PlayStation Video

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

~ the eulogy ~

The films I watched in these years lived on a hard drive attached to a PC. Say what you like about that arrangement, and there is plenty to say, but no company in another country could reach into it afterward and take a title back. That is the whole reason this particular store is worth burying, and it took Sony until a year after the funeral to prove the point.

The store opened on 15 July 2008 as a video section inside the PlayStation Network, in the years when every console maker was convinced the box under the television should sell you everything the television could show. It picked up the name Video Unlimited under Sony's Qriocity umbrella, expanded into five European markets in November 2010, and reached Japan and Australia after that. On 29 January 2015 Sony gave up on the separate branding and called it PlayStation Video.

The country list stayed short for its whole life and Turkey was never on it, which is the ordinary condition of Sony media services outside the big markets. You could own the console, sign in to the network and buy games, and the video tab simply was not there. So my distance from this one is not a preference. It is a licensing map.

~ the dossier ~

~ what you were buying ~

Two things were on sale. A rental gave you a window of a couple of days, and a purchase was described as yours, permanently, in your library. The purchase was the interesting product because it was competing with a shelf of discs, and a disc does not need permission from a server to play.

The playback story was better than people remember. A film bought on a PS3 would open on a Vita or on a Bravia television, at a time when getting the same file onto two devices otherwise meant a cable and an evening. That was the pitch for the whole Sony Entertainment Network: one account, and every screen the company sold you.

~ the announcement ~

On 2 March 2021 Sony said it would stop selling and renting films and television on 31 August. The stated reason was that PlayStation owners had moved to subscription and ad-supported services, which was true and had been true for years. Nobody was buying a film on a console when Netflix was one button away on the same machine.

The announcement carried a reassurance in the same paragraph. Anything already purchased would stay watchable on the consoles and on mobile. That is the sentence that mattered, since a digital store closing is only a story about the past if the past keeps working.

~ the films that came back off the shelf ~

In August 2022, less than a year after the store closed, Sony notified customers in Germany and Austria that StudioCanal content was being removed from their libraries. The stated cause was evolving licensing agreements, which means Sony's right to serve those titles had run out and had not been renewed for a store that no longer existed. Three hundred and fourteen items went in Germany, a hundred and thirty seven in Austria.

The list included Paddington and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and Lionsgate titles like John Wick. These were purchases, not rentals. Sony declined to say anything useful about refunds. The company had written the words permanently and library into its own store, then removed the films anyway, because the license behind them was between Sony and a distributor rather than between Sony and the buyer.

Every digital purchase since has carried this footnote whether or not it is printed. What you buy is a permission to watch, held open by a company that has to keep paying someone else for it. PlayStation Video is where that stopped being a theory and became a support email.

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