Sony won't take away your PlayStation-bought Discovery shows after all

If you'd previously purchased Discovery shows from the PlayStation Store, you can breathe easily now. Sony has announced that it's no longer removing shows from the network by December 31 like it had previously planned, thanks to updated licensing agreements. Earlier this month, the company said that it's pulling Discovery shows from PlayStation and is even removing any purchased title from your library due to content licensing agreements with its providers. The Discovery shows available on the PlayStation Store include MythBusters, Deadliest Catch and Cake Boss.

In all, around 1,200 titles would've been affected by the change, and you wouldn’t have gotten a refund for any of them. The announcement came shortly after Warner Bros Discovery, the owner of Discovery Channel, had revealed in an earnings report that its flagship streaming service Max lost 2.5 million subscribers over a six month period.

Both of Sony’s announcements were brief and didn’t elaborate on its licensing troubles with the network. As The New York Times said when the company published the warning that it was going to remove any Discovery show you’d purchased in the past, though, the situation raised questions about the meaning of ownership in the age of digital goods. Supposedly, buying digital would give you access to a piece of content forever, since there’s no physical medium that could break or get lost. As this incident demonstrates, that’s not true at all, and you could only hope that networks and providers never change their licensing deals.