Technology

Companies issuing refunds in the form of gift cards is just straight-up insulting

Remember, streaming only has a business model as long as it has a better user experience than piracy. That's why iTunes took off in the era of Napster. When a streaming service's user experience drops below that of digging up pirate treasure off a shitty ad-ridden torrent site, that service is not long for the world.

If you can't save it, its not yours. Sail the seas.

It's easy to scoff at this whole "You will own nothing, and you will be happy" phrase, but it's really gone too far already.

You don’t own the video file. You own access to their video file, which they also don’t own, they only own the right to distribute it. If their distribution contract ends and doesn’t gets renewed, then they can’t let you access the file. At least they refunded you. This system is one of the issues with the ongoing writers and actors strikes. Amazon can decide to stop making a video available, which cuts all dividends revenues to actors and writers. So having a video available for you to watch costs money to Amazon (or Netflix or Max…) but not enough content makes users unsubscribe, so they ride that thin line for maximized revenue. This means that older movies that aren’t blockbusters get dropped in favor of new content. Now new content doesn’t means good content, remember, it needs to be as cheap as possible. Aaand this is why steaming companies are spiraling down and everything is going to shit. Filmmaking is an art form turned into an industry. But art isn’t about maximized profit, it’s about art first. But you can’t make that art without millions of dollars and that requires the art to take a step back to maximize profit, but not too far back. It’s a really big issue in the film and entertainment industry.

— I’m an IATSE local 600 camera operator.

We've taken away this thing you've bought, here's a gift card so you can give us that money back again later.

Gift card. GIFT CARD! Those bastards "refund" with gift card instead of actual money! I hope EU will haunt their asses. Big corpro hunting season is open.

When brain-computer interface finally became reality, right holders and streaming companies will require you to hook in and let them wipe the memory of you watching the movie whenever they cancel your "purchase" like this.

Sometimes I think I made the right decision to just get a huge harddrive and download all my favorite entertainment in drm free format. Movies, music, games, books. I saw this coming a mile away a decade ago. The only thing that will really hurt me is if/when Steam inevitably goes full corporate cucks and starts going hard on the DRM locking down my library.

They removed books from your Kindle in the past. Who could have seen this comming?

Mofos

Return me ALL my money for that, fuck your girftcard coupon shit! That is the least you can do and still doesn't change the fact that I can't buy to own anything there, so why the fuck would I?

Jellyfin and torrents for the win!

Every day on the internet, a lucky 10,000 get to learn "common knowledge" for the very first time.

Like everyone said 50 times, yar har be pirate, all that.

Or, buy hard copy, which is refusing to completely die because of this shit, right here.

BUT, you have to make sure the data is on the hard copy and that you can access the data (play the songs, watch the movie, etc) WITHOUT internet access, that is you have to make sure the hard copy of the media is really on the damn disc, and it's not just a glorified access key to media that will then be streamed from their servers they control. If it is then do not pay for it.

This is honestly why vinyl is still a thing, once you rip things back out of the digital realm it gets a lot harder for them to pull bullshit, they pretty much have to put the songs on the wax if they want your $40, and they do, oh boy they do they want that money bad.

Piracy is always a bigger pain in the ass than internet techies act like. No, I don't want to buy a Plex server and learn how to use it and learn how to make my own VPN and make sure the VPN doesn't just report my activity to 7 Eyes or whatever that things called and and and and, and results like "my movie got unbought" are also unacceptable.

Yes, we know, there are "special" websites that you can just surf to and it's like a janky Netflix that "just works" so long as you already know the name of the thing you intend to watch, otherwise it's just a blank search bar. Also, you cannot tell other people about the website or the website gets taken down. Nothing is more useful than a website that you absolutely can't tell people about, wow, what a problem solver that is.

"I want to watch a movie" is a very "This activity must offer zero friction, I will only accept push button get movie" kind of activity so, yeah. "Be pirate" is not that useful, it's just the internet's go-to answer, they always speak loudly for the tiny minority in this place.

What we're actually doing is drastically limiting our spending on any of this type of thing, and never, ever pay money to "own" something digital. That era is over. It sucks, but it's yet another shitty thing that would take bullets to change, and since it's not worth bullets it's not changing.

