I’m not sure you’ve seen Netflix’s dwindling catalog, but they are very aware of this phenomenon and have been pivoting away from deep catalog to originals since at least 2012. I remember once a VP said in all hands, “our plan is to become HBO before HBO becomes us”

Their dwindling catalog is the result of the other services thinking that removing their old content from Netflix will help them. But nobody is going to subscribe to a different service just so they can do a one-time watch of a series that has been on Pirate Bay for five years, so all those companies are really doing is depriving themselves of the money Netflix would have paid them to license that series.

What about the super-series content? netflix just purchased the rights to Seinfeld for example -- probably for an insane amount of money. Or The Office which is leaving netflix in a few years.

Those probably drive new users and retain current ones.

That quote is interesting. I'm not surprised to be a minority but I've paid for Netflix for several years and at no point would I have subscribed to HBO instead (though I did look at doing it, but only for GoT).

It would be nice if media companies could stop trying to own the World and instead be content offering a good service for good compensation. When they get to that point they seem to go "well if we can force people to consume something else that they don't like as much then we can get even more customers". Bleurgh.

OTOH they were willing to pay almost $100 million a year just for rights to The Office.

I wonder if that included the rights to produce new content.

It did not.

NBC already owns the production rights to the Office. Under agreements with the various Hollywood talent guilds, they are required to pay market value for distribution rights such as exclusive online streaming, because that money gets paid to profit participants like producers, actors, writers, etc.

However, NBC is considering rebooting or spinning off the Office with some of the original cast.

Personal anecdote, but the reason i dropped the households Netflix subscription is because they had nothing on their back catalogue i wanted to watch.

I couldn't give two hoots about most of their original stuff which has been laughably mediocre and designed by committee at best, and I have no problem watching it in 5 years time off it's any good.

I just want a media delivery service where I look for something and then it plays, and so far that doesn't exist...

If so then government can take part. Government "technically" buys content of 5+ years old (at fixed price or whatever-measurement they have) to provider, then streaming sites pays a set of price to government to access those content.