PlayStation is erasing 1,318 seasons of Discovery shows from customer libraries | The change comes as Warner Bros. tries to add subscribers to Max, Discovery+ apps.

So they’re taking shows away from people who have already purchased them and moving the shows to other services in order to try to make potential customers subscribe to more services?
Fuck those guys, especially for ripping off people who already paid for the content.
Here we go again. Instead of being forced to subscribe to shitty bundles of cable channels in order to get the channel you do want, we’re being forced to subscribe to multiple shitty services to get the shows we want.
This industry is a one-trick pony. Literally giving the worst service they can to force people to subscribe to more services.
- Oh no, here I go pirating again!
  
  Krombopulos Michael, the early years.
  
  That's it. I am heading to the goodwill and picking up some media. And I gotta find our old discs too.
  
  I haven’t paid for a movie, show, or song since… like 2005.
  Games get my money, but I usually wait a couple years to make sure they’re good lawl
- Welp time to start mass-buying dvd box sets and ripping the files, screw not owning shit you paid for
  
  Don't even waste your time and just go directly to the high seas. You'll get all the same quality content several orders of magnitude faster.
- Fuck those guys, especially for ripping off people who already paid for the content.
  If either side cared about good customer service, they'd find a compromise. Either Sony would pay for the purchases and make it available under the new home at whatever the new sales-channel is called. Or, Warner Bros. Discovery would switch the licenses and make it available themselves.
  Of the two options, Warner Bros. Discovery doing that would make the most sense. For them, it would have zero cost. They'd lose out on the potential to re-sell the same content to people twice, but they'd keep potential future customers happy by doing that. Especially true for people who had bought a few seasons of a show but hadn't finished it. They'd be incentivized to purchase future seasons using the new store.
  The fact that neither side is willing to make these concessions shows just how little they care about their customers. They deserve all the copyright infringement they're about to see.
- Agreed. Streaming services always seemed like gilded cages to me. You can only see what they allow you to see - piracy or old-school Netflix DVD delivery gives you all the options. The promise of being able to stream any content at any time, with the producers and people involved being able to get compensated fairly and justly, just isn’t reality with these ghouls running the show.
  The model (in the current form, of artificially restricted licensing) seems like less a way to curate a media catalog, but more like a way to curate the subscribers and culture.
  
  piracy or old-school Netflix DVD delivery gives you all the options.
  Netflix cancelled their DVD service in September. In an entirely unrelated move, I have recently cancelled my Netflix service…
- Kind of.
  You don't have yearly contracts and it's a lot easier to start and stop a particular service at any time.
  It's weird to see this take when I remember streaming started out that this was what was heralded. You could pick and choose what streaming services you wanted and you could change them easily. You didn't have to buy the sport package or pay the built in royalties of sports teams if you didn't watch sports.
  
  For now. However, I’m going to pick at something you mentioned about switching when you want - sure, but most services offer a discount for a year’s subscription. I don’t think it’s an insignificant amount of people that might buy in on that. Switching becomes irrelevant when the service already has your money.
  Also, services are separating popular shows, unbundling for lack of a better word, to other platforms to force people to subscribe to more services. Effectively that’s making you pay for shows you don’t want (like your sports reference) to get the shows you do.
- ripping off people who already paid for the content.
  They didn't pay for the shows. They paid for access to the shows. That's all anyone gets these days.
  
  They didn’t pay for the shows. They paid for access to the shows.
  And, if they had made that completely clear, there would be less of an issue. If the "Buy" button was replaced with "Rent, Long Term" then maybe people would be less annoyed that their long-term rentals were now being forcibly returned. But, labelling the button "Buy" makes them more money.
  
  Ok, a technicality that still leaves the access removed. Regardless of whether they paid for it or the access to it.

Fuck Warner Bros and Sony PlayStation for this.
But it's not just them, it's an entire industry. If you pay for media and you don't get it physically in full, or the ability to download it in a DRM-free portable format, remember that you don't own it. Only do it in the knowledge that some day you will not have it anymore.
There are other options available for you. BluRays, piracy.
- People need to start paying creators to make stuff for the public domain and refuse to pay to access anything that everyone doesn't have access to.
  I've given Wikipedia money, I'll never pay for Netflix.
  
  Considering how much it costs to make the average movie or TV show, a Patreon isn't going to cut it. If you want a guy talking in front of a microphone with a producer and a writing team of two, sure, you can pay the creators for that. It's not something most people will want to watch in replacement of the entertainment they're used to.
- People were so happy MultiVersus happened, failing to realize the sheer acquisitions and monopolistic behaviour it takes to own so many IPs. How, when weaponised, it commands so many big names.
  And now it's not working for people, because they're pulling the shows from PS.
- If buying isn't owning, then piracy isn't stealing.
  
  Mate, we've got it; we understand your position. You don't need to keep posting it.

