We are contacting you regarding a past Prime Video purchase(s). The below content is no longer playable on Prime Video.
In an effort to compensate you for the inconvenience, we have applied a £5.99 Amazon Gift Card to your account. The Gift Card amount is equal to the amount you paid for the Prime Video purchase(s). To apologize for the inconvenience, we’ve also added an Amazon Gift Certificate of £5 to your account. Your Gift Card balance will be automatically applied to your next eligible order. You can view your balance and usage history in Your Account here:
Companies issuing refunds in the form of gift cards is just straight-up insulting
And it may be illegal in some states to not offer the customer an actual refund.
Wait a minute, the US doesn’t have a blanket consumer law federally?
This sounds like a pain.
Federally this is against Australian Consumer Law. Didn’t offer the service you paid for? Better believe that’s a refund.
Our government is trash, you see.
And is that amount of money enough to replace the item that’s been taken away? Like if the DVD were widely available at the same price at the time of the digital purchase, but you got the Amazon “purchase” instead (for convenience?) then what are the odds that you can still get the DVD for that price today?
Remember, streaming only has a business model as long as it has a better user experience than piracy. That’s why iTunes took off in the era of Napster. When a streaming service’s user experience drops below that of digging up pirate treasure off a shitty ad-ridden torrent site, that service is not long for the world.
I cancelled Netflix and prime and went back to piracy a few months ago, it’s been a nice blast from the past
In addition to piracy, I’ve also been checking out DVDs from my local library. It’s kinda fun.
Surprised myself because I half expected I’d miss the convenience of Netflix, but I haven’t missed it even a little.
“Was I a good streaming platform?”
“No.”
The benefit of the library DVD is it takes away the “What will we watch tonight?” conversation. You’re going to watch the DVD.
It just switches the question to the library: “What will we borrow tonight?”
Source: experience from my Blockbuster days.
lol I remember those days. Standing there trying to decide what movie to rent. Good times…
Yes but you have that discussion somewhere else. By the time your ready to be watching something you have made that choice
Checking one out is fun, too. It feels like an event vs. just watching anything out of boredom
It was nice when you could actually watch almost everything on it. Once everyone else started taking peices of the pie it just feels like cable with more hoops now
I would change that to:
“Was I a good streaming platform?”
“Yes, during your first year. Then all companies went greedy monkey savage and ruined it”
I’m about ready to do the same.
I bought a raspberry pi, a SATA SSD and usb adaptor, and installed Plex now I’m the new netflix for my family, they send me movies and shows they want to watch and I put them on there, then they connect to my server and watch
It’s been really good
Netflix will also be raising prices soon. Again.
Netflix recently stopped shipping discs, that was all I kept them around for anymore…
I’m just always spooked by viruses and shit.
Use yts.mx, if you use any other site, try checking comments first if they have them, if not you can use torrent file viewer to check the download is actually a video file before downloading
Lastly you could try anti virus, but don’t rely on it to do your job for you, they can catch most but not always all viruses
Paying 0.99 per song was how a better user experience? Music piracy was pretty big till Spotify. No service was even close before.
Being able to easily purchase a single song from a reputable source in the comfort of your home instead of going out to physically buy an entire album and then rip it to your computer was a better user experience, yes. Most users are technologically illiterate, and trying to pirate stuff just lead to them getting viruses.
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If you can’t save it, its not yours. Sail the seas.
Or buy it on physical media. More and more studios are pulling their disks and it is getting harder to find. If you have a disk, it can never be recalled.
But it can just stop playing… I have a handful of discs, still in cases, look pristine, no scratches, and yet can’t be read by either my computer or DVD player. No recourse. It’s a separate problem of course, but similar.
Disks can degrade or be manufactured badly. If they never play you can usually get a warranty replacement. Old disks can degrade, but I have many 20+ year old DVDs that play fine.
technically you dont own the disks either bro have you never read the back of a DvD box
I mean, yeah, but so what? We are talking about an article where Amazon pulled a video someone purchased down so they can never watch it again. I have never heard of a company recalling physical media and demanding it’s return.
