(IANAL)
This is fairly pedantic, and I do apologize foe this, but it feels inaccurate to state (or to think) that you were able to buy those movies. We don't buy movies. At least in the US, we buy license/right to view. This gets... into interesting legal territory, but also this leads to situations like digital assets being unavailable after the account to which they are licensed being deleted.
> We don't buy movies. At least in the US, we buy license/right to view.
(IANAL) That part is the same even if you buy a music CD or a Blu-Ray disc. You're only granted a license to play it for your personal use (and you're not even allowed to play at a public event or broadcast it). But, you're legally allowed to make backups for yourself and (in certain instances) encode them for use with a different mechanism. That's one of the things that iTunes (taking a popular example) helped revolutionize, with CD ripping and place-shifting the content for convenience. DRM, along with making the breaking of DRM illegal (is it still illegal for all kinds of content? I haven't kept up) is what messed this whole thing up.
I've been eye-ing a lot of movies on Google Play recently. Wasn't sure about making the jump, but now I'm curious. What makes you think they're going to fail? Any big warning signs?
That was too aggressive. Better to say that it's failed for me, and I suspect it will fail for others. YMMV.
In my case, I lost access to one of my Google accounts, for no apparent reason, and I have been unable to regain access. The movies I have are actually attached to my other account, but the message seems clear--they can go away at any time with no recourse.
In principle this is true for Amazon, Apple, and other Play competitors. In practice, I haven't heard of such cases, and because their economic model is different, this seems a lot less likely, to me.
More broadly, Google has a track record of discontinuing services, which also makes me nervous.
Yes to the first, and pretty sure about the second. And the two accounts were intertwined in many other ways: one was the recovery address for the other, one forwarded its email to the other, they were both accessed at the same time from the same IP over the years.
The only trigger I could see was that I had not logged into the account I lost for a while (months).
Baffling, but it clarified that relying on a single company for multiple services was quite foolish, and I've since spread my accounts around to multiple vendors. Highly recommended.
It looks like Google's current focus has been moving things out of Google Play sub-brands to YouTube sub-brands with their own new apps. Or at least that's what ads and upsells in YouTube itself keep trying to tell me? No idea if Google has made any public announcements one way or the other, but the growing confusion certainly doesn't help anyone figure out what Google's strategy here is (or if it even has one or even if this is just like that "new messenger app every year, X% chance one dies this year" russian roulette thing they do).