Honestly I doesn't even take bullets but if you're going to build the kind of political movement it would take to create change then all that work would be absolutely wasted on this problem while everyone eyerolls at you like you're stupid and worthless for caring so yeah, it's not changing.

So yeah, do not pay for digital ownership of any kind, ever. It's only ever a lease with one-sided terms, at best. Amazon lost the contractual right to provide that movie, so you lost the right to watch it, and "buying" it meant buying a license to watch it on their terms, the end. Don't pay for it.

Yeah that'll happen for anything streamed and licensed.

If you want to own something, you need to own it physically. Buy an actual disk. People won't and I'll be surprised if they are still making blurays at all in ten years but that's the only way you can actually buy media now.

Wow. This is why owning DVDs is better. And if you can't buy, download via torrents. Imagine these bastards rolling up to your home and reclaiming a movie you physically purchased. We gave them too much power. Time to withdraw it. Convenience is not worth this shit. Get uncomfortable and get your entertainment away from these streamers who don't give customers what they paid for.

DVD rental stores could surely make a comeback given these new developments. Libraries still loan movies as well. Remember, Barnes & Noble didn't run all independent bookstores out of business. And after Amazon savaged Barnes & Noble, Amazon Books suddenly came into existence (2015 - 2022). Greed driven corporations aren't the answer.

Companies LOVE punishing their customers while the pirates sail on without trouble

Can't have shit in the cloud

Before YouTube Music, I purchased quite a lot of albums on Google Play Music. Paying normal CD prices, no renting.

My Google Play Music library consisted of 60% uploaded and 40% purchased music.

After my Music Library migration to YouTube was done ( this sentence alone, is enough doom and sorrow for any music lover ), my uploaded music was merged with my purchases and both were put under quarantine within the "uploads" tab.

No way to recognize purchases or even the possibility of downloading any of my uploaded or purchased music.

The money I paid for the music?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Edit: i bought 2 - 4 albums every month on average. For a few years. Sometimes more. So, it's not like they only got a few bucks ... At least from my pov. lol

Digital goods are just not physical goods, you don't really own them - which also mean you can't really steal them.

The only thing that surprises me is that anyone is surprised by this. If you buy a physical book from anywhere, you own it. If you "buy" the rigth to play a movie (or read a book) from amazon, you own nothing. Usually they don't show that so clearly but that's the reality.

If companies won't sell you a DRM-free copy of media, just pirate it. It's the only way to actually own it.

If people suddenly collectively understood they're paying for basically nothing it would probably spur large-scale revolution.

Is this a shock? If you want to own your media you need to have the raw video. This can be though getting DRM-free media or buying DVDs and blurays. (Be careful of bluray has they are infected with DRM)

blu-rays are often as cheap or cheaper than "digital copies", and ripping them to my NAS is pretty trivial these days thanks to makemkv.

the best part is, uncle jeff cannot legally break into your house and take back the disc just because of some petty rights issue.

I mean yeah, that sucks, but them refunding you is absolutely the right move. I don't think they did that the last times Amazon removed something from their catalogue.

Edit: I missed this wasn't a refund, just store credit

You know where Amazon (and any other company for that matter) can't pull content from? My Jellyfin instance. Yo-ho-ho!

well, at least they paid you back for it. that's actually quite respectable of them. and if they didn't, it would have been a class action lawsuit, so kind of a moot point all around. You got your money back. I recommend using it to obtain several tiers of backup hard drives and make sure you have two physical copies of every piece of media you feel is not replaceable. Because some day, you won't be able to replace it. the corporate dream is nobody owns anything, you just have to jack into their "stream" and consume whatever they feed you. the funniest thing is, people are already getting a head start on that dystopian future. they're doing it to themselves, by actually paying for shitty streaming services. You really shouldn't do that, as it only emboldens them.

If you need an account to play it, it's just not yours to enjoy it.

Oh, are we acting surprised because we forgot all the people that got screwed exactly like this on Kindle books in 2009?

Welcome to digital media. If you can’t play it without some company’s say do, you don’t own it.

Welcome to the Pay Per View information economy. Amazon, and others, have been pulling this shit for years.