Comment by mghackerlady

I "bought" a few digital kids movies because kids want to watch them over and over and I didn't want to deal with handling physical media.

Convenience is 99% of the answer.

Plus, when "renting" a movie costs $3.99, and "buying" it costs $5.99, there's not a particular reason to not click the "purchase" button.

Yes, it doesn't sound like a wise decision given what we know about the usual practices of those services. But the average consumer is not as savvy as us HN users. I would not blame someone for expecting to own permanent access to the content if they purchase it. This only happens because big Sony and such are not held accountable of their actions, they are the one to blame.

For me it's usually just a cost thing. Some movies I just know I'm going to watch multiple times, certain ones even annually. Clicking buy generally already makes sense if you're going to watch it twice. Wouldn't buy it from the PS store though, it seems like such a niche outside their core business that I'd be worried they would pull exactly what they pulled here.

Kids and convenience. 99% of the movies I’ve bought from iTunes are kids movies. Some of them were watched over and over and over.

DVDs and Blu-rays I purchased from the same era required a) advance planning and b) care. To the second point, most of the physical media is now destroyed (scratched, stepped on, lost, or just degraded), but I still have access to the copy of Cars I bought almost 20 years ago from Apple.

I don't own any way to play physical disc media anymore, and for the handful of movies I watch multiple times (so far 2), it made sense to buy them.

I only buy through Amazon Videos, with the logic being Amazon is going to be around awhile.

If you're going to watch it multiple times it's cheaper to buy than rent (especially if you see it on offer). With streaming you're relying that at least one of the providers has what you want and then you have to pay for a month to watch it if you're not already subscribed. I've also found streaming services are way more likely to censor older content.

>Why do people buy movies digitally anyway? I can understand digital movies (they are convenient)

You answered your own question very efficiently.

> Why do people buy movies digitally anyway? I can understand digital movies (they are convenient) but renting or streaming seems far more reasonable. If you truly want to own a movie as I suspect people who buy them digitally do, the only way to ensure that is to buy it on DVD/Blu-ray and rip

You're forgetting there's a slice of people who want to "own" a movie library but don't have the technical acumen to rip and/or (more importantly) host (consider that you'd have to stand up a Jellyfin server and have a good amount of HDD space -- I personally have 50TB).

Again, it's not _that_ hard in general but daunting enough and with high enough startup costs to dissuade a lot of people.