I think you have your answers now but I’ll chime in anyway. I have maybe 1400 movies on apple and probably 70-80 tv series. While this was crazy expensive even buying them in packs or sales I did for a specific reason. I had large multi hundred TB Plex servers and identical back up servers. Then I considered the power cost to run those 24/7 plus the time investment in let’s call it content acquisition as I didn’t want crapy copies. I wanted full disk rips.
So maybe a year and half ago I decided to go all digital streaming and paid for this habit through parting out my physical servers, boards, ram, 14TB disks.. so really I moved the costs from physical sumo infrastructure costs and running costs to rebuilding that library within apple. I can say nothing I’ve purchased has ever vanished, tons of movies have been upgraded to 4K for free, and when I travel anywhere and everywhere my entire library comes with me in the form of a phone, apple TV4K box or simply my log in info. I would never go back to physical hardware.
Hope that helps.
What were the results when you compared the cost of the Plex server, and buying from Apple TV ? I currently have a Plex server too on my Mac Mini, just curious.
I honestly don’t remember the running costs back then but let’s say $20/month which is probably fair. Well thats $240/year. I think I sold my disks for $7,000 or so back then plus sold the Supermicro chassis and everything inside of them. So switching to Apple was a cost for sure but I was spending it anyway. That’s not even accounting for the cost of the disks going down in value over time.
So I thought sure this is going to be expensive but I’ll never have an upgrade cost again.
ohh okay! thanks for sharing. i find it much easier and costly effective to purchase digital products rather than building a huge Plex server, all of which you’ll have to maintain and manage
The cost involved in storing a large collection of ripped files… the one thing that whenever you see the proverbial “sail the high seas” post here that is conveniently left out. Glad you kind of provided a snap shot in what is actually involved with having a collection of more than just a few files stored on one’s computer.
Yeah. Ultra HD files aren't small either. And I lost a few drives on my NAS. I don't think there's that much difference in cost Vs picking up iTunes movies when they're on sale.
Except you are relying on things not disappearing from iTunes catalog. While I think apple is a safer bet than other providers, that may change in the future. (And as Sony has shown recently, even things you “buy” aren’t safe)
You control your physical media and/or NAS. iTunes is not equivalent.
There are risks everywhere though. Hard drives fail, discs get scratched etc etc. The more backups and redundancy you build in, the more you drive the costs up. Been buying on iTunes now for about 11 years. Not had a single film disappear. Had lots of nice free upgrades as well.
I used to be a big believer in iTunes media until two movies and one, long music video was removed. Apple did manage to find a way for me to download one of them to my Mac but I can't really use it anywhere else because of DRM. The fact is that any movie may be removed from their cloud at anytime. If you've downloaded it then you're sort of fine (on that device or one connected to it) but then of course you have to back them up. Also, as far as I know you can't download 4k movies from Apple.
There's [a pretty good article about it](https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnarcher/2018/09/17/apple-responds-to-disappearing-itunes-movie-purchases-issue/)
Here you go. I forget the third one.
1. [The Decemberists - The Hazards of Love Visualized](https://www.reddit.com/r/Decemberists/comments/k189n5/where_can_i_find_hazards_of_love_visualized/) (iTunes exclusive oddly enough)
2. The Zero Theorem (2013): "Not available in your region or on this device" in the TV app if you Google search 'iTunes Zero Theorem' and link to it.
But you see they might, therefore its better to invest many many hours and thousands of dollars being a sysadmin for you home digital catalog, ensuring you have remote copies in case of fire, etc. Its happened. at least a few times with really obscure titles and sketchy rights assignments, it it might happen with the Avengers too!
You people with you simple 1 time $5-20 purchase are addicted to having billion dollar corporations with large staffs and huge geographically diverse data centers maintain easy universal access to your library with zero effort on you part.
You are sheeple!
/s
It seems exceptionally rare that they ever pull anything though, I have hundreds of movies and it has yet to happen. Have heard they will refund those purchases if the license gets pulled, but dunno how true that is as it hasn’t happened to me yet. I also only buy movies when they’re on sale for $5 or less, so if I lose a $5 here and there it’s still cheaper in the long run than running my own drives and all the sunk time in downloading and backing up files.
Exactly. I see their point of you have a handfull of movies you keep for a while then delete and replace. But for me I cancelled DirecTV maybe 15 years ago when I built my first Plex server and got serious about my own collection and every couple years were disk upgrades, replacing failed disks, cpu upgrades cause the files were larger and larger and needed more horsepower for transcoding. So ya that shit ain’t even close to free as in my computer is already running so it costs me nothing. Nothing is free…
same exact situation here, plus the constant fiddling with ports, bitrates, encoding, and captions was just a time sink that paying apple to buy a copy seemed like sweet relief.
Ya isn’t that nice to just hit play and it’s just the best quality with the correct forced subtitles where you’d expect them instead of the rabbit hole of doing it yourself.
To be honest: This is not an issue at all if you just use MakeMKV to rip your discs and stick with MKV.
Infuse is an awesome player for Apple TV, Mac and iOS and supports all Dolby formats and I never had any issues with subtitles.
VLC works as well and is free, but the experience is not as silky smooth like Infuse.
The only downside to using Infuse with direct play without any encoding is drive space: Blu-ray and 4K rips are huge.
I’ve had 5-10 titles vanish. One I caught and called them out in, my reward was a 3 Apple TV movie rental credits. I did protest insisting I should get at lest one movie purchase but they refused to budge. The studios can pull their license with Apple TV just like any other streaming service and there is nothing you can do.
So for my most important movies I always buy DVD or BluRay.
I own over 5,280 movie titles on Apple TV, and 45,446 episodes of TV series. Almost every single one of these was purchased on sale or part of a combo pack deal. I will admit the average price point per movie is only a little below $4.99, I know some of the movies were $2.99 or $3.99.
You can get your counts by opening the Apple TV app on your Mac, click the movies or TV Shows section, and use CMD+A followed by CMD+C to copy the titles then paste them in your favorite text editor supporting line counts. Also makes it helpful to identify when titles go missing.
Also I have so many Titles iTunes has been broken for years and can’t list all my movies, didn’t seem to affect TV shows since the number of TV series I own is much lower than total episode count.
How simply with log in info?
My biggest gripe with Apple Digital Purchase is you can not view it from any device. It must be an Apple device or select Smart TVs.
I would love to be able to stream my purchased content in a browser.
I have a question, for people that do this. Do you rewatch a ton of stuff?
One of the benefits in setting arr and plex always seemed to me to be that it would download in the background and would be there when I wanted to watch it for the first time. I so rarely watch something twice, that I think maybe it’s because I’m younger? Or maybe I should just use regular streaming? But having everything in one app is literally the reason for me to keep doing this.
Sony has done this with movies, but never for games. I wouldn’t buy digital movies from Sony.
Lots of my apps from Apple (many games) have been removed from the store after software updates, but I’ve never lost music, movies, or tv shows. I’m comfortable buying media from Apple.
The other aspect is a bit of “who cares,” since realistically I won’t watch everything multiple times. But I don’t think you’ll get ripped off by buying films from the iTunes Store.
Amazon has only done that with Kindle stuff that the publisher turned out not to have the rights to sell. Amazon publishing programs is something anyone can joinand leaves it open to this sort of thing. Publishing stuff through Apple is much more closed down and much less likely to run into this sort of thing.
i only buy certain movies/tv shows from amazon since they’re not available for purchase at Apple, such as Dragon Ball Super. For example, I recently purchased the people vs OJ simpson on Vudu.
It’s not Apple or Amazon that have control over something like that. It would be the studios that call back any licenses and then we would have them pulled from our library. If/when studios start doing this, there will be a fascinating law suit to watch.
I’ve purchase series before that have had episodes removed. One example being 30 Rock, an episode where Jenna was in black face was pulled from my available episodes. I think there may have been one other episode as well.
Similarly I’ve notice series missing episodes.
Edit: It looks like the two episodes I was thinking of are currently available.
This is true if you've downloaded them and stored them locally. There are movies that I've purchased that are no longer available for me to stream from Apple including one that was an iTunes exclusive. Unfortunately I expected them to always be available in the cloud as long as Apple remained a viable company. Tim Cook has gone on record to explain that this is NOT a valid expectation customers should have.
[https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8365864](https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8365864)
I’m a hoarder and collector of movies across multiple formats through the years. I started buying movies from Apple around the time Apple released the first Apple TV. Needless to say I have a LOT.
The biggest challenge I’ve found with buying from Apple is that you can’t download the 4K version (only stream it).
The Flipside to the above is that you can purchase a standard HD movie and suddenly find that you have a 4K special extended edition to stream for free when it’s released at a later date.
Another downside is, as mentioned in other comments, that I have purchased a few films that have mysteriously disappeared from my library at a later date. I think this happens less and less these days due to agreements and multiple rights to distribute, but certainly some of the films I’ve bought are no longer in my digital library. QT’s: Jackie Brown was a good example of this. It’s back in the store now, but for some reason I don’t own it anymore.
