Microsoft is pulling the HDMI cable on its Movies & TV service today, as it confirmed in a support document. Effective immediately, you can no longer purchase any TV shows or movies from the Microsoft Store, on both Windows and Xbox.
The move comes as the company continues to distance itself from consumer entertainment services, shutting down Groove Music Pass back in 2017, and more recently, canceling a bunch of big-name Xbox game releases amid mass layoffs.
You can still access your purchases, for now
The Movies and TV app will continue to exist
As of right now, there's still an 'Entertainment' section in the Microsoft Store that points you to movies and TV shows, but clicking on any of them displays a warning at the top that this type of content is no longer available for purchase. It also says that you can continue to view your purchased content via the Movies and TV app, an app that doesn't even come preinstalled on Windows PCs anymore.
Naturally, you'd be right in being skeptical of the future of the app, and for questioning the future of your media purchases if the Redmond firm ever chooses to remove it from the Microsoft Store entirely. When Groove Music was discontinued, Microsoft shut down the app, but it also gave its users a bridge to move their libraries to Spotify if they chose to do so, and to download anything purchased.
Looking back at Microsoft entertainment services
In its original form, Movies & TV was introduced in 2006
Microsoft used to care a lot more about consumer services like these. Back in 2006, Zune Video was part of the Zune Marketplace, because in competition with Apple, Microsoft actually had a product that was aimed entirely at media consumption.
When the Xbox One was released in 2012, that was billed as an entertainment device, and Zune Video was rebranded to Xbox Video. Indeed, Xbox Video existed across Xbox, Windows PCs, Windows phones, and more.
It wasn't until 2015 that the service got the more generic Movies & TV branding, and while there was a huge emphasis on making Groove Music cross-platform so you could play it on all of your devices, Movies & TV never got the same treatment. In fact, you'd be able to find a Roku set-top box in a Microsoft Store, and the product wasn't even able to play the movies that you bought...from Microsoft.
It just never happened, and it never seemed like a priority. It always seemed like Movies & TV continued to exist simply because Xbox needed a way for people to purchase and stream media, and now even that's going away. Obviously, the company has sales data that show whether or not this is a sustainable service, and I don't think anyone really thought Movies & TV was thriving.
Hopefully, if there comes a day that everyone loses access to their purchases, Microsoft will work out an arrangement with a streaming partner to allow users to transfer their libraries.