This is a non-story.
“Who knew $EvilCo would fuck me over for a sub-$10 profit?!”
I never stopped stealing media, and I never will.
you can’t steal media, it’s still there but just copied over.
Sucks for online games though…
Amazon’s Music service, while it takes some hoops to jump through, actually does let you download music. Though I don’t know if that’s a general policy or on a per music/per artist basis.
and save outside of their app as a non DRM’ed file because otherwise its extra hoops for the same problem
Everything should allow you to download what you purchased. The fact that the music industry has pushed streaming so goddamn hard is because they’re mad that people can still download MP3s.
And above all of this, let’s not forget that a major negotiating point of the Hollywood strike was getting residuals per stream, something that never existed when people actually had their own media. It’s greed on every single side in that corrupt, hell town and I’m at the point where I don’t even watch TV or movies any more, not only because it all sucks, but because of this bullshit. The greed and the corruption needs to be punished.
It’s easy to scoff at this whole “You will own nothing, and you will be happy” phrase, but it’s really gone too far already.
I’m really tired of hearing “you don’t own it you own a license to it” like it’s some revelation for people complaining. We’re aware that the system has been constructed to benefit media companies at the expense of consumers.
To be honest; I never really bought the argument anyway. From a legal standpoint I don’t give half a shit. From a layman’s standpoint it’s bullshit. Nowhere do they use terms like “rent” or “lease”. They explicitly use terms like “buy” and it’s not until the fine print that the term license even comes up.
They know they’re pissing on you and telling you it’s raining and the goobers doing their legwork by repeating the sentence like they just came up with it annoy me to no end.
Nowhere do they use terms like “rent” or “lease”. They explicitly use terms like “buy” and it’s not until the fine print that the term license even comes up.
This! It really should be illegal to present something with the phrasing “buy” unless it is provided to you via a license that prevent it from being withdrawn. To “sell” cloud hosted media without having the licensing paperwork in place for it to be a sale is fraud.
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Guns don’t kill people… I do.
Yeah, I understand that hearing the same simple explanation of “you don’t own it…” gets to be annoying. Especially in places like this where most people are pretty well aware of the situation.
The primary issue seems to be that enough people support this type of service willingly for the sake of convenience and are generally ignorant to the potential long-term issues. It feels pretty exploitative as a consumer.
But I don’t see how making the distinction between ownership of the content vs the license is providing legwork for those services. In my mind, that distinction is key for understanding that the service is not for me. And I may just be looking at this too optimistically, but I would hope the same would be true for users who don’t read the fine print, or happen to have not understood the issue until something like this post is presented.
This sounds worse than communism. At least communism said “everyone will own everything”.
We’ve been screaming about it for 20+ years now and no one seems to be listening.
I’m hoping that someone will tie digital ownership rights to a block chain sooner or later and offer me movies, music, games and books that I can actually own resale rights to - but as publishers are already drinking from the rent-seeking model teat where every single license is a new sale I’m not terribly optimistic about that particular future.
block chain
No. Never. Stop asking. Crypto is not a currency and blockchain is a solution in search of a problem.
Well put
Adding blockchain into the mix changes nothing. Whether your digital ownership is stored in their centralized database or a distributed database, they still have control over everything because they’re the ones streaming it to you. They can just as well block your access & block resale.
The only way to actually digitally own something is to have a full DRM-free copy of it (ianal though this still might not be enough to allow resale).
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Adding blockchain into the mix changes nothing. Whether your digital ownership is stored in their centralized database or a distributed database, they still have control over everything because they’re the ones streaming it to you. They can just as well block your access & block resale.
So you push digital goods to a robust public platform like IPFS and tie decryption to a signed, non-revokable, rights token that you own on a block chain. It’s a transparent and consumer friendly model compared to what we accept now. I know people are over block chain hype but this type of publishing model is where it’s actually useful.
Transferable digital rights tokens and chain of custody are places where block chain tech actually works.
