The Myth of An Endless Streaming Catalogue

“If you limit the ways people can access art, there will be whole generations that won’t fall in love with this art form — they’ll fall in love with other things.”— Maggie Mackay

Since 2010, the total number of feature films available to stream on Netflix has dropped from 6,755 to 3,686 as of writing this — a loss of more than three thousand titles. There are far more television shows available on Netflix than in 2010 — up from 530 to 1,122 — but that doesn’t make up for the massive decline in streamable films.

And, as BGR notes, “Not only is Netflix primarily focused on generating original TV content, Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos a few years ago said that 66% of all Netflix subscribers don’t even watch movies.”

In 2018, over 375 million people subscribe to Netflix, HBO, Amazon Prime, and Hulu. Streaming has become the dominant way in which most of us consume media, but little consideration has been given to what we’ve lost in saying goodbye to the tactile, human experience of visiting a video store.

Netflix Streaming in February 2012

“The technology only becomes problematic when it eradicates other forms of access. When you have a new technology and you rush to dump everything that came before it, you are literally dumping titles, you’re dumping artwork, you’re dumping full catalogues of work,” says Mackay. “Most of us fell in love with this art form when we were relatively young, and it was because we had access to it," she continues.

The volatile nature of streaming catalogues becomes apparent when trying to look into hard numbers on just how many titles are available. One has to use third-party sites like JustWatch to find out how many movies are currently available on major platforms (as well as other data, like release year, genre, and a search function that covers all major streaming services) rather than the platforms directly offering those numbers up.

Netflix’s current streaming catalogue of 3,686 films seems paltry when compared to even the most average Blockbuster, which stocked in the neighborhood of 10,000 titles. Amazon Prime’s streaming library is three times the size of Netflix’s, with 14,214 films now streaming — Amazon also offers an additional 20,265 titles via their rental service for an additional fee. Hulu has less than half as many movies as Netflix with 1,448 titles now streaming. On HBO NOW, that number falls to only 727 films.

Scarecrow Video (via Flip the Media)

When comparing these numbers to the libraries of three essential video stores — Los Angeles’ own Vidiots and Eddie Brandt’s Saturday Matinee and Scarecrow Video in Seattle — the lack of what’s available on streaming falls into sharp relief. Vidiots boasts a collection of over 50,000 titles; Eddie Brandt’s carries over a hundred thousand videos, 80,000 of them on VHS.

In Seattle, Scarecrow’s video collection of over 131,000 is the largest in the world — they carry more than twice as many titles as the 57,351 movies and television shows currently available on the 44 streaming and rental platforms that JustWatch tracks.

With such a deep catalogue, it’s no surprise that Scarecrow’s library contains some exceptionally rare titles. The Daily Mail reports that “Scarecrow boasts 4,967 titles on their Rental By Approval (RBA) list…that can be checked out with an extra deposit. Of their top 100 rarest titles, which they are cross-checking against esteemed institutions including the Library of Congress, UCLA’s Film and Television Archive and the WorldCat database among others, 88 are not held by the Library of Congress and 44 are not accessible to the public anywhere but at Scarecrow.”

No streaming service has been able to match the breadth and depth of a decades-old video store — at least not yet. Netflix’s disc rental service included 93,000 titles as of 2015 — a comparable library to somewhere like Eddie Brandt’s. But, disc rental isn’t a priority for Netflix: in 2016, they spent almost $1 billion promoting their streaming platform, but the physical rental service “doesn’t even have a marketing budget,” reports AP News.

And, even with 125 million streaming subscribers, Netflix still relies on physical media more than one might assume. AP News notes that Netflix makes “an operating profit of roughly 50 percent on DVD subscriptions, after covering the expense of buying discs and postage to and from its distribution centers…DVD profits have helped subsidize Netflix’s streaming expansion outside the U.S., a push that has accumulated losses of nearly $1.5 billion during the past five years [2011–2016.] The DVD service has made $1.9 billion during the same period, enabling Netflix to remain profitable.”

Besides Netflix’s physical DVD and Blu Ray service, the best, more accessible option for physical media rental for most is one of the 40,000 Redbox kiosks currently operating in America. While Redbox does carry many new release titles long before they reach streaming, when I looked up the Redbox closest to me in Hollywood, I found that only 168 titles were available in the machine, most of them from the last three years —not exactly an extensive selection, nor one that appeals to viewers interested in film history beyond the last decade.

