A moment of silence for the dead? Maybe Don Mclean will write a song? Bye Bye my movies in life,
Theres a lot of really good movies gone. Slate has a link to the complete list, but it’s not loading for me. This is why I buy my movies and keep them on a shelf.
That’s why I still subscribe to Netflix’s DVD service as well as its streaming service. With each and every content provider seemingly wanting to set up its very own equivalent to HBO GO, the titles available for streaming on any one service are just too limited and ephemeral. Netflix’s DVD library can’t be as quickly or easily undercut by a greedy content producer.
My husband and I were looking through the Instantwatcher list and couldn’t find anything we were really that interested in, but we’re not really interested in classic movies in general and had heard of hardly any of them. It is a huuuuuge list, though, and a bummer. I’m still happy to keep my Netflix membership because I’d rather pay $8 a month than store entire seasons of Reno 911, Home Movies, or MST3K on disk or hard drive. Of course, those have the potential to vanish any time too.
The only one on the short list that interested me was Billy Wilder’s One, Two, Three. Gosh, it’s now available on Amazon Prime–for free. I’ve had Prime for years; free priority shipping is worth the investment for me.
The Amazon interface on my Visio TV is rather shitty, so I prefer Netflix. Of course, Netflix still has a much better selection; I especially like the TV series. (Hey, they have Samurai Jack now!)
So–lots of these movies will show up on Amazon. (Or another service.) If you’re a serious movie buff, checking out Netflix’s DVD option might be worth a couple of bucks a month…
Don’t know why everyone’s blaming Netflix for this. They’re not the ones making the streaming rights unaffordable, the content producers are. If Netflix is going to lose revenue by paying what some content producers are trying to charge for certain titles’ streaming rights, what other choice to they have but to drop those titles from their streaming service?
I’m certainly not happy about the catalog dropping by 1000 titles, but I’d like to see some of the articles talking about how many titles they’ve added to streaming over the last year or so–Netflix streaming used to be a wasteland; now it’s an impressive range of stuff.
Two years ago it was rare for me to be able to find a specific title I wanted, so it was more of a “browse for something interesting” environment. These days, it seems they have almost everything I look for, as long as it’s at least 2-3 years old – TV series, especially.
I’m surprised that they had that many streaming options left to delete. When Netflix split into the separate streaming and DVD services, they were making noise about the streaming side being the future. You’d think they would have had some kind of deal in place with the studios to support that. Instead, the number of titles available for streaming just seemed to dwindle. I had maybe three titles left on my streaming queue, all of which had been there for ages waiting for me to find time for them. Now even those are gone.
ETA in response to TimeWinder’s post: I’ve found almost nothing I’ve searched for in the last couple of years available for streaming if it was an actual movie. Old TV shows are about all I would find.