How long is “forever”? When it comes to digital media, forever could be as close as a couple of months away.
Funimation, a Sony-owned streaming service for anime, recently announced that subscribers’ digital libraries on the platform will be unavailable after April 2. For years, Funimation had been telling subscribers that they could keep streaming these digital copies of purchased movies and shows, but qualifying it: “forever, but there are some restrictions.”
Own your shit without anyone’s permission or it will disappear
This actually IS theft, selling you something and then stealing it back!
But but but you didn’t read page 36 of the ULA where it says they can!
I vaguely remember reading that terms of service that violate basic rights are not going to be upheld in court.
I’m not a FUNimation subscriber but I hope that the people who are take Sony to court
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Funimation, a Sony-owned streaming service for anime, recently announced that subscribers’ digital libraries on the platform will be unavailable after April 2.
For years, Funimation had been telling subscribers that they could keep streaming these digital copies of purchased movies and shows, but qualifying it: “forever, but there are some restrictions.”
But in addition to offering video streaming, Funimation also dubbed and released anime as physical media, and sometimes those DVDs or Blu-rays would feature a digital code.
For people lacking the space, resources, or interest in maintaining a library of physical media, this was a good way to preserve treasured shows and movies without spending more money.
It also provided a simple way to access purchased media online if you were, for example, away on a trip and had a hankering to watch some anime DVDs you bought.
Regarding refunds, Funimation’s announcement directed customers to its support team “to see the available options based on your payment method,” but there’s no mention of getting money back from a DVD or Blu-ray that you might not have purchased had you known you couldn’t stream it “forever.”
The original article contains 420 words, the summary contains 186 words. Saved 56%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Are you able to download your purchases? I feel like the answer is “no,” but if they were serious about your library being “yours” downloading your purchases would have been part of their service plan from the start.
Not to my knowledge.
But also, I would assume the vast majority of library licenses were from buying blu-rays. You buy a movie or a season/collection and get a card to get the digital copy with it. So people, theoretically, already have physical copies.
In large part because… funimation was “the good anime streaming service”. That is similar to “Sony’s network shit is good compared to Nintendo” and “I would rather get shot in the ass than the foot”
Still hot bullshit though considering that there IS another anime service with similar capabilities under the same company (crunchyroll). I understand license hell and all that but… still.
This is how my library was with Funimation. Entirely from physical copies. I still canceled my Crunchyroll account and listed this move as my reason. Probably won’t matter one bit since most people will go right on subscribing even after the price hike.
I understand license hell and all that but…
Nah, don’t offer them your understanding. These guys’d root thru your pockets if you were bleeding out
Doesn’t change media licensing being a minefield. Especially with respect to Japan where many of the studios/rightsholders have genuine fears of blu-rays and streaming hurting their market.
Eh I’m not saying you’re wrong or anything. Your explanation was good and thorough. I’m just being grumpy about a point you weren’t making really.
These days there are countless articles explaining the intricacies of why things are shit… I’m tired of the explanations when it boils down to “they’re doing it because they can.” Gets tiring ya know?
Hope i didn’t come off as attacking you, just rantin’
That is the thing though. When you trivialize it to “they’re doing it because they can”, you aren’t approaching with good faith and are starting from an antagonistic stance. Which is a good recipe to guarnatee things get even shittier because if you are going to get the exact same response for being “kind of shitty” and “punting a baby off a roof” then…
Like, the reddit API bullshit is something that basically everyone here is aware of. And it was definitely shitty. But also understand that everyone runs adblockers, advertisements/sponsorships in general are increasingly “weird”, and people were actually spending money to pay for third party apps that blocked ads while using reddit servers/content. It is massively shitty (and part of why I “left”) but it also was a very “real” problem without a good solution.
I think the way reddit made it clear they did not care about users and just cared about having “the content” means they can go fuck themselves. But… how the fuck does it make sense for them to provide a service that other people charge for?
Your take on Reddit’s API changes genuinely suck since it was a complete 180 in policy with no middle ground and tons of disrespect from Reddit’s higher-ups.
That being said, I agree with your principles. Companies and people make decisions based on the cards they’re dealt with. Oftentimes, those cards are dealt by other people with their own deck of cards. Somewhere down this chain, you can find a company or person who purposefully dealt a bad hand to the next guy in the chain out of greed, spite, or even incompetence. You really can’t get mad over the last guy in the chain because they can’t change the decision made by someone 10 layers before them.
