Slashdot Mirror
Netflix Now Only Has 31 Movies From IMDB's Top 250 List (streamingobserver.com)
According to Streaming Observer News, the quality and quantity of Netflix's movie library has declined over the last two years when cross-referenced with IMDB's Top 250 movies list. From the report: Well, it's a pretty common fact at this point that Netflix's library is shrinking. Of course, what Netflix needs to do as it shrinks its licensed movie library is make sure that movies it does have are good ones. But according to our analysis, it's going backwards, unfortunately. A while back we noticed a post from this Reddit member who, two years ago, cross-referenced the IMDB (Internet Movie Database) top 250 movies list with Netflix's movie library to find out how many of the top movies Netflix carried. When u/clayton_frisbie posted his list on Reddit, Netflix had 49 of the Top 250 movies on the IMDB list. That's just under 20 percent, which isn't terrible. But we wondered how that number has held up over the last two years in the face of a quickly shrinking library. So we reran the analysis. How many of the top 250 movies does Netflix now have? As of September 2016, that number has dropped to 31, or about 12 percent. [You can view the list via Streaming Observer News.]
I came to realize I was paying to watch one original series for a week a year, five seasons of Top Gear and Futurama. I could get everything else that I might watch elsewhere and more. It stopped being worth subscribing.
I'd much rather Netflix spends their money on TV shows (especially originals) than chasing expensive, popular movies. If I feel I need to watch The Dark Knight again (and I don't expect to) I'll find a way. No - I stay subscribed to them for TV: Stranger Things and House of Cards and Better Call Saul.
Well, that and my kids have been into Digimon lately.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
In addition to the breakup, I'd like to see movies and television put under a compulsory licensing scheme after, say five years. Set up a similar system to how music royalties get collected and paid out. This way companies like YouTube and Netflix can stop worry about this and follow where the demand takes them. The five year buffer doesn't stop studios from cutting deals to get shows and movies out to platforms of choice earlier and gives them time to sell the physical media.
I find their "original" stuff mediocre at best. The licensed movies and TV shows were the *only* reason we subscribed to Netflix streaming in the first place.
I'm just waiting for my wife to finish a couple BBC murder mysteries that are still on Netflix... then I'm pulling the streaming plug (will keep the DVD subscription, though - at least for now). Dumb thing is - these all aired on PBS's "Masterpiece", but PBS doesn't seem to include most of their more popular shows in their app (and yes, we still have a limited cable subscription so we can get PBS over the wire).
#DeleteChrome
I'll give the studios some credit in this. It would appear they looked at what happened with music and book publishers and decided they didn't want any one company lording over them and being able to cut deals like Amazon and Apple did. For them, it's a choice of either shooting their left foot and let Netflix have what they want at whatever price they can get or shoot their right foot by forcing people to have more than one account.
Only time will show which one they shot.