- Hundreds of TV episodes and movies will be removed from PlayStation Store accounts on September 1
- People bought the movies and shows
- No apology, 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 house in the middle of the night and taking them away.
Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for digital purchases: Sony is removing hundreds of movies and TV show episodes purchased on the PlayStation Store from people’s collections, without any compensation. In September, they left.
The list of affected films and shows can be found on Sony’s website and includes remastered versions. Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Gomorrahthe Rambo movies and many more. At issue is the end of a licensing agreement between Sony and StudioCanal, a major producer and distributor of films and shows.
As Sony explains, from September 1, 2026, “you will no longer be able to access your content previously purchased from StudioCanal, and it will be deleted from your video library.”
To add insult to injury, the notification ends with the PlayStation slogan: “Play has no limit.”
As you can imagine, this has decreased very good with movie buffs.
Why is Sony removing people’s purchases?
Sony’s deal with film production company StudioCanal has ended, meaning Sony no longer has the right to sell those TV shows and movies. The fact that people bought them doesn’t matter to Sony, because in the terms and conditions that absolutely no one reads, it states that you are buying a license to watch a show or movie, not to own it.
Since the news broke, my social media has been filled with people saying the same thing: Sony’s decision is a very good advertisement for digital piracy. And it definitely upset many movie fans, like Quelonious on r/movies who vowed, “I will never buy streaming movies again,” although that poster sticks to the Blu-ray rather than flying a pirate flag.
“If I were you, I wouldn’t make digital movie purchases,” Rewdyroo writes on the same subreddit, noting that “you don’t buy the movie. It works more like a lease and if the movie license, regardless of what service you bought it from, runs out, your digital movie goes away too, no refunds. This happened on Amazon and I will never buy a digital movie again.”
Mildmichigan spoke for many: “It should be illegal. If I buy something digitally and the platform loses the distribution rights or whatever, then I should be grandfathered in.”
We’ve discussed this before, because it’s one of the main reasons 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 that it will be yours forever.
(Is this a good time to mention that Criterion’s 4K Blu-rays are currently 50% off in the US?)
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