Streaming requires negotiating licensing rights, with each IP owner independently.
This is why the DVD service had so many more titles than the streaming service. At least when I was actively using it.
It still does. Just think of a movie or show and search for it, and they'll probably have it, although they seem to be missing the occasional season.
I think the DVD site would still be popular if more people were aware of the size of its catalog. Most probably assume it has the same catalog as the streaming service.
Investors should be diversified; firms should be specialized.
Agree that streaming never looks as good as what I get from Bluray.
And here I thought I should go check out Netflix DVD catalog before it closes for good in September.
To me, the quality of the content was better in the DVD service.
I watch a couple of DVDs from Netflix each week. I haven't streamed anything from Netflix since 2020.
This is something I've wondered about. I've never subscribed to either CDs or streaming but my impression of streaming is that there are hundreds of movies not tens of thousands. Wikipedia says that in 2005 Netflix had 35,000 different movies on disk, presumably many more by now. How many different titles does Netflix streaming have for the USA service ?
That site claims that they've got about 3600 TV series and 3700 movies in their US streaming catalog, as of January 2023.
California folks, worth knowing is that most (if not all) library systems in California will give a card to anyone with a California ID, even if they don’t live in district. When I lived in Santa Monica, I had cards for Santa Monica, LA County, LA City, Orange County and Beverly Hills.
My previous city library was a pretty good supplement to Netflix. But my new city only has new stuff. An only does inter-library loans for printed material.
West coast libraries are unusually well stocked for DVDs because occasionally (before streaming) a movie or other entertainment company will get caught doing some minor misdeed, and was able to pay the fine by dumping DVDs on rural library systems.
I don't mind buying the movies, but Netflix has some movies that aren't anywhere. Not even on ebay.
In fact plenty of the movies you and I have probably already seen ("Easy Rider", "2001: A Space Odyssey", "The Graduate" for example). So perhaps even before I began going through the list I may have seen 20% or so.
But there are also a lot of early films from the 1930's I had not seen, and plenty of foreign films. In fact, now that I'm working through the 1970's, "foreign films" is more or less the rule.
Sadly the foreign films are the ones hardest to find both on Netflix and at the local library.
The site also still had a social component back then with star ratings, lists, you could see what your friends were watching and comment. There was almost a goodreads vibe to parts of the site - it was fun.
This is why I think it was smart they started releasing content weekly instead of all at once. Give people a chance to build excitement and talk about something.
It is, however, not legal to rent CDs in the US. Because the US is weird.
To use a Non-US example of the judiciary looking the other way because the letter of the law is satisfied, but not the intent:
https://www.mei.edu/publications/temporary-marriage-iran-and...
It did not last long.
It wasn't the buying and reselling. It was the editing and digital lock picking.
Went to the Supreme Court, and they got owned. Company was shut down.
IIRC the trouble came down to the notion of retransmission (thus copyright violations). The argument that it was being sent to just one customer was not really accepted by the justices I think.
It was several markets, not just NY. Houston was one because I remember briefly subscribing to Aereo.
A major problem was the high breakage rate for the DVDs they were renting. This created issues with the supply chain of new DVDs to replace broken ones since DVDs are not considered continuously consumed, disposable products. Additionally, it made it easier to manage the bursty nature of demand for particular DVDs since you no longer had to optimize the economics around the number of rentals per physical DVD.
It was Redbox that got the studios on the ropes. Not only were home entertainment revenues dropping because of over-saturation, a bad economy, and burgeoning digital rental options -- and these were revenues the studios had started to rely on and build into their budget forecasting for films that would often only become profitable after a successful home release -- being able to get a new release for $1 from a kiosk (a kiosk that can store 500 copies and might be loaded up with just the top X new releases) and then returned and re-rented within 24 hours, that was a problem. Because now I don't have to pay $15 for that movie I'm not sure I'll ever watch again and that will clutter up the living room, I can just drive up to the grocery store or the gas station or whatever and grab a disc and go. And a website will tell me where the disc is available if it's out at the place up the street. And it's $1 and I can just return it right after I watch it. $1 rentals was a threat, but Netflix never had that pricing. They were like $7.99 for one out at a time and then it would go up from there.
But the studios didn't have a problem with Netflix and in the early years, were probably able to get better terms (for the studio) with them on bulk purchases than they had with Blockbuster.
Studios didn't start to have to grapple with Netflix until Netflix signed its landmark deal with Starz, allowing it to stream Starz's catalog of content (there was no provision in the Starz contract with studios that disallowed offering a digital streaming option -- future contracts obviously added those clauses but that would take several years to expire), thus truly making good on Reed Hasting's vision of having the internet deliver movies.
And even then, the relationship was adversarial but also somewhat necessary from both sides, because Netflix needed to license content for its library, and studios needed that sweet licensing revenue (at least before Netflix started to create its own content that competed directly against the studios).
That changed with DVD, where the studios stopped differentiating and went direct-to-consumer.
The proliferation of DVDs without the need for a distinction between home video and rental is part of what led to the decline of video stores (in addition to the real threat, which of course was streaming) because consumers could buy their own movie collections instead of renting them for $5 for 2 nights or whatever Blockbuster used to charge. I became an avid DVD collector as a teenager in the peak DVD era (1999-2003) and a combination of unsustainable online stores (many that were dead by 2001) selling DVDs at rock-bottom prices (even during release week) and Blockbuster's lackluster selection led to me getting a Netflix account in 1999 (thanks, mom, for the credit card!) and then building my own collection of what would become thousands of titles, rather than rely on the chains. I still have a great affinity for local video stores and support my OG hometown video store (Videodrome in Atlanta) and Scarecrow Video in Seattle, b/c curation is key.
Now, when the DVD boom flatlined in the late 2000s, three of the major studios refused to sell directly to Redbox until 28 days after a tentpole got a home video release because they worried about kiosk rentals cutting into their home video revenues (which at this point, had often started to overtake or match theatrical revenue), but Redbox got around that by just buying through other distributors or buying out Walmart, Best Buy and Costco stock. They also sued the studios that were refusing to sell to them directly. The reason the studios went against Redbox was because Redbox undercut them by offering rentals for $1 a day and most people (obviously not me), stopped collecting movies.
But again, the first sale doctrine means that they can't require anyone to buy a different version. This is the same with book publishers. They try to strongarm libraries into buying library copies of physical books but the truth is, if a library needs a book or needs more copies, they can buy them from Amazon or a bulk distributor all the same.
[0]: https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/15/20967268/redbox-disney-m...
Is that actually true ? I thought buying a disk and then lending it for money was a breach of the copyright ... isn't that pretty much what that big block of text says at the start of every disk delivered movie ? At least where I live !
When direct-to-consumer happened, there was typically not any difference between when a large rental chain got a disc and when I could pick mine up on Tuesday morning at Best Buy (or get it in the mail, sometimes arriving the day before) or wherever.
Some chains like Blockbuster did sign rental agreements with studios both because of the bulk orders they needed and because for a few years, Blockbuster had to stock VHS tapes AND DVDs and the studios would basically make them sign those agreements if they still wanted to get VHS tapes -- but nothing stopped them from carrying the home release versions from retail if a rental copy was not available. And as you say, nothing stopped the indie shops from buying Tuesday morning at 10am and then immediately putting them out to rent.
If you want to get a copy before it’s for general sale then you need to sign a contract, if you buy it at Walmart you don’t.
However, the physical disk is protected by First Sale Doctrine. You can sell it, rent it, auction it, destroy it, whatever you want. The same applies to, say, your laptop. You can do whatever you physically want to your laptop, even if you can't copy your Windows license wherever you like.