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Comment by user17847392650 | Hacker News Reader

You remember incorrectly. The first real commercial on-demand streaming service to gain traction was Netflix, and it exploded in popularity precisely because it did have "almost everything". One reasonable price, practically everything worth watching. That was the original promise.

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It really wasn't. Early streaming (like 2012-ish, after cord-cutting was possible but before it was mainstream) had Netflix and Hulu as the two major services, and so anything that was on streaming was on one of those two. But lots and lots of stuff just wasn't on streaming at all.

If you subscribed to Netflix back then, you probably subscribed to both the streaming and the disc-mailing plan, because there were enough things you couldn't get on streaming, so getting the discs was important to fill those gaps.

> there were enough things you couldn't get on streaming, so getting the discs was important to fill those gaps.

That's true today, Netflix just misses those gaps outright now.

Having everything was part of the marketing. It was just a complete lie. Everyone had that moment with Netflix where they realized every movie is in every category and there isn't nearly as much on there as it seems.

I remember ads that exaggerated things that suck about rental stores. One of them was about all the cool movies being thrown out and replaced with 30 copies of Pony Adventure 4. They never explicitly stated that Netflix will always have the solution to those problems forever, but they implied it as hard as they legally could.

The truth is that there was a lot more available in the early days of Netflix than there is now, which with some rose-tinted glasses may very well make it seem like Netflix had everything.

It wasn't until studios caught on to the fact that streaming was going to significantly eat into cable subscription revenues that they began pulling their licenses so they could start their own streaming services.

Depends in which country you live. Netflix was the only thing in many places outside the US for a long time.

It really was. Hulu was seen as “the worse netflix”, was launched significantly after netflix already had a critical mass, and its launch was seen as the beginning of the end for streaming as a one stop shop.

Netflix had “everything” because it was the first (commercially successful) mover on streaming, and as a result it was pretty much the only game in town for a long time. Every other producer HAD to be on Netflix if they wanted to reach the streaming audiences.

It was only after their success did all the other producers feel comfortable that this was the future, started building their own apps, and then had to wait for their exclusivity contracts they had given to Netflix expire.

There was a lot of fear around what would happen to Netflix when those contracts would expire, and that’s how we started getting their originals like Stranger Things.

There were so many expensive TV shows being made that it simply wasn't sustainable.

We're actually back to normal. TV before streaming was A LOT of reruns, trashy talkshows/reality TV, soaps and quiz shows.

The 90s and earlier, yeah. But cable in the first 15 years of the 2000s is where TV peaked quality-wise. Streaming captured the max output, but peak TV quality was largely before streaming went from re-runs to new-production. The 2015-2022 era honestly watered the quality down quite a bit.

IMDB Top shows ratings https://www.imdb.com/chart/toptv/ - the bulk of the top for scripted series are cable shows (especially HBO)

RottenTomatoes fan picks https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/guide/rt25-fans-top-tv-... - very similar list

But the sense that it had "almost everything" was more a halo effect of the old dvd-by-mail business, I'd say? I do agree with the general idea that streaming is less satisfying than ever, I probably get more mileage out of my completely free (thanks to my local library) Kanopy account than I do Netflix these days, just because it really does have a wider range of stuff to watch.

What? It famously didn't on the streaming side. It had everything on DVD. For years I kept both parts of Netflix because a lot of popular shows—newer ones especially—weren't on it. So I could get DVDs of past seasons. Or go to Hulu for newer episodes.

Hulu was created at the same time, and launched in the same year as Netflix's streaming service, specifically to compete with less-convenient pirated streams of current-run TV with a free-the-next-day-with-ads alternative. And that stuff was never on Netflix at the same time.

High-profile not-on-Netflix-streaming-for-first-run things from the 2007-2014 time frame: The Office, Game of Thrones, Walking Dead, and honestly basically everything else broadcast and cable made during "Peak TV." It was big news and considered a big bet when Netflix debuted their own high-budget first-run content with House of Cards, because of how weird it was to see Netflix competing in the brand-new show space.

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