EPISODE 128

Your Digital Purchases Might Not Be Permanent

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Summary

When you purchase a product, you probably believe that you will own that forever. However, with digital products, you might find that purchasing a digital product isn’t as permanent as you expect.

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Transcript

For decades, you’ve had the option to either buy or rent a movie. Even as the media has changed from VHS to DVDs to Blu-rays and now to streaming, buying or renting have always been your options. However, when you buy a streaming movie, that purchase might not be as permanent as you think.

For Personal Tech Media, this is Two Minute Tech. I’m Jim Herman.

Throughout the history of home movies, buying a movie meant receiving a copy of it that was yours permanently. As long as you had a device to play that movie, you could always watch it whenever you wanted.

When purchasing a movie through a streaming service, it would then be reasonable to assume that buying it would give you the right to stream it through that service forever. However, if you check the terms and conditions at the site where you made the purchase, you’ll find that owning a physical copy of media is much more permanent than purchasing a digital version.

Every site that will sell you a digital copy will explain in their terms that the content could become unavailable due to licensing restrictions. That means that if a studio no longer wants its films available through a particular service, that media would be removed from the service and you would lose the ability to stream it.

Multiple companies are currently facing lawsuits regarding the inability to access purchased content. However, until adequate consumer protections are in place, you’re purchasing digital movies and other digital content at your own risk. If you want to ensure that you actually own a copy of a film, buying the physical media is your best option.

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