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Comment by lancesells | Hacker News Reader

This sounds like a business opportunity for someone.

It's a niche, but I don't know how profitable it is. They pay postage both ways, which must cost them a significant fraction of a dollar. It doesn't take all that many disks per month to eat their profit margin.

And it all seems pretty hard on the disks. I've had a few disks arrive broken, including one just recently. I know that sometimes they have studio agreements to burn their own custom disks, but sometimes they're just paying full retail price.

Netflix got rid of much of its back catalog of cinephile movies a long time ago. I suspect that they just stopped replacing them when the physical disk broke. I don't know how big the market is for people who want obscure movies; I'm sure it's not zero, but it's probably not enormous.

It's a big deal for me. There's very little on Netflix streaming that interests me, but I've got a DVD queue of over 400 great films.

That's what Netflix's niche should have been. They can own one copy of every movie. I gather that they used to have the greatest library in the world, and have gradually let it diminish to a kind of glorified Redbox.

I discovered that I'm just not a cinephile. I would love to love old, great, less-well-known films, but I just use TV these days as mindless distraction. It's the cinephiles (and fans of other material that doesn't get picked up by streaming, like some anime) who really lose out in this.

Could you have "remote access" to a DVD player in the cloud? And then stream the audio and video to a TV? Suppose you had one user per "DVD" at a time and you let them "borrow it" like they do ebooks at the library. It might be shutdown quick based upon the streaming laws but it does seem like a sort of variation to it all.

I think old movies will find their way, there is a relatively small number of them but there is an awful lot of TV (also probably just awful TV) that I have a very hard time finding someone wanting to pay to have it streamed. Other than some pop culture memories and nostalgia, I don't know that there is a great loss; the really high quality content tends to live on. It doesn't feel right. When Netflix DVDs are gone, there is a lot of stuff that I don't know where you could find it.

Sounds similar to Aereo [1], which provided remote access to TV antennas but was sued and forced to shut down.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aereo

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_v._VidAngel

Netflix didn't have this service outside the US, and (at least in the last decade, there were some services like LoveFilm a long time ago) nobody has launched a competitor - the rising cost of postage and shrinking physical production means there's no opportunity here.

Yeh, Redbox.

Not the same. Redbox is a good Blockbuster replacement in that they have a good selection of recent hits, but not much else. What made Netflix magical was that it had a huge back catalog - larger than any rental store or library I have ever used.

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