Aren't the other digital services like the Apple movies store and Amazon the same way? That's what has kept me from buying digital content specifically movies, since it's just like renting but costs more.
Yes. All the digital platforms rely on licenses with the actual rights holders. A producer used to license movies across multiple platforms for largest reach but as the market continues to splinter and fracture and large studios keep being bought out by content houses (Netflix, Prime, Disney, etc) the incentive to have a wide distribution channel is being replaced with an incentive to hoard licensed content to pull higher subscriber numbers.
If the rights holder pulls the license and you own the movie on that platform, you no longer own the movie. Digital purchases need to be able to follow a user from service to service but I'll be long gone before that happens.
They are indeed like that, although it is relatively rare for digital content to be completely delisted in a way where you can't even re-download existing purchases.
I know Apple in particular traditionally had/has a method to back up your movie purchases physically to your hard disk, but that is probably a little blurrier in the world of tvOS and iOS.
For iTunes music, Apple has always stated that music storage and backup is the customer's responsibility, that re-downloads are essentially provided as a courtesy.
> I know Apple in particular traditionally had/has a method to back up your movie purchases physically to your hard disk, but that is probably a little blurrier in the world of tvOS and iOS.
AFAIK movie "purchases" are still by-and-large only available with DRM, so ultimately I still have to rely on Apple for continuing access to such movies, though, locally backed-up or not.
> For iTunes music, Apple has always stated that music storage and backup is the customer's responsibility, that re-downloads are essentially provided as a courtesy.
On the other hand music is mostly DRM-free these days (is there actually any notable music store left that sells DRM'd files?), especially including iTunes/Apple, so while as you say re-downloads might be provided as a courtesy, I have absolutely no need to rely on Apple for ongoing access to my purchased music collection.
Yeah, I think the idea was that as long as Apple's DRM services are still up, your backed up movies will still function even if they are taken off the store. But I am not 100% sure about whether that is/was true.
As you mentioned, iTunes music hasn't had and DRM in many years.
Still, TV streamers don't really have significant storage space, so that's kind of a problem for the average person.
Since Apple renamed iTunes and turned it into a Music-only app, my movie library seems to have moved to the Apple TV app's "Library" section.
I chose a movie and clicked the cloud download icon. The movie downloaded, and now it just has a checkbox in the interface. I don't seem to have any other control from within the TV app (it doesn't even let me delete it off my system from that interface, and I don't have a lot of confidence that this app is guaranteeing that the app will remain locally downloaded without intervention).
Once I clicked the download icon, I notice that the file is located in ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes\ Media/Movies/[Movie Name]/[Movie File Name].m4v
Presumably, I could back up that file manually on my own and it would work even if taken off the iTunes Store (Hopefully?), but that it might not work if Apple went out of business.
You'd probably also have to back up wherever those apps store the decryption keys for that content and then hope that you never trigger the case where those apps decide that those keys aren't valid on your computer any more and you require a re-authorisation from Apple's servers.
