The streaming platforms in our lives with several promises to try to become the main way in which we watch series and movies. No one can argue with its comfort, but it is becoming increasingly apparent that they are shamelessly betraying what was sold at the time as one of their great advantages: Make sure your favorite titles are always available to watch. Whenever and wherever you want, we just needed your subscription.
There it is true that there have always been catalog productions that disappeared from the platforms from time to time. After all, they were mere licenses and the platforms were not their owners, but in recent months it has begun to become popular a worrying tendency to eliminate exclusive series and films with the sole objective of reducing costs -The most usual thing is that it is due to a tax issue-.
A worrying trend
The first to resort to this solution was HBO Max, but Disney+ also recently chose to do a similar purge and it would no longer be a surprise if it happened again. There will be productions that end up on other platforms, but there is no guarantee that all of them will find a new home. Not to mention cases as particular as that of ‘Batgirl’ being little more than buried in a safe.
All of this leads streaming platforms to lose credibility, because it is one thing for a catalog title to expire and another for you to get rid of what you had sold until now as one of your hooks. For example, I didn’t connect too much with the ‘Willow’ series, but that it is going to disappear from Disney+ less than six months after the release of its last chapter is clearly incomprehensible.
That is where the fact that the vast majority of productions that premiere on streaming never get to have a physical edition. I am aware that many already see it as a cumbersome alternative, since it takes up space, you have to pay each title individually to have it in your collection and then you have to get up and put it in the player, but if the alternative is nothing, I think there is no color.
We don’t have alternatives either.
I have no doubt that there will be those who comment that all those movies and series that disappear from the platforms are still available online through other means and that there are people who only consume them that way. There, the only certainty I have is that if we all did the same, the audiovisual industry would collapse in a heartbeat, so in no case do I think it is a reasonable solution. If anything, an alternative if all else fails.
Another argument I’ve read is that streaming platforms are spending too much on content, so it is inevitable that some titles will stick with it. It is true, and the companies themselves are aware of this, so they do not stop looking for formulas to become profitable and stop having multimillion-dollar losses. But even reaching that point of equilibrium does not free us from the possibility that more exclusive productions will disappear in the future.
Those enormous limitations on its availability are something incomprehensible in the world of streaming. With the physical format you always had the excuse that an edition was sold out and then it took time until it was available again. It was Disney’s tactic for a long time with its Animated Classics in the VHS era. to preserve an aura of important titles, but then it was lost and everything happened to be that they were simply discontinued and sometimes they were never reissued.
That problem is something we should have put behind us at least with platform-exclusive titles. After all, The goal of these streaming companies is that we keep our subscription forever and in return they promise us new content constantly and a catalog that you may not have just seen in your entire life, with those exclusive titles as the main hook.
In this regard, it is worth remembering the bad fame that Netflix has been dragging lately for canceling so many series -a very recent example we have with ‘Lockwood Agency’, a science fiction series that was canceled after a single season, thus making good the bad omens of many when they saw its trailer-. That is something inevitable to some extent, but it would also help not to release titles without stopping and that many seem to come to the platform by the dead behind and that Netflix itself has already decided to let them die even before their launch.
The deletion of titles is something even more serious, because it simply leaves you without the option of being able to see them. And also, there are many streaming platforms that do not have a clean strategy when it comes to notifying us of those titles that are going to disappear. You can walk in one day and it’s just not there anymore. It can already bother you when it is something that they knew in advance in the world -and it is that they licensed that title for a certain time- and you find in your list to see something that is no longer available, but the thing about titles disappearing that just a few years ago months they were being promoted like wildfire is confirmation that streaming platforms should be, at best, a complement. And his strategy is not exactly that.
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