I firmly believe that in five or ten years (… if the world hasn’t ended by then) we’ll have a “leak” that will reveal the behind the scenes negotiations between reddit and the app makers. Because even as it was occurring there was a decent amount of back and forth until it became “Reddit are trying to kill me, your best friend, by charging me rates that I can’t afford”. And then all hell broke lose which led to all the “Well, fuck it, reddit doesn’t need you either” level responses.
Which gets back to: When you approach “enshittification” from an actively antagonistic stance? There is zero benefit in providing a middle ground. If you are “literally hitler” whether you are reasonable or not and being reasonable doesn’t even properly stem the bleeding? Why bother.
Its why the various youtube messes have actually gone “okay”. Yes, you have people like Rossman who make it their brand to basically say “Fuck this company and I am going to actively attack them and encourage you to drop them while relying on them for income”. But the vast majority of “voices” had to take a more nuanced stance because… they need youtube to exist to make money. Which means the vast majority of Voices tended to be “Okay, this is bullshit and youtube is kind of a hellscape with ads so I am not going to blame you for running an ad blocker… even though I literally need you to watch those ads so I can make rent. Also, I get a LOT more money from youtube premium viewers. Just saying…”
And that is why… Youtube Premium has a LOT of supporters (myself included). Because we watch a lot of youtube and can “justify” it. And youtube music is probably the second best service based on almost any metrics/feature requirements.
Maybe I am just old and grumpy. But I remember all the various webcomics and (what we would now call) blog sites that had variants of “Please for the love of god whitelist us in your adblocker. We need those ads to pay for server expenses. We go out of our way to curate good ads and if you see a bad one, let us know and we’ll remove it from the rotation within 24 hours. But please, let us keep drawing stupid shit” that were almost universally responded to with "too hard. Adblocker on
You really can’t get mad over the last guy in the chain
Oh trust me, you can. It doesn’t do any good but you can. You can cultivate a deep and burning, passionate hatred. It gives you superpowers. I gained the superhuman ability to cope and seethe while housing rocky road
It’s wild that I just got my Robotech collectors edition box set, which was a pre-order, a few weeks ago, and it had a Funimation code in it. This was either a sudden decision or very poorly communicated in-house.
This really grinds my gears. Every company is always complaining about piracy, just to add invasive DRM and/or crappy measures that only ever hurt the consumer.
Some might not act like this is a big deal because those codes typically come with a physical disc, but when you bought the disc you actually bought TWO copies, the physical disc AND the digital code.
What if you sold your code to someone else? GONE. What if you sold your disc? GONE.
This should be illegal but unfortunately they can update their crappy EULA’s that say something along the lines of “By using our service you agree to–”, and there goes your media that you “own forever”.
What a joke.
if just annoys me so much that they did away with dvds and blurays - which offered infinitely more value to streaming because of the added bonus features and the fact that you owned it - and then raised streaming prices even though they didn’t have to spend as much making the physical media anymore.
Plus the DRM on blu-rays is just asinine. It’s getting harder and harder to actually own digital wares
Fuck these companies. Seriously, they dont give a shit, they are not competitive and want you to keep paying for shit you bought years ago.
🏴☠️Just remember to seed
Death to all ceos and anyone involved in decisions like this
Kill them all, I don’t even use these services but holy fuck
How long is “forever”? When it comes to digital media, forever could be as close as a couple of months away.
No, the question was “how long is ‘forever’”, not “how far away is ‘forever’”
Second time Sony has done this in almost as many months. Fuck Sony.
Relevant (old) XKCD : https://xkcd.com/488/
That is exactly the XKCD I pictured.
forever like when harry potter’s mum said she’d always be there for him
Just like any lifetime guarantee, its guaranteeing access for the lifetime of the service (which could end at any moment) not your lifetime.
services that promise lifetime or forever accessability should be avoided.
it’s* guaranteeing access
Good bot!
Physical media FTW once again.
That said, I still feel bad for the people who got fucked over here. There are a lot of options Sony could have pursued in order to do right by their customers, but instead Sony chose to be shit bags about it.
