My Own Little World

I'm going to start a new series for things I care about outside of the topics I already discuss on my blog, simply titled "Why I Care." In this first post, I want to take a look at announcement made yesterday that has the potential to change the entire way digital movie purchases work. A couple years ago, Disney launched a service called Disney Movies Anywhere. It worked like Ultraviolet, the digital copy service, in a way: you entered codes online and it put it into your libraries in various retailers. Here was the difference, though: Disney partnered with Apple, Amazon, Google, and Vudu, making it far more cross-platform than Ultraviolet (it only had Vudu), as well as putting your movies in ALL of your connected libraries instead of just one. It was a nice little thing that I grew to love and wish others copied. Well, yesterday something really big happened: Sony, Universal, Fox, and Warner Bros. all joined Disney's service and rebranded it as Movies Anywhe...

I deeply dreaded this moment. Every single streaming service so far had failed me. Spotify was too focused on playlists, Google's option just didn't quite work, and Tidal was too unstable as a business. I was going to try Rdio next, but they just got bought by Pandora and are going to be shut down, so they were out. And Deezer isn't available in the United States yet, so that was also out. That left pretty much one option. The one that I swore I would never try. The one from one of my least favorite companies in the world. If you guessed Apple Music , you're right. And if you missed that in the title of this post...well, I don't know what to tell you. I really have never been a fan of Apple as a company, ditching every part of their company except for their music store over a year ago. I didn't like using iTunes with such a large music library, and as for iOS...well, that's a completely different (and much longer) explanation. Yet, when moving over...