Edit: People seem really hung up on crypto as currency which I’m not asking for at all. I’m asking for control, ownership and resale rights to digital goods I’ve paid for which isn’t possible at all on current digital publishing platforms. I appreciate that people hate crypto shit, that’s fine, but at least read the content you’re replying to.
Fuck no. I ain’t paying a transaction fee each time I want to take a breath. If you don’t want to be robbed by streaming companies, blockchain is the last (or maybe not even a) thing you should consider as a solution.
Hyperbole much?
It’s only hyperbole until it isn’t.
This doesn’t make any sense, who distributes/gives out rights tokens? And if they lose publishing rights, why would the new owner of the publishing rights care about the rights tokens they didn’t sell?
Blockchain doesn’t fix anything new here, there’s no point in decentralizing the rights ownership, verifying ourselves as owners of the right to watch the media was never the issue here.
Getting companies to be willing to give out non revokable rights tokens is the issue, and no company wants to do that because it’s not profitable for them. It’s not a technological issue that blockchain is going to solve
So you push digital goods to a robust public platform like IPFS and tie decryption to a signed, non-revokable, rights token that you own on a block chain.
What you describe is fundamentally impossible. In order to decrypt something you need a decryption key. Put that on the blockchain and anyone can decrypt it.
Even if you can, pirates would only need to buy a single decryption key and suddenly your movie might as well be freely available to download. Pirates never pay hosting fees because it’s using the same infrastructure as customers and they can’t be taken down because they’re indistinguishable from customers.
it’s quite fun to see the whole thing you want to engineer just to have an excuse to use a blockchain.
Have you ever heard of Torrents? USENET? eDonkey? Those things are more resilient than your blockchain, they’ve proved themselves by being around more than 20 years and still in use.
I think it makes sense in some areas. For example private ownership of cars is completely unsustainable in the literal sense of the word.
But when it comes to digital goods, clearly it’s all for the profit of the media cartels. There’s no justification.
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Agreed that majority transport should be shared&public but smaller personalized transport will still be needed (eg a doctor being called to an emergency)
I could also see a system of self driving cars (not trucks but very small city cars) as a kind of public uber. Kind of like how gondolas work in some mountain cities. And of course just one per let’s say 10 or more people as opposed to 1 or more cars per family like we have now.
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That’s the real danger. Shared ownership is great but not if you privatise the whole thing.
You don’t own the video file. You own access to their video file, which they also don’t own, they only own the right to distribute it. If their distribution contract ends and doesn’t gets renewed, then they can’t let you access the file. At least they refunded you. This system is one of the issues with the ongoing writers and actors strikes. Amazon can decide to stop making a video available, which cuts all dividends revenues to actors and writers. So having a video available for you to watch costs money to Amazon (or Netflix or Max…) but not enough content makes users unsubscribe, so they ride that thin line for maximized revenue. This means that older movies that aren’t blockbusters get dropped in favor of new content. Now new content doesn’t means good content, remember, it needs to be as cheap as possible. Aaand this is why steaming companies are spiraling down and everything is going to shit. Filmmaking is an art form turned into an industry. But art isn’t about maximized profit, it’s about art first. But you can’t make that art without millions of dollars and that requires the art to take a step back to maximize profit, but not too far back. It’s a really big issue in the film and entertainment industry.
— I’m an IATSE local 600 camera operator.
They should be refunding in cash though, not store credit.
You are always free to sue with your lawyer to make a more just world as the founding fathers intended… /s
Depends on the contract you agreed to with Amazon.
Then they should refund you. Even in the event that’s the case, still makes me not want to risk it.
But you can’t make that art without millions of dollars
I have a used 3DS with a touchscreen and stylus, and a drawing program, and I beg to differ.
You can totally make art for less than ten thousand dollars. Heck, most art within that price bracket is valued objectively better than the “”“art”“” costing more. The problem is not “making art is costly”, it’s that the current schools of media seem to have a curriculum purpose-built to make artist understudies belive that has to be the case.
That’s not the point. We’re talking about filmmaking. Some art project don’t need that much but others do.
So? I’ve seen pretty good filmmaking art done by far less than a gazillion dollars, and then even showing up for free on Youtube.
