I've Spent Years Writing Streaming Guides, and Yes, for Movie Fans, Streaming Is Getting Worse

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Netflix's streaming era began way back in 2007, right around the time the company had delivered its billionth DVD by mail (a copy of Babel to a woman in Texas). That’s the year when the company began development of an app that would allow you to watch video-on-demand content on your actual TV, rather than in a window on your PC via Internet Explorer—or whatever the hell browser you happened to be using during the George W. Bush administration.

Internet speeds and interest built and, by 2011, the company had moved fully away from its DVD-by-mail business as streaming took on a life of its own. While distribution rights for streaming content were, and remain, wildly different than for physical copies, the potential of streaming was obvious: Netflix would offer something like the breadth and depth of its DVD library, minus the "mailing things back and forth" part.

There was a value proposition there, too: As cable prices skyrocketed and we were all forced to pay for endless channels that we mostly didn’t watch, Netflix (and Hulu, which grew more slowly, but debuted around the same time), the promise of a vast library of movies to watch whenever you wanted was irresistible—and cheap: In 2011, you could get an all-streaming subscription for about $8 a month. Which was a good deal, even during the Obama administration.

Despite a few caveats—you might've needed to bump your internet connection to a higher, pricier bandwidth, and you still needed a separate DVD subscription to watch some older movies, it seemed like the future was in sight, filled with endless possibilities.

A decade and a half later, we all know that future was a lie—especially if you're a movie lover.

The rise of "streaming originals"

Netflix’s first foray into original programming was a straight-to-series order for the Kevin Spacey-led, David Fincher-produced political thriller House of Cards, which debuted in 2013. The decision to pursue the show—and to outbid every traditional cable and broadcast network for it—was almost entirely data-driven, and a harbinger for what would come: Netflix saw that viewers liked Kevin Spacey (it was a different era, obviously), and David Fincher movies! House of Cards had both.

Data has always been the Holy Grail of entertainment programming, but Netflix had data that was better, more specific, and more current than any focus group could hope to provide. Gone were the days of extrapolating from surveys—Netflix knew who was watching what and when with unheard-of specificity, and thus the streamer’s ability to give people what they want would become unprecedented. It would also lead them to focus more on developing their own proprietary series and films, rather than negotiating massive licensing deals for stuff other studios owned.

And the deals were massive—Netflix would spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year to fill its servers with "content." But as time went on, and other studios launched their own streaming services, chasing cash they used to make selling movies to cable, Netflix's library started to shrink, going from 11,000 titles in 2015 to just 6,000 by 2022.

The golden age of streaming

Still, it was hard to complain too much when those Netflix rivals seemed willing to do anything to compete. Whereas Disney once kept tight control over its library, placing films into "the Disney Vault" so it could rerelease them to theaters and on video every decade or so, the launch of Disney+ in March 2020 saw the studio offering up hundreds of its classic films at once—a treat for animation buffs and a boon to parents who no longer had to endure their kids watching the same handful of DVDs on repeat (in theory, anyway).

Not to be outdone, when Warner Bros. launched what was then known as HBO Max in May 2020, it seemed like a pandemic-era gift: The studio went all-in on its massive catalogue—one of the largest and most enviable in Hollywood, encompassing classic films, more recent blockbusters, beloved animation, and shows culled from its array of cable networks. Alongside big gets—like securing the rights to all of the films from Japan's revered Studio Ghibli, something its cranky co-founder Hayao Miyazaki swore would never happen—Warner Bros. leaned into its history, loading the service with hundreds of classics from across the decades.

For a while, perusing the lists of films coming to these services every month was a delight—sure, no one service offered every movie, but there was a decent chance what you wanted to watch was available somewhere, and monthly subscriptions were cheap enough that most people subscribed to a few of them.

But this golden age of streaming proved to be short-lived.

Shrinkflation comes for streaming

Even during this period of explosive growth, streamers started to follow the Netflix model of investing more money in original content, and leaving catalogue as an afterthought. It's hard to build buzz around movies that are 50, 20, or even a decade old, after all, when you could instead promote something shiny and new.

Still, the reckoning didn't truly come until 2022, when inflationary pressures, including rising interest rates, coupled with a surprising loss of subscribers, caused Netflix's stock value to crater, dropping from more than $600 to less than $200 over the course of a few months.

Suddenly, every streaming service seemed concerned about the bottom line—and it seems the easiest way to cut costs, when it comes to digital offerings, is to reduce your library. Over the course of the next year, embattled entertainment companies announced plans to begin removing vast quantities of older content from their services—often even as they raised prices. Like spending more money for a smaller bag of chips at the grocery store, shrinkflation came for streaming too.

Where did all those movies go?

Remember the data I mentioned earlier? The downside is that the numbers apparently showed streamers that customers don't care that much about older movies—or at least, not enough about any one movie for a lack of them to move the needle when it comes to subscriptions. So why give people free access to stuff most wouldn't watch when you could instead make a little money?

