In the DVD-by-mail days it really did. Even obscure movies made in communist East Germany! Maybe it still does (I like most people who were early Netflix customers, haven't subscribed to the DVD option in nearly a decade).

Friend worked in operations in those days and explained to me how they had 3 levels of storage including "deep" storage. Parallels to data warehousing.

I'm glad I watched my bucket list of movies from Netflix before they shrank the DVD selection. It seems worse now than that of the local public library.

it came from the concept that they sought to replace : in-person rental companies.

Blockbuster didn't only stock Paramount pictures -- and people wouldn't have had much patience for rental groups that worked that way when there were alternatives that didn't -- piracy being the alternative here.

It's well past time for there to be a mechanical license for streaming copyrighted video content. This lock down garbage is just that. Copyright is a joke that provides zero benefit to the public, little benefit to the starving artist, and almost all the benefit to the mega corporations. Sonny Bono is a plague on creativity and his law was even worse.

> Blockbuster didn't only stock Paramount pictures

Keep in mind the this was only because of some monopoly busting decades earlier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pic....

With Disney owning so much of the production and now entering the distribution/retail side there might be some more anti-trust cases coming.

If the govt was going to nail Disney for anti-trust they wouldn't have let them buy Fox. Disney + was being talked about before the deal was approved.

Blockbuster could stock anything it wanted without the studio’s blessing by just buying DVDs at retail (even though they had special deals with the studio to get reduced prices).

Netflix can only stream what they are allowed to. If you want the convenience of the Blockbuster model there are always rentals from Amazon, Apple, Google Play etc. Yes I realize that some movies aren’t available for rent.

you're right. netflix never had a comprehensive selection of movies or tv to stream. it seems to have even less now, which must be disappointing for subscribers (I canceled my subscription years ago so I'm just going off what I hear).

they used to (and still do AFAIK) have a pretty good selection of DVDs to have mailed though. I think people hoped that eventually the streaming offerings would come to be as broad as the mail-order selection, which doesn't seem unreasonable from the perspective of 2009 but obviously isn't happening today. there's also the fact that music streaming services have mostly succeeded at offering a very wide selection of music to their customers (even free accounts!).

frankly I don't know enough about the music, tv, and movie industries to tell you why it turned out this way, but to the layman it does seem like a perplexing "shut up and take my money" situation. if a service launched with a really good catalog that could at least match the convenience and quality of torrents, I would be willing to pay quite a hefty monthly fee. I have very little interest in paying for five different streaming services that will still inevitably exclude a couple of my favorite shows and movies.

It had all the DVDs, and for a while the catalog really was expanding into major titles and releases. Everyone assumed that eventually the DVD catalog would be entirely available digitally, but that never happened because of greed.