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Last year, I did a movie watching challenge: 50 movies that I haven't seen before, from 50 years, 1975 through 2024. From the outset I knew that the selection of older titles on streaming services is abysmal, especially when you're not in the US, so my plan always was to plan the movies first, assume I'll need to pirate most, only watch on streaming if it's available. What I'm trying to say is that my expectations for streaming sites are very, very low, and yet I can't help but be surprised how bad the actual situation is. You really live like this?
This is one of the areas where the current state of the market is objectively worse than in the pre-internet era. I remember when I was in college (the internet existed but hadn't subsumed everything) it seemed like every town had a video store that opened when the VCR came out in the 1980s, ordered every title that was available, and never threw anything out. The result was that you had independent shops whose archives included pretty much everything that was ever released on video. Sure, it might not be on DVD, and the tape might be in bad shape from having been watched 4 million times, but at least it was available. I remember they had a 5 catalog rentals for $5 deal, and the rentals were for a week, so it was kind of a weekly ritual to rent 5 movies every week whether I planned on watching them or not. They also had a byzantine setup that encouraged browsing because you never knew where you'd find anything, though they had a catalog you could consult. The new releases were obviously segregated, and they had the normal categories (comedy, drama, etc.), but the AFI 100 movies had their own section, as did "Black and White Classics", and there was something called the Video Vault that could have anything. I believe there was even a small LBGT section, definitely odd for a small town store in the mid 2000s.
They closed in 2007, well before streaming. I think it was a combination of OG Netflix and Redbox. I worked at a video store in high school, and 90% of our sales were newer releases, though the one I worked at didn't have much of an archive. It was part of a grocery store, and it became easier for the grocery stores to just put a Redbox machine in the lobby that would cover the dozen or so titles that actually made money. Netflix didn't make sense for new releases at the time, since you had to wait and could be on a list, but for movie buffs who would just put a hundred movies in the queue and watch whatever Netflix sent them, it was perfectly fine and didn't require as much effort. My roommate and I got the Blockbuster equivalent circa 2008 and I remember he spent an afternoon just inputting the entire 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list in, and we'd watch whatever came in. That was probably the peak of movie availability since they really did have close to everything you could think of, unless it was really obscure.
As soon as streaming became the main business it was over, because bandwidth considerations came into play, similar to the space considerations of Redbox, and it was thus impossible to keep an inventory of that size, especially when the licensing agreements were more complicated and probably required them to pay for rights even for stuff that wasn't in high demand.
It's 100% the licensing agreements that cause this shortage, and not bandwidth.
Bandwidth cost is of course completely independent of the number of available movies. Video streaming is rather forgiving of storage medium speed. Almost everyone watches linearly, 95% of traffic is to a small section of the catalog and people are quite tolerant of some seek time for longer seeks and startup time for rarer films. You can store a couple of thousand films on even a small disk array, the first 5-10 minutes of tens of thousands on another and then you have a few minutes to load the remaining film to a server cache for those rarely accessed titles.
Have you seen the storage requirements for 2160p content? They’re enormous. Maybe if you’re talking about 480p, I could see that. Because if the former held up, then I ‘clearly’ built my stack the wrong way; lmao. And I know this stuff fairly well.
If I was talking about 480p content, I'd have 10x'd the number of films. And yes, I did do the math (hell, back in my university days I implemented from scratch all the major parts of a video codec for an image processing course and then worked for a number of years on a video compositing platform so this ain't exactly my first rodeo).
The number of films that even have a 2160p digital transfer is limited and this isn't about archival quality copies but streaming for actual viewers, not for a few nerds who compare films purely based on specs. You don't need ridiculously high bitrates for tens of thousands of films because no profitable customer segment actually expects that nor can the vast majority of customers even stream reliably at such speeds. 99% of paying customers won't care if a film is available in "only" 15-20 Mbps when encoded with a decent modern codec (*) with proper options (and not the PSNR optimized crap that was popular for so long in "professional" encoders). They particularly won't care if that's the only way to watch the film at all.
I’m not doubting your expertise in this area necessarily, but I’m completely unable to square the math away on this one. How are you conceptualizing the storage requirements at home for the average user? Because I’m imagining the 15GB-20GB’s on a single file will absolutely murder the allotted bandwidth of the average consumer’s ISP data cap, never mind the at home storage requirements for the user. Say my storage cap was 8TB but even then it’s not a clean slate entirely. How in the world does one get as much as you’re saying on the high end of the spectrum with what I just quoted to you? And that’s at the mega/ultra tail end of a consumer that is going out of their way to future proof their setup. The overwhelming mass of people aren’t doing that.
The home user of course doesn't have to store any of the films, only the streaming service (eg. Netflix) needs to do that. The number of different films in the catalogue only affect the service's storage costs and those are really quite modest. Even a high end consumer level 8x4 TB drive NAS is enough for 2000 movies at 15 Mbps average bitrate (the peak bitrate for action sequences can be much higher and is limited by the maximum network speed), so any halfway decent datacenter can easily handle an order of magnitude more (particularly as the streaming servers can use local caching to service probably 90% of the end user requests).
The discussion was afterall about the rental catalogue size, not about how many films a customer could watch per month (which is affected by bandwidth and licensing but not by amount of storage).
Netflix provides the content through the CDN intermediaries on the backend, but I’m specifically talking about consumer storage requirements. Some people may not want long-term storage. I do. That’s specifically what I’m saying. If you just stick with the business side of things, then sure the consumer is only stuck with the bandwidth issue. Netflix as a content provider will have no issue hosting it, their primary issue is data transmission and network uptime.
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