Most advice about holding on to the shows you love arrives with a shopping list attached. A drive, a Plex install, an evening spent working out why the metadata scraper has decided every episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a different film, and a resolved commitment to maintaining all of it forever. The advice isn’t wrong, and the people giving it usually end up with exactly what they wanted. But there’s a duller option sitting between the all-you-can-eat subscription and the home server: just buying the handful of things you actually rewatch.

I’ve made the case before for subscribing to shows rather than services, though buying carries a catch that nobody mentions until it bites, and the catch falls on TV rather than on the movies you buy.

Buying beats subscribing for the stuff you genuinely return to

But it’s a much narrower slice of your viewing than it feels like

Credit: Netflix / MGM

The arithmetic isn’t complicated, and a service you open weekly is earning its money. A service you open twice a year to watch one thing is a standing order you keep forgetting to cancel, however, and at $12 a month, that’s roughly $144 to rewatch a show you could have bought outright for $25 and kept.

Where buying wins is in comfort viewing, a category most of us underestimate. The prestige limited series everyone talked about in March should probably be a rental, with a single month of access, because you will likely admire it once and never reopen it. The thing you put on when you’re too tired to follow anything new, though, is the thing you’ll come back to for a decade. For me, that’s mid-2000s teen drama and mystery shows where I already know who did it, which frees me up to notice other nuances instead. Whatever yours is, it’s probably shorter than your watchlist and worth considerably more.

On paper, that makes buying an easy recommendation, but in practice, there’s a structural problem with TV specifically that doesn’t apply to film, and it’s the sort of thing you discover at the exact moment you need it not to be true.

Movies got a safety net, but TV shows never did

Yet shows are what most people actually rewatch

If you buy a film digitally in the US, there’s a good chance it’s covered by Movies Anywhere, Disney’s free rights-locker service. Link your Apple TV, Prime Video, Fandango at Home, or Google TV accounts to it, and eligible purchases from participating studios surface in one library, playable through any of those apps. Buy once, watch in whichever app you happen to be in front of. It’s a genuinely useful bit of consumer engineering, and by Disney’s own count, it had around 14.5 million users as of May.

It also doesn’t cover television, and Movies Anywhere’s own help documentation is blunt about it: TV shows aren’t available on the service, and any TV titles sitting in your retailer libraries simply won’t import. There is no TV Anywhere, and there never has been. So the seasons you bought on Prime Video stay on Prime Video, the ones you bought from Apple stay with Apple, and if either of those relationships changes, nothing catches you.

Here’s where every major storefront currently stands on TV:

The film side isn’t watertight either, which is worth knowing before you treat it as one. The studio list runs to Disney, Sony, Universal, Warner Bros., and Lionsgate. Lionsgate only joined in June, with an initial 225 titles and roughly 100 more arriving each month into early 2027. Paramount and Amazon-owned MGM are still absent, so a Paramount film bought anywhere stays where you bought it, exactly like a TV season does. The service is US-only, too, which is a conversation in itself.

And the arrangement can wobble. Google Play and YouTube dropped out of Movies Anywhere on October 31 last year, seemingly as collateral damage from the Disney and YouTube TV carriage dispute, which meant Google purchases stopped syncing for about seven weeks before both returned in mid-December. Nothing was lost permanently. But a service whose entire value proposition is “your purchases are safe across stores” spent seven weeks demonstrating that its coverage is a commercial arrangement rather than a property of the file you bought.

There’s a bigger version of that question hanging over the whole thing, but I’d look at it as something to watch rather than panic about. Paramount Skydance has an agreed deal to buy Warner Bros. Discovery. Warner is a participating studio, Paramount pointedly isn’t, and closing has now been pushed out to June 2027 while a coalition of state attorneys general litigates. What happens to Warner’s participation if the deal closes is not something anyone has said publicly, and I’d be guessing if I told you.

What the word “buy” means on that store page

And why California made the stores spell it out

None of this makes a digital purchase the same as owning something, and the industry has thankfully stopped pretending otherwise. Since January 2025, California’s AB 2426 has required sellers of digital goods to disclose, separately from the general terms nobody reads, that clicking “buy” grants a revocable license rather than ownership, and that access can end if the seller loses the rights. If you’ve noticed slightly awkward new wording at checkout on a US storefront, that’s why. It’s a good law, but it’s also an official confirmation of what enthusiasts have been saying for years.

The consequences aren’t hypothetical, and the TV examples are the most acute. When Sony folded Funimation into Crunchyroll in April 2024, the digital copies people had redeemed from their own DVDs and Blu-rays didn’t transfer, and Crunchyroll confirmed it had no plans to support them. Those were TV libraries, built deliberately by people who had bought the discs, and now they’re gone.

Storefronts close too, of course. Microsoft stopped selling movies and TV shows across Windows and Xbox in July 2025, with no advance notice and no refunds. Existing purchases still appear in the Movies & TV app, and Microsoft says it will continue to support them, so nobody has lost anything yet, but what’s gone is the option to keep building there, which is a clear picture of the risk when building a digital library.

Sony is removing 551 previously purchased StudioCanal titles from PlayStation Store video libraries on September 1, with no refunds. That’s a UK and Europe action, though. US libraries are unaffected, and it echoes a smaller 2022 removal in Germany and Austria. US customers had their own scare in 2023 when Sony announced that Discovery content would be pulled, only to reverse course after striking a new agreement.

You may notice a pattern here. In every case, the failure occurred upstream of the buyer, and there was nothing the buyer could have done differently within the digital system.

Let’s be clear about one route the internet will happily point you toward, because I’ve seen it recommended as a tidy workaround. Stripping DRM from a purchased file to create a “permanent” copy is not a legal gray area in the US. Section 1201 of the DMCA prohibits circumventing access controls, even when your intended use would otherwise be lawful, and it separately prohibits distributing the tools that do so.

Personal backup isn’t a carve-out, and ripping a disc you paid for isn’t either. Whatever you think of that as policy, and there’s a respectable argument that it’s overbroad, it isn’t advice I can give you.

How I’d actually go about it

Pick one store, then decide what deserves a disc

The practical version of this is less dramatic than the framing suggests.

• Buy where you already watch, then stay there. Fragmenting a TV library across three storefronts because each had a sale that week is how you end up unable to remember where season four of your fave is. Since TV purchases don’t sync anywhere, the store you pick is the store you’re stuck with, which makes it worth choosing based on longevity and app quality rather than on a $4 saving.
• I’d lean toward Apple for shows, and I say that as someone not especially sentimental about Apple. It has been upgrading purchased TV seasons to 4K for free, which is a rare instance of a digital purchase getting better after you’ve paid for it rather than silently getting worse. Prime Video is the obvious alternative if your setup already points there.
• Download episodes where the app allows it. This is a convenience feature rather than a preservation one, and the file is encrypted, tied to the app, and can stop playing when your license does. It gets you through a flight, but it won’t get you through a licensing dispute.
• Redeem every disc code you come across, including from boxes you’ve since passed on. Costs nothing, takes a minute.
• Turn on two-factor authentication for the account that holds the library. A locked-out account is a far more common way to lose a collection than a licensing row, and it’s the one failure mode that’s entirely within your control.

And for the very small number of shows you’d be genuinely put out to lose, buy the box set. Not as a lifestyle choice, and not because physical media is having a moment, but because a disc is the one copy that isn’t downstream of a contract renewal. My own list of those is about four shows long. It’s probably worth working out what yours is before someone makes the decision for you.