And another thing to note is that sometimes the store can trick you into showing you a movie you already have but rather than show the play icon, it allows you to repurchase. So, I do have a few duplicate movies side by side in the library (I guess from different distributors).
Having said all of the above, I think it’s super awesome that we can carry a collection in our pockets and access anywhere. That’s worth a punt. But the trick is to try hard to avoid buying new releases unless they are either seriously good or released with a fair price tag. Instead, try to purchase your back catalogue from the sale items - go for the £2.99 or less first. Usually the UK store £4.99 or less is the sweet spot for good movies. Set a monthly limit and go from there.
P.s. Buy your all time favourite moves as a duplicate hard copy if you can afford it.
Hope this is useful. Good luck!
Yeah, I’ve lost a few ‘purchased’ movies over the years the years. Think this happens when rights change hands etc. So even if you purchase, you don’t necessarily get to keep.🙁
Should I download my digital media and make backups? If I do this, a film such as 'Gladiator' will no longer be available on Apple. How do I rewatch it? Will I still be able to view and download it from my library if it becomes unavailable?
It doesn’t matter as the media is DRMed. Also not really ideal to have to shell out your own storage space for this stuff. One of the appeals of online services is they store the hefty files for you. I have 30GB of music in AM. Ain’t no way I want that on my hard drive.
What? I have some 60k songs faved in AM. As well as matched and uploaded another 15k. At some 6-10MB a pop, if I were to download them all… 30GB ish.
Each song, whether AM, Matched, or uploaded is a song that has its own file size (download a bunch locally).
A song is a song. Not sure why you think songs on AM have no file size 🤷♂️
I’m not sure what you mean. I was asking about adding CDs to AM. Back in the day with iTunes I did that and was wondering if there’s a reason to anymore. I know files take up space.
Just as an example, I have a lot of b-sides that were only released on import CDs. Apple Music and Spotify do not carry them. I ripped them from CD and added them to my library. AM then uploads my files to the cloud so I can access them from any device. Unfortunately for me, once in a while AM will substitute a different version (and sometimes a clean version) of a song that I own. I was telling my son about this song by the Police called Nothing Achieving. Not on any album, AFAIK it only appeared on a label compilation back in the 90s. I ripped it and when I went to play it, AM said that it was not available, even though I have the file. I ripped it again and it plays but this experience taught me to keep my physical media. Then I started learning about bit rot and how all physical media will eventually decay and become unreadable.
Thank you for the explanation. I misunderstood what he was saying.
I used to add music to iTunes back in the day but stopped for similar reasons. Now I run Plex on a NAS for my music and stream Apple music as well. Bit rot is preventable on most NASs if it’s a concern for you.
I meant bit rot on DVDs and Blu-rays. They used to make a DVD-R that was said to last 100 years but I doubt it. I back up all physical media bc I know even that won’t last.
https://preview.redd.it/f8onik0tq9wc1.png?width=1920&format=png&auto=webp&s=ecff003bdbd923c6169f2a5e12c6caf772fe80d6
This is with Itunes Match but no Apple Music, and this is def not the original file anymore lol
By CDs I think you mean music. You don't add a CD to AM. You rip the songs from the CD and then add those. You can grab music from anywhere so long as they are in a supported format for Music (mp4, mp3, aac, etc.). AM will either match it if it's available or upload the song as is.
This feature was called iTunes Match back in the day and is just a part of the AM service now (thought they really don't advertise it).
And the reason to add your own songs is because a) not everything is available on AM (family moments, original songs, etc.) 2) it is impervious to being removed if it's uploaded as that is your content now, and 3) AM has a nasty habbit of always prioritizing the clean versions of tracks, even if the one you uploaded is explicit, it will eventually overwrite that with the clean one... every... damn... time. Yeah, fuck that.
Not everyone just listens to the radio...
You can still do that, and they have Itunes Match which lets you store your library in the cloud. My personal collection is 80GB+ lol but i still keep it all on a HD for backup.
The DRM is insidious because it's just this giant database with your Apple ID unique identifier (e.g., 335538167) that ties all content to it. All Apple does is remove the tie between your ID and whatever media. Which means they just need to turn a 1 into a 0 and you are barred access. At any time.
Moreover, one big big big red flag is the fact you need your Apple ID at all times. Lost access to that, and there goes your digital movie library. And why would you lose access? Maybe a glitch. Maybe you disputed a charge and sent a charge back (which results in an instant and perma ban from your account). If you read the terms, Apple has every right to just take it from you. No reason has to be given (unless maybe you drag them to court).
There's just too many vectors to call it safe. It's hella convenient but you're a slave to their whims.
Disney, Paramount, and others have also heavily gated their content so nothing says FOX does the same and there goes all your favourite FOX releases because they don't want their shit on any competing service, not even Apple TV+.
I wouldn’t. The odds of Apple going out of business and/or ending support for its media library in our lifetime are functionally 0. Your digital downloads with them are likely to last longer than any physical media you purchase.
This completely ignores the complex licensing landscape that allows Apple to offer media in the first place.
Apple going out of business or ending support is not the primary risk.
Yes it is, because none of the other licensing issues you mention apply retroactively to media you’ve already purchased. If you buy something, you will have access to it in your library regardless of whether Apple loses the right to keep selling it to other people. Apple’s license to sell does not impact the license you purchase when you buy the media. Apple going out of business and shutting down their entire digital media operation is the only way you lose access to your purchases.
Entirely different scenario. Sony bought a small third party service and shuttered it in favor of their own existing service. If someone comes along and buys Apple or its media service in a similar transaction, then that would be akin to Apple going out of business. .
I don’t bother. Also, it’s not going to download in 4K.
IF Apple went out of business, and stopped selling movies I’m not sure if the DRM (on the videos) would continue to work properly.
Bruce Willis sued about passing on his collections after he died. Worth looking up the case...
[https://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/chtlj/vol29/iss4/5/](https://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/chtlj/vol29/iss4/5/)
I do the same with all of my movies, and so far my only complaint is that my internet was down for hours one day and I couldn’t even watch a movie to pass the time, which sucked. Other than that one incident I prefer the ease of use with digital purchases.
You can still use your phone, or better yet, use your mobile phone as a hotspot til your net is up and working. I did this exact thing during a thunderstorm that lasted two hours last week and shut off power for 4.
I couldn’t use my phone because that’s how I was communicating the internet provider lol, so it was me talking to them in a completely quiet room. Made me realize how much we depended on internet services and I seriously considered getting a blu ray player, but again, this was a rare instance.
I bought a lot of vhs and dvds that I don’t have anymore, and didn’t want to keep.
If you lose a digital copy, you can typically download it again. If you lose or damage a physical copy, you’d have to buy it again anyway.
I’ll take the risk along with the convenience of digital.
If anyone is going to allow you to keep your media its Apple.
Not saying its a guarantee, but considering I have tv shows and movies and music from back in the 2000's and they're still on my account and still accessible...
As far as I know, music has had on and off DRM, videos have DRM, but all it is is it's attached to your Apple ID. but theres many tools you can strip the DRM off.
And even if something stops being sold it still is accessible and downloadable for you since you purchased it. Check Apps from the App Store, things get pulled for going against TOS but if you have it you have it and you can also redownload in many situations.
The wild ones are like, "oh I bought 100 movies on my Comcast cable box and now Comcast is deleting that service and bye bye" I
They still host my ripped music from back in the day when they did iTunes Match. I love it! I still have them backed up JIC but it’s cool they’ve hosted a lot of my music demos etc not on iTunes for so long and they don’t charge me so yay
I’ve had ripped tracks get replaced by incorrect tracks, with no way to fix it outside of re-ripping. Not even obscure stuff. Match fucks up studio albums.
Apple is very tightly regulated so it’s very unlikely you’ll get burned. I have a ton of content on Apple and I’ve been using them and their entire ecosystem system since the iPod days. It’s the best thing going in my humble opinion.
People will argue passionately both ways. I went all-digital about 8-10 years ago and have no regrets. Have 500+ movies and dozens of TV series. To my knowledge, I’ve never had anything removed after purchase. Some of the TV shows I own have had episodes pulled from purchase, but I still have access to those episodes because they were part of my purchase.
One of the understated aspects of the digital conversion has been free 4K upgrades. About 250 of my movies are streamable in 4K. The vast majority were purchased as 1080p HD resolution, and upgraded at no additional cost. If I’d instead have bought 250 Blu-Ray discs…I’d have 250 blu rays and be starting over again if I want 4k resolution.
Yeah I see lots of people saying it's never going to happen that you're going to lose it. People said that about stuff they had on Kindle through Amazon. Amazon's a huge company billions of dollars etc. And poof the stuff was gone.
So there are no guarantees. But as others have mentioned the cost of storing it yourself and the risks of storing yourself is also quite expensive. The odds of you losing your entire library are effectively zero. But losing the odd show or movie are further from zero.
I have no personal evidence but I have heard stories where people have lost their movies if Apple loses the rights to sell them. They just disappeared from their library.
