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blazehedgehog
@blazehedgehog

I can't decide if Sony made its media player hub better or worse.

When I first got my PS4, where it says "Featured Apps" was only the things I had installed: Youtube, Twitch, etc. Here's somebody else's image of how it looked:

The original layout for Sony's "TV & Video" hub: a single row of apps with ad space for recommended shows underneath.

Somebody at Sony realized they were leaving money on the table, so they started mixing in suggestions so that peppered among Youtube, Twitch, Pluto and etc. were now channels you did not actually have installed. So you'd have a button to launch Disney+ whether you were subscribed or even had the app at all.

And slowly, these streaming suggestions began to take over the list. They had NINE APP SLOTS and seven of them would be shit you didn't have, need, or want. The apps you actually used would always be at the very end of the list. On top of the entire rest of this screen being COVERED in solid ads.

It got so bad that eventually all nine slots were recommendations and you'd have to click a "See All" button to get to what was installed on the machine. It was foul.

Within a couple weeks, they hastily compromised: the top bar was renamed to "Featured Apps" and a special "Recent Apps" bar was added on the third row to show everything you had installed and actually used:

The updated layout for Sony's "TV & Video" hub: a row of ads, followed by another row of bigger ads, with the apps you actually use buried on the third row.

They wanted to make ABSOLUTELY, 100% SURE you created as many "ad impressions" as you could before you actually launched the app you were looking for. And this is how it's been for the last, say, three or four years. Until tonight.

I guess Sony decided that wasn't good enough, so they've shrunk the "Recent Apps" bar to just three icons, moving it back up to the top of the screen again where recommendations tragically loses two whole slots. It is both better and worse, somehow


blazehedgehog
@blazehedgehog

It gets worse: back in 2019, I bought the complete series of Cowboy Bebop on the PS4 because it was $9. Kind of a deal, right?

Two years later, Sony shut down media sales on the Playstation Store, but according to their support site, I should still be able to access my existing purchases. Instead, my account is completely empty of any media content, despite still having the receipt for Cowboy Bebop in my transaction history.

The only person I can speak to at this time of night is a robot who objectively refuses to cooperate.


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in reply to @blazehedgehog's post:

Oh cool I love that their response to "you paid for ownership of something that doesn't exist" is to comp a whole free month of a subscription service. Also, despite that article barely being a month old, the link they provide to contact Funimation/Crunchyroll/Sony over this is already dead.