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Netflix's streaming era began way back in 2007, right around the time the company had delivered its billionth DVD by mail (a copy of Babel to a woman in Texas). Thatās the year when the company began development of an app that would allow you to watch video-on-demand content on your actual TV, rather than in a window on your PC via Internet Explorerāor whatever the hell browser you happened to be using during the George W. Bush administration.
Internet speeds and interest built and, by 2011, the company had moved fully away from its DVD-by-mail business as streaming took on a life of its own. While distribution rights for streaming content were, and remain, wildly different than for physical copies, the potential of streaming was obvious: Netflix would offer something like the breadth and depth of its DVD library, minus the "mailing things back and forth" part.
There was a value proposition there, too: As cable prices skyrocketed and we were all forced to pay for endless channels that we mostly didnāt watch, Netflix (and Hulu, which grew more slowly, but debuted around the same time), the promise of a vast library of movies to watch whenever you wanted was irresistibleāand cheap: In 2011, you could get an all-streaming subscription for about $8 a month. Which was a good deal, even during the Obama administration.
Despite a few caveatsāyou might've needed to bump your internet connection to a higher, pricier bandwidth, and you still needed a separate DVD subscription to watch some older movies, it seemed like the future was in sight, filled with endless possibilities.
A decade and a half later, we all know that future was a lieāespecially if you're a movie lover.
Netflixās first foray into original programming was a straight-to-series order for the Kevin Spacey-led, David Fincher-produced political thriller House of Cards, which debuted in 2013. The decision to pursue the showāand to outbid every traditional cable and broadcast network for itāwas almost entirely data-driven, and a harbinger for what would come: Netflix saw that viewers liked Kevin Spacey (it was a different era, obviously), and David Fincher movies! House of Cards had both.
Data has always been the Holy Grail of entertainment programming, but Netflix had data that was better, more specific, and more current than any focus group could hope to provide. Gone were the days of extrapolating from surveysāNetflix knew who was watching what and when with unheard-of specificity, and thus the streamerās ability to give people what they want would become unprecedented. It would also lead them to focus more on developing their own proprietary series and films, rather than negotiating massive licensing deals for stuff other studios owned.
And the deals were massiveāNetflix would spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year to fill its servers with "content." But as time went on, and other studios launched their own streaming services, chasing cash they used to make selling movies to cable, Netflix's library started to shrink, going from 11,000 titles in 2015 to just 6,000 by 2022.
Still, it was hard to complain too much when those Netflix rivals seemed willing to do anything to compete. Whereas Disney once kept tight control over its library, placing films into "the Disney Vault" so it could rerelease them to theaters and on video every decade or so, the launch of Disney+ in March 2020 saw the studio offering up hundreds of its classic films at onceāa treat for animation buffs and a boon to parents who no longer had to endure their kids watching the same handful of DVDs on repeat (in theory, anyway).
Not to be outdone, when Warner Bros. launched what was then known as HBO Max in May 2020, it seemed like a pandemic-era gift: The studio went all-in on its massive catalogueāone of the largest and most enviable in Hollywood, encompassing classic films, more recent blockbusters, beloved animation, and shows culled from its array of cable networks. Alongside big getsālike securing the rights to all of the films from Japan's revered Studio Ghibli, something its cranky co-founder Hayao Miyazaki swore would never happenāWarner Bros. leaned into its history, loading the service with hundreds of classics from across the decades.
For a while, perusing the lists of films coming to these services every month was a delightāsure, no one service offered every movie, but there was a decent chance what you wanted to watch was available somewhere, and monthly subscriptions were cheap enough that most people subscribed to a few of them.
But this golden age of streaming proved to be short-lived.
Even during this period of explosive growth, streamers started to follow the Netflix model of investing more money in original content, and leaving catalogue as an afterthought. It's hard to build buzz around movies that are 50, 20, or even a decade old, after all, when you could instead promote something shiny and new.
