End of the line in sight for Netflix DVD business

Netflix is preparing to shut down its DVD-by-mail rental service. The streaming video leader announced the end of the 25-year-old business on April 18. It plans to send out its final DVDs to customers on Sept. 29.
One unanswered question was how long the service would keep adding new releases to its inventory. Now, the answer to that question is becoming clear.
The company recently purged its database of almost all unavailable titles, including placeholders for many movies that have not yet been released.
Netflix’s DVD.com is now offering new films such as “Renfield” (released June 6), “John Wick: Chapter 4” (June 13), “The Pope’s Exorcist” (June 13) and “Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant” (June 20).
However, Netflix’s DVD listings don’t include upcoming titles like “Evil Dead Rise” (June 27), “Scream 6” (July 11) and “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” (Aug. 1).
However, it does list as coming soon “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” (July 11) and “Fast X” (Aug. 8). I suspect those releases are not guaranteed.
It’s safe to say that DVD.com is all but finished buying new discs for its inventory.
As for me, I’ve got 34 titles in my queue to watch in the next three months. Of those, 20 movies are not available on any of the streaming services to which I subscribe. Some are only available for online rental or purchase. And three are not available anywhere online in any form.

Photo: Netflix DVDs (Netflix)

Reelgood is a great website, but here’s an improvement I’d like to see

My favorite website for locating movies and TV shows I want to stream online is Reelgood.
I use it mostly to keep track of films and TV series I’m interested in watching. Reelgood tells me if the content is available on my subscription services, free services or elsewhere.
I have set up watch lists on the service for movies I want to see and TV shows I’m tracking.
I also can mark which movies I’ve seen and which episodes of TV series that I’ve seen. This is important. Because when you’ve seen as many films as I have, you sometimes forget if you’ve seen a particular movie.
I can name two movies that I’ve sat all the way through in the last year or so, not fully realizing that I had already seen them. They were familiar, yes, but I had to check my viewed lists on separate services to confirm. (By the way, those movies were “The Reef” (2010) and “A Walk Among the Tombstones” (2014).)
Unfortunately my viewing lists are spread out across numerous services. I would love to see Reelgood find a way to import those lists into its database. I can envision Reelgood users opting in to have their viewing lists and ratings imported.
Reelgood could start with Netflix’s DVD-by-mail service, DVD.com, which is ending its 25-year run in September. Netflix currently is allowing members to download their DVD rental history and ratings in a “personalized PDF.”
That data is not that useful sitting in a static PDF document. It would have much more utility if added to the Reelgood database.
If that’s successful, Reelgood could move on to other services such as Internet Movie Database (IMDb) and Rotten Tomatoes.
Come on, Reelgood. What do you say?

Photo: Promotional art for Reelgood’s AI assistant. (Reelgood)

Locating movies and TV shows online is becoming a major hassle

For cinephiles and video enthusiasts, it is becoming increasingly difficult to track where specific movies and TV shows can be found online, if at all.
Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery and other streaming services lately have been reducing their content libraries in a cost-saving move. Some of that content will be licensed to other services but much of it will go into the vault.
The days of “peak TV,” “long-tail content” and deep libraries at subscription streaming video services appear to be over. It was nice while it lasted.
Meanwhile, the number of video services consumers use continues to climb. In the fourth quarter of 2022, the average number of video sources consumers used reached nearly 12, according to Fierce Video. That’s up from about nine a year earlier.
Online services have sprung up to help video consumers keep track of shows and movies they’d like to watch and which ones they’ve already seen. They also point viewers to the services that have the specific movie or TV series they’re searching for.
These services include aggregators JustWatch and Reelgood. IMDb and Letterboxd are other useful services for film fans.
Review aggregators Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic also play an important role today because no subscription service is going to tell you which of their shows suck.
My biggest gripe is that these services don’t interoperate. I’m not going to create duplicate lists of movies I’ve seen along with ratings and reviews. The same goes for watch lists I’ve compiled.
There either needs to be more interoperability or consolidation or both.

Related reading:

The Reason So Many Favorite Shows Are Leaving The Big Streamers (Forbes; June 7, 2023)

Why are streaming services removing some of their own movies and shows? (NBC News; May 29, 2023)

The Streaming Purge: Behind The Wave Of Library Content Removals & Its Impact On The Creative Community (Deadline; Feb. 14, 2023)