[koofdoof]

I agree with the point of your post, however I question whether streaming's utopian moment even actually happened. I was a very early adopter of Netflix streaming and their catalog was quite poor for a long time. Just tons of cheap no name filler content, old public domain type stuff, and a surprising amount of softcore pornography. There were high profile movies and shows sometimes too, but they were the exception and even back then they would get removed regularly. Today's streaming landscape, greedy as it may be, at least offers the ability to stream premium content that Netflix never would have had even in their days of solo dominance. Perhaps the streaming golden age is closer to something that could have been, rather than something that actually was.

[kmeisthax]

Perhaps people are remembering DVD rental Netflix. It was slightly less convenient but had literally everything.

[greedo]

I still use Netflix's DVD service, despite it being a pale pale shadow of its former glory. It makes me sad when I browse their catalog and either fail to find a movie, or find that's its only available in DVD. I find at least 25% of the movies I search for unavailable in Blu-Ray format, and I get furious. Blu-Ray has been out since 2006 and watching a DVD today is like looking at 640x480 jpegs.

[smm11]

Netflix streaming had literally everything for a time. Now it's literally all Netflix productions.

No thanks.

[chrisseaton]

> Netflix streaming had literally everything for a time.

No that's not true - it was never even remotely as extensive as their DVD catalogue, which was almost literally every commercially available DVD. I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of films have never been available on any streaming service. Streaming rights entirely different to them buying some DVDs.

[kmeisthax]

You can operate a rental service for physical media with zero licensing required. The cost to Netflix to rent out a niche DVD only five people care about is the cost of buying one copy of the DVD and shipping it out to five people. The cost of a streaming license could be hundreds of thousands of dollars, minimum, no matter how niche the work.

[smm11]

For us it was. There was a ten-year period when we had young kids and didn't do anything. Once that was over we caught up with tons of movies we hadn't seen, on Netflix.

Maybe they've never had newer releases, but for seeing nearly everything from 4-10 years ago at one point was very much possible.

[chrisseaton]

> For us it was.

This just isn't a truthful statement.

Netflix's DVD catalogue was like 100,000 titles. They've never had 100,000 titles on their streaming site. There aren't 100,000 streaming titles anywhere today across all streaming services!

"At its peak, in fact, the number of DVD titles possessed by Netflix would have dwarfed the entire streaming libraries of all the major streamers today … combined."

https://www.pastemagazine.com/movies/netflix/netflix-dvd-ser...

The reason is that the rights are different.

https://www.quora.com/Why-does-Netflix-still-have-much-of-it...

[smm11]

You're right. I'm lying. I didn't watch any movies. I just have ESP or something.

[guelo]

There was a period when they had a content deal with Starz that their catalog was pretty beefy. They also had a lot of Disney's stuff for a long time.