It’s been less than a week since Disney-owned channels went off the air for YouTube TV subscribers, but we’re still seeing some unintended effects ripple through the industry. Following Disney’s move to pull its vast collection of original and acquired entertainment, Movies Anywhere is the next platform to see a hit from the House of Mouse.
According to a very, very brief announcement on the Movies Anywhere site — I’d hesitate to call it a support page, since it offers little in the way of actual support — Google Play and YouTube are no longer participating in Movies Anywhere, a program that allows you to sync the bulk of your digital library across multiple platforms at once. The reasoning behind this change requires a little bit of dot-connecting, but to no one’s surprise, it almost certainly ties back to Disney’s ongoing feud with Google.
Although Movies Anywhere includes participating studios like Sony, Universal, and Warner Bros, like many aspects of the modern entertainment industry, it’s actually owned by Disney. The October 31st date on that announcement page isn’t a mistake — it lines up perfectly with ABC, ESPN, and other Disney-owned channels leaving YouTube TV over a contract dispute. Factor in the missing titles from Play, YouTube, and Google TV, and it’s hard not to see this as yet another casualty surrounding cable packages.
Here’s the good news: if you’ve already synced your Movies Anywhere library with Google Play, it doesn’t appear that your existing collection is disappearing just yet (though 9to5Google confirmed new purchases do not sync). I have Movies Anywhere synced with Google, Amazon Prime Video, and Apple TV, and although my account settings only show the latter two accounts, my Play library still has the entirety of my collection, even if it was purchased outside of Google’s marketplace. You’ll also be able to continue accessing your Movies Anywhere library through those other services; even on something like the Google TV Streamer, options like the Prime Video app will have your collection synced and ready to go.
An email I received in July asking to renew my Movies Anywhere consent.
That said, there’s no inclination that this is a temporary split, and if Google isn’t added back into the supported services list, you’ll likely eventually stop seeing your collection appear in your Play library. Over the summer, I had to manually relink my Google account to Movies Anywhere after my given consent had expired. With Disney no longer allowing Google into its shared library service, presumably, once that consent expires on a per-user basis, that’s it.
With any luck, an eventual agreement between Google and Disney will revive the status quo, with Disney-owned channels on YouTube TV, Disney-owned media on Play and Google TV, and Google’s placement in the supported platforms list on Movies Anywhere. But it doesn’t seem like either company plans to return to the negotiating table any time soon, and as time ticks by, the higher the chances are that the relationship between these two brands won’t be as close as it might’ve once been.
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