Streaming movies from iTunes
Posted on 09/18/2018 3:29:29 PM PDT by Swordmaker
The internet is flipping out with stories like, “Apple can delete your movies any time it wants.” No, Apple isn’t deleting movies people bought through iTunes, but one man’s heading with mysteriously missing movies underscores how messed up international movie licensing is.
Streaming movies from iTunes
Here’s the back story: Anders G da Silva shared his experience on Twitter. Some movies he bought through iTunes disappeared from his streaming library. The response from Apple was that the “content provider removed these movies from the Canadian Store. Hence, these movies these movies are not available in the Canada iTunes Store at this time.”
Me: Hey Apple, three movies I bought disappeared from my iTunes library.
Apple: Oh yes, those are not available anymore. Thank you for buying them. Here are two movie rentals on us!
Me: Wait… WHAT?? @tim_cook when did this become acceptable? pic.twitter.com/dHJ0wMSQH9— Anders G da Silva (@drandersgs) September 10, 2018
Apple offered him a couple free movie rentals, which didn’t seem like much of a consolation considering the now missing movies had been paid for.
The conclusion people jumped to was that any movie you purchase through iTunes could be taken away at any time without warning or compensation. It turns out there’s more to the story, and Apple isn’t simply removing movies from your iTunes purchase list.
First, the movies only in da Silva’s iTunes library disappeared. Since the odds that he’s the only person who ever purchased those movies is extremely low, we should’ve heard from a lot of people complaining just like he did.
Second, a critical piece of information was missing when the missing movies report first started circulating: da Silva had recently moved from Australia to Canada (via CNET). He purchased the movies in Australia, and it seems the had different licensing terms in Canada.
Different licensing terms could mean different versions of a movie, or that for whatever reason they’re blocked from viewing in specific countries. Since da Silva was trying to stream movies he bought in Australia while in Canada, they were blocked.
In the end, Apple is taking care of da Silva so he can keep watching his movies. The big takeaway here is that media licensing is a hot mess. Region locking was a big headache when DVDs were the big thing, and now we’re seeing a version of that with digital movie purchases.
Downloading a digital purchase means you have the movie and it won’t disappear from your library. If iTunes checks the license when you play it, however, you may still be locked out from watching.
That makes physical movie purchases sound pretty compelling. You buy the DVD or Blu-ray and it’ll work without any worries about licensing changing. That’s assuming, of course, you have a disc that matches the region encoding for your player.
The real fix here is to change licensing from regions to world wide—but that isn’t going to happen any time soon. It seems movie studios are glad to take our money, but aren’t too concerned about keeping us happy.
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Valid concern regarding physical media versus digital. I love my kindle books, but worry about potentially losing access to them some day. Same for video. I know I should download the “physical” copies and save them to have some guarantee of access should things go wonky.
I've had my share of problems with iTunes, all related to licensing. Don't get me wrong, I like iTunes and the convenience of digital items stored on the computer hard drives versus hunting for DVDs or VHS tapes.
I have digital movies stored on external hard drives. Sometimes my computer won't play them, with an iTunes message that my computer is not authorized to play them. Particularly a problem with rented movies that will expire regardless of not having been watched. I contacted Apple several times and they couldn't fix the problem, and gave me credit for rentals. Never mind that I purchased or rented them on the same computer, I deauthorized and reauthorized same computer, etc.
Frustration ended when I got "TunesKit for Mac". Plus I back them up to a separate hard drive.
I won’t buy digital movies from Comcast. We may move someday and who knows if Comcast will have a cable presence where move to? If they don’t i will have lost all those purchased movies.
We are drowning in content.
Point is I have paid for the digital media already, yet have access to it at the “whims” of the company I purchased it from. Balance of the convenience of not requiring physical space for all these movies and CDs, and the risk of losing access.
This is not a rebuttal to his point, that he paid for movies and now he can't watch them. It might be an explanation; it certainly is not a rebuttal.
Apparently you didn't read the next sentence after your quotation from the article. "In the end, Apple is taking care of da Silva so he can keep watching his movies."
Apple techs working on the problem did not originally know he had moved from Australia to Canada. The issue is pretty obscure on streaming services and will only hit someone who has packed up their gear and moved around the world. Once Apple figured out WHY he was blocked from watching his streaming content, they fixed his problem by exchanging his Australian licenses for Canadian licenses. Problem solved.
This was a problem created by the DVD industry who did not want consumers buying products across international borders due to extreme pricing differentials in some Asian, South American, and African markets, compared to the North American and European markets. So they put in region Digital Rights Management that would not allow disks made to play in one area to play in others, unless you had a universal or multi-region DVD player. It also prevented some piracy, most of which came out of Russia and Asia, plus some from South America. You could buy the copied disks but they wouldn't play. . . but the pirates were quick to start making disks in the right formats. The DRM just poured over into the purchased streaming formats by default, even though there was not much real purpose for it, except minor copyright law differences, and who collected the per stream copyright royalty pennies.
Indeed I did not read that. But it doesn’t change anything. I’d say it underscores da Silva’s complaint.
da Silva: “Apple is deleting my movies!”
MacObserver: “Apple didn’t delete his movies.”
MacObserver: “Also, the movies in da Silva’s library disappeared. Maybe because he moved to Canada.”
jiggyboy: “This not a rebuttal to his point, that he paid for movies and now he can’t watch them.”
MacObserver: “Also, Apple is taking care of da Silva.” (For deleting his movies.)
I see nothing in this article about how anybody “is taking care of da Silva,” nor in his twitter, but that’s another matter.
That's been clarified. They did not "disappear" from Da Sllva's iTunes movie library, they just would not run. He got a "This title is not available to you" alert and the suggestion that he needed to purchase it to see it when he had already purchased it in Australia.
Da silva tried to re-download them and could not. Again, incorrect license for Canada.
Earthlink internet service provider had a music offer that let you “buy” the music BUT if you stopped paying for Earthlink service then “your music” did not open in any other player but Earthlink and stopped working when you cut the service.
They went from 5 million customers to out of business with stunts like that.
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