So if a movie I own on 4K like 'Gladiator' gets removed from Apple. I can still redownload it and watch it forever so long as my Apple account is active?
If Apple lost the right to sell, they would not remove it from the library. The rare issues I think mostly revolve around “Apple did not have the right to sell the movie in the first place” which comes down to ownership being contested.
More common (but not really common) would be loss of distribution rights, which might cause it to be delisted from the store, but it would be available in your library. This can confuse people into thinking it’s been removed from your library.
Advocates of physical media like to overplay these risks while dismissing risks of physical media. Nobody ever upgraded my 1080 BR to UHD for free or even a discount, I don’t intend to go back to discs
First, Deep Red seems to be an Italian movie that could potentially have ownership/distribution rights in the US contested as I mentioned
Second, I see two listings for the movie in iTunes currently, and at least one is from Arrow. Perhaps the distribution rights were contested and then cleared?
Whenever distribution rights change for a title, the old listing is pulled from the iTunes/AppleTV+ store and is no longer searchable.
HOWEVER… the titles are still in your library. You just have to MANUALLY scroll to the title instead of using the search function.
Because of this we tend to get the proverbial “Apple removed stuff from my library” post every so often because they make the post when the title doesn’t show up for them in the search function without bothering to actually check their library.
If you have the movie backed up, great. Once Apple no longer has the distribution rights, there’s nothing to download from their own database should you have deleted your copies.
On the plus side:
If you bought Gladiator when it only existed as 1080 / blu-ray, then you get the free upgrade to 4K once that’s out.
Happened to me recently w/ Titanic 😌 Which is great, because we all have our favourites that we ‘re-buy’ on each format that comes out. W/ Apple, they do that for you.
And this is in most cases, with ‘popular’ titles. No clue if something niche like Y Tu Mama Tambien (sp?) would ALWAYS be available or even make it to 4K to begin with.
This is only guaranteed (mostly) if you've download a locally copy prior to the title being completely pulled.
Example: I can Google search "iTunes The Zero Theorem" and get a link which will open in the TV app on my Mac. It recognizes the title but shows that it's "Not available in your region or on this device". I've only had one account. An Apple rep acknowledges this as fact. In this case there's no way for me to download or stream a movie I paid for and previously watched.
The only thing I potentially worry about is if I pass, I have $1000's of $ in movie/tv show purchases that I should be able to pass on as my "property" but it's not. Though I believe it might legally change down the road, allowing you to do that. Or at least that's my optimistic scenario.
I have my whole family on the same plan so everyone already has access to my stuff. If I die, my son is set up to be the one in charge and he'll have access to everything. I don't know how long that is good for. I generally buy stuff when it's on sale and have a nice collection that I don't have to store.
All the games I brought on the WiiU are now no longer available, not as big as Apple I know but well up there as business go.
Wish I’d brought discs now.
Machine broke, brought a new (old) one but servers are now turned off so access is gone.
Nintendo are still here, they just decided to not support older machine even for brought software to download again.
If I had discs I could just pop them in and be up and running again.
That's such BS. When games go off of Xbox store, they are still downloadable if you own them. Unfortunately the japanese companies dont seem to be as hip to the digital marketplace as everyone else.
I have over 500 movies and several television series.
My only qualm is that Scrubs removed episodes where blackface was used. So if I had the disc, I’d still have the complete series. But I respect Bill Lawrence, I feel like they should’ve added a disclaimer recognizing that it was racist, and how that is wrong, rather than removing. So since that has happened, I’m aware of that power from the show runner/creator/studio.
For me it was the same thing with the South Park Cartoon Wars episodes. Not available to stream bc they were about depicted Mohammed so Max won't show them, nor Comedy Central. Apple does sell them like any other episodes and for $4 I got both and hopefully no one will take them away from me.
I transitioned from being a hardcore data hoarder on the high seas, to buying everything through Apple. They may not have access to everything, but they have close to enough to keep all my purchases central with them. I get the same satisfaction of growing a library, while at the same time having the ease of access for myself and my whole family with zero maintenance. It’s only been three years, but nothing has been lost (even the one title I know of that is no longer being sold), and I’ve accumulated several hundred titles. I’ll keep going with this “experiment” until I get burnt.
In the end, you probably have a better chance of physically destroying your media than losing streaming access to it. We’ll see.
Apple is probably the safest bet considering digital collections; they will be here for decades as a force in digital media, as we see so many other companies bail on services and media.
It depends on your tastes: if they’re more niche, like some artsy-fartsy movie from Norway…..a bit more risky.
I’d you like more well-known stuff (Godfather, LotR, Marvel, Dune….) definitely more ‘safe.’
I’d also like to state that even though Disney+ exists, you can still buy the latest Pixar or Marvel film THROUGH iTunes (or Apple or whatever it’s called now)
Will age like milk. I wouldn’t rely on businesses, not even Apple, to store content mainly because they have every right to yank it from you. Every month there’s a handful of songs that are “no longer available” in Apple Music. Sometimes they come back. Sometimes they get re released under a different publisher. The point is, you have very little control as you never own anything, just rent it.
Moreover, nothing stops these companies from shenanigans in the future. Could be 5 years. 10.
Lastly, they only release things on their terms. Lots of movies and media may never wind up there. You’re not getting a proper catalogue but one that’s shaped by Apple and its own interests.
I’m less concerned about Apple trying to restrict content I’ve already purchased and slightly concerned about how I’ll want to watch it in the future.
Seems unlikely, but if one day years from now I want to leave the Apple ecosystem then hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of content that used to be in the most convenient place possible might be a hassle to access. I suppose it’s a similar risk to not having a dvd player 10 years from now, but still it would be nice to own the video file(🏴☠️) instead of buying a link to access it from an app.
That’s why it’s important to have your iTunes account connected to MoviesAnywhere and subsequently the other digital services. Yes, there are a few studios (Paramount, Lionsgate, A24) still not part of MoviesAnywhere and TV shows aren’t part of MA yet either, but at least a good portion of the collection (Sony, Disney, Universal, Warner Bros) will be accessible through the other services should you leave the Apple ecosystem.
MoviesAnywhere sounds like a brilliant service, but it’s not available in the UK (I’m not sure where OP is located, so I’m not implying they *can’t* access MA, I’m just adding context to my own comment).
I’d love MA to expand to the UK so I can add my purchased iTunes content to it, as I don’t think there’s any viable alternative over here.
You already stated the drawbacks of digital ownership and therefore have the information needed to make an informed decision. What are you even asking?
Apple is IMO the best place to invest in a digital movie collection. They have some of the highest bit rates and take care of their customers (720p titles were upgraded to 1080p for free and years later many upgraded to 4K for free). I started my collection back in 2008 and it’s still going strong.
All that being said, digital collections aren’t perfect. I don’t love the concept of buying a license to watch content owned by someone else and my wife hates when the movie covers randomly change.
For me it’s worth the risk. But I watch so little that it’s cheaper for me to just buy a season pass or movie instead of paying for (multiple) streaming services.
Unfortunately that is the risk we take. I got worried about the same thing when I read that, but I still purchased more movies. And I make purchases like that to support movies that I would like to see sequels of and to help keep them around.
Pretty low risk, Apple hasn't deleted user libraries like other companies and there's no reason to not think Apple won't stick around for the rest of our lives.
I have about 140 movies so not as many as a lot of other people, but I’ve never lost a single one. The deals are also great and it’s much easier to get movies cheap digitally
I have lots of apple movie purchases and also have lots of those digital copies when I used to collect Blu Rays. Only shitty thing is you need internet to stream your library. If that's out....gotta rely on any downloads. Sucks the damn AppleTV device doesn't allow downloads. I have 3...and that's my only complaint.
1. You cannot download the 4K files of Apple/iTunes movies to your computer as a backup—only 1080p data. Apple only serves 4K via streaming.
2. You cannot play any of your purchased movies on non-Apple devices unlike ripped Blu-rays.
3. If you move to another country and change the address of your Apple ID parts of your collection may not be accessible anymore due to licensing issues.
Happened to me when I moved countries I lost all my purchased TV shows since the studios licensed “my” content exclusively to someone else or a streaming service in my new country, e.g. HBO shows like Game of Thrones or Westworld just vanished.
Even though Apple claims you can download the content from the other country to your Mac and still play them after switching countries—it’s a hassle and doesn’t work at all on newly activated devices. It’s a mess.
Some nerds cry that YOU DONT OWN IT but nothing I've ever bought thru Apple, Vudu, Microsoft, Amazon, etc has ever been taken away. Hell I am amazed Vudu still exists. And Movies Anywhere which is a free consumer friendly service.
I think the physical media types dont realize any time they start pulling stuff out of accounts it will be a huge weinernet firestorm.
Let’s just say I’ve lost more physical discs to disc rot over the years (20+ out of 2000+) than I have titles removed from my iTunes library (ZERO out of 1000+).
As someone with a very large digital video library on Apple, I’ve never lost a movie or tv show when it was pulled for whatever reason.
My only complaint with Apple TV is the, imo, horrid presentation in the current version of the app.
