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Companies issuing refunds in the form of gift cards is just straight-up insulting
And it may be illegal in some states to not offer the customer an actual refund.
It’s easy to scoff at this whole “You will own nothing, and you will be happy” phrase, but it’s really gone too far already.
I’m really tired of hearing “you don’t own it you own a license to it” like it’s some revelation for people complaining. We’re aware that the system has been constructed to benefit media companies at the expense of consumers.
To be honest; I never really bought the argument anyway. From a legal standpoint I don’t give half a shit. From a layman’s standpoint it’s bullshit. Nowhere do they use terms like “rent” or “lease”. They explicitly use terms like “buy” and it’s not until the fine print that the term license even comes up.
They know they’re pissing on you and telling you it’s raining and the goobers doing their legwork by repeating the sentence like they just came up with it annoy me to no end.
Remember, streaming only has a business model as long as it has a better user experience than piracy. That’s why iTunes took off in the era of Napster. When a streaming service’s user experience drops below that of digging up pirate treasure off a shitty ad-ridden torrent site, that service is not long for the world.
I cancelled Netflix and prime and went back to piracy a few months ago, it’s been a nice blast from the past
In addition to piracy, I’ve also been checking out DVDs from my local library. It’s kinda fun.
Surprised myself because I half expected I’d miss the convenience of Netflix, but I haven’t missed it even a little.
“Was I a good streaming platform?”
“No.”
The benefit of the library DVD is it takes away the “What will we watch tonight?” conversation. You’re going to watch the DVD.
It just switches the question to the library: “What will we borrow tonight?”
Source: experience from my Blockbuster days.
You don’t own the video file. You own access to their video file, which they also don’t own, they only own the right to distribute it. If their distribution contract ends and doesn’t gets renewed, then they can’t let you access the file. At least they refunded you. This system is one of the issues with the ongoing writers and actors strikes. Amazon can decide to stop making a video available, which cuts all dividends revenues to actors and writers. So having a video available for you to watch costs money to Amazon (or Netflix or Max…) but not enough content makes users unsubscribe, so they ride that thin line for maximized revenue. This means that older movies that aren’t blockbusters get dropped in favor of new content. Now new content doesn’t means good content, remember, it needs to be as cheap as possible. Aaand this is why steaming companies are spiraling down and everything is going to shit. Filmmaking is an art form turned into an industry. But art isn’t about maximized profit, it’s about art first. But you can’t make that art without millions of dollars and that requires the art to take a step back to maximize profit, but not too far back. It’s a really big issue in the film and entertainment industry.
— I’m an IATSE local 600 camera operator.
If you can’t save it, its not yours. Sail the seas.
Or buy it on physical media. More and more studios are pulling their disks and it is getting harder to find. If you have a disk, it can never be recalled.
Ever since Disney announced they are also going to ban account sharing, I’ve been going to thrift stores and grabbing any DVDs my children like or might like. I’ve gotten quite a few classics so far for less than the cost of one month of Disney+. I almost bought a VCR because the VHS collection at thrift stores here is huge and they are so cheap, but rewinding sucks.
I don’t think you realize how unwatchably blurry VHS is. I can’t believe we ever watched those things now.
DVD is still a bit of a nuisance because of aspect ratios and they’re a little blurry because SD, but VHS is just garbage.
VHS can look as good as DVD (or better in cases where the DVD was poorly mastered), but there aren’t many good VCRs out there anymore. A well maintained VHS tape and VCR can give you a great capture. https://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/video-restore/1567-vcr-buying-guide.html
The only thing that surprises me is that anyone is surprised by this. If you buy a physical book from anywhere, you own it. If you “buy” the rigth to play a movie (or read a book) from amazon, you own nothing. Usually they don’t show that so clearly but that’s the reality.
If you buy a physical book from anywhere, you own it.
Even that isn’t strictly true, as IP laws metasticize and mutate over time. But its far more expensive to try and reclaim a book than to revoke a digital license on a 3rd party repository.
If you kept your digital copy of a digital book on an e-reader in airplane mode, you’d have as much access to that as any trade paperback. And backing up my collection of PDFs to a drive is significantly easier than shouldering a shelf’s worth of books.
The fundamental issue with digital media is that its ultimately convenient to access a central digital archive than to keep your own personal collections on hand and catalogued. But then you have to ask the question “Who controls that central digital archive?” And if its a bad actor, there’s your problem. Its the same problem physical libraries have, too. Don’t let the guy who burned down the Library of Alexandria run your neighborhood branch. Don’t let Ron DeSantis near it, either.
It’s just a long term licence to watch it
Strictly speaking, so is a DVD or other physical media, per the EULA they flash across the screen for half a second before starting the show and therefore makes it legally binding.
The big difference is that nobody’s running around trying to claw back DVDs. Whereas, with Amazon, its trivially easy to just click “Remove License” from the repository and snatch back an arbitrary number of licenses. Purely a question of convenience.
Of course, if you have a… uh… backup copy stored conveniently on a PLEX server, then they can’t claw that back either.
You know where Amazon (and any other company for that matter) can’t pull content from? My Jellyfin instance. Yo-ho-ho!
True. But your jellyfish instance only really works for you and a few trusted friends/neighbors. I would still like a comprehensive library that I can browse and select from at a moment’s notice.
The infuriating nature of Amazon / Hollywood / IP law / etc, is that these two combined goals are inimicable to the profit motive. I can’t have access to a big public library of continent, because that means someone else won’t be able to collect the real-time maximal market-rate from me to access it.
Shit happens. Tech breaks. You forget where you leave things. People outside your social circle (people you’ll never know existed) will want access to that same media at some future date. And Jellyfin doesn’t get them that.
