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New Data Shows Netflix's Number of Movies Has Gone Down By Thousands of Titles Since 2010 (businessinsider.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Business Insider: If you thought Netflix's movie selection had been lacking lately, you're right. The streaming service's amount of movies has dipped by over 2,000 titles since 2010, while its number of TV shows has nearly tripled. Third-party Netflix search engine Flixable compiled data that shows a dramatic shift in Netflix's priorities in recent years. In 2010, Netflix had 530 TV shows compared to 6,755 movies. Now, in 2018, the amount of TV shows has nearly tripled to 1,569, and the amount of movies offered has decreased to 4,010. It's no secret that Netflix has focused more on TV shows and less on movies in recent years, but now we have a visual representation of just how significant that focus has become.
Nevermind that, serialized (TV) shows have massively improved in content quality. Even if they had the money and the technology, they wouldn't have done shows like they're doing now, rather the studios would have just saved that talent for feature length content.
Meanwhile, most high budget movies have been big disappointments over the last 5 years.
Netflix initially gave us the dream that we could pay $10, even $20 a month and have access to most (or even just a significant number) of the movies that we would be interested in watching. That has effectively come true for most music, but not for movies. It was unfortunately not to be once the movie content owners decided to hike their licensing prices or outright deny Netflix in favor of starting their own streaming services.
It's kind of understandable, once everyone realized that Netflix was a threat to the content owners (too much power over them, similar to what iTunes had over music companies back in the day - the movie companies learned their lesson from the music companies). Netflix also realized this and that the content owners were also a threat to them and started investing massively in producing their own exclusive content as a defense.
The result, at least for us, was our rejoining our local DVD/Bluray rental store. We were very lucky that they were still around and had a great selection of the movies we wanted to watch. The selection of movies is night and day - Netflix has 10% of the movies we want to watch and the local store has maybe 80% or more.
Before you say that we could also do the Netflix disc rental service, we used to have that but ended up paying through the nose for each individual rental because of how long we kept them. Also, I don't think even Netflix disc rental selection compares to the local store anymore. Besides, it feels better (and it's in our best interest) to support a local small business rather than a multinational corporation.