(Note: we reached out to representatives for Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu for comment on their current streaming catalogues. Netflix and Hulu did not respond; Amazon Prime declined to answer our questions.)

The dearth of classic films and focus on new content becomes more apparent when taking a closer look at what’s available by decade on each of the major streaming services. According to JustWatch, two titles made before 1930 are now streaming on Netflix — they offer only 15 films made before 1950, 26 made before 1970, and 98 made before 1990. By streaming fewer than one hundred films to cover the medium’s first one hundred years, Netflix is doing an egregious disservice to film’s first century.

With four times as many titles as Netflix overall, it’s not surprising that Amazon Prime offers far more classic titles as well — 77 films on the platform were made before 1930; 661 before 1950; 1,292 before 1970; and 3,048 before 1990. But Amazon is the exception among streaming platforms—Hulu offers 115 films made by 1990 or earlier, and on HBO NOW, there are only 55 films that meet that same criteria.

There’s simply no question that new and exclusive content is the priority for Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu. 3,155 of the 3,686 films now available to stream on Netflix are from the last ten years — 85% of their entire catalogue. On Hulu, 75% of all movies are from the last ten years too. And while Amazon Prime certainly bests all other major platforms when it comes to “old movies”, 59% of their currently streaming films are from the last ten years as well.

But, one streaming platform is prioritizing classic catalogue titles: FilmStruck, which launched in late 2016. FilmStruck self-describes as featuring “iconic films of all kinds from Hollywood classics to independent, foreign and cult cinema. As the exclusive streaming home of TCM Select and the Criterion Collection, FilmStruck is the world’s largest classic film vault.”

FilmStruck partnered with Warner Bros. to (eventually) bring films like CASABLANCA, CITIZEN KANE, SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN, REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, and WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? to a streaming platform for the first very time. Including Criterion Collection titles (which are available for a small additional monthly fee) FilmStruck’s catalogue is still growing with 1,975 titles available. But more than 86% of their library is from 1990 or earlier, providing film fans with exclusive access to essential titles that are being overlooked and de-prioritized by other streaming services.

(Note: The Black List is an official partner of FilmStruck.)

One of FilmStruck’s recent themes

The idea that beloved, superlative films like CASABLANCA and CITIZEN KANE can only be accessed with a subscription to an arthouse/classic focused streaming service is quite frankly insane. THE GODFATHER trilogy is now available on Netflix, but that’s only been the case since January of 2018. Even something as ubiquitous as STAR WARS is only available in its first, unedited iteration as a VHS box set from 1995 — and the original trilogy isn’t currently streaming anywhere.

And of course, most major streaming platforms are deep into the original content game. Netflix has released 25 original films and added 7.4 million new subscribers thus far in 2018 — that’s as many releases as the six major studios combined. They plan to release 80 films by the end of the year. The focus on new content creation over the preservation of and access to catalogue titles for most streaming services is quite clear.

“How does anyone new get curious to watch a Fassbinder or Claire Denis film if they never encounter one during their Netflix scroll?” asks Eric Allen Hatch, a film festival programmer and consultant who’s also one of the founding members of the Baltimore Video Collective.

While the focus on new content is an easy scapegoat for what’s keeping many classic films off of streaming platforms, it’s also important to keep factors related to rights and distribution in mind.

To get a better sense of what keeps films off streaming services (or disc formats) I spoke to film historian Marc Edward Heuck, best known as the Movie Geek on BEAT THE GEEKS. Marc posts fascinating threads on Twitter about film licensing, distribution, and rights situations. Here, he explains the complex circumstances that can keep films stuck in limbo —

