For me worse than the can't pay is the lack of options. In the VHS time I had more good movie options than in the current streaming services. I remember when I bing watched Kurozawa or Mario Monicelli's movies. Now it's very hard to find non American cinema. The tech is there, but the System fail us.

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epolanski 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

Even many American movies are no shows on most streaming platforms. Sometimes I'm like: "Let's take the top 30 movies that critics loved the most in US in year X".

As soon as it's earlier than 2005 you're gonna find less than half available across most streaming platforms, unless for renting/buying.

	▲	JKCalhoun 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		"Gold Diggers of 1933", "Stella Dallas", "Marty", "The Snake Pit", "Casablanca", ... I could go on.

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whobre 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yep. I swear I liked the old Netflix with DVDs better. I could rent pretty much any movie I wanted.

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thewebguyd 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

Even after the DVDs, Netflix had a much bigger catalog before everyone else decided they needed to copy Netflix and launch their own service, then IP rights got restricted and redistributed.

Streaming was great when I only needed to subscribe to a single service to watch most everything I wanted. It's not so great when I need to subscribe to 5+ services and still not have everything I want to watch.

Yeah, monopolies are bad but the way IP is distributed right now across so many different services just ends up being worse for consumers.

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rgblambda 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Netflix found that while it was a nice advertising tool to boast about the broadness of its catalogue, most customers rarely ordered the more niche stuff so it wasn't particularly profitable.

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devilbunny 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

> most customers rarely ordered the more niche stuff

I'm sure that's true, but the flip side is that the niche stuff is what pulls in the hardcore film buffs. And guess who those of us who aren't big film buffs turn to when picking films and services? The hardcore film buffs we know.

They may not generate a ton of revenue if you look only at "how many people request obscure movie X", but having those movies pulls in the people who will, in turn, influence others.

	▲	ajmurmann 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		Want the DVD-by-mail business still available until 2-3 years ago? It seems that faded silently away and there wasn't even a whimper when it died.

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0cf8612b2e1e 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That’s what happens when you have a big library. The usage is going to be some 80:20 rule. A small slice drives the numbers. Yet it is nice to be able to consume some long tail content. Without the DVD catalog, access to the long tail has disappeared from mainstream providers.

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layer8 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

We don’t have that problem with books for the most part, why do we have it with TV shows and movies?

	▲	rgblambda 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		I suspect if book sellers were as data driven as Netflix, then we would have that problem. I suspect they're (like Netflix used to) creating an illusion of choice of a wide range of options as you walk to the big shelf in the middle of the shop that has 100 copies of the book that's currently selling well. Also the fact that physical book shops are still somehow a thing helps. I guess people like the experience.

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JKCalhoun 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

That may be true. But for those in "the long tail" Netflix could have been the only game in town.

Amazon was that way for me. I went to record (music) stores to buy my music in the 1990's. I started buying music from Amazon in 1996 because they had the stuff I couldn't find in the record stores.

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piva00 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

MUBI is a good option for the more high cinema stuff, one of the few subscriptions I'd feel sad canceling.

	▲	ajmurmann 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		Same. We rotate through services but Mubi and Criterion are fixed. I do sometimes miss when Mubi would only have movies for 30 days. It helped me to actually watch the movies I wanted to watch. I'd guess that at least half the movies that from the last ten years that sometimes pop into my head were from Mubi. I've probably watched entire series on Netflix I don't remember anything of.

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weeznerps 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Criterion Channel and Kanopy are very good (not perfect) for international films.

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ajmurmann 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Have you checked out Criterion or Mubi. Lots of excellent foreign movies. Criterion seems to have about two dozen Kurozawa movies.

	▲	neves 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Thanks. Never heard about Criterion. I'm not in USA. These are very expensive to buy and don't have subtitles in my native language. I'm complaining that the tech to allow me to stream every movie ever produced is here, but I'm not able to do so.