In what might appear counterintuitive to most people, Apple TV does not actually let you own the movies that you've bought, with most purchases remaining locked to a given region, as illustrated by a Redditor's recent plight.
Apple TV's content licensing policies leave much to be desired
A Redditor who goes by the username u/AlpacAKEK recently penned an interesting post, explaining the pitfalls associated with purchasing movies from Apple TV.
The user maintained a "small movie library" populated with titles purchased from the Apple TV. However, the Redditor lost access to all but three movies upon changing his Apple ID region.
When our protagonist contacted Apple Support, he was informed that Apple TV movies remain region-restricted even after you've purchased them. Frustratingly, there is no way of discovering which movies are locked to which region or regions before going through with a purchase.
Of course, region-based content licensing is an industry-wide practice. However, Apple TV should clearly delineate the region or regions to which a particular title is locked, allowing users to then make an informed decision as per their convenience.
This is all the more jarring given the fact that the Redditor was able to access his purchased iTunes music even after changing his Apple ID region, indicating that this is an Apple TV-specific problem.
To make matters worse, once you change your Apple ID region, you can't track the movies that then disappear from your library. They apparently vanish as if they were never there to begin with. Your only recourse then would be to manually go through your purchase history, which simply adds to the overall frustration.
Thankfully, if you revert your Apple ID region to the original one, you do gain back access to the missing purchased movies. All of this just goes to show that you don't actually own the titles in your purchased Apple TV collection, which remains subject to the whims of Apple's convoluted content licensing deals.
About the author: Writing is my one incontrovertible passion. Over the past six years, he has authored over 2,200 distinct articles on financial and tech-related topics, spanning nearly 1 million words. And he has been a member of Wcctech mobile team since 2025. As an alumnus of the University of Toronto, Rotman Commerce Program, I bring nuance, in-depth knowledge, and a unique perspective to every topic that I cover. When I'm not writing, I'm traveling the world, exploring hidden confectionaries and restaurants as an aspiring food connoisseur.
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