Citing a shift in customer behavior towards streaming video services, Sony said today that it will no longer sell movies and TV shows through its PlayStation Store.
“We’ve seen tremendous growth from PlayStation fans using subscription-based and ad-based entertainment streaming services on our consoles,” Sony’s Vanessa Lee writes. “With this shift in customer behavior, we have decided to no longer offer movie and TV purchases and rentals through PlayStation Store as of August 31, 2021.”
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When this change occurs, previously-purchased movie and TV content will still be available to customers, Sony says, and can be accessed via PlayStation 4 and 5 consoles and mobile devices.
That last bit is interesting, and could provide a playbook for Microsoft to follow should it ever make a similar decision for its Movies & TV service, which is only available via Xbox consoles and PCs. I’ve long cautioned users not to purchase movie or TV content from Microsoft—rentals are obviously not an issue—because this isn’t exactly a core business for the software giant. And let’s face it, if Microsoft was serious about Movies & TV, it would be available on smartphones, tablets, set-top boxes, and smart TVs.
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<blockquote><em><a href="#616070">In reply to Angusmatheson:</a></em></blockquote><p>With streaming-services, the only real major issue is how many of them there is: they might all be "only £9.99 a month" or something, but when there is something like 15 of them… it all adds-up. But if you use one, and it dies, you move to the next-best one to suit you.</p><p><br></p><p>But for digital <em>purchases</em> I'd steer-clear, as then if the service you bought it from does die, so does your copy of whatever it was. If you can buy a DRM-free item which you can save to your own device locally, and backup, such as DRM-free MP3 or FLAC song or album downloads from Amazon, or video-games from Good Old Games .com, then sure. But a TV show, film or album that you can only access via an app or website, no thanks</p>
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<blockquote><em><a href="#616276">In reply to Calibr21:</a></em></blockquote><p>Depending how-often you are doing a rental, something like 2-3 might come-to the same-cost as doing a monthly sub to a service anyway…</p>
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<blockquote><em><a href="#616340">In reply to jlariviere:</a></em></blockquote><p>Digitally, or on physical-media… I think some movies and music-albums did used to get released onto the UMD format the original PSP used…?</p>