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Netflix's US Catalog Has Shrunk by More Than 2,500 Titles in Less Than 2.5 Years
According to a report on AllFlicks, a website that lists and categorizes Netflix content, the streaming service's library for American subscribers has shrunk by a third since 2014. The report claims that in March 2014, the US Netflix library consisted of about 6,500 movies and 1,600 television shows. As of this month, the same library offers 4,330 movies and 1,200 TV shows. An article on Quartz explains the shrinkage: The reason is that securing international streaming rights to shows and movies is exceedingly difficult -- laws and regulations differ by country, as does the type of content that people around the world consume. Netflix hopes that its library in other countries will eventually rival its comprehensive selection in the US.
All this tells me is that Netflix has looked at what people actually watch or want to watch and have lessened everything else. Furthermore, the real question is, how many titles do they have in their current catalog. How much of a percentage is 2,500 titles.
Party's over people. It'll be $29.99 a month and one new show a month within 2 years. Those 401(k)'s won't top up themselves.
Back to torrents everyone.
> According to a report on AllFlicks, a website that lists and categorizes Netflix content, the streaming service's library for American subscribers has shrunk by a third since 2014.
> Netflix hopes that its library in other countries will eventually rival its comprehensive selection in the US.
So they're going to equalize the catalog sizes by shrinking the American catalog to be more like it's international catalogs? Makes me scratch my head, but I'm not a MBA or a management consultant, so what do I know.
Although the summary is simply quotes from the article, the way they presented them makes it nonsensical. (The US Netflix library is shrinking because it's hard to secure international streaming rights?) The actual article at least has a couple real reasons -- competition from Hulu and getting rid of obscure titles.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
the US Netflix library consisted of about 6,500 movies and 1,600 television shows. As of this month, the same library offers 4,330 movies and 1,200 TV shows. An article on Quartz explains the shrinkage:
securing international streaming rights to shows and movies is exceedingly difficult...Netflix hopes that its library in other countries will eventually rival its comprehensive selection in the US
The article quote only explains the shrinkage if it is actually Netflix's plan to shrink the US library to be as small as their international libraries.
International will be as comprehensive as US content withers away...
The real explanation is simple, Netflix was not taken very seriously as a potential channel to displace traditional revenue channels (was seen as free money for little threat), and as Netflix proved it would displace the usual revenue channels, the content holders began being far more demanding as renewal time came around.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
The reason quoted in the summary does not make sense in the context of the headline. TFA is more clear in that the 'reason' stated above is actually explaining why the US catalog still has more content than the international catalogs.
...there's The Pirate Bay.
Honestly, media companies, wouldn't it just be cheaper and easier to authorize TPB to distribute your products and charge $20/mo for access?
or Netflix will become the next Redbox.
I have seen how "the obscure" titles have dried up, which is sad.
There are a lot of foreign and classic films that deserve to be available.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
This month they opted me in to the 4 screen plan at higher cost even though I only use a single screen at best a few times a month. It's not even worth figuring out how to get the single screen plan I am just going to cancel.
love is just extroverted narcissism
In the mood to watch a concert and netflix has little offering. Their music category really should be much bigger, there is no excuse for under so little content.
I'm finding myself on youtube red watching concerts due to the lack on netflix. And I get free google music with youtube red. (no commercials)
If it wasnt for daredevil, house of cards and narco, I'd have canceled. Been viewing amazon prime video more lately, since I get it free with prime...
It really has nothing to do with international rights. Cost may be a factor, but it isn't the most important right now. They can license whatever the studios will sell them.
The studios aren't selling.
The reason is that they figure they've got the killer show that is enough to get them to install the service for just that studio's output. HBO and Starz are already exclusives (with HBO recently revoking Netflix's license with Sesame Street), Disney's working on theirs, CBS has forked off their own instead of signing on to Hulu with the other networks.
At $15/m, they figure they've got the one killer show that is enough to get that monthly subscription, and they're gambling they're right by taking their material off of Netflix.
In the end, "cutting the chord" is not going to save anybody any money, because instead of paying cable $99+ / month for shows and HBO, they're going to have to sign on to 7 services to get the same shows they want to watch, resulting in the same $99/month.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
"Cut me some slack, I just got out of the pool"
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
I still pay for DVD subscription for anything that isn't streaming. And they are shrinking their deep catalog fast. My queue has almost as many unavailable titles as available titles now. They are dumping used discs at Dollar General or Big Lots fast.
It used to be that just about anything you could think of was available on disc, and then there was streaming with the more limited catalog. Now, DVD is less and less worth paying for. I am turning to buying a copy of a movie rather than having any way to rent for the more obscure titles.
Although the summary is simply quotes from the article, the way they presented them makes it nonsensical. (The US Netflix library is shrinking because it's hard to secure international streaming rights?) The actual article at least has a couple real reasons -- competition from Hulu and getting rid of obscure titles.
