Microsoft had a movies and TV store?
this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2025
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They did. It was so awful with hardly any updates. I bought some things on it but usually when it was on major discount and connected to Movies Anywhere so I could watch it elsewhere.
I don't know why they had the same movie for sale... one with bonus features, one without... for the same price. Every other platform includes the bonus features automatically. Why separate them? Is there someone out there thinking, hmm... I like this movie, but I don't want the bonus features.
It was doomed to fail.
Movies Anywhere was the whole deal for me. With Microsoft connected, I used MA for its wishlist to indicate when things were on sale. Sometimes MS had a sale when other services did not! But that's it.
I own a couple that were only distributed in this region that way in an acceptable format for weird reasons related to localization. And then I moved internationally a couple of times and the Microsoft store REALLY isn't willing to understand that's a thing that can happen. It's been a bit of a mess and one of the multiple reasons to not use MS's store as a package/software manager in the first place.
Remember when Microsoft was telling shareholders that the Xbox multimedia ecosystem was going to dominate living rooms everywhere, then people stopped hanging out in their living rooms?
Imagine having a living room
You guys have rooms?
MS ruined living rooms.
I remember when they killed their Games For Windows store and the games I'd bought on there just went poof. Never trust Microsoft to keep a digital storefront around, they'll delete it all at the drop of a hat.
Like with Bitcoin, not your keys not your coin. If you don't hold it you don't own it.
Never trust Microsoft
I can see Microsoft just being the Azure company at this rate. Then they’ll have to charge what it costs to run and a lot of companies will wish they had stayed cloud agnostic.
The business is basically thirds last I looked. Windows, Office and Azure.
Not sure how their purchase of platform companies they shouldn't have been allowed to buy plays into that. Thinking LinkedIn and GitHub.
They already make money hand-over-fist on Azure. Cloud computing is already quite expensive
So the Microsoft brand is just for show and it's actually called Azure.
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If you think about it: Microsoft owns XBox, that has been one of the three major consoles for decades now. They own Windows, the world's most popular operating system. They own Edge, one of the major browsers. And they still failed to create a movie and TV store and shut down their music streaming service. Which is totally insane - that shit was bundled with fucking windows and Xbox and they still made it suck so hard that it failed
Don’t forget that they didn’t succeed on mobile phones either. Despite it was very fine OS and devices were good too.
Good except for the critical features they didn't add. Like when the iPhone didn't have copy-paste, but on a Microsoft phone, way later.
Microsoft isn't popular by choice. They can't force people into shitty ecosystems if they have no reason to choose it to begin with. Microsoft was the only choice for decades, and will go down as the golden example of business monopoly.
Apple, amazon, google, all have their claws deeper in people because they make products people choose to use. They actually like the products, so the companies can slowly enshittify them and keep their users.
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I think it’s more that consumers didn’t know what the fuck it was.
Which is totally a failure of Microsoft. People have their Xbox connected to their TV. They have an account and they have their payment information maintained there. And Microsoft can't make the simple proposal of "Hey, this device you have connected to your TV and where you are playing games on, you can also use it to watch movies and series"
PS3 was a 1080p capable device connected to our (new in 2007) 1080p living room TV, the only 1080p device for almost a year. It played BluRay discs - they had the opportunity to cooperate with Netflix and other content providers like the Smart TVs that followed, but they didn't. When they rug-pulled the "otherOS" feature that I was using to stream live (still) photos from WebCams in the Caribbean, that earned a NetTop PC a place in the living room, and from there PC based content sourcing became the norm in our house. To this day, we have no "Smart" TVs. Our BluRay players are not internet connected (and they play 99% DVDs, less than 1% BluRay content...)
Consumer behavior gets ingrained, hard to change when they're happy where they are.
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"You'll still be able to access your content"
Yeah, until they release a new version of the launcher, or underlying framework, which prevents the old app to run, locking people out of the content they paid for.
If purchasing isn’t owning, piracy isn’t theft.
Oh well. They should have brought back the Zune. And my Nokia windows phone in bright yellow.
I liked Zune. Microsoft is the real killer of their own demise. They have great products/ideas, but they just torch them before they take root.
always after the ever elusive profit margin. can't have a product that lives forever became there's no more profit after the market has been saturated.
they then take all the IP they have and either license the technology or sell it for a profit or loss depending on what is needed.
doesn't matter though, because the consumer always loses.
For what it's worth, Windows Phone was sort of a successor to that. And then they went and killed it too...
Ahem Sony ahem - referring to Minidisc which I thought was awesome but most Americans didn't care.
Remember when Xbox required a Live subscription to use the any streaming entertainment app?
I distinctly remember them failing a console launch spectacularly by (among other things) trying to pass it as a media center and talking about how great it is to watch TV on.
Don't forget one needed to stay online with Xbox Live subscription even for basic functionality and gaming during XBOne's E3
Not to mention games were heavily reliant on DRM so you can't trade discs easily
Meanwhile Sony...
Laughs in 1200 disc DVD collection
laughs in 20tb raid10 multimedia storage
☠️
Yes, you could rent or buy series and movies.
If you don't own the storage, you don't own the content. You're just renting it.
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You'll still be able to access content. But for how long?
They did this with "plays for sure" DRM protected music files too, way, way back. Never bought content of any kind from them after that and then killing Windows LIVE.
Just assume everything from them has a "destroy after" date set in the near future.
Ahoy.
First time I hear about this store...
I may have seen it, but it "felt wrong" from the start - never considered it anything of interest.
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Wait.. they had a movies and TV store?
You’ll still be able to access content you own
Haha yes, that was never in doubt.
It will be if your using MS tech for it. They will pull the plug on that too. Just not yet, it's quieter to do it separately later.
On it's on disks you control in formats you can play with anything you like, its never yours.
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