Still, the reckoning didn't truly come until 2022, when inflationary pressures, including rising interest rates, coupled with a surprising loss of subscribers, caused Netflix's stock value to crater, dropping from more than $600 to less than $200 over the course of a few months.
Suddenly, every streaming service seemed concerned about the bottom lineāand it seems the easiest way to cut costs, when it comes to digital offerings, is to reduce your library. Over the course of the next year, embattled entertainment companies announced plans to begin removing vast quantities of older content from their servicesāoften even as they raised prices. Like spending more money for a smaller bag of chips at the grocery store, shrinkflation came for streaming too.
Remember the data I mentioned earlier? The downside is that the numbers apparently showed streamers that customers don't care that much about older moviesāor at least, not enough about any one movie for a lack of them to move the needle when it comes to subscriptions. So why give people free access to stuff most wouldn't watch when you could instead make a little money?
While some of these films have gone to ad-supported services like The Roku Channel and Tubi, watching a movie with a bunch of ad breaks is no cinephile's dream.
Enter digital rentals: For five years I've been writing streaming guides for Lifehacker, suggesting movies you can watch based on your mood or to fit a particular theme. And, anecdotally but undeniably, these film lists are increasingly less about "streaming" and more about reminding you of things you can pay to rent. Whereas I used to be able to point you to a few dozen films spread across the major services, these days my recommendations tend to include a lot more rentals.
Broad categories of films, usually anything more than a decade old, arenāt typically included with any streaming service. If you want to watch them, you're going to have to pony up around $4 for a digital rental. This holds true no matter how beloved the movie: As of this writing, the likes of Citizen Kane, Double Indemnity, All About Eve, The Shining, Back to the Future, Malcolm X, and The Iron Giant are all rental-only, meaning you have to pay extra on top of whatever streaming fees youāre already paying. That list of movies is entirely off the top of my headāI looked them up based on my confidence that, being older than a decade or two, they would only be available for a fee.
Netflix still has a classic movies section, but it's pretty anemic. While the rotation changes, the oldest movie currently in the lineup is 1957ās An Affair to Rememberānot ancient by classic film standards, but certainly venerable. Itās tagged as āLeaving Soon.ā Beyond that, there are but a dozen movies from the 1970s (almost all of them Bollywood classics), and a few more than that from the 1980s and ā90s. Of the dozen or so 1980s movies offered, several are marked as āLeaving Soon,ā including The Karate Kid films. (They do have a James Garner movie from 1984 that Iāve never heard of called Tank, if you have a couple of hours to kill.)
Iām picking on Netflix here, with its relentless focus on original ācontentā and newer releases that sees the streamer churning through shows and movies, often before they have time to register. But the picture at Hulu, Paramount+, MGM+, etc. is roughly the same, even if those others have slightly better libraries of current-ish movies.
Max remains a bright spot, with a reasonably well-curated selection of movies dating back to the silent eraābut even that has shrunk. The streamer used to prominently feature its association with classic-movie network TCM as its own category. Itās still there, but now you have to dig. No oneās tracking exact month-to-month numbers of older (meaning, sigh, the ā90s or earlier) movies included in streaming, but, again, anecdotally: whenever possible, I try to recommend movies from a cross-section of streaming services. I figure itās nice if any list of suggestions includes options for everyone, and I know that for me, personally, that extra rental price (on top of all the streaming fees) is a big barrierāno matter how much I want to see a particular movie. And that's a lot harder than it used to be.
A culture of relentless, exhausting new-ness has evolved around streaming, one in which shows and movies are considered out of date once the first-week drop window has passed. So we're left with a (very) limited selection of old movies, or we're stuck with rental fees on top of streaming charges.
It's hard out there for a cinephile.
Though I still mourn the loss of HBO Max, Maxāthe app that replaced itāis still the mainstream streamer with the best classic film library, including a broad range of Warner Bros. stuff, from Casablanca to Goodfellas to Lord of the Rings; it includes popular favorites alongside some more artsy fare, including those Studio Ghibli films. A recent partnership with A24 films has also made it the destination of choice for the modern cinephile crowd. Cost: starting at $9.99/month with ads, or $99.99/year.
