Microsoft suddenly kills its movies and TV store on Xbox and Windows
Microsoft suddenly kills its movies and TV store on Xbox and Windows
www.theverge.com
Microsoft suddenly kills its movies and TV store on Xbox and Windows
57 comments
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If you don't own the storage, you don't own the content. You're just renting it.
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Usually I agree with this sentiment but that gets dicey as if you store your work on a cloud service, they don't own the work, the company/person who made it does. They are just parking the vehicle they own in a rented garage. In this scenario you're saying you are renting a license to access it I suppose. Which would mean we are renting our driver's licenses per se, which is true I guess.
*Where the fuck did my brain go with that metaphor
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That's slightly different. You aren't paying them to store that specific content, you are paying to rent space in their service. They guarantee that space to be available for whatever SLA they have and for as long as the service exists. If they shut down the service, you are still SOL on that content if you don't have it backed up locally.
Contrast that to "buying a digital movie". You are paying to access that content, at that time, and as long as it's made available on whatever service you paid for it. The latter part is the kicker. My argument is that if I can't download it in a usable format independent of the platform "selling" it, I didn't buy it. I rented it. Buying digital movies is just renting them for a longer time frame, unless they let you download it.
I always argue with the less tech savvy people in my life that it's like buying a car vs. leasing a car. If you buy it, it's yours, period. If you lease it, it's not truly yours. You have to give it back when the lease is up, or buy out the lease. You don't truly own it until after that. The media companies just don't offer the "buy out the ease, later", part. While Microsoft retired the whole service, these companies also have this issue when they let media agreements expire with content producers. You buy a movie, but then they decide not to renew their agreement with Paramount? You just lost access to that movie.
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They did this with "plays for sure" DRM protected music files too, way, way back. Never bought content of any kind from them after that and then killing Windows LIVE.
Just assume everything from them has a "destroy after" date set in the near future.
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Ahoy.
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Wait.. they had a movies and TV store?
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It was terribly overpriced. No idea who used it.
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I never knew either of these things existed for Xbox or windows. Who is stupid enough to buy streaming movies or tv shows? Oh xbox and windows users. Makes sense.
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if you can still sign in, then i recommend linking your account to moviesanywhere for the time being so you can at least access any movies purchased there in other apps.
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Microsoft had a movies and TV store?
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They did. It was so awful with hardly any updates. I bought some things on it but usually when it was on major discount and connected to Movies Anywhere so I could watch it elsewhere.
I don't know why they had the same movie for sale... one with bonus features, one without... for the same price. Every other platform includes the bonus features automatically. Why separate them? Is there someone out there thinking, hmm... I like this movie, but I don't want the bonus features.
It was doomed to fail.
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I own a couple that were only distributed in this region that way in an acceptable format for weird reasons related to localization. And then I moved internationally a couple of times and the Microsoft store REALLY isn't willing to understand that's a thing that can happen. It's been a bit of a mess and one of the multiple reasons to not use MS's store as a package/software manager in the first place.
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Remember when Microsoft was telling shareholders that the Xbox multimedia ecosystem was going to dominate living rooms everywhere, then people stopped hanging out in their living rooms?
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Imagine having a living room
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You guys have rooms?
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I remember it like it was yesterday. "Xbox, go home!"
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MS ruined living rooms.
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I remember when they killed their Games For Windows store and the games I'd bought on there just went poof. Never trust Microsoft to keep a digital storefront around, they'll delete it all at the drop of a hat.
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Never trust Microsoft
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Like with Bitcoin, not your keys not your coin. If you don't hold it you don't own it.
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I can see Microsoft just being the Azure company at this rate. Then they’ll have to charge what it costs to run and a lot of companies will wish they had stayed cloud agnostic.
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The business is basically thirds last I looked. Windows, Office and Azure.
Not sure how their purchase of platform companies they shouldn't have been allowed to buy plays into that. Thinking LinkedIn and GitHub.
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They already make money hand-over-fist on Azure. Cloud computing is already quite expensive
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So the Microsoft brand is just for show and it's actually called Azure.
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Azure is tiny compared to the competition.
363 is much more successful comparatively. That said, its dying fast, with the utter garbage service upgrades, its enshitified hard into a rigid platform unsuitable for enterprises. So find/make a real alternative to EXO with the Outlook app: and 365 ends over night.
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If you think about it: Microsoft owns XBox, that has been one of the three major consoles for decades now. They own Windows, the world's most popular operating system. They own Edge, one of the major browsers. And they still failed to create a movie and TV store and shut down their music streaming service. Which is totally insane - that shit was bundled with fucking windows and Xbox and they still made it suck so hard that it failed
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Don’t forget that they didn’t succeed on mobile phones either. Despite it was very fine OS and devices were good too.
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Good except for the critical features they didn't add. Like when the iPhone didn't have copy-paste, but on a Microsoft phone, way later.
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I think it’s more that consumers didn’t know what the fuck it was.
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Which is totally a failure of Microsoft. People have their Xbox connected to their TV. They have an account and they have their payment information maintained there. And Microsoft can't make the simple proposal of "Hey, this device you have connected to your TV and where you are playing games on, you can also use it to watch movies and series"
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Their phones too
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Oh well. They should have brought back the Zune. And my Nokia windows phone in bright yellow.
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I liked Zune. Microsoft is the real killer of their own demise. They have great products/ideas, but they just torch them before they take root.
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For what it's worth, Windows Phone was sort of a successor to that. And then they went and killed it too...
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always after the ever elusive profit margin. can't have a product that lives forever became there's no more profit after the market has been saturated.
they then take all the IP they have and either license the technology or sell it for a profit or loss depending on what is needed.
doesn't matter though, because the consumer always loses.
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Ahem Sony ahem - referring to Minidisc which I thought was awesome but most Americans didn't care.
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Remember when Xbox required a Live subscription to use the any streaming entertainment app?
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I distinctly remember them failing a console launch spectacularly by (among other things) trying to pass it as a media center and talking about how great it is to watch TV on.
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Don't forget one needed to stay online with Xbox Live subscription even for basic functionality and gaming during XBOne's E3
Not to mention games were heavily reliant on DRM so you can't trade discs easily
Meanwhile Sony...
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You'll still be able to access content. But for how long?
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You’ll still be able to access content you own
Haha yes, that was never in doubt.
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It will be if your using MS tech for it. They will pull the plug on that too. Just not yet, it's quieter to do it separately later.
On it's on disks you control in formats you can play with anything you like, its never yours.
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57 comments
"You'll still be able to access your content"
Yeah, until they release a new version of the launcher, or underlying framework, which prevents the old app to run, locking people out of the content they paid for.
If purchasing isn’t owning, piracy isn’t theft.