Yes, Netflix’s Movie Selection Is Getting Worse (And There’s A Reason For That)
By Jacob Hall/April 6, 2016 1:00 pm EST
This report comes to us from All Flicks, who crunched the numbers and discovered that the Netflix movie catalog has shrunk by over 31% in less than three years. Here are the gritty details:
For more numbers and charts, you can hit the link above. But one thing is clear: the number of movies and shows on Netflix is rapidly declining, with the movie selection plummeting by 33.2% and the television selection by 25.6%.
The statistics are simple and remarkable: in January of 2014, Netflix offered its US-based users a selection of 6,494 movies and 1,609 TV shows, for a total of 8,103 titles. As of March 23, 2016, they offer just 4,335 movies and 1,197 TV shows – 5,532 titles in total. That’s 2,571 fewer titles. In other words, Netflix’s catalog has shrunk 31.7% in less than two and a half years!
And on one level, that’s fine. Many of the shows and movies produced by these streaming networks are pretty great. However, there’s a dark side here that should concern every serious movie fan. The arrival of Netflix was an atomic bomb on the rental industry, murdering many mom-and-pop rentals stories with horrifying speed and sending Blockbuster careening toward an awful slow-motion death. But as Netflix’s disc rental service continues to be neglected and their streaming library shrinks, options for movie fans have truly begun to dwindle. Netflix killed the video store and then it transformed into a completely different service with completely different priorities. A shrinking library is a bad thing for movie fans. If you want to watch something and it’s not on Netflix, you probably no longer have a local establishment to rent from.
Is the sky falling? Not yet. But since it’s possible to imagine a day when the vast majority of movies are increasingly hard to watch as all of the streaming giants focus on their original stuff instead of licensing other movies, it sure feels like it’s getting there.
