- Hundreds of TV episodes and movies will be removed from PlayStation Store accounts on September 1st
- People had bought the movies and shows
- No apologies, let alone compensation, from Sony
One of the best things about Blu-ray discs is that you don’t have to worry about Sony sneaking into your home in the middle of the night and taking them away.
Unfortunately, you can’t say the same for digital purchases: Sony is scrubbing hundreds of movies and TV shows bought on the PlayStation Store from people’s collections without compensation. In September they are gone.
The list of affected movies and shows is on Sony’s website and includes the remastered ones Terminator 2: Judgment Day, GomorrahThe Rambo movies and many more. At issue is the termination of a licensing agreement between Sony and StudioCanal, a major producer and distributor of movies and shows.
As Sony explains, starting September 1, 2026, “you will no longer be able to access your previously purchased content from StudioCanal and it will be removed from your video library.”
To add insult to injury, the notification ends with the PlayStation slogan: “Play has no limits”.
As you can imagine, this has gone down very good with movie fans.
Why is Sony removing people’s purchases?
Sony’s deal with film production company StudioCanal has ended, meaning that Sony no longer has the rights to sell these TV shows and movies. The fact that people bought them is irrelevant to Sony, because the terms and conditions, which absolutely no one reads, state that you buy a license to watch a show or movie, not to own it.
Since the news broke, my social media has been full of people saying the same thing: Sony’s move is a pretty great advertisement for digital piracy. And it’s sure to upset many movie fans, such as Quelonious on r/movies, who vowed, “I’ll never buy streaming movies again,” even if that poster sticks to Blu-ray instead of flying a pirate flag.
“If I were you, I wouldn’t make digital purchases for movies,” Rewdyroo writes on the same subreddit, noting that “you’re not buying the movie. It’s more like a rental contract, and if the license for the movie, whatever service you bought it from, expires, your digital movie is gone too, no refund. I’ve had that happen on Amazon movies and will never buy it again.”
Mildmichigan spoke for many: “This should be illegal. If I buy something digitally and the platform loses distribution rights or whatever, then I should be grandfathered in.”
We’ve discussed this before because it’s an important reason to keep buying Blu-rays: Blu-rays are yours forever. But it’s a problem with all kinds of digital media, dating back to the days of Microsoft’s PlaysForSure digital music, which sold audio files that died when Microsoft shut down the servers. Whether it’s a streaming catalog or GTA 6, if it’s not on physical media, you can never be sure it’s yours forever.
(Is now a good time to mention Criterion’s 4K Blu-rays are currently 50% off in the US?)
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