How long is “forever”? When it comes to digital media, forever could be as close as a couple of months away.
Funimation, a Sony-owned streaming service for anime, recently announced that subscribers’ digital libraries on the platform will be unavailable after April 2. For years, Funimation had been telling subscribers that they could keep streaming these digital copies of purchased movies and shows, but qualifying it: “forever, but there are some restrictions.”
Are you able to download your purchases? I feel like the answer is “no,” but if they were serious about your library being “yours” downloading your purchases would have been part of their service plan from the start.
Not to my knowledge.
But also, I would assume the vast majority of library licenses were from buying blu-rays. You buy a movie or a season/collection and get a card to get the digital copy with it. So people, theoretically, already have physical copies.
In large part because… funimation was “the good anime streaming service”. That is similar to “Sony’s network shit is good compared to Nintendo” and “I would rather get shot in the ass than the foot”
Still hot bullshit though considering that there IS another anime service with similar capabilities under the same company (crunchyroll). I understand license hell and all that but… still.
Nah, don’t offer them your understanding. These guys’d root thru your pockets if you were bleeding out
Doesn’t change media licensing being a minefield. Especially with respect to Japan where many of the studios/rightsholders have genuine fears of blu-rays and streaming hurting their market.
Eh I’m not saying you’re wrong or anything. Your explanation was good and thorough. I’m just being grumpy about a point you weren’t making really.
These days there are countless articles explaining the intricacies of why things are shit… I’m tired of the explanations when it boils down to “they’re doing it because they can.” Gets tiring ya know?
Hope i didn’t come off as attacking you, just rantin’
That is the thing though. When you trivialize it to “they’re doing it because they can”, you aren’t approaching with good faith and are starting from an antagonistic stance. Which is a good recipe to guarnatee things get even shittier because if you are going to get the exact same response for being “kind of shitty” and “punting a baby off a roof” then…
Like, the reddit API bullshit is something that basically everyone here is aware of. And it was definitely shitty. But also understand that everyone runs adblockers, advertisements/sponsorships in general are increasingly “weird”, and people were actually spending money to pay for third party apps that blocked ads while using reddit servers/content. It is massively shitty (and part of why I “left”) but it also was a very “real” problem without a good solution.
I think the way reddit made it clear they did not care about users and just cared about having “the content” means they can go fuck themselves. But… how the fuck does it make sense for them to provide a service that other people charge for?