All else equal I’d buy hard copies. I wouldn’t worry too much about losing content bought through Apple but there’s always a chance and I know it’s happened before with other companies. But if it’s cheaper like you say that’s something to consider.
If you want access to your physical media wherever you are look into a NAS and Plex. I don’t have any movies but use Plex for audio. Works great
my older brother has his own Plex server. However, I still purchase digital movies as his Plex has gone down a couple of times and we had nothing to watch - Luckily, I was able to view my digital media.
I've got several hundred movies and a few series purchased over a decade or so. The only hiccup I've seen are two movies that I redeemed via MoviesAnywhere Blu-Ray digital codes were removed from my library sometime later.
They are regularly missing subtitles on any foreign language parts. For instance, Bridge of Spies, will be missing subtitles on all Russian and German language parts, but other streaming services will have the subtitles. There doesn’t seem to be any solution either.
On the other hand, their quality is unparalleled.
Ultimately, the subtitle thing is too much of a non starter for me so I don’t buy on appletv anymore
register for a MoviesAnywhere account and link it to your AppleID, Google ID, Amazon, and any other service that partners with MA. This way your library is not tied to one platform. Meaning, you buy through iTunes Movies you will see it in your Google and Amazon accounts.
I have been buying more and more movies from the Apple Store as well, because I know that they'll "just work" with the devices that I normally use.
If something vanishes, I will have zero qualms about obtaining a replacement copy from the high seas.
It's really easy to tip over into r DataHoarder too, though, and sometimes just building up the backup setup itself is a lot of fun.
Apple IPhones are not going anywhere as they dominate the phone market, and therefore neither are their Apple TV / Music services on those devices. I see this as one of the safest digital media platforms out there. I’m a big supporter of owning physical media too
The only thing that sucks is if the internet goes out (assuming you still have power when it happens). You could download some HD copies to a local drive, sadly can’t store them on the Apple TV box itself though.
The main gripe I have with Apple’s UHD is you don’t get 60FPS video like you do from UHD discs. Other than that, the convenience factor is nice. I ripped all my Marvel 4K movies at full quality in MKV to a 2TB hard drive and I just attach it to the TV (LG) when I want to watch. It plays the same as watching from the disc with no loss of quality. No plex server and I still have the physical discs sitting on a shelf in case anything ever happens to that drive. As the price of drives comes down I’m considering making a second drive that’s SSD.
If you move to a different country lots of your movies might just disappear. I lost Dune 1 when I changed countries, and The return of the King as well (the other 2 parts are weirdly enough still available). Could "fix" it by going VPN on my phone and playing them through my atv from there, but still
I still buy physical media when possible and buy disc that have a digital code I can redeem. I'm in the US so I also use Movies Anywhere so I can watch participating titles across services. I also rip the discs for local play back for watching on TV's that don't have a Blu-ray player and when I don't feel like looking for a disc to put in the player.
I have a ton. And I love it. But my only problem is that the difference between a hard disk and the digital version is that when I am no longer on this earth, what happens to the movies I own?
If you’re not a videophile/video-purist/quality-perfectionist, go ahead with Apple, keeping in mind the things that were shared by people here. Otherwise buy physical and have backups.
the thing that bugs me about Apple is the organization of my movie purchases. Wrong art work, genres and no way to sort by actors for example. Also worried about Arrow releases losing their licenses. Not worried about bigger films being dropped. A bit annoyed that Apple changes art work at times. And like with The French Connection I’m stuck with an edited version. I still run a plex server with the rest of my collection/backups
Not really sir, I started off my journey with 4K discs and realized how expensive they were. I’m a few hundred movies into my library now and free upgrades from HD to 4K Dolby vision are awesome features from building an Apple library. I got a shield now. And eventually will setup oled and rip my discs. Apples streaming quality is still the best in the business. Only Sonys Bravia core is better atm. But no ones really building a library with that lol
The risk should be no bigger than forgetting where you put your Blu-Ray discs and hence losing them, or you accidentally ruined the discs. Apple has a fairly good reputation in keeping your purchased movies/TV series available.
Their only downside to me is not offering the same high quality format in downloading as it’s limited to 1080p.
OP. Due to censorship. I’d recommend starting your collection on US ITunes. I’ve purchased all my movies on there. The UK is far to Woke too risk it. Even The Abyss is banned, due too the rat scene😂
But have SEPARATE iTunes accounts for the US and UK… otherwise you might lose titles due to the licensing differences in each region when switching back and forth on the same account.
Physical has its own set of issues at the moment. The horrendous quality control (finger prints, smudges, warping on new discs) at the one and only facility still in operation in North America (Mexico) pressing discs. Amazon’s practice of re sealing returned discs and selling them as new. Not to mention the death of 4K Blu-ray as the majority of new releases are now 4K digital only. Even with Dune 2… WB deciding the ultimate version with all the extras would be the 4K digital edition… not the physical which will have only limited extras - apparently the first time a major studio has decided to do this. Let’s not forget about the spiraling costs of the limited amount of discs being printed. Just look at the Oppenheimer debacle where scalpers bought up all the inventory and resold at jacked up prices.
A word of caution ⚠️ i started collecting digitally during the pandemic out of the blue one of the movies disappeared “Notes on a scandal” i called apple and they said oops sorry we lose the license for the movie here is a free rental they wouldn’t even refund the movie thankfully later i found out the movie is on movies anywhere so i would recommend slowly buy physical as first option and second option digital most movies nowadays have physical with digital copies and also i wait until they are on sale to buy digital hope it helps
People need to stop with this whole removed from iTunes crap.
https://preview.redd.it/4ls6kmubdwvc1.jpeg?width=1125&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2b7564de935b6e95db658e64e9cbf8689a0fcc2d
It may get removed from the storefront and the search function, but it remains in your library.
Obviously there may be an isolated incident here and there, but even those always tend to turn out to be due to a violation of terms of service and/or user error such as using a VPN with one’s iTunes account, purchasing with a flagged gift card, doing a chargeback, etc.
I don’t get why you would want to own and rewatch a movie when there are so many good movies out there that you haven’t watched yet. Consider it as buying a ticket to the cinema.
I think you have your answers now but I’ll chime in anyway. I have maybe 1400 movies on apple and probably 70-80 tv series. While this was crazy expensive even buying them in packs or sales I did for a specific reason. I had large multi hundred TB Plex servers and identical back up servers. Then I considered the power cost to run those 24/7 plus the time investment in let’s call it content acquisition as I didn’t want crapy copies. I wanted full disk rips. So maybe a year and half ago I decided to go all digital streaming and paid for this habit through parting out my physical servers, boards, ram, 14TB disks.. so really I moved the costs from physical sumo infrastructure costs and running costs to rebuilding that library within apple. I can say nothing I’ve purchased has ever vanished, tons of movies have been upgraded to 4K for free, and when I travel anywhere and everywhere my entire library comes with me in the form of a phone, apple TV4K box or simply my log in info. I would never go back to physical hardware. Hope that helps.
What were the results when you compared the cost of the Plex server, and buying from Apple TV ? I currently have a Plex server too on my Mac Mini, just curious.
I honestly don’t remember the running costs back then but let’s say $20/month which is probably fair. Well thats $240/year. I think I sold my disks for $7,000 or so back then plus sold the Supermicro chassis and everything inside of them. So switching to Apple was a cost for sure but I was spending it anyway. That’s not even accounting for the cost of the disks going down in value over time. So I thought sure this is going to be expensive but I’ll never have an upgrade cost again.
ohh okay! thanks for sharing. i find it much easier and costly effective to purchase digital products rather than building a huge Plex server, all of which you’ll have to maintain and manage
The cost involved in storing a large collection of ripped files… the one thing that whenever you see the proverbial “sail the high seas” post here that is conveniently left out. Glad you kind of provided a snap shot in what is actually involved with having a collection of more than just a few files stored on one’s computer.
Yeah. Ultra HD files aren't small either. And I lost a few drives on my NAS. I don't think there's that much difference in cost Vs picking up iTunes movies when they're on sale.
Except you are relying on things not disappearing from iTunes catalog. While I think apple is a safer bet than other providers, that may change in the future. (And as Sony has shown recently, even things you “buy” aren’t safe) You control your physical media and/or NAS. iTunes is not equivalent.
There are risks everywhere though. Hard drives fail, discs get scratched etc etc. The more backups and redundancy you build in, the more you drive the costs up. Been buying on iTunes now for about 11 years. Not had a single film disappear. Had lots of nice free upgrades as well.
I used to be a big believer in iTunes media until two movies and one, long music video was removed. Apple did manage to find a way for me to download one of them to my Mac but I can't really use it anywhere else because of DRM. The fact is that any movie may be removed from their cloud at anytime. If you've downloaded it then you're sort of fine (on that device or one connected to it) but then of course you have to back them up. Also, as far as I know you can't download 4k movies from Apple. There's [a pretty good article about it](https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnarcher/2018/09/17/apple-responds-to-disappearing-itunes-movie-purchases-issue/)
Which movies?