I'd be a lot less bothered if the UI for services like Sony didn't use words like "buy" to describe what customers are doing when they pay for content. It would be a lot more honest to describe it as a rental for an indefinite time period. But of course then very few people would choose that option.
- I agree, it feels like this is a place where the law or regulation needs to come in and enforce something like - rent vs lease vs buy.
  The average consumer thinks "buy" means forever, and that's just not the case in these scenarios. It really is more like leasing it.
  
  Looking at you Steam
  I have 15 years of rented video games
- Also that option is always like 4 times more expensive for no real reason

Fuck this shit.
If buying isn't owning. Piracy isn't stealing.
This is so anti consumer, I'm surprised the EU hasn't stepped in to stop it yet

If we break into people's homes and destroy their property, maybe they'll have to give us money to replace what was lost?
Why has no one come up with this business strategy before.
- Planned obsolescence is the preferred method (and doesn't require breaking and entering).
- Pay us protection or we'll smash your business.
  Wait a minute, I've heard this before.

Seems like piracy is going to become fashionable again
- Props to Sony and all related entities for endorsing it!
- Loving it myself. Delving into the world of Plex and sailing the high seas. Just trying to figure out the best way to keep it organized and also standardizing subtitles for various video files.
  
  Radarr and Sonarr
  
  Yeah, don't get me started on subtitles. It's the wild west out there to get standardized good subtitles.
  It's a hobby in itself just fixing all the crappy subs.
- Do what you want cause a pirate is free, you are a pirate.
- If buying isn't owning, then piracy isn't stealing.

Maybe I am underestimating the amount of people buying seasons of TV shows on PlayStation, but this seems like a lot of PR pain for very little potential upside.
- I'm just surprised there are over 1,000 seasons of shows on discovery Channel... once you get past the gold mining, crab fishing, Mythbusting and sending people out into the wilderness naked, what's left?
  
  Storage wars and trucks on ice.
- I think WB is counting on people blaming Sony even though it seems like WB is the one who decided not to play nice.
- It says 1,318 seasons, so that's like 100 people buying thirteen seasons of Shark Pilots or Junkstore Wars or whatever. So, you're definitely right it's bad PR over almost nothing, but I think Discovery should be taking the heat, not Sony. They made the call to cancel those licenses.
  
  Um, what? You think removing 1,318 seasons of shows only affects 100 users? They've been selling these since the PS3 era and it's hundreds of millions of devices.
  ...did you possibly think it meant 1,318 total purchases? 😂

If buying isn't owning, then piracy isn't stealing.

Oh, so theft?
- If this isn't theft, then the inverse isn't either. Raise your flags, it's time once again to sail the high seas
  
  If paying for something dosent mean I own it, then piracy isn't stealing!

- Technically, when you buy a show or a movie you're buying a license to watch it. That license can be revoked at any time. This is true for physical and digital copies, it's just impossible for companies to revoke the license when you have a physical copy.
  
  Not the same in the EU as far as I know. Digital goods have to uphold a certain standard.

Streaming services: if we take the shows they purchased away from them, then they HAVE to subscribe to our service! There's nothing they can do if they want to watch their shows, piracy is soooo 2008.
- Yeah, it's not like the Servarr application suite has made piracy literally easier than using streaming services.
  
  The caveat is that it's still mostly just for moderately tech savvy individuals. It's easier for the people who have the knowledge to set it up, have access to decent trackers, a VPN, newsgroups, and hardware to run the suite on.
  Piracy isn't hard, but there is a barrier of entry that most people won't overcome.

Damn. Maybe we shouldn't have downloaded cars. It's only fair that the capitalist collective should be able to delete our vhs and DVDs etc in return right?

This is Warner Bros being the bad guys, but also Sony for not refunding people. Either way it doesn't matter consumers lose out, all the more reason to pirate.
- I see where you are coming from. The original version of streaming Netflix was the answer to piracy. Good price and had all the content one wanted. Was also easy to use. The streaming wars proved competition isn't always the answer (I think this is the first time I've ever said that). Without that version of Netflix, the answer to piracy is gone...
  
  Netflix was in competition with piracy. They competed mostly on two parameters: price and convenience, but catalog is also a secondary or tertiary parameter.
  Piracy is kinda free unless you pay for newsgroups, seedbox or straight up membership. It's also inconvenient for most people. The catalog is basically unlimited if you know where to look.
  Paid streaming or digital purchases wins on convenience, but at a greater price and with a limited catalog.
  With older content constantly being bounced around different services, aggressive anti-shsring measures and continually rising prices, paid streaming is becoming less and less attractive, as we're slowly sliding back to the times of cable TV, albeit video on-demand this time around.
  
  Competition is the answer, though. The problem is companies ended up competing the wrong way. If I could watch "The Office" on any streaming platform, suddenly they're all in competition to create a better platform (quicker loads, different pricing models, integration with different devices, etc). By limiting shows to only certain platforms, sure, you're creating an easy way to differentiate between platforms, but you're letting the competition stagnate as you just create cable TV with extra steps: minimal choice, minimal ease of use, minimal cost upside.
  
