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A comment on It's hard to say who's winning the streaming wars, but customers are losing. Parent comment

Re:It's hard to say who's winning the streaming wars, but cu... by abruzzi on Friday November 19, 2021 @05:38PM (#29283525)
Its funny, but I never watched broadcast TV or Cable primarily becuase "just watching whats on" meant a 99% chance of sitting through dreck that I can't stand, so I never did it. In 1995, I had a collection of over 200 VHS tapes of movies I loved (all purchased, not copied.) In 2005 I had a collection of 500 DVDs that I had purchased.

Today, I have about 700 movied ripped from DVDs (and the DVDs still in boxes somewhere), and 500 movies purchased on iTunes. I don't subscribe to Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO, or any other streaming service because, again, 99% of it is dreck I can't stand. So instead I have a collection of 1200 movies that I like and specifically chose and purchased. Some are better than others, but they're all ones I like.

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Re:It's hard to say who's winning the streaming wars, but cu... by tomnipotent on Friday November 19, 2021 @05:49PM (#29283634)
> 500 movies purchased on iTunes

iTunes sells licenses, not movies. Providers can pull content from iTunes and you lose access to whatever you paid for.

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Re:It's hard to say who's winning the streaming wars, but cu... by Ryder123 on Friday November 19, 2021 @08:17PM (#29284684)
I don’t believe this is true, and I can’t find any confirmed examples of it happening.

There have been cases where users thought they lost a purchase, but it ended up being an issue where they changed storefronts to one where the purchase wasn’t available. The movie reappeared when they went back to the original storefront (and I believe even that behavior was a bug that’s been fixed).

I keep an eye on this because I’ve also purchased a lot of movies from iTunes.

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Re:It's hard to say who's winning the streaming wars, but cu... by Beldin on Saturday November 20, 2021 @02:37AM (#29286298)
The licensing part is most likely true. Can you download purchases for offline play in a random (non-Apple) video player? Or do you need iTunes to exist in order to watch "your" purchases?
[ Parent | on HN ]