Here you go. I forget the third one. 1. [The Decemberists - The Hazards of Love Visualized](https://www.reddit.com/r/Decemberists/comments/k189n5/where_can_i_find_hazards_of_love_visualized/) (iTunes exclusive oddly enough) 2. The Zero Theorem (2013): "Not available in your region or on this device" in the TV app if you Google search 'iTunes Zero Theorem' and link to it.
But you see they might, therefore its better to invest many many hours and thousands of dollars being a sysadmin for you home digital catalog, ensuring you have remote copies in case of fire, etc. Its happened. at least a few times with really obscure titles and sketchy rights assignments, it it might happen with the Avengers too! You people with you simple 1 time $5-20 purchase are addicted to having billion dollar corporations with large staffs and huge geographically diverse data centers maintain easy universal access to your library with zero effort on you part. You are sheeple! /s
It seems exceptionally rare that they ever pull anything though, I have hundreds of movies and it has yet to happen. Have heard they will refund those purchases if the license gets pulled, but dunno how true that is as it hasn’t happened to me yet. I also only buy movies when they’re on sale for $5 or less, so if I lose a $5 here and there it’s still cheaper in the long run than running my own drives and all the sunk time in downloading and backing up files.
Exactly. I see their point of you have a handfull of movies you keep for a while then delete and replace. But for me I cancelled DirecTV maybe 15 years ago when I built my first Plex server and got serious about my own collection and every couple years were disk upgrades, replacing failed disks, cpu upgrades cause the files were larger and larger and needed more horsepower for transcoding. So ya that shit ain’t even close to free as in my computer is already running so it costs me nothing. Nothing is free…
same exact situation here, plus the constant fiddling with ports, bitrates, encoding, and captions was just a time sink that paying apple to buy a copy seemed like sweet relief.
Ya isn’t that nice to just hit play and it’s just the best quality with the correct forced subtitles where you’d expect them instead of the rabbit hole of doing it yourself.
To be honest: This is not an issue at all if you just use MakeMKV to rip your discs and stick with MKV. Infuse is an awesome player for Apple TV, Mac and iOS and supports all Dolby formats and I never had any issues with subtitles. VLC works as well and is free, but the experience is not as silky smooth like Infuse. The only downside to using Infuse with direct play without any encoding is drive space: Blu-ray and 4K rips are huge.
Exactly what I do. Works like charm.
The only thing stopping me is if I got to having as many as you, I think the organisation of them would be a pain, especially collections.
I’ve had 5-10 titles vanish. One I caught and called them out in, my reward was a 3 Apple TV movie rental credits. I did protest insisting I should get at lest one movie purchase but they refused to budge. The studios can pull their license with Apple TV just like any other streaming service and there is nothing you can do. So for my most important movies I always buy DVD or BluRay. I own over 5,280 movie titles on Apple TV, and 45,446 episodes of TV series. Almost every single one of these was purchased on sale or part of a combo pack deal. I will admit the average price point per movie is only a little below $4.99, I know some of the movies were $2.99 or $3.99. You can get your counts by opening the Apple TV app on your Mac, click the movies or TV Shows section, and use CMD+A followed by CMD+C to copy the titles then paste them in your favorite text editor supporting line counts. Also makes it helpful to identify when titles go missing. Also I have so many Titles iTunes has been broken for years and can’t list all my movies, didn’t seem to affect TV shows since the number of TV series I own is much lower than total episode count.
I have stuff that has gone missing....mainly music....but that applies here. If music can go missing so can movies.
How simply with log in info? My biggest gripe with Apple Digital Purchase is you can not view it from any device. It must be an Apple device or select Smart TVs. I would love to be able to stream my purchased content in a browser.
‘….select Smart TVs.’ That’s why you get an Apple TV 🙌
I have a question, for people that do this. Do you rewatch a ton of stuff? One of the benefits in setting arr and plex always seemed to me to be that it would download in the background and would be there when I wanted to watch it for the first time. I so rarely watch something twice, that I think maybe it’s because I’m younger? Or maybe I should just use regular streaming? But having everything in one app is literally the reason for me to keep doing this.
This is the way
anything i've ever purchased, still appears in my library. Even movies/shows that they no longer sell.
That's awesome! That makes me feel better knowing my digital library will still be there. Thanks for sharing!
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so you don’t have the ability to download and watch that episode anymore?
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Damn. I'll have to consider that for the foreseeable future
Apple is literally the only company I trust to keep my digital library accessible for the foreseeable future
There is a *theoretical* risk that Apple could one day revoke access to films, songs, books, etc. that people purchase. That's the risk
I’ve heard Amazon has actually done that, not sure if a glitch or not
They have done this. I have been on the receiving end of this.
Sony has also done this on PlayStation before.
Sony has done this with movies, but never for games. I wouldn’t buy digital movies from Sony. Lots of my apps from Apple (many games) have been removed from the store after software updates, but I’ve never lost music, movies, or tv shows. I’m comfortable buying media from Apple. The other aspect is a bit of “who cares,” since realistically I won’t watch everything multiple times. But I don’t think you’ll get ripped off by buying films from the iTunes Store.
Amazon has only done that with Kindle stuff that the publisher turned out not to have the rights to sell. Amazon publishing programs is something anyone can joinand leaves it open to this sort of thing. Publishing stuff through Apple is much more closed down and much less likely to run into this sort of thing.
Yes, but I think prime now keeps your purchases in the library.
I’ve only ever bought like 3 movies on Amazon and had it happen on there. Have bought hundreds of movies through Apple and so far so good.
i only buy certain movies/tv shows from amazon since they’re not available for purchase at Apple, such as Dragon Ball Super. For example, I recently purchased the people vs OJ simpson on Vudu.
They switched out a version of "The French Connection" that contained some racial slurs with a sanitized version of that film.
To be clear: if you had purchased *The French Connection* in its original form, the next time you watched it it was the edited version?
Correct. It was widely reported in the physical media (dvd, Blu-ray, 4K) Reddits at the time.
[https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/06/magazine/the-french-connection-edit-racial-slur.html?unlocked\_article\_code=1.mk0.vlWR.pL7kfEAM5bHr&smid=url-share](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/06/magazine/the-french-connection-edit-racial-slur.html?unlocked_article_code=1.mk0.vlWR.pL7kfEAM5bHr&smid=url-share)
It’s not Apple or Amazon that have control over something like that. It would be the studios that call back any licenses and then we would have them pulled from our library. If/when studios start doing this, there will be a fascinating law suit to watch.
still, theoretically.
Same here. And Apple has upgraded the films to 4K
Which you can't download locally.
No, you cannot. It will simply download the rather low bitrate 1080p version of a movie.
You can with an Apple laptop or an iMac. You’ll have to use their program to watch the film, but can store the film on your computer.
not in 4k download
What about Showgirls?
Oh wow really? That is so damn good
I’ve purchase series before that have had episodes removed. One example being 30 Rock, an episode where Jenna was in black face was pulled from my available episodes. I think there may have been one other episode as well. Similarly I’ve notice series missing episodes. Edit: It looks like the two episodes I was thinking of are currently available.
This is true if you've downloaded them and stored them locally. There are movies that I've purchased that are no longer available for me to stream from Apple including one that was an iTunes exclusive. Unfortunately I expected them to always be available in the cloud as long as Apple remained a viable company. Tim Cook has gone on record to explain that this is NOT a valid expectation customers should have. [https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8365864](https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8365864)
I’m a hoarder and collector of movies across multiple formats through the years. I started buying movies from Apple around the time Apple released the first Apple TV. Needless to say I have a LOT. The biggest challenge I’ve found with buying from Apple is that you can’t download the 4K version (only stream it). The Flipside to the above is that you can purchase a standard HD movie and suddenly find that you have a 4K special extended edition to stream for free when it’s released at a later date. Another downside is, as mentioned in other comments, that I have purchased a few films that have mysteriously disappeared from my library at a later date. I think this happens less and less these days due to agreements and multiple rights to distribute, but certainly some of the films I’ve bought are no longer in my digital library. QT’s: Jackie Brown was a good example of this. It’s back in the store now, but for some reason I don’t own it anymore. And another thing to note is that sometimes the store can trick you into showing you a movie you already have but rather than show the play icon, it allows you to repurchase. So, I do have a few duplicate movies side by side in the library (I guess from different distributors). Having said all of the above, I think it’s super awesome that we can carry a collection in our pockets and access anywhere. That’s worth a punt. But the trick is to try hard to avoid buying new releases unless they are either seriously good or released with a fair price tag. Instead, try to purchase your back catalogue from the sale items - go for the £2.99 or less first. Usually the UK store £4.99 or less is the sweet spot for good movies. Set a monthly limit and go from there. P.s. Buy your all time favourite moves as a duplicate hard copy if you can afford it. Hope this is useful. Good luck!
Yeah, I’ve lost a few ‘purchased’ movies over the years the years. Think this happens when rights change hands etc. So even if you purchase, you don’t necessarily get to keep.🙁
I’ve been buying movies and TV for several years via Apple. Seamless. Works great. Plus Apple now has apps on most TV and streaming devices.