There will never be as many titles on DVD as there were on VHS, there will never be as many titles on Blu as there were on DVD, and so forth…newer generations with shallower memories determine what gets out, the cost of upgrading and remastering old stuff versus the projected size of the audience and likely sales rarely ratio well — history forgets a dying king. The biggest hurdle affecting deep catalogue home video releases, going all the way back to the dawn of the format, has been music rights, since from EASY RIDER onward, when pop song recordings became common on film soundtracks. Contracts only covered theatrical and TV, and even after they started accounting for home video, they didn’t factor the invention of DVD. Some of the earliest home video releases are the rarest now because they were put out before the lawyers realized you needed to make a new deal for the new media. Now that there are only three major labels, with the downturn of physical media and the slivers of pennies that come from streaming, they and the artists they control get significant money from licensing to TV, film, and commercials, so their incentive is to take the studios for all they’ve got, feeling they have them over a barrel, since many times the songs are often so embedded in the films, they can’t be replaced, or directors won’t approve of the change. But in turn, studios are loath to pay the inflated music fees because they feel the cost spent in clearing the songs will not be recouped by whatever sales a title may have, and it’s cheaper just to do nothing. The second biggest problem keeping movies off of physical media is ancient, expired intellectual property rights, usually involving books or plays that were originally only cleared for so many years because back then, nobody thought about repertory demand years after the fact. Warner Bros. has had a big problem with this in particular, a lot of Golden Age classics that they own — BEYOND THE FOREST, LETTY LYNTON, CEILING ZERO — can’t be cleared for video because the estates of the authors of those original source materials can’t come to terms about relicensing the story rights. This is what held up NIGHTMARE ALLEY for years, and likely also what has kept one of the greatest comedies of all time, Olsen & Johnson’s HELLZAPOPPIN’, in limbo. Since the rise of “secondary studios” from the ’70s onward, lots of movies that went out through the majors are now reverting to other companies that are only interested in them as properties to be developed rather than preserved. Bristol-Myers-Squibb owns the original THE HEARTBREAK KID, THE STEPFORD WIVES, and SLEUTH, and they’ve done nothing with them since the early noughts Anchor Bay releases, aside from sell remake rights. We’re beginning to see that on a larger scale with Morgan Creek, Regency, Revolution, and others — the old deals are expiring, what new deals are being made are just cherry-picking the hits and leaving the deep cuts behind.^

Heuck has put together a list of titles stuck in rights hell due to music-licensing issues which includes films from directors like Spike Lee, Jonathan Demme, Michael Mann, and Robert Altman. It becomes impossible to watch the complete filmographies of these fundamental filmmakers when certain titles aren’t available — an issue for audiences, archivists, and historians alike.

When presented with the option of easy to stream titles or movies one has to work harder to find, it’s easy to guess which choice the majority of audience members will make, greatly narrowing the cinematic landscape in the process. Aside from classifying films by genre and recommending similar titles to what you’ve already watched, there’s very little curation on most streaming services, though it should be noted that FilmStruck, MUBI, and Fandor do have consistent curatorial visions.

“Streaming platforms ostensibly offer as wide a selection as a video store, but they are most successful as businesses when they keep selling you more of the same thing you first bought, the ‘If You Liked This…’ Unless you yourself do the genre leaping, the site will clog your front page with nothing but more suggestions for the same stuff, mixed with whatever homegrown material they want to push,” says Heuck.

Exploring the much-lauded recommendations algorithm is key to understanding how Netflix prioritizes content. In August 2017, Netflix’s vice president of product innovation, Todd Yellin, told Wired to think of the algorithm like a three-legged stool: “The three legs of this stool would be Netflix members; taggers who understand everything about the content; and our machine learning algorithms that take all of the data and put things together.”

Along with studying user behavior, Wired reports that Netflix also employs “dozens of in-house and freelance staff who watch every minute or every show on Netflix and tag it.” When coupled with sophisticated machine-learning algorithms, this allows Netflix to develop “taste communities.”

According to Wired, these taste communities “affect what recommendations pop up to the top of your onscreen interface, which genre rows are displayed, and how each row is ordered for each individual viewer. The tags that are used for the machine learning algorithms are the same across the globe. However, a smaller sub-set of tags are used in a more outward-facing way, feeding directly into the user interface and differing depending on country, language and cultural context.”

In 2016, Neil Hunt, Netflix’s chief product officer, explained how instrumental those top rows of recommendations are to users, telling Business Insider that “the user either finds something of interest [within the first 60 or 90 seconds] or the risk of the user abandoning our service increases substantially.”