Come on. It’s not a need of the art.
Still. Not. The point!!! I can make a sculpture out of paper maché or an arch to a city. Both are sculptures both are art but they don’t cost the same price to make.
On a side note, I’m playing DS games on my iPhone with Delta emulator and it’s awesome. But still not the point.
Lol, I have been using vDS on my Android phone it’s the DS emulator that I found works best (at least best free emulator.) Most games work well, some don’t seem to translate well to a phone screen though. I wanted to play Sonic Rush Adventure, and it runs fine on the emulator but the on screen buttons just don’t seem to be suitable for that type of game.
This is veering off topic hard but the Zelda Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks are perfect. It can be controlled 100% with touchscreen only.
I still don’t get how a consumer can’t just pay (fantasy hypothetical world) $10, and what they watch/view is recorded.
- Streaming company takes their cut, distributes the rest to content producers proportioned based on what was watched.
- Producers take their cut then distribute the rest as residuals.
I lied. I do know that the current contract infrastructure doesn’t allow for this.
Because of the shareholders take all the benefit without contributing actual work. Just capital. And the same shareholders don’t want to take risks. But you can’t make a movie without money upfront. That is the whole problem.
That’s what MoviesAnywhere was for. If the provider stops selling the video or goes under, it should still be available there.
Gift card. GIFT CARD! Those bastards “refund” with gift card instead of actual money! I hope EU will haunt their asses. Big corpro hunting season is open.
“Sorry we fucked you over on your previous purchase, but here, as compensation we’re giving you the illustrious privilege of spending money with us again!”
Sometimes I think I made the right decision to just get a huge harddrive and download all my favorite entertainment in drm free format. Movies, music, games, books. I saw this coming a mile away a decade ago. The only thing that will really hurt me is if/when Steam inevitably goes full corporate cucks and starts going hard on the DRM locking down my library.
I love my Plex library. I use YouTube Music because I think it’s more convenient and fair for the price. It’s one service for basically all music. Movies and shows, on the other hand, is an absolute cluster fuck. I’m perfectly happy to pay for good content, but I’m not okay with paying for 10 services where the content keeps shifting and disappearing and being retroactively edited so as not to offend “modern audiences.”
Valve turned me from gaming pirate to VERY solid customer. Spotify turned me from music pirate to customer. I am patiently waiting for the visual media industry to pull their heads out of their asses.
If you have enough technical computer knowledge to put commands in a terminal I highly recommend you check out and install Youtube-dlp (yt-dlp) I am an avid hoarder of music on my mp3 player and love being able to download a whole playlist from youtube (and other sites like bandcamp, soundcloud, vimeo, ect) and have it auto convert to music format and optionally number them in playlist order, with one command. It works with windows and most operating systems.
The best part is that theres no illegal activity involved. It uses the same technologies and rules a web browser uses to download and stream stuff normally.
I appreciate that, but unless you can automate it through an iPhone app, I’m not interested. My life is complicated enough and I want my music access to be seamless.
There are many websites that exist that act as web front ends for youtube-dl/dlp you may want to give consideration to such as https://youtubemp3free.com/en/ Unfortunately these tend to be very slow to convert as they have a lot of people using them all the time.
Many invidious instances/websites offer video+audio format download functionality. If you don’t know what invidious is its a free and open source front end/scrapper for youtube that usually offers a better user experience than youtube premium. Here is a list of all public instances, vid.puffyan.us is my go-to but is currently having rate-limiting issues for being too popular so the vid download function is broken. However I managed to get another instance, https://invidious.slipfox.xyz/feed/popular to download a vids audio in .mp4 format.
There is also piped, similar to invidious in spirit and function but is built with different video extraction technology under the hood, based off the very popular NewPipe app and developed by the same team. Here is a list of public piped instances. piped.video is the most popular instance and you have probably seen a lemmy bot in the comments provide a piped alternative link whenever someone links a youtube url. Download is also hit or miss youll have to try a few piped instances yourself to find one that works probably.
