Have you ever heard of the Bravia Core app? Me neither. This service was previously only accessible for people who owned Bravia TVs and certain Xperia devices, and gave audiences access to Sony Pictures films. Sony announced last week that Bravia Core will be rebranded to Sony Pictures Core and launched on PS5 and PS4 consoles, likely in a bid to increase the size of its user base. The Sony Pictures Core app will allow users to buy or rent up to 2,000 movies from their consoles, including Spider-Man, Uncharted, Bullet Train, No Hard Feelings, Gran Turismo, and more.
Gran Turismo: Based on a True Story is getting a tie-in with Gran Turismo 7 through the app as well. Buying the movie through Sony Pictures Core will give audiences credit towards an in-game purchase in the racer, which makes sense, but I’m hard-pressed to think of a reason why anybody would want to buy a digital copy of this undeniably mediocre film.
If you have a PlayStation Plus Premium or Deluxe member, you’ll also be able to stream a ‘curated catalog’ of up to 100 movies through the app on demand, ad-free, of course. This includes films like Looper, Elysium, and Resident Evil Damnation, with more benefits to come for all PlayStation Plus members. Anime from Crunchyroll should be joining the service soon as well.
On its face, this is a good thing. I think that the buy/rent model is much more sustainable than current streaming models, and I’m a frequent user of Apple TV+ for that reason – the quality of offerings on most streaming services is middling at best, and having access to movies Iactuallywant to watch and being able to rent or buy them is a huge, invaluable boon for me. I’d rather spend $10 to rent a film that I can’t find on streaming services than pay $10 for a streaming service that I never use because there’s nothing good on there.
But I do have my concerns – mainly the same one that I have with all online services, which is that you can buy a copy of a film but you don’t really own it. I have previouslyadvocated for piracy as a form of media preservation, because of the propensity of streamers to unceremoniously remove media from their platforms, giving audiences no way to ever enjoy it again.
Buying media ostensibly eliminates this threat, because you supposedly own a copy. But when it comes to digital, you never really own something. Technically, a company could pull the product from its platform, and you’d be screwed since you don’t actually own the movie on a disc. That’s why people get into uproars about game studios not releasing physical editions, or when physical discs trigger online downloads instead of having the data on the disc itself.
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