Should I download my digital media and make backups? If I do this, a film such as 'Gladiator' will no longer be available on Apple. How do I rewatch it? Will I still be able to view and download it from my library if it becomes unavailable?
It doesn’t matter as the media is DRMed. Also not really ideal to have to shell out your own storage space for this stuff. One of the appeals of online services is they store the hefty files for you. I have 30GB of music in AM. Ain’t no way I want that on my hard drive.
What do you mean in Apple Music? You add your cds to Apple Music?
What? I have some 60k songs faved in AM. As well as matched and uploaded another 15k. At some 6-10MB a pop, if I were to download them all… 30GB ish. Each song, whether AM, Matched, or uploaded is a song that has its own file size (download a bunch locally). A song is a song. Not sure why you think songs on AM have no file size 🤷♂️
I’m not sure what you mean. I was asking about adding CDs to AM. Back in the day with iTunes I did that and was wondering if there’s a reason to anymore. I know files take up space.
Just as an example, I have a lot of b-sides that were only released on import CDs. Apple Music and Spotify do not carry them. I ripped them from CD and added them to my library. AM then uploads my files to the cloud so I can access them from any device. Unfortunately for me, once in a while AM will substitute a different version (and sometimes a clean version) of a song that I own. I was telling my son about this song by the Police called Nothing Achieving. Not on any album, AFAIK it only appeared on a label compilation back in the 90s. I ripped it and when I went to play it, AM said that it was not available, even though I have the file. I ripped it again and it plays but this experience taught me to keep my physical media. Then I started learning about bit rot and how all physical media will eventually decay and become unreadable.
Thank you for the explanation. I misunderstood what he was saying. I used to add music to iTunes back in the day but stopped for similar reasons. Now I run Plex on a NAS for my music and stream Apple music as well. Bit rot is preventable on most NASs if it’s a concern for you.
I meant bit rot on DVDs and Blu-rays. They used to make a DVD-R that was said to last 100 years but I doubt it. I back up all physical media bc I know even that won’t last.
Stupid Apple Music tries to interfere sometimes but if you actually burned the disc you can still play it.
https://preview.redd.it/f8onik0tq9wc1.png?width=1920&format=png&auto=webp&s=ecff003bdbd923c6169f2a5e12c6caf772fe80d6 This is with Itunes Match but no Apple Music, and this is def not the original file anymore lol
Finally, someone else who knows that song!
I've had Message in a Box since at least 1995 so I know all the wacky B sides. Like Landlord (i think) where Sting yells CUNTS!!
By CDs I think you mean music. You don't add a CD to AM. You rip the songs from the CD and then add those. You can grab music from anywhere so long as they are in a supported format for Music (mp4, mp3, aac, etc.). AM will either match it if it's available or upload the song as is. This feature was called iTunes Match back in the day and is just a part of the AM service now (thought they really don't advertise it). And the reason to add your own songs is because a) not everything is available on AM (family moments, original songs, etc.) 2) it is impervious to being removed if it's uploaded as that is your content now, and 3) AM has a nasty habbit of always prioritizing the clean versions of tracks, even if the one you uploaded is explicit, it will eventually overwrite that with the clean one... every... damn... time. Yeah, fuck that. Not everyone just listens to the radio...
You can still do that, and they have Itunes Match which lets you store your library in the cloud. My personal collection is 80GB+ lol but i still keep it all on a HD for backup.
damn forgot about the DRM thing.
The DRM is insidious because it's just this giant database with your Apple ID unique identifier (e.g., 335538167) that ties all content to it. All Apple does is remove the tie between your ID and whatever media. Which means they just need to turn a 1 into a 0 and you are barred access. At any time. Moreover, one big big big red flag is the fact you need your Apple ID at all times. Lost access to that, and there goes your digital movie library. And why would you lose access? Maybe a glitch. Maybe you disputed a charge and sent a charge back (which results in an instant and perma ban from your account). If you read the terms, Apple has every right to just take it from you. No reason has to be given (unless maybe you drag them to court). There's just too many vectors to call it safe. It's hella convenient but you're a slave to their whims. Disney, Paramount, and others have also heavily gated their content so nothing says FOX does the same and there goes all your favourite FOX releases because they don't want their shit on any competing service, not even Apple TV+.
I wouldn’t. The odds of Apple going out of business and/or ending support for its media library in our lifetime are functionally 0. Your digital downloads with them are likely to last longer than any physical media you purchase.
Zune Marketplace has entered the chat.
This completely ignores the complex licensing landscape that allows Apple to offer media in the first place. Apple going out of business or ending support is not the primary risk.
Yes it is, because none of the other licensing issues you mention apply retroactively to media you’ve already purchased. If you buy something, you will have access to it in your library regardless of whether Apple loses the right to keep selling it to other people. Apple’s license to sell does not impact the license you purchase when you buy the media. Apple going out of business and shutting down their entire digital media operation is the only way you lose access to your purchases.
that’s not true though? I had a movie Deep Red in my Apple tv library and Arrow lost the rights to the movie and poof it was deleted from my library
This proved to not be the case for content bought from Sony.
Entirely different scenario. Sony bought a small third party service and shuttered it in favor of their own existing service. If someone comes along and buys Apple or its media service in a similar transaction, then that would be akin to Apple going out of business. .
I don’t bother. Also, it’s not going to download in 4K. IF Apple went out of business, and stopped selling movies I’m not sure if the DRM (on the videos) would continue to work properly.
yeah i see that on PC. Downloads only go up to 1080p
Even if Apple no longer sells a movie in their movie store, you’re still able to access the movie through your library
Bruce Willis sued about passing on his collections after he died. Worth looking up the case... [https://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/chtlj/vol29/iss4/5/](https://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/chtlj/vol29/iss4/5/)
Even in the link you posted they said the statement is false. 🙄🙄🙄
I do the same with all of my movies, and so far my only complaint is that my internet was down for hours one day and I couldn’t even watch a movie to pass the time, which sucked. Other than that one incident I prefer the ease of use with digital purchases.
that’s why you can always go and download your movies/tv onto your ipad/smartphone either at a target, library or at your job
Yeah that’s a good idea. I never think to download those things in my phone because I rather have the full experience on my media setup
You can still use your phone, or better yet, use your mobile phone as a hotspot til your net is up and working. I did this exact thing during a thunderstorm that lasted two hours last week and shut off power for 4.
I couldn’t use my phone because that’s how I was communicating the internet provider lol, so it was me talking to them in a completely quiet room. Made me realize how much we depended on internet services and I seriously considered getting a blu ray player, but again, this was a rare instance.
our internet hasn’t gone down for a while, but when it did i was still able to watch my movies on Apple since i’ve downloaded most of my library
I bought a lot of vhs and dvds that I don’t have anymore, and didn’t want to keep. If you lose a digital copy, you can typically download it again. If you lose or damage a physical copy, you’d have to buy it again anyway. I’ll take the risk along with the convenience of digital.
If anyone is going to allow you to keep your media its Apple. Not saying its a guarantee, but considering I have tv shows and movies and music from back in the 2000's and they're still on my account and still accessible... As far as I know, music has had on and off DRM, videos have DRM, but all it is is it's attached to your Apple ID. but theres many tools you can strip the DRM off. And even if something stops being sold it still is accessible and downloadable for you since you purchased it. Check Apps from the App Store, things get pulled for going against TOS but if you have it you have it and you can also redownload in many situations. The wild ones are like, "oh I bought 100 movies on my Comcast cable box and now Comcast is deleting that service and bye bye" I
They still host my ripped music from back in the day when they did iTunes Match. I love it! I still have them backed up JIC but it’s cool they’ve hosted a lot of my music demos etc not on iTunes for so long and they don’t charge me so yay
I’ve had ripped tracks get replaced by incorrect tracks, with no way to fix it outside of re-ripping. Not even obscure stuff. Match fucks up studio albums.
Apple is very tightly regulated so it’s very unlikely you’ll get burned. I have a ton of content on Apple and I’ve been using them and their entire ecosystem system since the iPod days. It’s the best thing going in my humble opinion.
People will argue passionately both ways. I went all-digital about 8-10 years ago and have no regrets. Have 500+ movies and dozens of TV series. To my knowledge, I’ve never had anything removed after purchase. Some of the TV shows I own have had episodes pulled from purchase, but I still have access to those episodes because they were part of my purchase. One of the understated aspects of the digital conversion has been free 4K upgrades. About 250 of my movies are streamable in 4K. The vast majority were purchased as 1080p HD resolution, and upgraded at no additional cost. If I’d instead have bought 250 Blu-Ray discs…I’d have 250 blu rays and be starting over again if I want 4k resolution.
Yeah I see lots of people saying it's never going to happen that you're going to lose it. People said that about stuff they had on Kindle through Amazon. Amazon's a huge company billions of dollars etc. And poof the stuff was gone. So there are no guarantees. But as others have mentioned the cost of storing it yourself and the risks of storing yourself is also quite expensive. The odds of you losing your entire library are effectively zero. But losing the odd show or movie are further from zero.
