Have you been ditching your physical media library for a digital one from a major VOD library and feel reasonably safe in the knowledge those films will always be available? Think again.

Twitter user Anders G. da Silva (drandersgs) has found himself in a few stories today after he tweeted that he lost three digital movies bought on the iTunes Store in Canada. da Silva wrote to Apple to complain about the missing movies, Apple wrote back saying: “the content provider has removed these movies from the Canadian Store. Hence, these movies are not available in the Canada iTunes Store at this time.”

Apple's reply was interesting. You are paying for the right to download a copy of the film at the time of purchase, there is no other guarantee of availability and you should keep a backup copy of the film.

How many films can you cram onto an AppleTV again? Or what happens when you get a new iPhone? No wonder the new iPhones have so much memory on them.

It wouldn't be such a problem for people like me, who have a decent NAS system in the cellar, but, really, how many average people have multiple terrabytes of backed up storage in their house?

An American blogger had a go at me about this yesterday, saying that even with physical media, like a DVD, you can scratch it and it is unplayable.

I pointed out that, yes, he was correct, scratched media is a problem, but that is my problem, the retailer doesn't burst into my house and scratch the DVD for me!

This is exactly why I still buy DVD's and rip them to digital.
I don't have a moral issue doing that as I'm still paying the studeos their money to own the film.