It really wasn't. Early streaming (like 2012-ish, after cord-cutting was possible but before it was mainstream) had Netflix and Hulu as the two major services, and so anything that was on streaming was on one of those two. But lots and lots of stuff just wasn't on streaming at all.

If you subscribed to Netflix back then, you probably subscribed to both the streaming and the disc-mailing plan, because there were enough things you couldn't get on streaming, so getting the discs was important to fill those gaps.

The truth is that there was a lot more available in the early days of Netflix than there is now, which with some rose-tinted glasses may very well make it seem like Netflix had everything.

It wasn't until studios caught on to the fact that streaming was going to significantly eat into cable subscription revenues that they began pulling their licenses so they could start their own streaming services.

Having everything was part of the marketing. It was just a complete lie. Everyone had that moment with Netflix where they realized every movie is in every category and there isn't nearly as much on there as it seems.

I remember ads that exaggerated things that suck about rental stores. One of them was about all the cool movies being thrown out and replaced with 30 copies of Pony Adventure 4. They never explicitly stated that Netflix will always have the solution to those problems forever, but they implied it as hard as they legally could.

Depends in which country you live. Netflix was the only thing in many places outside the US for a long time.

> there were enough things you couldn't get on streaming, so getting the discs was important to fill those gaps.

That's true today, Netflix just misses those gaps outright now.

It really was. Hulu was seen as “the worse netflix”, was launched significantly after netflix already had a critical mass, and its launch was seen as the beginning of the end for streaming as a one stop shop.