Comment by shermantanktop
1 hour ago
Buying a physical DVD means you own the item and have it in your hands.
"Buying" a streaming movie means that you enter into an agreement with an online service that promises to make your experience the rough equivalent of physical ownership. But to do that they have to solve a pile of problems, and solve those forever for as long as your purchase is valid.
Realistically, Sony will have service outages, they will have contract disputes, they may have data loss, security incidents, etc., all of which can make your "bought" content unavailable either temporarily or permanently. The real question is what type of agreement Sony had with StudioCanal.
None of this would ever affect your DVD. So the word "buying" wrt a streaming movie is easy to understand, but a bit misleading in practice. It's clear what Sony is signing up to provide; it's just hard to see how they can provide that consistently over the time period involved.
Consumers went wild over digital media distribution, because of its quality, its lossless copying, and the ease of reproduction and transmission. When CDs and DVDs appeared on the scene, I never dreamed that they would only be a temporary stepping-stone to intangible cloud downloads. But Napster happened.
The RIAA, MPAA, and entire industries were vehemently opposed to digital media (and recording in general) and fought digital distribution every step of the way, tooth and nail, until all the DRM and gatekeeping was in place.
Perhaps we were both on the wrong side of history?