An offshoot of boutique film distributor Janus Films, The Criterion Collection has billed itself as a purveyor of "important classic and contemporary films" for decades. The Criterion Channel streaming service is, thus, unsurprisingly the destination of choice for anyone who wants to watch movies older than the Reagan administration. It has a rotating library of a couple of thousand films, including many foreign and classic American films. You may never heard of many of them, which could be either a pro or a con, but itās not all snooty art films. Last year, for example, the Channel ran a month of Razzie-nominated movies including Showgirls, Gigli, The Blair Witch Project, and even Freddy Got Fingered. Cost: $10.99/month or $99.99/year.
Another boutique streamer, Mubi is similar in some ways to The Criterion Channel, but with a key difference: Since Mubi has more of a focus on its role as a distributor of newer films (including recent Oscar nominee The Substance), the catalog tends to be a bit newer, and a bit smaller, but with a steady and smartly curated rotation. Cost: $14.99/month or $119.88/year.
TCM is the gold standard in classic film, particularly when it comes to Hollywood, and the curation is solid. TCM has introduced me to more classic films that I otherwise never might have heard of than any other service, but finding it is more complicated. Max has a limited selection of TCM-branded films but, to get the full experience, including āliveā movies, interviews, host segments, etc., you need to either suck it up and subscribe to cable, or a rough equivalent: YouTube TV offers TCM as part of its lineup, including on-demand content, as do Hulu with Live TV and Sling TV. Sticker shock with these options is real, however. Cost: Sling TV: starts at $45.99/month, YouTube TV: starts at $82.99 per month; Hulu+Live TV starts at $82.99/month.
Full story here:
Netflix's streaming era began way back in 2007, right around the time the company had delivered its billionth DVD by mail (a copy of Babel to a woman in Texas). Thatās the year when the company began development of an app that would allow you to watch video-on-demand content on your actual TV, rather than in a window on your PC via Internet Explorerāor whatever the hell browser you happened to be using during the George W. Bush administration.
Internet speeds and interest built and, by 2011, the company had moved fully away from its DVD-by-mail business as streaming took on a life of its own. While distribution rights for streaming content were, and remain, wildly different than for physical copies, the potential of streaming was obvious: Netflix would offer something like the breadth and depth of its DVD library, minus the "mailing things back and forth" part.
There was a value proposition there, too: As cable prices skyrocketed and we were all forced to pay for endless channels that we mostly didnāt watch, Netflix (and Hulu, which grew more slowly, but debuted around the same time), the promise of a vast library of movies to watch whenever you wanted was irresistibleāand cheap: In 2011, you could get an all-streaming subscription for about $8 a month. Which was a good deal, even during the Obama administration.
Despite a few caveatsāyou might've needed to bump your internet connection to a higher, pricier bandwidth, and you still needed a separate DVD subscription to watch some older movies, it seemed like the future was in sight, filled with endless possibilities.
A decade and a half later, we all know that future was a lieāespecially if you're a movie lover.
The rise of "streaming originals"
Netflixās first foray into original programming was a straight-to-series order for the Kevin Spacey-led, David Fincher-produced political thriller House of Cards, which debuted in 2013. The decision to pursue the showāand to outbid every traditional cable and broadcast network for itāwas almost entirely data-driven, and a harbinger for what would come: Netflix saw that viewers liked Kevin Spacey (it was a different era, obviously), and David Fincher movies! House of Cards had both.
Data has always been the Holy Grail of entertainment programming, but Netflix had data that was better, more specific, and more current than any focus group could hope to provide. Gone were the days of extrapolating from surveysāNetflix knew who was watching what and when with unheard-of specificity, and thus the streamerās ability to give people what they want would become unprecedented. It would also lead them to focus more on developing their own proprietary series and films, rather than negotiating massive licensing deals for stuff other studios owned.
