Buying Films Online

Makhaira

Makhaira

Makhaira

Soldato
Joined
23 Nov 2007
Posts
5,064
Location
Lancashire, UK
I recently had the misfortune to delve into the horror show that is UltraViolet, and the utter shambles that is the way they treat their customers - not being able to download copies of films I own, being tied to specific apps, etc etc.

As I fancied watching a film tonight, I thought I'd go have a look at Amazon Video and Google Play about buying a film directly. On closer inspection, it looks like even these services won't actually let me download copies of the films I purchase, I can only stream them from online (or in the case of Google, cache on an Android device). Is there any service that actually lets me buy a film and then manage it as I see fit rather than dictating to me??

(I don't want to start the debate again about how the industry treats paying customers as pirates, and how pirates avoid all the hassle by just beating the copy protection, that's not the aim of the thread.)

Any suggestions welcomed!

Thanks
 
I don't think there is any service that would let you do this because what's stop you from freely distributing it.
 
ZeroG said:
I don't think there is any service that would let you do this because what's stop you from freely distributing it.
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Nothing they are doing now stops it anyway. All of the Netflix shows like Daredevil, House of Cards etc (same for Amazon) end up on torrent sites within hours of them coming out. If piracy is the reason then it's not a very well thought out one.
 
NexusK said:
Nothing they are doing now stops it anyway. All of the Netflix shows like Daredevil, House of Cards etc (same for Amazon) end up on torrent sites within hours of them coming out. If piracy is the reason then it's not a very well thought out one.
Click to expand...
Eh? That's like saying that because people can smash a window of a car and hotwire it, you may as well leave all cars unlocked :confused:

Content piracy happens, but they're not going to give it to you on a plate are they.

Makhaira, what exactly do you wish to do with a file that you can't do through one of the apps?
 
I want to be able to play a digital file through any one of my phone/tablet/computer/TV/media server whenever I see fit. Whilst I have no objections to some sort of ID verification per platform, the way they've gone about it is to lock you into various proprietary applications that are wrapped around the video file.

It's all pretty academic when you're at a PC on a broadband connection, but when you start playing around away from that environment, things rapidly become pretty constrained.
 
I think you just have to dive-in and get engrained into an eco-system such as Amazon Prime, really. E.g.

FireTV = stream at home (TV)
Amazon website = stream on PC
Android app = cache to phone/tablet

Google is pretty much the same options. I don't know about Netflix. Yes it's "nice" to be able to have a file you can duplicate etc. and sit locally on a server, but that's just not going to happen.
 
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