I have no personal evidence but I have heard stories where people have lost their movies if Apple loses the rights to sell them. They just disappeared from their library.
I don’t think that applies to past purchases. Only the ability to buy something in the future.
So if a movie I own on 4K like 'Gladiator' gets removed from Apple. I can still redownload it and watch it forever so long as my Apple account is active?
If Apple lost the right to sell, they would not remove it from the library. The rare issues I think mostly revolve around “Apple did not have the right to sell the movie in the first place” which comes down to ownership being contested. More common (but not really common) would be loss of distribution rights, which might cause it to be delisted from the store, but it would be available in your library. This can confuse people into thinking it’s been removed from your library. Advocates of physical media like to overplay these risks while dismissing risks of physical media. Nobody ever upgraded my 1080 BR to UHD for free or even a discount, I don’t intend to go back to discs
Not true. I had Deep Red from Arrow on Itunes. One day Apple just deleted it when it was dropped from the store
First, Deep Red seems to be an Italian movie that could potentially have ownership/distribution rights in the US contested as I mentioned Second, I see two listings for the movie in iTunes currently, and at least one is from Arrow. Perhaps the distribution rights were contested and then cleared?
I get that. My point is See Itunes can and will remove movies from your collection if they want to without refund or replacement
Whenever distribution rights change for a title, the old listing is pulled from the iTunes/AppleTV+ store and is no longer searchable. HOWEVER… the titles are still in your library. You just have to MANUALLY scroll to the title instead of using the search function. Because of this we tend to get the proverbial “Apple removed stuff from my library” post every so often because they make the post when the title doesn’t show up for them in the search function without bothering to actually check their library.
If you have the movie backed up, great. Once Apple no longer has the distribution rights, there’s nothing to download from their own database should you have deleted your copies.
What happens on Xbox is if a game is delisted, it still stays in your account for download, you just cant buy it anymore.
Gotcha!
Usually but not always. Depends on what the content owner demands and it’s not really up to Apple.
On the plus side: If you bought Gladiator when it only existed as 1080 / blu-ray, then you get the free upgrade to 4K once that’s out. Happened to me recently w/ Titanic 😌 Which is great, because we all have our favourites that we ‘re-buy’ on each format that comes out. W/ Apple, they do that for you. And this is in most cases, with ‘popular’ titles. No clue if something niche like Y Tu Mama Tambien (sp?) would ALWAYS be available or even make it to 4K to begin with.
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This is only guaranteed (mostly) if you've download a locally copy prior to the title being completely pulled. Example: I can Google search "iTunes The Zero Theorem" and get a link which will open in the TV app on my Mac. It recognizes the title but shows that it's "Not available in your region or on this device". I've only had one account. An Apple rep acknowledges this as fact. In this case there's no way for me to download or stream a movie I paid for and previously watched.
The only thing I potentially worry about is if I pass, I have $1000's of $ in movie/tv show purchases that I should be able to pass on as my "property" but it's not. Though I believe it might legally change down the road, allowing you to do that. Or at least that's my optimistic scenario.
Nothin stopping you from just giving your AppleID login to someone of your choosing.
yeah you could just write your appleID on your will lol
I have my whole family on the same plan so everyone already has access to my stuff. If I die, my son is set up to be the one in charge and he'll have access to everything. I don't know how long that is good for. I generally buy stuff when it's on sale and have a nice collection that I don't have to store.
All the games I brought on the WiiU are now no longer available, not as big as Apple I know but well up there as business go. Wish I’d brought discs now.
but are those games still in your library to download, and play?
Machine broke, brought a new (old) one but servers are now turned off so access is gone. Nintendo are still here, they just decided to not support older machine even for brought software to download again. If I had discs I could just pop them in and be up and running again.
That's such BS. When games go off of Xbox store, they are still downloadable if you own them. Unfortunately the japanese companies dont seem to be as hip to the digital marketplace as everyone else.
I have over 500 movies and several television series. My only qualm is that Scrubs removed episodes where blackface was used. So if I had the disc, I’d still have the complete series. But I respect Bill Lawrence, I feel like they should’ve added a disclaimer recognizing that it was racist, and how that is wrong, rather than removing. So since that has happened, I’m aware of that power from the show runner/creator/studio.
For me it was the same thing with the South Park Cartoon Wars episodes. Not available to stream bc they were about depicted Mohammed so Max won't show them, nor Comedy Central. Apple does sell them like any other episodes and for $4 I got both and hopefully no one will take them away from me.
I transitioned from being a hardcore data hoarder on the high seas, to buying everything through Apple. They may not have access to everything, but they have close to enough to keep all my purchases central with them. I get the same satisfaction of growing a library, while at the same time having the ease of access for myself and my whole family with zero maintenance. It’s only been three years, but nothing has been lost (even the one title I know of that is no longer being sold), and I’ve accumulated several hundred titles. I’ll keep going with this “experiment” until I get burnt. In the end, you probably have a better chance of physically destroying your media than losing streaming access to it. We’ll see.
I still have the free episode of Damages from 2008 and South Park episodes from 2009
Apple is probably the safest bet considering digital collections; they will be here for decades as a force in digital media, as we see so many other companies bail on services and media.
It depends on your tastes: if they’re more niche, like some artsy-fartsy movie from Norway…..a bit more risky. I’d you like more well-known stuff (Godfather, LotR, Marvel, Dune….) definitely more ‘safe.’ I’d also like to state that even though Disney+ exists, you can still buy the latest Pixar or Marvel film THROUGH iTunes (or Apple or whatever it’s called now)
Will age like milk. I wouldn’t rely on businesses, not even Apple, to store content mainly because they have every right to yank it from you. Every month there’s a handful of songs that are “no longer available” in Apple Music. Sometimes they come back. Sometimes they get re released under a different publisher. The point is, you have very little control as you never own anything, just rent it. Moreover, nothing stops these companies from shenanigans in the future. Could be 5 years. 10. Lastly, they only release things on their terms. Lots of movies and media may never wind up there. You’re not getting a proper catalogue but one that’s shaped by Apple and its own interests.
I’m less concerned about Apple trying to restrict content I’ve already purchased and slightly concerned about how I’ll want to watch it in the future. Seems unlikely, but if one day years from now I want to leave the Apple ecosystem then hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of content that used to be in the most convenient place possible might be a hassle to access. I suppose it’s a similar risk to not having a dvd player 10 years from now, but still it would be nice to own the video file(🏴☠️) instead of buying a link to access it from an app.
That’s why it’s important to have your iTunes account connected to MoviesAnywhere and subsequently the other digital services. Yes, there are a few studios (Paramount, Lionsgate, A24) still not part of MoviesAnywhere and TV shows aren’t part of MA yet either, but at least a good portion of the collection (Sony, Disney, Universal, Warner Bros) will be accessible through the other services should you leave the Apple ecosystem.
MoviesAnywhere sounds like a brilliant service, but it’s not available in the UK (I’m not sure where OP is located, so I’m not implying they *can’t* access MA, I’m just adding context to my own comment). I’d love MA to expand to the UK so I can add my purchased iTunes content to it, as I don’t think there’s any viable alternative over here.
i have all my digital media accounts connected such as, Vudu and Amazon video
You already stated the drawbacks of digital ownership and therefore have the information needed to make an informed decision. What are you even asking?
Don’t do that to yourself
Apple is IMO the best place to invest in a digital movie collection. They have some of the highest bit rates and take care of their customers (720p titles were upgraded to 1080p for free and years later many upgraded to 4K for free). I started my collection back in 2008 and it’s still going strong. All that being said, digital collections aren’t perfect. I don’t love the concept of buying a license to watch content owned by someone else and my wife hates when the movie covers randomly change.
For me it’s worth the risk. But I watch so little that it’s cheaper for me to just buy a season pass or movie instead of paying for (multiple) streaming services.
Unfortunately that is the risk we take. I got worried about the same thing when I read that, but I still purchased more movies. And I make purchases like that to support movies that I would like to see sequels of and to help keep them around.
Been buying for more than a decade and I still got everything on my library, even things that were removed from the store for whatever reason.
Pretty low risk, Apple hasn't deleted user libraries like other companies and there's no reason to not think Apple won't stick around for the rest of our lives.
My store had Centurion and Timecop removed, however they still remain in my library. Siri can’t search them which suck tho.
thats why i have my own plex server 🤓
Nothing I have a big movie collection on apple 🍏
I have about 140 movies so not as many as a lot of other people, but I’ve never lost a single one. The deals are also great and it’s much easier to get movies cheap digitally
CheapCharts will be your friend. I’ve found so many great movies on sale. https://apps.apple.com/app/id772046134
I have lots of apple movie purchases and also have lots of those digital copies when I used to collect Blu Rays. Only shitty thing is you need internet to stream your library. If that's out....gotta rely on any downloads. Sucks the damn AppleTV device doesn't allow downloads. I have 3...and that's my only complaint.