  Why should we care if corporations find the 'answer to piracy'?
  What's better for them is worse for us. Are you invested with them? If not, then you would be a textbook useful idiot to lower your standards so they can have even more.

Keeping the money and yanking back the content it was used to purchase will surely entice those people to sign up for that Max/Discovery+ subscription.
Only an out of touch corporate stooge would see a logical through line there.
- surely entice those people to sign up for that Max/Discovery+ subscription.
  That's the sad part. It will. These people already have more money than sense, or else they wouldn't be subscribing to streaming services at all.

Maybe more people would subscribe to discovery if the content wasn't so fucking abysmal. There's like 2 good shows on there, Mythbusters and how it's made
- BattleBots!

Yo Ho, Yo Ho, A Pirate’s Life for Me 🏴‍☠️
- We download torrents, we use VPNs
  Drink up, me hearties, yo ho!
  Copyright law can kiss our rear ends
  Drink up, me hearties, yo ho!

PlayStation is erasing 1,318 seasons of Discovery shows from customer libraries | The change comes as Warner Bros. tries to add subscribers to Max, Discovery+
2 sentences, 5 names of different entities
- Two companies though, one with multiple business units under various names. Warner Bros. Discovery owns Warner Bros., HBO Max and Discovery.

You will own nothing and you will love it.
- They’re gonna start feeding us bugs next!

This is the best summary I could come up with:
If you purchased any Discovery shows from the PlayStation Store, Sony has some bad news for you to discover.
The company recently announced that all Discovery content purchased on the PlayStation Store will be erased before 2024.
But there were users who had already purchased stuff from the PlayStation Store and, believe it or not, expect to be able to watch it when they want, since they paid money to buy (rather than rent) it.
Shows getting axed from user libraries include Wives With Knives, An Idiot Abroad, Evil Twins, and Body Bizarre.
But there are also plenty of more well-known titles on the list of purchased content being revoked, including American Chopper, Cake Boss, MythBusters, Shark Week, and Say Yes to the Dress.
That means there's a good chance numerous users will be affected by Sony's announcement.
The original article contains 332 words, the summary contains 138 words. Saved 58%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Never buying a TV show or movie I can't download ever again. Never have, but still, never again.
- Good. You can stream pretty much anything for free here anyways: https://fmoviesz.to/
  Just make sure you have uBlock Origin or Adnauseam installed.

So AOL bought Warner Brothers and initiated a paroxysm of "new media" hype way back in the 1900s. They had no fucking clue what to do so they sold it. AT&T bought it more recently and pretended like a technology company should own content until they too realized they had seriously fucked up.
Now right-wing "libertarian" David Zaslav is in charge of "Warner Brothers Discovery" and he could not give a flying fucking shit about content unless it's time to destroy wokeness at CNN again, which he's all about.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/15/magazine/david-zaslav-warner-media-discovery.html
I'm starting to think Warner Brothers is cursed. Like, Monkey's Paw cursed.

This is why anytime I buy content like this, I mirror it locally. DVDs, CDs, videos, music, whatever. GoG and Steam both allow local offline copies. Storage is cheap and not only can I continue to play these items if the store goes away, but I can also access them where and when I want thanks to things like Plex and Jellyfin.
- What do you mean that Steam allows a local offline copy? You can switch Steam to offline mode, but I haven't heard of an "Offline Copy". It would certainly be useful for some games.
  
  You can make backups of games through the backup and restore menu. I assume that's what he means, unless he's referring to the limited selection of Drm free games
  
  So, I’ve got a vm setup to booth and do steam auto installs with steam running periodically. It can be set to offline mode and in such a mode, if another machine on my network needs to pull the install it will do so locally from that vm without going on it to the internet. If I block external access, again steam will pull from that machine to install on my main gaming machine. Periodic backups of the machine makes sure that I have full installs ready to go for any of my truly offline machines.
  It’s actually pretty cool to get gig speeds installing something from steam because it’s already somewhere on my local network.
  It’s not as nice as GoG though. Definitely recommend that method if you can.

Thermocline trust inversion, perfect example of why customer trust continues to erode and corporations continually lose credibility. Albeit Sony's not the only bad actor here, it's the overall agreements in place that were poor to begin with between businesses. The end result is a negative customer experience with all involved brands.
When the industry fails like this, we go back to incentivizing torrents.

Just let companies keep doing shit like this. They're only leading people down the path that is piracy.

Wow, I didn't know I was that far behind on Star Trek: discovery. And Lower Decks only got 4 seasons?
- Lower Decks is still in production, and there will be plenty more.
- 4 seasons too many.
  
  Shut your filthy mouth.

I know Mythbusters went for a while, but 13 centuries?

"If you had just read the fine print, you would have realized that you're not actually owning and they could take it away at their own discretion." - an associate of mine
So you're saying we shouldn't consume content?

I have no sympathy for people not getting all their media for free in 2023.

- Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  https://piped.video/rLXWqdry3Qc?si=LItEsEzrkK2DTL2D
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.