Competition is a big one. Hulu's free offerings have gotten much worse (and mostly they flood it with intrusive or deceptive advertising about their subscription service, like claiming they have X eps when only X-150 are available unless you subscribe to their premium service), but they are paying for more content. Amazon Prime has its own big library. Even the cable companies have amazing on-demand content libraries now, just terrible interfaces. You would think it would drive prices down, but it's actually driving competition for content up and overall prices up if you want the same or greater coverage.
Was removed in February. Hey Netflix... Bring it back or you lose another customer!
Netflix is NOT the cause of this -- it is the greedy asshole content providers. Have a NetFlix (streaming) subscription but travel to Canada or over seas and want to watch Netflix? Tough shit -- you are forced to use a proxy / VPN workaround due to retarded licensing contracts. The content providers don't have a fucking clue that some people want to watch anything anywhere and that we're willing to pay for it. They want to nickel and dime every region independently to maximize profits.
The actual reason Netflix's catalog is so sparse -- where the fuck is Seinfeld? Big Bang Theory? -- is because licensing costs go up about 10% every few years. Sadly, Netflix just doesn't the capital nor critical mass that the cable industry has. :-/
Here is a list of Movies not on Netflix
People think "cutting the cord" is a solution. That doesn't effect the content providers AT ALL. The cable companies are big enough that a few lost customers aren't going to make a difference. The cable industry is so OVER saturated that the terminology is "churn". Cable box penetration has remained consistent for the past ~10 years.
It is a similar reason Netflix basically ignores its deaf subscribers and screws up the subtitles. The solution would be crowd source the whole dam thing but you can thank the lawyers for fucking that over.
* http://theweek.com/articles/45...
As the years go by, you're paying more and getting less for your money. On top of that, the Netflix quality is the worst of all the major players. I ran a test where I found the same movie on Hulu Plus, Amazon Prime and Netflix, and tried playing all 3 on the same TV on the same evening over the same internet connection. Netflix's was noticably worse, and bandwidth monitoring on my connection showed that it was also the only 1 of the 3 which didn't make full use of available bandwidth.
Physical media + Plex server solves the problem for us. You can buy movies on the cheap used at lawn sales, eBay, Amazon marketplace, or just general sales.
What I miss are the older movies.
I love movies from the 1930s,40s, 50s, and 60s. The ones that used to be on AMC and TMC.
Where are all the old westerns?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
That was due to a move by the BBC. They see the money in their own streaming channel too...
No, they saw money in Amazon streaming. https://doctorwhowatch.com/2016/03/21/doctor-who-comes-back-exclusively-to-amazon-prime-video-in-the-us/
Old crusty business moguls with old crusty fingers stuck in their old crusty bums need to hurry up and die already.
have the 1 DVD at a time plan and get all the stuff that's not streamable sent to me on DVD. Then I'd rip it using Handbrake and store it on my Synology Diskstation so that I could watch it later at my leisure. I've probably be able to get 2 to 3 movies ripped a week if I ripped them and sent them back right away. Like I said, if it weren't illegal.
More and more things in my DVD queue keep being silently moved from the "next to be mailed" section into the "saved" section with wait times of "unknown", never to come back out. There's never any explanation or even warning.
It is a similar reason Netflix basically ignores its deaf subscribers and screws up the subtitles.
How do they even screw that up? A LOT of their streaming TV content is transferred straight from the beta broadcast tapes. In fact, a lot of times while streaming a TV episode, the picture will drop to a blue error screen that looks like you'd see when a VCR hits a bad spot on the tape.
This means that the Netflix encodes are coming straight off the tapes that likely have EIA-608 Closed Captions embedded on line 21 of the broadcast picture. It's a matter of just ripping and converting the timing instructions within to their own format.
I love movies from the 1930s,40s, 50s, and 60s. The ones that used to be on AMC and TMC.
Indeed. Looking at what Netflix streaming offers, there is only a single Danny Kaye movie. Just wow on that one.
..... just to name a few.
Danny Kaye has starred in many hit movies and tv shows that also include other famous actors and actresses, including stars like:
Angela Lansbury, Bing Crosby, Boris Karloff, Benny Goodman, Mia Farrow, Dinah Shore, Flip Wilson, Sandy Duncan, Telly Savalas, Vincent Price, Casey Kasem, Richard Chamberlain, Eli Wallach, Carl Reiner, Brian Dennehy,
Netflix streams a single one. Just one. Thats it. Crazy. Surely a lot of these movies wouldn't cost much to license long-term, but then again even if they had them maybe netflix would decide that you are using too much bandwidth for your own good.
"His name was James Damore."
retarded licensing contracts. The content providers don't have a fucking clue that some people want to watch anything anywhere and that we're willing to pay for it. They want to nickel and dime every region independently to maximize profits.
I don't think anyone in the media industry is unaware of the consumer desire to watch any content anywhere, but the problem is that in many territories "non-internet media" like cable TV and over-the-air TV is paying so much more than Internet media SVOD distributors. You can't make your reliable, paying distributors mad by encouraging distribution channel cannibalization.
The top content producing media companies have gross profit margins between 30% and 40% right now, and international revenue is rising quickly - often based on syndication to countries where TV access is way ahead of Internet access, and where poor people are more likely to watch free broadcast TV than have any kind of subscription.
