A friendly warning: Don’t be too quick to get rid of all those DVDs and Blu-rays
(Before I start, please understand that I don’t consider this a “problem” compared to actual problems such as poverty, sickness, the death of a loved one, a friend’s betrayal, and so on. I learned a long time ago to keep little annoyances such as this one in their proper perspective. This is simply a friendly warning to anyone who might be about to make the same mistake I made.)
I’m afraid to add up how much I’ve spent on Amazon Instant Video movies and TV shows since I bought my Kindle Fire HD. It’s definitely more than “hundreds,” but I’m not sure if I can claim to have spent “thousands.”
Adding up the total cost would make me sick, given what I just discovered, so I won’t add it up. But it’s a lot.
When I purchased season 9 of The Office on Amazon Instant Video last June, the season finale (which was also the series finale) was 52 minutes long. (It was 52 minutes long when I watched it on NBC the night it originally aired, and it was 52 minutes long when I purchased and downloaded it on Amazon Instant Video.)
Over the past four months, I’ve been slowly re-watching the season on my Kindle. Last night, I began watching the season finale again.
It was 44 minutes long. Amazon had shortened content I already “owned.”
This left me wondering why I had fallen under the assumption that physical media was somehow inferior to digital media. I have never had a DVD or Blu-ray suddenly and inexplicably become shorter in length after I watched it and put it on my shelf.
My first clue was when Dwight failed to refer to PBS as “the propaganda wing of Bill and Melinda Gates - and (addressing the camera) viewers like you” in the first minutes of the episode. It was a great line, given Dwight’s authoritarian personality. (I can’t help but wonder what was behind the decision to censor that particular line.)
But at first I just assumed my memory was failing. I knew Dwight’s PBS/Gates comment was there, because when I bought the season in June, I plugged my Kindle into my TV and watched the finale with a friend. (This was just a short time after NBC originally aired the episode.) We talked about the PBS/Gates comment at the time.
So last night, I thought at first that Dwight’s PBS/Gates comment must have been somewhere other than in the first few minutes of the episode. Then I checked the length of the episode, and that’s when I got a shock that made me lose faith in digital downloads.
At some point since I watched the finale last June, Amazon has cut eight minutes from the episode.
I called customer service, and they refunded the original purchase price. That was really nice of them (normally, a customer has up to seven days to return digital content), but I can’t see any reason to ever buy another Kindle book, movie, TV show, game, or app.
I bought the content on the assumption that it was safe on Amazon’s servers, because why would they want to lose a compulsive spender like myself? But lose me they did. There’s just no reason to keep buying content that can be altered/shortened when my back is turned.
And since I’ve gotten used to the extra space where my physical media used to be (before I donated hundreds of books and movies to charity) ... well, I guess I’m done buying those, as well.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Like you, I would also assume that media I purchased would remain the same as when I purchased it.
It's bad enough that some old shows can't be found with the original content (WKRP with different music, for example), but to change the content AFTER it's been purchased is obnoxious.