And the deals were massiveāNetflix would spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year to fill its servers with "content." But as time went on, and other studios launched their own streaming services, chasing cash they used to make selling movies to cable, Netflix's library started to shrink, going from 11,000 titles in 2015 to just 6,000 by 2022.
The golden age of streaming
Still, it was hard to complain too much when those Netflix rivals seemed willing to do anything to compete. Whereas Disney once kept tight control over its library, placing films into "the Disney Vault" so it could rerelease them to theaters and on video every decade or so, the launch of Disney+ in March 2020 saw the studio offering up hundreds of its classic films at onceāa treat for animation buffs and a boon to parents who no longer had to endure their kids watching the same handful of DVDs on repeat (in theory, anyway).
Not to be outdone, when Warner Bros. launched what was then known as HBO Max in May 2020, it seemed like a pandemic-era gift: The studio went all-in on its massive catalogueāone of the largest and most enviable in Hollywood, encompassing classic films, more recent blockbusters, beloved animation, and shows culled from its array of cable networks. Alongside big getsālike securing the rights to all of the films from Japan's revered Studio Ghibli, something its cranky co-founder Hayao Miyazaki swore would never happenāWarner Bros. leaned into its history, loading the service with hundreds of classics from across the decades.
For a while, perusing the lists of films coming to these services every month was a delightāsure, no one service offered every movie, but there was a decent chance what you wanted to watch was available somewhere, and monthly subscriptions were cheap enough that most people subscribed to a few of them.
But this golden age of streaming proved to be short-lived.
Shrinkflation comes for streaming
Even during this period of explosive growth, streamers started to follow the Netflix model of investing more money in original content, and leaving catalogue as an afterthought. It's hard to build buzz around movies that are 50, 20, or even a decade old, after all, when you could instead promote something shiny and new.
Still, the reckoning didn't truly come until 2022, when inflationary pressures, including rising interest rates, coupled with a surprising loss of subscribers, caused Netflix's stock value to crater, dropping from more than $600 to less than $200 over the course of a few months.
Suddenly, every streaming service seemed concerned about the bottom lineāand it seems the easiest way to cut costs, when it comes to digital offerings, is to reduce your library. Over the course of the next year, embattled entertainment companies announced plans to begin removing vast quantities of older content from their servicesāoften even as they raised prices. Like spending more money for a smaller bag of chips at the grocery store, shrinkflation came for streaming too.
Where did all those movies go?
Remember the data I mentioned earlier? The downside is that the numbers apparently showed streamers that customers don't care that much about older moviesāor at least, not enough about any one movie for a lack of them to move the needle when it comes to subscriptions. So why give people free access to stuff most wouldn't watch when you could instead make a little money?
While some of these films have gone to ad-supported services like The Roku Channel and Tubi, watching a movie with a bunch of ad breaks is no cinephile's dream.
Enter digital rentals: For five years I've been writing streaming guides for Lifehacker, suggesting movies you can watch based on your mood or to fit a particular theme. And, anecdotally but undeniably, these film lists are increasingly less about "streaming" and more about reminding you of things you can pay to rent. Whereas I used to be able to point you to a few dozen films spread across the major services, these days my recommendations tend to include a lot more rentals.
Broad categories of films, usually anything more than a decade old, arenāt typically included with any streaming service. If you want to watch them, you're going to have to pony up around $4 for a digital rental. This holds true no matter how beloved the movie: As of this writing, the likes of Citizen Kane, Double Indemnity, All About Eve, The Shining, Back to the Future, Malcolm X, and The Iron Giant are all rental-only, meaning you have to pay extra on top of whatever streaming fees youāre already paying. That list of movies is entirely off the top of my headāI looked them up based on my confidence that, being older than a decade or two, they would only be available for a fee.
