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You all remember just a few weeks ago when Sony ripped away a bunch of movies and TV shows people “owned”? This ad is on Amazon. You can’t “own” it on Prime. You can just access it until they lose the license. How can they get away with lying like this?
I haven't ran into a situation where any of the digital copies of things I bought have been pulled. So I can't speak to what happened with your friends. But I will say that if you have any purchased digital copies of movies, you should at least setup Movies Anywhere and link all accounts you have. It isn't like how Steam will still allow you to download a pulled game. But it does give you copies of things on multiple sources once linked. So if you got something on Amazon, it would also be linked as "purchased" on other services like Vudu, YouTube/Play Movies, Apple, etc.. It won't apply to everything you have got but would likely cover most big name items.
It used to be marked with the old "Ultraviolet" branding, but when that was shutdown the basic underlying service was transferred to Movies Anywhere. Most of the time you can see which things would count because they have the MA logo. Not great for smaller releases and most shows won't be part of it (atm at least). Though some shows might also show up, as I have seen things from HBO and some other ones.
All that being said. You are very much correct about "buying isn't owning" these days. And even when there is something like MA, there are still thousands of movies and shows that will only ever get a digital "release" from torrents/P2P. Sad that some cool shit will never get a real HD re-master for Blu-ray (let alone streaming). I very much feel that studios should have at best a 10 year window to make whatever sales before the masters should be copied to public archives. If the studios won't do it, then there are more than plenty of people out there that would do the job for the love of keeping old media preserved and accessible. Also bullshit when I try to go the "legal" route and find a show on one service in HD but only in SD on others. It is pretty infuriating to see that in some cases I can only get like season 2 of something on say Vudu for example, but season 1 is seemingly exclusive to Amazon. And one is in HD and the other is only SD.
I looked at Movies Anywhere and
I did fail to mention it is US only (my bad in that). Though it could get expanded if it is popular enough and it can be pointed to as "reducing piracy." But international laws being complicated from nation to nation is also an issue, or at least something they might say. I haven't been out of the country since setting it up, so I am curious if I would need a VPN to access my licensed stuff. Maybe would work for folks that have made accounts in the past with VPN? Idk.
It does work with some very limited sets of shows. But like I said, they aren't really about that and the shows tend to be from studios like HBO. But not helpful for most anything other than movies.
It is a unified interface, but if I buy a MA labeled movie from say Vudu. It will also show-up in my iTunes, Microsoft, YouTube/Google Movies, Amazon, and of course MA. They have some additional connected services via Direct TV and Verizon, but I don't use those. But the point is that if I get it on one of the services I connected, they become available on all of them. Even when the UltraViolet service went down, I didn't lose the things I had bought. Though I think that Disney must have bought their connections and the UV stuff was migrated. Though I am not sure of those details. Either way it didn't lead to me losing anything.
It also does require that you periodically sign back into their site to re-connect each provider similar to how you have to sign back into other sites. But again, I at no point have lost access to what was in my account if I haven't signed in to re-verify. It isn't as cut and dry as having the physical discs or a torrented copy on a NAS. But it is still worth knowing about if you have "legit" copies. I really wish that there were a way to link my Plex account and be able to watch them in the same front-end as my local stuff though. But no way that is going to happen unless Plex completely stops supporting the Plex Server and works out deals to use APIs of stuff like Vudu, Amazon, iTunes, etc..