Over the past decade, we've purchased thousands of TV shows and hundreds of movies and songs from iTunes. These have all been stored on a massive NAS, and served from a Mac Mini with iTunes Home Sharing enabled.
Until just a few days ago, our iPhones and our children's iPads could easily browse and play any previous purchases. This was great, because well, when nothing new and interesting is available or when guests visit, we can quickly and easily re-play old shows and movies that we purchased without consuming any internet bandwidth.
We allowed both iPhones and our newest iPad to update. Apple removed the Video app and replaced it with the TV.app. The TV app sucks. Not only does it hang and crash often, it lists about 20 of our 4000+ shows and 10 of over 300+ movies that we purchased.
Our old iPad that has not updated yet still has the Video app installed. It can still access Home Sharing, and thus it still lists and plays any of our purchases instantly.
So, is it possible to copy the old Video app from the old iPad somehow, and then copy that app over to our iPhones and the new iPad?
I really get the impression from what is happening with "TV apps" and "subscription" terminology that Apple is trying to force people to become subscribers to an old-school, cable-like service tv-networks' bundling apps (shwew, that's a mouthful and yes it stinks of expensive cable TV). So thoughtlessly breaking access to our own purchases, stored on our own networked devices further re-enforces this impression. I've doubts that it was a total blunder that the new TV app is no longer listing Videos on our NAS, and only allows re-streaming. So if we could recover by using the old Video app that would let us continue using the thousands of dollars of movies and shows that we paid for.