PlayStation Store
Sony
While the promise of an all-digital, streaming-based future felt like it had a lot of benefits, now it’s all starting to crumble a bit, and now one of the worst case scenarios is happening over on PlayStation.
Sony has announced that certain TV shows that players may have bought through PlayStation will be deleted from their libraries. Yes, shows you paid for, just…deleted.
Which shows? That would be Discovery TV shows, and the culprit, yet again, seems to be not necessarily Sony itself, but this is another move from Warner Bros. who has been stripping content down from its service and deleting finished projects to save on residual and get tax breaks, respectively.
Here’s what Sony is saying about what happened (via Kotaku):
“Due to our content licensing arrangements with content providers, you will no longer be able to watch any of your previously purchased Discovery content and the content will be removed from your video library.”
Warner Bros. recently merged Discovery and HBO Max into “Max,” one of the worst rebrands in the industry, and this no doubt has something to do with that move and the expiration or alteration of some sort of licensing deal with PlayStation.
There is a full list of shows you can check out to see which you may own that are about to get zapped, but there are a number of big shows on the list from Mythbusters to Deadliest Catch to Finding Bigfoot to How It’s Made to My 600 Pound Life. Some may scoff at Discovery’s increasingly bizarre lineup of reality shows, but they’re popular, and no doubt some PlayStation owners have bought them.
I’m sure there’s some sort of fine print that they do not technically own the content, so you run the risk of this when you buy them, even if you don’t know. In that sense, physical media is better, but I doubt many people are buying Blue-Ray box sets of Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo, if those even exist. I have no doubt WB is doing this mainly to get people to subscribe to Max, and I wonder where else this may start happening.
It’s a few hundred seasons of shows, from what I can tell, thousands of episodes. Wild. This will happen at the end of the year when some sort of deal expires, December 31, 2023. It’s unclear if Sony could be to blame for some of this, but it’s also possible WB was just asking for too big a licensing bill for them to renew. But plenty of people are going to be mad at them over this, and it makes you think twice about purchasing digital content from PlayStation in the future, that’s for sure.
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Michael Johnson is a tech enthusiast with a passion for all things digital. His articles cover the latest technological innovations, from artificial intelligence to consumer gadgets, providing readers with a glimpse into the future of technology.