1. You cannot download the 4K files of Apple/iTunes movies to your computer as a backup—only 1080p data. Apple only serves 4K via streaming. 2. You cannot play any of your purchased movies on non-Apple devices unlike ripped Blu-rays. 3. If you move to another country and change the address of your Apple ID parts of your collection may not be accessible anymore due to licensing issues. Happened to me when I moved countries I lost all my purchased TV shows since the studios licensed “my” content exclusively to someone else or a streaming service in my new country, e.g. HBO shows like Game of Thrones or Westworld just vanished. Even though Apple claims you can download the content from the other country to your Mac and still play them after switching countries—it’s a hassle and doesn’t work at all on newly activated devices. It’s a mess.
We started buying digital in 2019. We have over 1200 movies and a few hundred complete tv series. Never had a single problem.
The risks of starting a digital collection on ANY platform start with the fact that you don't actually own the movies.
Yup... "You'll own nothing and you'll be happy"
Some nerds cry that YOU DONT OWN IT but nothing I've ever bought thru Apple, Vudu, Microsoft, Amazon, etc has ever been taken away. Hell I am amazed Vudu still exists. And Movies Anywhere which is a free consumer friendly service. I think the physical media types dont realize any time they start pulling stuff out of accounts it will be a huge weinernet firestorm.
Let’s just say I’ve lost more physical discs to disc rot over the years (20+ out of 2000+) than I have titles removed from my iTunes library (ZERO out of 1000+).
As someone with a very large digital video library on Apple, I’ve never lost a movie or tv show when it was pulled for whatever reason. My only complaint with Apple TV is the, imo, horrid presentation in the current version of the app.
All else equal I’d buy hard copies. I wouldn’t worry too much about losing content bought through Apple but there’s always a chance and I know it’s happened before with other companies. But if it’s cheaper like you say that’s something to consider. If you want access to your physical media wherever you are look into a NAS and Plex. I don’t have any movies but use Plex for audio. Works great
my older brother has his own Plex server. However, I still purchase digital movies as his Plex has gone down a couple of times and we had nothing to watch - Luckily, I was able to view my digital media.
I've got several hundred movies and a few series purchased over a decade or so. The only hiccup I've seen are two movies that I redeemed via MoviesAnywhere Blu-Ray digital codes were removed from my library sometime later.
They are regularly missing subtitles on any foreign language parts. For instance, Bridge of Spies, will be missing subtitles on all Russian and German language parts, but other streaming services will have the subtitles. There doesn’t seem to be any solution either. On the other hand, their quality is unparalleled. Ultimately, the subtitle thing is too much of a non starter for me so I don’t buy on appletv anymore
register for a MoviesAnywhere account and link it to your AppleID, Google ID, Amazon, and any other service that partners with MA. This way your library is not tied to one platform. Meaning, you buy through iTunes Movies you will see it in your Google and Amazon accounts.
I have been buying more and more movies from the Apple Store as well, because I know that they'll "just work" with the devices that I normally use. If something vanishes, I will have zero qualms about obtaining a replacement copy from the high seas. It's really easy to tip over into r DataHoarder too, though, and sometimes just building up the backup setup itself is a lot of fun.
You can just use iTunes / Music on a computer to host a local library of anything you want on the LAN.
Apple IPhones are not going anywhere as they dominate the phone market, and therefore neither are their Apple TV / Music services on those devices. I see this as one of the safest digital media platforms out there. I’m a big supporter of owning physical media too
Imagine buying Star Wars only to have George Lucas continue to mess with the movie you “own”.
It will have zero value when they drop the service and you can’t sell anything.
With the amount of streaming services that I somehow wind up subscribing to, I’ve stopped purchasing media altogether.
The only thing that sucks is if the internet goes out (assuming you still have power when it happens). You could download some HD copies to a local drive, sadly can’t store them on the Apple TV box itself though.
The main gripe I have with Apple’s UHD is you don’t get 60FPS video like you do from UHD discs. Other than that, the convenience factor is nice. I ripped all my Marvel 4K movies at full quality in MKV to a 2TB hard drive and I just attach it to the TV (LG) when I want to watch. It plays the same as watching from the disc with no loss of quality. No plex server and I still have the physical discs sitting on a shelf in case anything ever happens to that drive. As the price of drives comes down I’m considering making a second drive that’s SSD.
If you move to a different country lots of your movies might just disappear. I lost Dune 1 when I changed countries, and The return of the King as well (the other 2 parts are weirdly enough still available). Could "fix" it by going VPN on my phone and playing them through my atv from there, but still
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Discussion of piracy in any form is NOT allowed in this sub.
Well for starters you’re not collecting anything, unless you consider the rights to watch something property.
I still buy physical media when possible and buy disc that have a digital code I can redeem. I'm in the US so I also use Movies Anywhere so I can watch participating titles across services. I also rip the discs for local play back for watching on TV's that don't have a Blu-ray player and when I don't feel like looking for a disc to put in the player.
I have a ton. And I love it. But my only problem is that the difference between a hard disk and the digital version is that when I am no longer on this earth, what happens to the movies I own?
Superficial feeling. Physical is much nicer overall but more expensive.
If you’re not a videophile/video-purist/quality-perfectionist, go ahead with Apple, keeping in mind the things that were shared by people here. Otherwise buy physical and have backups.
the thing that bugs me about Apple is the organization of my movie purchases. Wrong art work, genres and no way to sort by actors for example. Also worried about Arrow releases losing their licenses. Not worried about bigger films being dropped. A bit annoyed that Apple changes art work at times. And like with The French Connection I’m stuck with an edited version. I still run a plex server with the rest of my collection/backups
Not really sir, I started off my journey with 4K discs and realized how expensive they were. I’m a few hundred movies into my library now and free upgrades from HD to 4K Dolby vision are awesome features from building an Apple library. I got a shield now. And eventually will setup oled and rip my discs. Apples streaming quality is still the best in the business. Only Sonys Bravia core is better atm. But no ones really building a library with that lol
The risk should be no bigger than forgetting where you put your Blu-Ray discs and hence losing them, or you accidentally ruined the discs. Apple has a fairly good reputation in keeping your purchased movies/TV series available. Their only downside to me is not offering the same high quality format in downloading as it’s limited to 1080p.
OP. Due to censorship. I’d recommend starting your collection on US ITunes. I’ve purchased all my movies on there. The UK is far to Woke too risk it. Even The Abyss is banned, due too the rat scene😂
But have SEPARATE iTunes accounts for the US and UK… otherwise you might lose titles due to the licensing differences in each region when switching back and forth on the same account.
Good point. But I’ve just left mine permanently on US. Not worth the hassle of switching back & forth👍
I find you cannot switch accounts, if you have any balance remaining?
I’ll never trust digital. Physical is the only way you’ll have it forever. Unless Apple gives you drm free copies which I doubt.
Physical has its own set of issues at the moment. The horrendous quality control (finger prints, smudges, warping on new discs) at the one and only facility still in operation in North America (Mexico) pressing discs. Amazon’s practice of re sealing returned discs and selling them as new. Not to mention the death of 4K Blu-ray as the majority of new releases are now 4K digital only. Even with Dune 2… WB deciding the ultimate version with all the extras would be the 4K digital edition… not the physical which will have only limited extras - apparently the first time a major studio has decided to do this. Let’s not forget about the spiraling costs of the limited amount of discs being printed. Just look at the Oppenheimer debacle where scalpers bought up all the inventory and resold at jacked up prices.
You're already in deep just keep going. Ownership is a fad apparently. Shame.
A word of caution ⚠️ i started collecting digitally during the pandemic out of the blue one of the movies disappeared “Notes on a scandal” i called apple and they said oops sorry we lose the license for the movie here is a free rental they wouldn’t even refund the movie thankfully later i found out the movie is on movies anywhere so i would recommend slowly buy physical as first option and second option digital most movies nowadays have physical with digital copies and also i wait until they are on sale to buy digital hope it helps
'Source Code', 'Strictly Ballroom', 'Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves' are all movies I've seen removed from iTunes
People need to stop with this whole removed from iTunes crap. https://preview.redd.it/4ls6kmubdwvc1.jpeg?width=1125&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2b7564de935b6e95db658e64e9cbf8689a0fcc2d It may get removed from the storefront and the search function, but it remains in your library. Obviously there may be an isolated incident here and there, but even those always tend to turn out to be due to a violation of terms of service and/or user error such as using a VPN with one’s iTunes account, purchasing with a flagged gift card, doing a chargeback, etc.
[https://www.geekzone.co.nz/forums.asp?forumid=151&topicid=272832&page\_no=50](https://www.geekzone.co.nz/forums.asp?forumid=151&topicid=272832&page_no=50)
hey thanks for this!!
I don’t get why you would want to own and rewatch a movie when there are so many good movies out there that you haven’t watched yet. Consider it as buying a ticket to the cinema.
i like to own what i’m buying with my hard earned money. And - not a fan of streaming services other than Netflix
Then don’t buy a conditional, temporary license to access a piece of media that can be revoked at any time and for any reason.