And as of January 2018, Netflix had implemented a new strategy for recommending content: tailoring thumbnails attached to each piece of work to best match the user’s history on the site. “Artwork was not only the biggest influencer to a member’s decision to watch content, but it also constituted over 82% of their focus while browsing Netflix. We also saw that users spent an average of 1.8 seconds considering each title they were presented with while on Netflix,” said Nick Nelson, Netflix’s Global Manager of Creative Services.

Differing Netflix thumnails, via Thrillist

Netflix’s current focus on providing the best “box art” to users feels like a silent acknowledgement of the video store era — where the right gory VHS cover could entice viewers to check out even the schlockiest of of schlock. Even with a high-powered recommendations algorithm fueled by data from millions of users, Netflix still understands that the first visual contact an audience has with a movie is essential to their selection process overall.

But even the most carefully selected thumbnail can’t compete with the tactile experience of holding a film in your hand. “Shopping in a great video store encourages discovery and deep engagement with an art form, leaving one fulfilled…trying to find something to watch on a streaming service usually requires compromise, leaving one feeling like they wasted their time,” says Hatch. “Many people are visual and spatial learners like me, and are more likely to make unexpected discoveries in a physical browsing atmosphere or in a conversation with a video-store clerk than they are on the internet,” he continues.

And while the proprietary recommendations algorithm has been a major feather in Netflix’s cap for over a decade, in 2016, Chris Jaffe, Netflix’s vice president of product innovation, told Business Insider, “We don’t really care if you watch JESSICA JONES or MARCO POLO, we just want you to watch.”

Data on recommendation algorithms for other services like Amazon Prime Video and Hulu isn’t widely available, so Netflix provides the most valuable study of just how streaming services display content best-suited to the user-experience. Netflix is throwing a lot of weight behind its recommendations algorithm (and their improvements to it) and the system does work well — so long as you’re only interested in content made in the last decade.

Plug “1950s movies” into Netflix’s search, and Netflix originals like THE CROWN and 13 REASONS WHY come back alongside movies like BRIDGET JONES’ BABY and SPOTLIGHT—all of these titles are less than ten years old, and two of them are Netflix originals.

To even access the three movies Netflix is currently streaming from the 1950s — you know, the thing you actually searched for — you have to click through to a second subcategory to get all three of those titles (WHITE CHRISTMAS, THE AFRICAN QUEEN, and UJALA) to appear together, separated from all other non-1950s movies.

When searching for a genre like Romantic Epic — one that falls outside what’s currently hot in Hollywood ,but is still totally legit — the results are even more disappointing, with only five titles coming back, two of them Netflix originals.

If you search “Classic Musicals” on Netflix, EVIL GENIUS, a true crime Netflix original docuseries, appears in the first row of recommendations — hardly the Astaire and Rogers fare one might imagine.

It is of course Netflix’s prerogative to promote their own content alongside catalogue titles, but it’s tough to not feel like you’re being duped as a user when Netflix originals are prioritized over the content you were actually searching for.

As the siren song of easily accessible technology grows harder to resist, we have to take a step back to consider how we’ve destroyed video store culture — a vital, early access pathway to the larger world of film for many folks, especially in more rural parts of the world — in the process.

“Video stores meant everything to me. Video Americain wasn’t just a job to me, it was also my film school, and social hub,” says Hatch. Hatch was the manager at Video Americian, a beloved Baltimore video store from 1998–2004. Video Americain closed in 2014 after 25 years in business.

Video Americain in John Waters’ SERIAL MOM

“When you watch little kids walk around a library or video store, it’s very different than watching them scroll, they’re engaged and excited, talking and asking questions, and sharing their opinions — they have agency,” said Mackay.

How will we create new movie lovers when we’ve taken away one of the easiest entry points to learning about and loving film? When so few classic films are available to stream? When no one offers them a guide of how to understand cinema’s history? How do we assure that most films, even something like FRESH HORSES, are available to anyone who wants to watch them? What happens to Hollywood history when films aren’t being protected, preserved, and well-presented as we jump to each new technological platform?

These questions keep me up at night, and keep me worried about what the future of home-viewing (and the next generation of film fans) looks like.

So for me, there’s only one solution: we have to go in search of the last great video store.