Unfortunately your options are rather limited because IOS is so locked down. If you had said android instead I could offer you more and much better options but well it is what it is. I hope that you at least try out some invidious or piped instances and find one you really like.
If you want to be sold a little bit more on using invidious or piped, here is louis rossmann talking about why he ditched yt premium for it and why he recommends his viewers do the same regardless of his ‘loss’ in ad revenue
Thank you very much :)
You’re welcome! 😎
They removed books from your Kindle in the past. Who could have seen this comming?
Wow. This is why owning DVDs is better. And if you can’t buy, download via torrents. Imagine these bastards rolling up to your home and reclaiming a movie you physically purchased. We gave them too much power. Time to withdraw it. Convenience is not worth this shit. Get uncomfortable and get your entertainment away from these streamers who don’t give customers what they paid for.
DVD rental stores could surely make a comeback given these new developments. Libraries still loan movies as well. Remember, Barnes & Noble didn’t run all independent bookstores out of business. And after Amazon savaged Barnes & Noble, Amazon Books suddenly came into existence (2015 - 2022). Greed driven corporations aren’t the answer.
Digital is the way to go - who knows how long DVD will be a viable format. Hard media formats come and go.
It still comes down to choosing convenience over not being taken advantage of. Building a computer, for example, has many benefits over buying one. It’s a matter of what a person places value on.
Why follow corporations’ timelines for obsolescence? I’m sure if they could erase the technology of media players from people’s minds, corporations would. Best to keep people completely hooked up and dependent on their “services” so they can be milked of their money continuously.
As long as the method and means to play the media is available, physical is my preference. Vinyl, CDs, DVDs. Cassettes and VHS quality over time leaves much to be desired and is the only reason why I wouldn’t add them to the list.
These aren’t dependent on a network, internet, cloud. Own forever, build and repair.
DVD is digital, lol. And nothing stops you from dumping entire DVD.
Companies LOVE punishing their customers while the pirates sail on without trouble
Punishing them by giving them £5? The bastards.
Is he not paying a monthly subscription on top of all this? They’re getting their money back pretty quickly.
Again, he got a full refund AND £5. He lost nothing of value.
He would have to pay a monthly fee regardless of these events in order to watch the movie he bought. Now he doesn’t have to, since he can’t.
I suppose you’re right.
I think in supposed to double down when I’m wrong on the internet… “How dare you make such outlandish claims! I’d Bezos doesn’t send the user £1M plus a ticket for a space trip, then the user shouldn’t settle!”
Was that good? 🤣
I doubt that he’s paying a subscription for a single movie, besides he got refunded 5 extra bucks, which amounts to at least something
Are you fine with me taking anything from your home as long as I pay you the purchase price + £5? Some of us assign a greater value to some of the things we own than the purchase price.
Lol. “Taking from your home”. Last time I checked, my home didn’t have a monthly access fee for me to use the things I bought.
Now he is freed from that requirement as well. A triple win.
What are you talking about? Amazon’s digital video purchases don’t require any monthly access fee. He paid £5.99 with the idea that he’ll get to keep it indefinitely, just like a physical DVD. I don’t get why you think it is ok for a seller to revert the sale of a digital item at any time for just the purchase price + £5 but (I presume?) not other sales?
Ignoring all the rest, the issue is simply that it was never bought. He bought a licence to access it. If he expected to “keep” anything, he was an idiot.
I don’t think it’s okay, but if I’m dumb enough to waste money on this stuff, it’s nice to get something extra for my stupidity.
Yeah that’ll happen for anything streamed and licensed.
If you want to own something, you need to own it physically. Buy an actual disk. People won’t and I’ll be surprised if they are still making blurays at all in ten years but that’s the only way you can actually buy media now.
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Can’t have shit in the cloud
You don’t own what is in
the cloudanother person’s computer
You know where Amazon (and any other company for that matter) can’t pull content from? My Jellyfin instance. Yo-ho-ho!
Skull joke? 😂
True. But your jellyfish instance only really works for you and a few trusted friends/neighbors. I would still like a comprehensive library that I can browse and select from at a moment’s notice.
