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Comment by fein | Hacker News Reader

Nice perspective, but perhaps a bit misguided. Netflix would LOVE to have every single movie ever made by man on the service, but there is more at play than just "get the file, now stream it".

The entire mainstream film industry is doing everything they can to make sure generic streaming services like Netflix and Amazon don't become as large as they could, and our current legal framework involving distribution of content is quite hostile to these services.

This is also following the concept that storage gets cheaper as time goes on. More movies = more storage fees, but I don't think this overhead is nearly as large as some would assume.

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The issue is that they no longer have classic movies available through their DVD services. There are no legal or licensing restrictions there due to the First Sale Doctrine.

It's true that first sale prevents the studios from restricting Netflix's usage but it doesn't require them to make new copies for Netflix. If they aren't selling the DVD commercially, as is the case for many classic films, there's no way to legally create a new copy to replace a damaged disc.

Yeah, this could be it. It could also be that Netflix simply isn't trying to replace titles because of reduced demand for the DVD service. Either way, too bad.

And that, in fact, seems to be the case. I haven't looked at it in depth but at least some of the examples cited by the OP do seem to be available for new purchase from Amazon even though they're not available for DVD rental from Netflix. Given that Netflix has made it quite clear that the DVD rental biz isn't strategic for them, I suspect that they're carefully managing repurchases of seldom-rented back catalog items.

Available for purchase by rental companies and purchase for retail are two different things. Netflix doesn't typically buy a bunch of DVDs from Amazon and then chuck the jewel case. There are exceptions though:

http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jun/07/entertainment/la-et-...

Right. But the point is they can buy from retail. (And I believe that's how they did it at first.) Today, they just generally choose not to do so primarily because it costs more.

wouldn't that qualify as legitimate use of a backup copy? if the original is destroyed?

> wouldn't that qualify as legitimate use of a backup copy?

The archival copy privilege as an exception to the usual rules that copyright excludes anyone from making copies without specific permission from the copyright holder [1] applies only to works classified as "computer programs" under the law. While DVDs do include computer programs, the main element of a DVD is an audiovisual work and likely wouldn't be included in the exception, so even if it would be a legitimate use of a backup copy, the kind of work isn't one in which there is any right under copyright law to create such a backup.

[1] 17 USC Sec. 117(a)

While I presume your quote is correct, I don't think you are applying it correctly. That is one exception, but there are others. Although I don't think there is clear case law, ripping audio CD's for archival backup is almost universally presumed (even by the MPAA and RIAA) to be legal in the US: https://www.publicknowledge.org/news-blog/blogs/united-state...

And it's frequently presumed that creating backups of legally owned video DVD's would constitute fair use under US copyright, but is instead illegal because it requires breaking DRM to do so, and the DMCA offers no such exception: http://lifehacker.com/5978326/is-it-legal-to-rip-a-dvd-that-...

But if you happen to come across an unprotected commercial DVD that you legally own (I have only ever come across one, "Cane Toads: An unnatural history") I think you probably would prevail in asserting that it is fair use to create a personal backup copy for use in case the original is destroyed.

I think that, if they were challenged, they would have to prove that they are only sending out as many backup copies as they have originals.

I wouldn't want to endanger my business to licensing lawsuits based on something like that which would be terribly hard to prove.

That would actually be really easy to prove given their database already tracks the location of DVDs.

I'm sure there are other issues at play.

Potentially, yes. Would you want to spend the next decade fighting that lawsuit up to the Supreme Court, hoping that the case goes your way? I think the odds would be in their favor but am even more confident that the movie industry would see the threat of an expensive lawsuit as a great lever to extort higher royalties.

The situation might be more complicated. If I was a rights holder for movies that Netflix wanted to stream (and sufficiently Machiavellian), I might negotiate reduced availability of DVDs of my movies to start transitioning everything to a streaming model.

To be clear, Netflix may have the DVDs but they may be bound by a contract clause (that they agreed to) restricting them from offering the DVDs for rent.

That said, maybe it's just Netflix reducing costs by dropping obscure inventory. I don't know what the relative costs and profit are of the streaming vs. DVD businesses that they have, but the costs of that physical inventory are not negligible.

Back in the day when Best Buy opened a new store they stocked the CD and DVD sections with incredible amounts of diverse inventory and then let it sell off - restocking only the mainstream stuff. I assume the goal was to get customers with a front-end flourish. That's probably what Netflix did.

Has this ever been tested around digital goods? As long as you had some mechanism to ensure that it is only streamed by one person at a time per license purchased.

Like Aereo, Zediva was shut down and was even playing an actual DVD.

http://techland.time.com/2011/08/03/judge-rules-against-remo...

> This is also following the concept that storage gets cheaper as time goes on. More movies = more storage fees, but I don't think this overhead is nearly as large as some would assume.

For a million 2-hour movies, stored at 10 mbps, (plus another 10 mbps for other versions), you end up with 18 petabytes. That can be stored on S3 for $396k per month, or on 200 180TB backblaze storage pods for a $1.8M one-time cost, plus $30k/mo for 20 full racks somewhere cheap. I assume bandwidth costs would be manageable either way, since the vast majority of these films are going to be accessed very rarely.

Just back-of-the-envelope calculations from someone who hasn't worked at this sort of scale. If I'm off by an order of magnitude then it'd be impractical to store on S3, since the fees would be something like 1/4 of their current profits.

According to their Wikipedia entry [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix#IT_infrastructure], they are storing all the content on S3. I have to imagine that they have some pretty good contracts with Amazon though.

You also have to factor in the pods/disks failing at N$/month and making sure the data is backed up in a redundant manner (more than 200 pods?). And skilled helper monkeys to swap bad disks. And electricity.

You also probably want something that reads really, really fast, and is durable. And you don't care about writes. I'm not sure, but 45 drives on a bus sounds congested. Maybe some sort of fancy super optical situation. DVDs fit the bill but I don't know about seek time on them. (?). Anyway, the answer is laserdisc, the answer is always laserdisc.

I would assume (and hope) that a company of that scale is using something like Glacier to hold rarely accessed data, so that storage fees aren't incurred on having it in a hot cache.

Netflix could not use Glacier for rarely accessed films, unless they wanted to impose a watching schedule on their users (i.e. "Bananas is only available on weekends", or similar, and even then, that'd impose even higher fees to move things out of Glacier and onto some other kind of storage). Glacier takes minutes to hours to retrieve files (I'm guessing hours in the case or large movie files). Just because it is "rarely accessed", doesn't mean it doesn't need to be available quickly when it is accessed. And, Glacier is priced for data that is moved in and almost never moved out to other types of storage.

I was not aware it would take that long to pull data out of Glacier.

You learn new things every day :)

that really wouldnt work. wait 4 hours to see what you wanted to see? for backup sure, but not for what they need to show customers

Note that the article is not about the streaming service.

I read the article as the complaint being that there is not an option to get a movie that was once available for rental, however is not available currently via streaming.

You mean that you didn't read it, then.

> And now it seems, while still nowhere as haphazard as the streaming selection, the company’s once reliably complete DVD selection is becoming less so all the time.

Here's another one...

> “My experience is that you end up with a bunch of things that have a very long wait and then they never come,” he said. “Things that were once available aren’t anymore.” Nine of the films at the top of his DVD queue are very long waits, he said, “sitting there forever.”

He definitely touches on the legal barriers surrounding this. I don't think he's unaware.

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