Microsoft Movies & TV

» see microsoft.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

On 18 July 2025 the buy button went away. Microsoft closed the Movies & TV storefront across Windows and Xbox on the same day, with no countdown and no farewell post. The app stayed installed where it had always been. The shop behind it simply stopped taking money.

The store was older than its name. It opened on 14 November 2006 as the Xbox Live Video Marketplace and spent its early years wearing Zune branding. It became Xbox Video on 14 October 2012, then settled on Movies & TV in 2015 and kept that name until the end. Nineteen years of selling rentals and purchases through a first party storefront that most people encountered by accident, because it was already sitting in the Start menu.

Microsoft's answer to the obvious question was that purchases keep working in the Movies & TV app. No end date was attached to that, which is the part worth reading twice, because a promise with no date is a promise until somebody changes their mind. There were no refunds and no mechanism to move a library to a competitor. The single exit that existed was Movies Anywhere, which Microsoft rejoined on 6 August 2018, and Movies Anywhere operates in the United States only.

I had the app. Every Windows machine I set up from around 2012 onward arrived with it, and I never bought a single film through it. That is not really a complaint about Microsoft, it is what the whole category felt like from here: a shop window built into a system I owned, selling into markets that were not mine. When it closed in 2025 the practical difference for me was nothing at all. For someone who had spent a decade buying films there, it turned a library into a thing that now runs entirely on trust.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the long tail ~

The interesting part of a dead digital storefront is never the closing, it is the library left behind. Microsoft still owes playback to everyone who bought there, and the only thing holding that up is a set of licensing arrangements with studios that carry no expiry a customer can see. PlayStation Video did the same thing when it stopped selling films in 2021 and kept purchases alive. UltraViolet did not, which is why UltraViolet is the case people bring up whenever this happens again.

The Movies Anywhere clause is the sharper edge. Microsoft pointed at it as the safety net, and for an American buyer it genuinely is one, since eligible titles show up in other participating apps. Everyone outside the United States got the shutdown without the net. The rescue was regional and the closure was not.

~ the funny part ~

Microsoft never wanted to be a video retailer. It wanted the console and the operating system to have one, because an Xbox with no film shop looked incomplete beside an Apple TV, and a Windows install with no film shop looked incomplete beside a Mac. The store existed to close a gap in a feature comparison. Once nobody was making that comparison anymore, because everybody had moved to subscriptions, the shop had no reason left to be open.

So it closed the way a feature closes rather than the way a business closes. No wind down and no attempt to hand the customers anywhere. Just a flag flipped on a Friday, and a support page written afterward to explain what had already happened.

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