[downerending]

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.

[wtmt]

I'm curious about your account loss. Was it a Gmail address that was your Google account? Did it have a verified phone number linked to it?

[downerending]

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.