AIBU to think that streaming platforms shouldn't tell customers they can "buy" films and series?

[Oyen]

Because the platform can remove it at any time, and then the buyer won't be able to watch it. So the customer doesn't have permanent ownership, so they haven't bought anything.

@Oyen I am hoping they go old school and release it on DVD 🙂

@Oyen I am hoping they go old school and release it on DVD 🙂

If you have a Sky subscription and have over the years bought movies/series as soon as you decide to get cancel your Sky contract you have no other way to download or access them (e.g. through a website). The stuff you have bought is very much tied to you remaining a Sky customer.

DH had this with the BBC a few years ago. They ran a service where you could buy archived shows, like 80s kids tv, but the stopped it. Anything that you had bought was deleted when they stopped it. They contacted DH and refunded him.

This is why my DH still buys blu-rays. Although not everything is even released in that format now!

It’s the same with kindle books. You don’t actually own the book. You’ve paid to use their license, to read it, but not to buy it. If they lose the rights to the ebook then they remove it and you can’t read it.

@CherryCokeFanatic same with prime. When you cancel you can't afterwards watch anything you've "bought" and "downloaded" (because you only "download" it onto the prime app).

Amazon had better not remove 'my' Die Hard that I bought so we could watch it every Xmas.

That’s not true. You don’t need to have prime to watch the stuff you’ve previously bought. I don’t currently have a prime membership, but at the exact moment, I am watching The Fifth Element on the Prime Video app on my TV, because I “bought” it. You just go to the “your stuff” tab and can scroll through the things you’ve bought and watch those, even without an active prime membership.

How odd. Amazon says you can't.

@Oyen

Dont they just mean any “Prime” titles you’ve downloaded?
You can download anything on prime to watch offline, but if you stop paying for the membership then you obviously cannot keep watching the downloaded prime titles, as you don’t have prime anymore. That’s perfectly fair.

But the titles you have “bought” have nothing to do with a prime membership, they’re separate and you can still stream them or download them to watch.

Download not the same as bought. Bought means you bought the right to watch it from their servers. Regardless of whether you have prime or not or have it downloaded or not.

That's just talking about things on Prime you've downloaded, not ones you've bought. You can buy films through Amazon even if you don't have a prime video subscription.

Ha I am confusing myself! Thanks for the correction.

Anyway it is all a bit of a bloody con. "Buy" doesn't necessarily mean that you have permanent ownership of things and can do as you please with them.

It's definitely not the same as buying a DVD!

Also, when you die, they go with you. You can’t pass down your movie collection. In video/dvd days, you bought them and family could take them when you died. With it all being digital collections, they go when you go.

It’s not like many people look forward to inheriting DVDs, but it’s the point that you can spend a considerable amount of money on a digital collection and in the end, it just goes nowhere.