In 1992, Bruce Springsteen complained about the sorry state of modern media: There were 57 channels, he crooned, but “nothin’ on.” He had no idea what would come 27 years later—when at-home viewing options are multiplying at a dizzying rate, but asking the simple question of what to watch next often results in hours spent aimlessly bloop-bloop-blooping through an array of endless possibilities. It’s especially tough for those trying to watch feature films, rather than television—especially classic movies, or indie options, or foreign films, which seem to be getting lost in the algorithm.

True, the era has its perks: “When I want to see an old movie, I can honestly sit on my couch and, two thirds of the time, it’s right there—which is better than I could’ve said driving to the tiny video store next to the grocery store in Texas, where I grew up,” said film critic and podcaster Amy Nicholson, who writes for the Guardian and hosts the canon-studying podcast Unspooled with Paul Scheer. “Now you can be 13 and watch everything in your basement, and that’s awesome.”

Yet the content that appears on these streaming platforms also “barely scratches the surface of what is theoretically available,” said Dennis Lim, the director of programming for Film at Lincoln Center in New York. “It is, unfortunately, a time that does not encourage proactive and curious engagement with the art form.”

Indeed, consensus seems to be that in 2019, it’s getting harder than ever to be a film snob. The days of perusing carefully curated indie video stores are gone; even if those places do exist, according to a recent report from the Motion Picture Association of America, global sales of video disc formats have dropped by around 50% over the last five years, and companies like Samsung are preparing to leave the U.S. Blu-ray player market altogether. At the same time, the economics and availability of streaming are changing moment to moment; to quote a representative from distributor Kino Lorber, there are more than 40 streaming subscription services available today—and the number is climbing as more major corporations create their own individual options. HBO Max, Apple TV, the currently untitled NBCUniversal streaming service, Disney+—all are coming, all will require some form of subscription fee, and none of them are likely to offer arthouse fare. And while the most intrepid film nerds may take to torrents, it’s not easy to find and download an obscure foreign film if you don’t know that it exists in the first place.

The stars of the current streaming ecosystem—Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu—can also stymie film enthusiasts. Netflix, for example, seems to be too busy these days expanding its own in-house offerings—from awards-friendly auteur projects (Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, Martin Scorsese’s upcoming The Irishman) to romantic comedies and Adam Sandler projects—to provide much in the way of archival material; it’s expected to spend $15 billion on original content in 2019 alone, even as it says farewell to some of its most-watched licensed content. The service does host films by directors that deserve attention, such as Dee Rees and Nicole Holofcener—but whether the algorithm recommends Holofcener’s The Land of Steady Habits to the average user remains an open question. (When I mentioned at a book reading in Brooklyn earlier this year that Holofcener had a new movie on Netflix, her target audience responded with blank stares—perhaps the strongest illustration I’ve seen of how Netflix releases can just disappear into the ether.)