I put the movie ‘Everyone Says I Love You’ in my Netflix queue in 2008. It went right into the ‘saved’ section where it sits still. I can buy it for $9.69 on Amazon, so it’s not exactly rare.
I put ‘Barfly’ in the queue in 2010. It’s available on Amazon for $9.51. Again, not rare.
As noted, Netflix is moving out of the DVD business.
Phase 1: stop being a completist company and only stock the big favorites.
The complaints about their shrinking catalog are common, but have no effect. If you want a cheap subscription to a DVD rental service with a big catalog, just try one of their many online or retail competitors.:rolleyes:
I wanted the last season of Riptide. The first couple seasons were there, but not the last. I think I put it in the queue in 2008 and they still don’t have it.
I’ve given up with their DVD service, if they don’t want to carry what I want to watch. Instead, I spend a lot of time in the used DVD stores. For four bucks, it’s easy to take a chance on a film. If it’s good, I keep it. If it sucks, I trade it in at one of the other stores.
I mostly watch new releases via the Netflix DVD-by-mail service so this may not apply to the back catalog titles, but I’ve noticed that many of the DVD/Bluray discs are not the same as the discs available for purchase. The ones Netflix rents appear to be very plain with just the movie title and FOR RENTAL ONLY on them. The rental discs usually don’t have the extras like commentary tracks and deleted scenes. So they may not be willing to offer a title unless the studio gives them the rental version of the disc.
They can’t just buy 50 copies off Amazon, print some labels, and call it a day. There are rights issues involved, and they have to then have some manner to enter it into their rotation (and pay someone to do so), etc. And very few people are demanding that they do so.
I don’t know if this is still the case but IIRC DVDs that are offered for rental cost much more than the retail versions.
Actually, I don’t believe that’s true. My understanding of the first-sale doctrine is that if you can buy a title on DVD, you can offer it for rental. Of course at the scale of a Netflix or a Blockbuster, this is an expensive way to acquire copies for rental, so they prefer to work with the studios. I think at the end, Blockbuster received rental copies cheaply in exchange for sharing the revenue with the studio.
That’s a big reason that many titles are available via the DVD-by-mail service that aren’t available via the streaming service. In order for Netflix to offer any title for streaming, they need to secure the rights to do so from the studio.
I joined Netflix in 2006, and have seen titles that were in my active queue that went to “saved” status, and then frequently dropped off altogether. My guess is that at least in some cases, copyright issues were going on.
If you REALLY want to see something, try interlibrary loan. I’ve used it for this many times.
Several years back Netflix purged their DVD stock. They look at the DVD business as a vestigial organ. Remember when they wanted to rename it to Flixster and everyone lost their shit? Well they did it anyway. It’s technically “DVD.Com a Netlfix Company”.
A read an article a long time ago that they claimed that when they had tens of thousand of titles only small percentage actually got rented. People want thousands of options but usually everyone picks the same couple dozen of them so I guess it doesn’t pay to keep all that stock.
They certainly can do so, at least as far as the law is concerned. You don’t need anyone’s approval to start your own DVD rental company. Go buy some DVDs and rent 'em out.
However, it’s possible (likely) that Netflix has signed some contracts that make it unable to do so. They certainly have contracts with a variety of movie studios to get rental versions of certain DVDs, probably with lower costs for Netflix and more… (not sure. data, profit sharing?) for the studios, and those contracts probably preclude them going around the official channels for the back catalog.
My guess is that Netflix has done the data mining and found that no one cancels their membership over not being able to get some random old back-catalog movie, so there’s just no financial incentive for them to go get them. And since they know full well that their DVD business is slowly dying, there’s little incentive for them to make capital investments in their stock.
Netflix went on a huge expansion binge and at one point had something like 300,000 items. 200,000 of which were “Vampire Biker Babes on Mars III” or worse. So they’ve quietly purged their stacks of junk and filled out some corners, but not all of them.
Missing seasons of shows don’t puzzle me as much as select episodes that are only available on disc while the rest of the season was on streaming. It may have faded away, but I remember frequently running into, say, certain Twilight Zone episodes, or the last episode of Quantum Leap, that were only available on disc. I could only guess that they wanted to prop up the disc+stream model in every way they could when that was still a viable option.
its funny a relative of mine worked at a mom and pop video store (lots of shockumentries and things like "i spit on your grave " Which I wish I had bought because its worth something …)
But they subscribed to a trade magaziene for new releases and apparently you were supposed to buy them from a certain places For 80 -90 dollars a piece that gave you the rights to rent it for profit sort of why libraries charge you 50 bucks for a 5.95 paperback … the lost profit on it gets paid up front
Only reason I asked was I seen an listing for a soft core cinemax type flick go for 79.99 (id seen the movie on max )and asked why would anyone pay for that much for that pos and found out how they were sold the tapes …
My understanding was that these prices were for advance sale only. Anyone could buy a tape at these prices (and, IIRC, *Platoon *sold and sold at $99.95), but the pricing was meant for rental stores. By paying a premium price at release, they had six to eight weeks of exclusivity (as a group) before Joe Consumer could buy a copy at $24.95.
The laws have changed a few times and vary between locales, but I don’t believe any license or special rights were needed to rent videotapes, any more than there would be to rent books. The initial-pricing system was the studios’ compromise and way to skim off some gravy from the red-hot rental market.
Sometimes, an item simply gets lost (user loses the disc, user damages the disc, etc.). When that happens, they don’t always replace it. If demand is low enough, there’s no particular reason to replace the disc.
Netflix went on a huge expansion binge and at one point had something like 300,000 items. 200,000 of which were “Vampire Biker Babes on Mars III” or worse. So they’ve quietly purged their stacks of junk and filled out some corners, but not all of them.QUOTE]
that’s when I made the observation that flix was just like every other video store ever … they had 10 or so new releases 100 or so older stuff and the rest pay tv trash
This misconception comes up so often, but, no, you didn’t get any special rights to rent it. You don’t need any special rights to rent videos, any more than you need Ford’s permission to rent your car or your contractor’s permission to rent a room in your house.
Yes, there are lots of complicated laws about broadcast and copyright and various things, but there has never been any requirement that you get the publisher’s permission before renting out a videotape (or DVD).