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jollofricepeas

Actually.

It’s because the market dynamics have changed and we stopped buying DVDs and VHS.

Matt Damon talked about this just a few years ago on Hot Ones.

https://youtu.be/Jx8F5Imd8A8

“So what happened was the DVD was a huge part of our business, of our revenue stream,” Damon said.

“Technology has just made that obsolete, and so the movies that we used to make you could afford to not make all of your money when it played in the theatre because you knew you had the DVD coming behind the release.”

Links:

https://www.ajc.com/life/why-dont-they-make-movies-like-they...

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There's no reason why having the back catalogue in streaming should be different from having it in DVD .. except that streaming has opaque accounting and seemingly pays terrible residuals.

Licensing is the reason.

Licenses are written before the technology is invented. Originally we had radios and record players. Each new medium requires a new license due to the structure of the ownership of the content.

Publishers that own images for print can't post them on the web. The problem is the exceptional nature of the contracts. This is why things are so splintered. All the acquisitions of corporations may create even more exceptions to the licenses.

The difference is that DVD collections were mostly created by movie fans. You had a small, but loyal audience of people that would wait every Tuesday for releases similar to movie releases.

Getting $20-30 per DVD from this audience was much more lucrative than the cents you get per stream when competing against the algorithm of "what should I watch next". It's a VERY different market now. Smaller stuff just doesn't compete.

Once you remove the need to personally curate and review (think also towards the death of the film critic), you introduce a homogenization to the industry.

Streaming is fantastic for convenience. It is terrible for variety, despite the illusion that we're overloaded with choice. The modern streaming system hides everything in plain site. It is almost impossible for me to "browse" streaming sites the way I used to in a Blockbuster or Best Buy. Discovery is much harder.

And DVDs could be released by anyone; there are entirely hidden collections of DVDs that only rarely got a wide release.

Regardless of reason differences exist.

If you have an original DVD collection of The Boondocks [1] then you have the episode

Boondocks, The S03E04 The Story of Jimmy Rebel

    banned after first showing on Adult Swim for excessive depictions of racism and perceived racial insensitivities over the episode's portrayal of a racist country singer named Jimmy Rebel (a parody of real-life white supremacist country singer Johnny Rebel). [2]

There are many other examples of broadcast episodes still available on DVD, BluRay, torrents, and still indexed on IMDB theTVDB etc. but not available via online streaming.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boondocks_(2005_TV_series)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boondocks_(season_3)

If that was true, then why are there movies/series created solely for streaming providers?

It can't be there sole reason, and I sincerely doubt it's even true. Sure, the price of a single DVD would've covered the price of 1-2 months of streaming on Netflix, but people didn't buy a DVD each month. And if they did, they lent it to friends after.

Some bought the movie, others rented the movie, and others just waited for it to show up on their cable subscription where they paid 100-150/mo for. Not it is just 20/mo and whatever the box is.

And yet, instead of making them available for streaming, in order to recoup at least some money, studios pull them from services and make them unavailable outside the US.

Thus making the only way to see something piracy, which is beyond trivial at this age and (at least to somewhat tech person) actually a better experience. All possible video, audio and subtitle formats, including fan-production are available within few clicks, no need to connect TV to internet (so it starts getting all those ads you've missed so terribly).

Makes me think - how do copyright owners know how many times ie Netflix streams given movie? Or do they just get some bulk fees from Netflix based ie on region and duration, and nobody cares about actual view counts?

> how do copyright owners know how many times ie Netflix streams given movie?

The actors and writers, who may be paid residuals on a per-stream basis, do not have access to this information, and I believe this is one of the demands of the current strike.

> All possible video, audio and subtitle formats

I recently tried to watch Spirited Away on Netflix. While Netflix has umpteen audio versions on mobile and desktop, it only shows 5 (Japanese, English, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish) on Apple TV. Why?

Somehow they still let you cast from mobile to TV with all the audio versions, but I expect them to remove that ability soon.

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