Netflix still has a classic movies section, but it's pretty anemic. While the rotation changes, the oldest movie currently in the lineup is 1957ās An Affair to Rememberānot ancient by classic film standards, but certainly venerable. Itās tagged as āLeaving Soon.ā Beyond that, there are but a dozen movies from the 1970s (almost all of them Bollywood classics), and a few more than that from the 1980s and ā90s. Of the dozen or so 1980s movies offered, several are marked as āLeaving Soon,ā including The Karate Kid films. (They do have a James Garner movie from 1984 that Iāve never heard of called Tank, if you have a couple of hours to kill.)
New content has pushed classic movies to the back
Iām picking on Netflix here, with its relentless focus on original ācontentā and newer releases that sees the streamer churning through shows and movies, often before they have time to register. But the picture at Hulu, Paramount+, MGM+, etc. is roughly the same, even if those others have slightly better libraries of current-ish movies.
Max remains a bright spot, with a reasonably well-curated selection of movies dating back to the silent eraābut even that has shrunk. The streamer used to prominently feature its association with classic-movie network TCM as its own category. Itās still there, but now you have to dig. No oneās tracking exact month-to-month numbers of older (meaning, sigh, the ā90s or earlier) movies included in streaming, but, again, anecdotally: whenever possible, I try to recommend movies from a cross-section of streaming services. I figure itās nice if any list of suggestions includes options for everyone, and I know that for me, personally, that extra rental price (on top of all the streaming fees) is a big barrierāno matter how much I want to see a particular movie. And that's a lot harder than it used to be.
A culture of relentless, exhausting new-ness has evolved around streaming, one in which shows and movies are considered out of date once the first-week drop window has passed. So we're left with a (very) limited selection of old movies, or we're stuck with rental fees on top of streaming charges.
It's hard out there for a cinephile.
The best streamers for movie fans
Max
Though I still mourn the loss of HBO Max, Maxāthe app that replaced itāis still the mainstream streamer with the best classic film library, including a broad range of Warner Bros. stuff, from Casablanca to Goodfellas to Lord of the Rings; it includes popular favorites alongside some more artsy fare, including those Studio Ghibli films. A recent partnership with A24 films has also made it the destination of choice for the modern cinephile crowd. Cost: starting at $9.99/month with ads, or $99.99/year.
The Criterion Channel
An offshoot of boutique film distributor Janus Films, The Criterion Collection has billed itself as a purveyor of "important classic and contemporary films" for decades. The Criterion Channel streaming service is, thus, unsurprisingly the destination of choice for anyone who wants to watch movies older than the Reagan administration. It has a rotating library of a couple of thousand films, including many foreign and classic American films. You may never heard of many of them, which could be either a pro or a con, but itās not all snooty art films. Last year, for example, the Channel ran a month of Razzie-nominated movies including Showgirls, Gigli, The Blair Witch Project, and even Freddy Got Fingered. Cost: $10.99/month or $99.99/year.
Mubi
Another boutique streamer, Mubi is similar in some ways to The Criterion Channel, but with a key difference: Since Mubi has more of a focus on its role as a distributor of newer films (including recent Oscar nominee The Substance), the catalog tends to be a bit newer, and a bit smaller, but with a steady and smartly curated rotation. Cost: $14.99/month or $119.88/year.
TCM (Turner Classic Movies)
TCM is the gold standard in classic film, particularly when it comes to Hollywood, and the curation is solid. TCM has introduced me to more classic films that I otherwise never might have heard of than any other service, but finding it is more complicated. Max has a limited selection of TCM-branded films but, to get the full experience, including āliveā movies, interviews, host segments, etc., you need to either suck it up and subscribe to cable, or a rough equivalent: YouTube TV offers TCM as part of its lineup, including on-demand content, as do Hulu with Live TV and Sling TV. Sticker shock with these options is real, however. Cost: Sling TV: starts at $45.99/month, YouTube TV: starts at $82.99 per month; Hulu+Live TV starts at $82.99/month.
Full story here:
![[DK]](/data/avatars/s/57/57999.jpg?1720990206){kind=avatar}
