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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.
The major movie studios and content owners did not want to see Netflix become another Apple iTunes, which would allow them to set the prices of movies and have control over content distribution, so raised the licensing fees to astronomical levels. And of course, players like Disney saw how controlling the content distribution in this way could be very profitable, and they have no intention of making those sorts of deals again. the genie is out of the bottle and it is not going back in.
But that's fine. The original offerings from Netflix are often amazing, so it's no big loss.
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.
This isn't just streaming. I use disc service also and now have over a dozen moves waiting in my queue with "Unknown" as the availability. Some for over a YEAR NOW. Most aren't even obscure, like Matrix Revolutions and Gladiator. Really? Some dork broke/lost/stole a disc and now Netflix won't even replace it with at least one copy???
Let me predict the future again. Netflix will raise prices, and offer crappier content. This will happen as long as they win more market share. If they become a dominant player, they will be just as ugly as cable and satellite.