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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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."