Commentary

Want to Watch a Movie? You Should Ditch Netflix

By Ben Stockton

Published June 19, 2024

It’s time to stop renting that newest movie with Netflix and start owning our favorite movies and TV shows again. Here’s why.

A few weeks ago, I wanted to watch an Adam Sandler movie I’ve watched on Netflix before. It wasn’t there.

This isn’t a rare occurrence. To enjoy any kind of content on streaming services, you now have to keep an encyclopedia in your own head of what you can watch and where. Oh, that TV show was on Netflix, but it no longer has the rights to it. Now it’s gone, and now I can’t find it anywhere.

You’ll have faced this problem (or you will, at some point, if you haven’t). The answer is simple. If you want to watch a movie or a TV series, you need to ditch Netflix and the rest of your streaming services.

Streaming services have replaced security with convenience

When Netflix launched in the U.K. in 2012, I was an immediate adopter. I had absorbed enough U.S. culture to know what Netflix was and how much of an impact it has in the market. 

Online streaming in the U.K. up until that point had largely been left to players like the BBC, with its own (very successful) iPlayer project. Other U.K. broadcasters had their own services or were soon launching them, but our internet connections weren’t hugely suited for it yet.

Netflix changed the game. The depth and variety of content, as well as the huge Netflix budgets, turned Brits into Netflixaholics. As a nation, we ditched our DVD players. Physical media became obsolete. You could watch everything you wanted through services like Netflix, online, for just a single monthly fee—why wouldn’t you?

Because in doing so, consumers stopped owning TV series and movies. Instead, we simply rented them. We lost the security of our physical DVDs. As soon as the fee ends, we lose access, and the depth of that access is up to Netflix itself. A lot more of its content now is self-produced, but in the early days, most of what it offered was down to distribution rights agreements with companies like MGM or Universal.

You’re paying, again and again, for the same content

The monthly fee for streaming services is for a rental agreement. You agree to rent access to all of Netflix’s services for 30 days. That means that you’re paying, again and again, for the same content, much of it that you wouldn’t watch.

You don’t have terms and conditions when you own a DVD or Blu-Ray

In contrast, a DVD or a Blu-Ray might cost you, but you’ll only pay that cost once. You own the product. You can play it now, in three months, in five years, and never again have to pay it again. 

Let’s put this into perspective. A standard Netflix subscription costs (at the time of publication) $15.49 a month. That’s $185.88 a year. Over five years, that’s $929.40, which doesn’t factor in likely price rises. How many DVDs or Blu-Ray disks could you buy, for series or movies that you actually enjoy, for $1000? 

Your physical media isn’t at the whim of a rights contract

The problem with streaming services is the content available on them changes with the expiry of the contracts that those services hold with media distributors.

In the early Netflix days, this wasn’t as big of a problem—it had a good rights agreement with most of the major players in the media market. It offered a good alternative to cable providers and the switch from physical media made sense because you didn’t need to worry about not finding what you wanted to watch.

The market is much more cutthroat now. Distributors and media creators like Paramount have launched their own services. The rights to different types of content are now split up among them, making it harder to watch all of the TV series and movies that you might want to watch—as well as more expensive.

With physical media, this isn’t a problem you ever have to think about. MGM goes bust? No problem, you’ve got your Stargate DVDs ready. Paramount is having trouble? That’s fine because your Star Trek collection is safe to watch at any point.

It’s time for physical media to make a comeback

My point is simple. As the streaming market suffers with dwindling numbers of subscribers and fragments with each new service launch, the choice for consumers becomes worse.  It costs more and more money to rent the content we want to watch every month, all while the choice becomes poorer. 

The prices go up, and the available content reduces. The only solution is to start buying physical media again. If you own the DVD or Blu-Ray, you own it for good. You’re still supporting the distribution chain, so companies like Paramount are still getting their cut. 

By physically owning the media you love to consume, all of the problems I’ve listed here (missing content, price rises, and more) disappear. You can then turn services like Netflix into the rental service it truly is—a luxury you can enjoy on occasion, but not something that you have to rely on completely.