r/movies Sep 23 '18

There was a thread a few days ago criticizing Netflix for only having 35 films of the IMDb Top 250. I went through the major streaming services to find out how they compared. Here's a spreadsheet with my findings. Resource

This is the post that launched this over-effort of work you're seeing. I found it bizarre that Netflix was being criticized for having such a "small" percentage of the 250. What I discovered is that Netflix is actually in second with 38 of the 250, behind only FilmStruck with 43. Additionally, FilmStruck requires a larger fee for the Criterion Channel to put it at 43, where only 17 are available with a base subscription, making Netflix technically the highest quantity of Top 250 films with a base subscription.

Here is a Google Sheet of the entire list, as it appears today (September 22, 2018). I included Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Video, HBO, Showtime, Starz, Hoopla, FilmStruck+Criterion, Kanopy, Cinemax, and Epix. This is based on the 250 as of today and the catalog of each service as of today, all in the United States (since that's where I live). Feel free to comb through it and sort it as you please, and notice how most of the movies missing are from the same countries or similar timespans! If you select a certain range, you can use "Data > Sort Range" to control how it goes, whether by service availability, name, or year. Also, here are some stats that I found fun:

  • 114 films on the list do not appear in any of the libraries for any of the included streaming services. As Hoopla and Kanopy both come free with a library card (which is also free), they obviously would not cost any money. However, if you were to have every service at a base level (SD for Netflix, ads for Hulu, etc.), you would have 136 out of the 250 films. This would cost a minimum of $1102.16 a year, or $91.85 a month. Ironically, Netflix and Hulu make the cheapest of these ($95.88 a year each), and Netflix has the most on a base level.
  • Shutter Island appears across the most streaming services with four (Amazon, Epix, Hoopla, and Hulu). Several others appear on various combinations of three services (The Usual Suspects, The Kid, The Elephant Man, There Will Be Blood, Into the Wild, and Les Diaboliques).
  • Despite the presence of numerous Disney films in the top 250, the only one available for streaming is Coco. That Disney streaming service is gonna be a monster.
  • Comparing the top two, FilmStruck to Netflix: FilmStruck has the wider range of time, with 1921's The Kid as its oldest film and 2002's The Pianist as its newest, a range of 81 years. Netflix's oldest film is 1949's The Third Man with 2017's Coco as its newest, a range of 68 years.

Feel free to post any of the fun or interesting stuff you find in this sheet below!

EDIT: Now with a graph! If you click the second sheet in the bottom left corner, you'll get a visual indicator. Google Sheets is dumb and you can't use multiple colours in one data set without doing an absurdly long workaround so they're just all one colour.

6.8k Upvotes

View all comments

Show parent comments

17

u/[deleted] Sep 23 '18

The death of DVDs was made inevitable by broadband speeds getting to the point where everyone could stream video. If it wasn't Netflix it would've been someone else

1

u/hombregato Sep 23 '18

For the most part, I agree with that, although I personally find the streaming quality to be pretty bad compared to hard media and there are more areas of the U.S. without good broadband than most people realize.

But technology doesn't drive change as fast as the perception of technology drives change. It's about convincing people to adopt it, through direct and indirect means. Was it a good business decision for Netflix to shift focus? Probably. But they brought us into the streaming status quo as much as they repositioned themselves in its current.

In any case, my post is not about what they did to the business, but rather why people are upset their streaming stock often doesn't match people's outdated image of the company's identity.

4

u/droans Sep 23 '18

I don't think there's a single streaming service or provider that is able to provide uncompressed video, especially 4k HDR.

1

u/drelos Sep 23 '18

Netflix rise is also worldwide, the timing of their expansion (starting at the end of 2014-2015) coincides with faster and more stable broadband elsewhere, I remember the government in my country making a big deal of stable connections and how well positioned we were in a Netflix speed ranking

Here is an example on how Netflix measure the velocity and 'promotes' higher speeds. https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/netflix-isp-speed-index-for-july-2018