The actual reason Netflix's catalog is so sparse -- where the fuck is Seinfeld? Big Bang Theory? -- is because licensing costs go up about 10% every few years. Sadly, Netflix just doesn't the capital nor critical mass that the cable industry has. :-/
The truth is that (in just the US) Big Bang Theory can regularly bring in 20 million viewers in live + 7 days VOD, and the advertising opportunity revenue for that will blow away any kind of SVOD revenue.
There actually is an FCC rule about this based on the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act (CVAA):
Full-length Internet video programming must be captioned if the programming is shown on TV in the U.S. with captions after Sept. 30, 2013.
We don't actually use "line 21" any more, as analog is dead in the US. CTA-608 and CTA-708 format captions are carried over HD-SDI in ancillary data packets, or more likely for Internet workflows, they are carried in user data or SEI messages of the compressed video codec in a file.
We don't actually use "line 21" any more
See above - talking about shows on Netflix actually transferred from SD broadcast tape. The older captions would literally already be there.
Yea, the same thing happened with a lot of old bbc tv shows I used to love watching. Now all are gone, they had a few sci-fi/sy-fi tv shows I liked for a while no most of those are gone too.
I tried looking up in the name of the rose the other day and got nothing. I'm seriously thinking about moving to apple tv or hulu plus. Netflix streaming just isn't what it used to be...though 9.99 a month is still pretty cheap when you don't have cable, on the flip side its no use when there is nothing but sharknado 3 and other really horrible DTTV stuff.
There are many people here complaining about not getting content anymore or not having enough content on Netflix. But many forget that it is as easy as a few clicks to suspend their Netflix accounts and move on to other avenues. I distinctly know that if I want to unsubscribe from BBC for example with my content provider because I don't watch it any more, I have to cancel their service all together. Which, by the way takes days of talking to customer support and sending or taking back the cable box. I understand that people have complaints about Netflix and some have moved on from it, but let's take a step back for a second and realize that getting Netflix or getting rid of it is such an easy choice now, and we don't have to subscribe to a hundred useseless channels to get it. Yes the number of titles shrank, but I can subscribe for a month to watch house of cards and daredevil, unsubscribe, and subscribe to HBO for game of thrones for a month, and not have to deal with Comcast and pay 100 a month to do this. Things can be always better, but I know they are already much better than ten years ago.
Just a couple of days ago I canceled my netflix subscription because of the user-hostile behavior of their roku app. Just clicking a show to read a more detailed description or get a list of actors in it would cause it to play automatically. Hit back, then select it again, it autoplays again. It's impossible to browse the catalog and add shows to my queue. Their support channel is useless, they just say they'll pass the suggestion on. There are threads on reddit and the roku forums with many people complaining about the same thing. Netflix also had a blog post about this "new feature" but after they got hundreds and hundreds of complaints they just turned off commenting and deleted all the existing comments. I know it's only $8/month but I'm not interested in giving any more money to these people. And we've been subscribers almost since the beginning.
It's nice that I could cancel online without calling in to support (a lot of online services don't let you cancel online). But it's telling that there was no survey asking why I canceled.
What do you think torrents are for?
US Households paying for TV service in 2010: 87%
US Households paying for TV service in 2015: 83%
So it's going down; not by a lot
They stated their u.s. catalogue has shrunk. So why are they blaming the cost increase in buying foreign media? Than apologizing for lack of more options for foreign subscribers. Seems like buying the rights to shows domestically is well within their means. So why can't they start approaching bigger named networks, and bargaining with those willing to. So as to increase there catalogue while saving money. I'd be happy with a wider range of domestic titles to choose from. There's been so many phenomenal shows from the last 20 years that would great additions.
"The reason is that securing international streaming rights to shows and movies is exceedingly difficult." Whose reason is this? Netflix's? Their economic motive might be to prune unpopular films to save inventory costs, while"disciplining" their customers to forego arty and out-of-the-way good work, and accept more lucrative conventional hits. Regulation could make Netflix represent all of film making, not just commercial hits. it is fair to regulate their privately-owned inventory because it is offered on the public market.
Here in the UK Netflix is a constant disappointment to me and I keep asking myself I am I still bothering to subscribe.. Its not uncommon to go a whole month without watching a single Netflix program and finding interesting stuff under the interface is always a nightmare.. Mythbusters series 1, 3, 3 only - for what must be over a year now, cmon. So many common shows unavailable, so many good films unavailable, the cycling of new stuff so slow. I dare them to put their prices up now.. - Of course there's not a lot of other (good) choice out there. Already have Amazon Prime but most of the good stuff costs just as much as buying it on Blu-ray, so why not just buy it on Blu-ray and own it without contract limits?
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..
Netflix's catalog sucks! It always has. I simply cannot understand all the hype that NetFlix gets. I guess the cord cutters love C grade movies.
Amazon, they suck ass too.
Terminator 2.... and the list goes on of ALL the movies and shows like this that they have removed that, I imagine, had a good following. Everyone that I know that has Netflix had those old 80s shows as favorites. It seems to me that keeping those kinda of older shows would be a priority.