The infuriating nature of Amazon / Hollywood / IP law / etc, is that these two combined goals are inimicable to the profit motive. I can’t have access to a big public library of continent, because that means someone else won’t be able to collect the real-time maximal market-rate from me to access it.
Shit happens. Tech breaks. You forget where you leave things. People outside your social circle (people you’ll never know existed) will want access to that same media at some future date. And Jellyfin doesn’t get them that.
But your jellyfish instance only really works for you
Yes, and that’s the whole point of it. It works even if my internet access goes down, and kids are screaming for their cartoons. Peace of mind.
blu-rays are often as cheap or cheaper than “digital copies”, and ripping them to my NAS is pretty trivial these days thanks to makemkv.
the best part is, uncle jeff cannot legally break into your house and take back the disc just because of some petty rights issue.
I recently bought a 4k Blu-ray player. My brother asked me if I also bought a fax machine because streaming is “where it’s at” . Nah My 4k player cleans up DVDs really nice where streaming has artifacts and banding. Not only is it true ownership but a better quality.
4k streaming is also way lower quality than a 4k blu-ray
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That is misinformation. The quality disparity you’re both pointing out is from streaming services compressing their media to much lower bitrates to ease bandwidth stress on their servers/clients and has nothing to do with a physical or digital medium.
lower bitrate == lower quality when using the same compression algorithms.
most streaming services are using h.265, same as 4k blu ray, but at substantially lower bitrates
streaming dolby vision profiles are also gimped considerably compared to blu-ray dolby vision
Doubling down on the misinformation, I see. H.265 is a high-efficiency codec, or in other words a better compression standard. Not a static compression level. This is why when you convert media there’s an input for quality, even when using HEVC. And you can absolutely stream the same Dolby Vision profile as a Blu-ray with single track double layer.
You’re still conflating digital medium with streaming services.
i am more than well aware of all of this. nothing i said is misinformation. same algorithm, different settings. the primary means by which you reduce bitrate with h.265 is by reducing the quality setting. there is no magical way to cut your bitrate by 75% using the same compression algorithm without sacrificing quality. no commercial streaming service is offering video at the same quality level as a 4k blu-ray.
few streaming boxes even support dolby vision profile 7, and no commercial streaming service offers it. so saying you can get it through a streaming service is actual misinformation.
i have literally been doing this shit for 20 years
i am more than well aware of all of this. nothing i said is misinformation
Your entire presupposition that Blu-ray quality is better than streaming quality by default is misinformation, and I’ve already explained why.
no commercial streaming service is offering video at the same quality level as a 4k blu-ray.
What does that have to do with digital media?
This is also demonstrably untrue if you take 5 seconds to research self-hosted streaming services.
few streaming boxes even support dolby vision profile 7, and no commercial streaming service offers it
Plex on Nvidia Shield. EZPZ.
there is no magical way to cut your bitrate by 75% using the same compression algorithm without sacrificing quality
I never said anything in contradiction to this. I don’t know who you’re shadow-boxing.
I just bought a big ass TV, and I’ve just started buying discs for movies I truly want to own for a few reasons.
-
You own it, period.
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Even if you trust Amazon, do you trust your ISP to stream 4K reliably on demand? I don’t. Fuck Comcast.
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A physical collection just kind of looks nice, especially if you fork out for Steelbooks and only buy your favorites. Steelbooks on eBay are like ~$30.
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If people suddenly collectively understood they’re paying for basically nothing it would probably spur large-scale revolution.
I think people already understand this, they just don’t care as long as their devices play the media they want to consume.
The only people I see that care about this issue strongly are people who fully understand how this works and prefer archival-friendly formats such as physical media or DRM-free downloads.
That Amazon refunded nearly 2x the purchase price for the inconvenience seems more than fair, imho. I looked it up, and it covers a purchase of a Blu-Ray of the same movie on Amazon, so you’d have a path to complete resolution here.
I hate plenty of Amazon’s practices, but I really don’t see any level of controversy here.
All those tv junkies would have to get off of their couches though
He received what he paid for and then got his money back
