Hacker News Reader

Comment by EliRivers | Hacker News Reader

Unhelpful but related; back in the day (15 or so years ago), Netflix had a truly excellent back catalogue of old movies. Over a hundred thousand titles. A DVD collection that we just didn't realise was going to vanish as quickly as it arose.

The current offering is just... less. I don't know if I mean in terms of sheer number of titles, but a million episodes of slop is just more slop. Netflix peaked 15 years ago and we didn't even notice.

View on HN

In fairness to Netflix, in the old days they only had to own a copy of the DVD in order to rent it out.

Now they have to secure rights for every title they want to stream. That’s a lot of work (and cost) for a hundred thousand titles, especially when your competitors own some of the studios that license those titles.

Disney, for example, owns the Disney / Marvel / Fox / Searchlight / Lucasfilm back catalogues and wants to hoard much of it for its own streaming service.

They've ended/sold/traded away many of their licensing agreements. Many things they used to have are gone.

It stinks because some of the things they tossed are mundane, but they add to the depth of the catalog if you're looking for something and improve the experience.

This is why I started getting into physical media. I was subbed to so many services, but I felt like only 15% of the time would any service I want have the movie (and almost never Netflix as they prefer their own content slop).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com