There was supposed to be a benefit from every single megacorporation having their own proprietary streaming service. Just one benefit. We’d tolerate their anti-competitive ways, ever-more-ludicrous pricing, and just blatant evil on the condition that they would make their entire catalog available on the platform. They own it, they own all of the rights to it, and unless people watch it it costs them nothing in bandwidth and an insignificant amount in storage space. Of course, it didn’t take all that long for those promises to be broken.
The recent news about streaming service catalogs changing for the worse are amusing because there’s no excuse for them. There was an excuse way back when. Back when you needed a factory to burn the content in the DVD’s and then etch the labels on them, another factory to make the jewel cases, and then ship one to the other and join them before burning fuel to make it to stores.
But now, the cost of keeping unpopular/low viewership programs on a streaming platform is essentially zero. And yet, when the excuse isn’t just “we’re writing this off to pay less tax”, the only thing that they can point at is “low viewership”.
I’m…biased. People say that the internet doesn’t forget but a much more accurate statement is that the internet only forgets the things that you would rather it remember. Conversely, it remembers everything you’d rather forget. Companies such as Basecamp, who are the ones who trumpet it loudly, are committed to keeping legacy products online forever, or until the end of the internet, whichever happens first. In a perfect world, most businesses would operate on this model.
Artificially hiding the unpopular and the failures means that they don’t get to be re-evaluated (presumably this is the point), nobody learns anything from them, they can’t go to “so-bad-it’s-good” status…or “so-bad-it’s-horrible” for that matter. Worst of all, it’s the perfect example of the end result of the streaming model where you don’t own anything but a temp pass for whomever to show you whatever it is they want to.
It rather gives an additional talking point and example for fans of physical media and those who acquire their content through, ahem, means of questionable legality. Say whatever you want about the palaver of having to store physical copies, but those are unlikely to disappear all of a sudden at the whims of Disney. Your copy can be ripped into as many computers as you want and is free from editorial control on part of the mothership as of the day they approved the print run and shipped it.
Best of all you don’t get Darth Vader showing up on your Smart TV’s menu going “whoops, little alteration, you didn’t pray hard enough.”
