps3
It was both I think lol, except that the ps2 one still works if you can find the gear for it (especially an old IDE HDD, and the original HDD+network adapter for the phat PS2)
I don't blame them as much for that one. It's a bad look, but the PS3's architecture was such that they could be used to make a cheap supercomputer and they were being sold at a fairly significant loss.
The cheapest way to build a supercomputer was to have a bot farm buying a bunch of PS3s, and don't wouldn't be able to recoup the losses through software sales.
They should have just sold the ability to unlock OtherOS for "X" dollars to offset the loss.
Yeah, but then you get into the "so, do I actually OWN my own hardware, or don't I?" debate
Also, the fact that they disabled it AFTER it being a selling point they advertised, for people who ALREADY bought them, without a way to revert
Anyway... Yeah, I don't take that as an adequate excuse. You sell the hardware, you no longer own it, so stop breaking it or forcing people to use it a certain way.
I get what you're saying, but I can also totally see Sony's POV that they were losing money on every unit sold. It was becoming popular enough for distributed processing/supercomputing they had to either stop supporting the Other OS feature or raise the price when they were already by far the most expensive console and way behind the much cheaper competition in sales.
They could hurt the minority of users who were costing them money by removing OtherOS, or they could hurt everyone by increasing the price of the console by a couple hundred bucks. Between the two options they absolutely made the better decision from a business standpoint, and it was also the better decision for 99.9% of the users.
Sure... But breaking the feature for people who ALREADY bought it was absolutely the wrong call. For people who that's the only reason they bought one (or more) that got the update before realizing what it would do basically wound up with expensive bricks as far as they were concerned, with no real recourse
It's user hostile no matter how you look at it. They chose to set them up as loss leaders, and that's always a risky gamble, one which they lost.
New sales? Sure, remove the feature, it's costing them money (though I again refer to my earlier point about hardware we buy not actually belonging to us), but leave the systems that already have it intact.
Lol
Class action is probably their best bet. Up until now, for the most part, companies have opted to refund digital purchases like this, like when Google ended Stadia and refunded everything. And while it's easy to laugh at people who trusted and believed that they had permanent ownership, I truly hope that there are enough people who stand up and take this to court, because people shouldn't be punished for not being cynical like us. And if a company is going to sell something as a purchase, rather than a rental, they should at least have to continue to provide it to those who did buy it. I have several games on Steam that can no longer be sold due to licensing reasons, but Valve still lets me download and play them, because I purchased a license. Sony and Discovery should either have to refund people, or continue hosting the files for those who purchased these shows.
Oh wow, Sony being shitty to customers.
How fucking expected.
A bit of harsh truth, people love and adore those corporations that shat on them, it's not the first time and not the last time this happens
Sony has an especially nasty history of giving the middle finger to customers.
Especially when it comes to stolen accounts and fraud.
In a world that wasnt filled with people who center their identity around which corporate overlord they worship, Sony's Playstation divison would have died in flames a decade ago.
Are we sure it's Sony and not just Zaslav again?
🏴☠️Ahoy Mateys! Avast and shiver me timbers. Tis a good day upon the high seas
Why they be cryn they boots, while ye be livin free all those years, lootin and rapin as ye please. There be nuff lootin for all of ye. The seas are vast and there be nuff ships fer everbody!
Full speed ahead Mr. Coheeeen
Ram dam dam be dam, ram dam dam be dam
Another case of Physical > Digital
Sometimes I feel bad for using vpns and stremio and keeping hundreds of my favorite movies and shows on Plex then this happens and I'm happy I'm prepared for enshittification. I don't lose sleep over piracy one bit. I've written guides and shared libraries with family also. Fuck corporations that can just retract contracts when they feel and take back what you already paid for. No thanks.
This is why you either buy physical media or pirate.
Well, I guess now is as good a time as any to become a pirate. Drink up me hearties, yo-ho!
Set the Jolly Rogers sailing again!
Fuck paying for tv now. Im done. This has been stupid for a long time. Im so done. Back to the pirate life.
Pircay
Pircay
Parcour!
Porque!
Parkay.
Partay?
Parley!
What you're telling me is that Sony was way ahead of tech bros when it came to NFTs.