While some of these films have gone to ad-supported services like The Roku Channel and Tubi, watching a movie with a bunch of ad breaks is no cinephile's dream.

Enter digital rentals: For five years I've been writing streaming guides for Lifehacker, suggesting movies you can watch based on your mood or to fit a particular theme. And, anecdotally but undeniably, these film lists are increasingly less about "streaming" and more about reminding you of things you can pay to rent. Whereas I used to be able to point you to a few dozen films spread across the major services, these days my recommendations tend to include a lot more rentals.

Broad categories of films, usually anything more than a decade old, aren’t typically included with any streaming service. If you want to watch them, you're going to have to pony up around $4 for a digital rental. This holds true no matter how beloved the movie: As of this writing, the likes of Citizen Kane, Double Indemnity, All About Eve, The Shining, Back to the Future, Malcolm X, and The Iron Giant are all rental-only, meaning you have to pay extra on top of whatever streaming fees you’re already paying. That list of movies is entirely off the top of my head—I looked them up based on my confidence that, being older than a decade or two, they would only be available for a fee.

Netflix still has a classic movies section, but it's pretty anemic. While the rotation changes, the oldest movie currently in the lineup is 1957’s An Affair to Remember—not ancient by classic film standards, but certainly venerable. It’s tagged as “Leaving Soon.” Beyond that, there are but a dozen movies from the 1970s (almost all of them Bollywood classics), and a few more than that from the 1980s and ‘90s. Of the dozen or so 1980s movies offered, several are marked as “Leaving Soon,” including The Karate Kid films. (They do have a James Garner movie from 1984 that I’ve never heard of called Tank, if you have a couple of hours to kill.)

New content has pushed classic movies to the back

I’m picking on Netflix here, with its relentless focus on original “content” and newer releases that sees the streamer churning through shows and movies, often before they have time to register. But the picture at Hulu, Paramount+, MGM+, etc. is roughly the same, even if those others have slightly better libraries of current-ish movies.

Max remains a bright spot, with a reasonably well-curated selection of movies dating back to the silent era—but even that has shrunk. The streamer used to prominently feature its association with classic-movie network TCM as its own category. It’s still there, but now you have to dig. No one’s tracking exact month-to-month numbers of older (meaning, sigh, the ‘90s or earlier) movies included in streaming, but, again, anecdotally: whenever possible, I try to recommend movies from a cross-section of streaming services. I figure it’s nice if any list of suggestions includes options for everyone, and I know that for me, personally, that extra rental price (on top of all the streaming fees) is a big barrier—no matter how much I want to see a particular movie. And that's a lot harder than it used to be.

A culture of relentless, exhausting new-ness has evolved around streaming, one in which shows and movies are considered out of date once the first-week drop window has passed. So we're left with a (very) limited selection of old movies, or we're stuck with rental fees on top of streaming charges.

It's hard out there for a cinephile.

The best streamers for movie fans

Max

Though I still mourn the loss of HBO Max, Max—the app that replaced it—is still the mainstream streamer with the best classic film library, including a broad range of Warner Bros. stuff, from Casablanca to Goodfellas to Lord of the Rings; it includes popular favorites alongside some more artsy fare, including those Studio Ghibli films. A recent partnership with A24 films has also made it the destination of choice for the modern cinephile crowd. Cost: starting at $9.99/month with ads, or $99.99/year.

The Criterion Channel

An offshoot of boutique film distributor Janus Films, The Criterion Collection has billed itself as a purveyor of "important classic and contemporary films" for decades. The Criterion Channel streaming service is, thus, unsurprisingly the destination of choice for anyone who wants to watch movies older than the Reagan administration. It has a rotating library of a couple of thousand films, including many foreign and classic American films. You may never heard of many of them, which could be either a pro or a con, but it’s not all snooty art films. Last year, for example, the Channel ran a month of Razzie-nominated movies including Showgirls, Gigli, The Blair Witch Project, and even Freddy Got Fingered. Cost: $10.99/month or $99.99/year.

Mubi

Another boutique streamer, Mubi is similar in some ways to The Criterion Channel, but with a key difference: Since Mubi has more of a focus on its role as a distributor of newer films (including recent Oscar nominee The Substance), the catalog tends to be a bit newer, and a bit smaller, but with a steady and smartly curated rotation. Cost: $14.99/month or $119.88/year.

TCM (Turner Classic Movies)

TCM is the gold standard in classic film, particularly when it comes to Hollywood, and the curation is solid. TCM has introduced me to more classic films that I otherwise never might have heard of than any other service, but finding it is more complicated. Max has a limited selection of TCM-branded films but, to get the full experience, including “live” movies, interviews, host segments, etc., you need to either suck it up and subscribe to cable, or a rough equivalent: YouTube TV offers TCM as part of its lineup, including on-demand content, as do Hulu with Live TV and Sling TV. Sticker shock with these options is real, however. Cost: Sling TV: starts at $45.99/month, YouTube TV: starts at $82.99 per month; Hulu+Live TV starts at $82.99/month.