Streaming catalogues shrink while you keep paying for them

One Friday evening, I had a specific wish: rewatch a film I’d added to my list on a platform. The page was still there. The play button had gone, replaced by a line saying the title was no longer available. There was no announcement, no email, no notice. In the end I watched it on a DVD borrowed from the library, which took six days and a library card.

A subscription doesn’t buy a catalogue, it rents access

A platform owns almost nothing it streams. It buys broadcast rights for a territory and a period, often a few years, sometimes less. When the window closes, the title leaves the catalogue, unless someone pays again to keep it. The contract sells you access to the service, not the presence of a given work in it, and the small print says so quite clearly.

The second mechanism is newer and less known. A platform that produces its own content can decide to remove it from its own catalogue, even though it owns the rights, when the royalties and storage for a rarely watched title outweigh what it earns. These films aren’t somewhere else. They’re nowhere.

Buying doesn’t protect you either

On online stores, the button says buy. What you get is a personal reading licence, enforced by a player that checks your rights against a server every time you open the file. If the publisher loses the rights, if the store shuts down, if the service changes format, the line stays in your library and the file won’t open. Several stores have closed this way, with partial refunds where there were any.

This dependency has a technical name and a practical consequence: control over playback stays with the seller, for life. A physical copy can be lent, resold, forgotten in a box for twelve years, and still work. That isn’t collector’s nostalgia, it’s a legal difference.

What disappears first

It isn’t the big titles. It’s the middling films, the documentaries, the single-country series, the old catalogues where nobody knows who holds the rights any more. Audiovisual heritage is now kept mostly by public institutions, national archives and libraries, the very places the same years have spent presenting as outdated.

I pay for two subscriptions. I watch good things on them, and I have no wish to go back to a shelf of plastic cases. But I started buying discs again for a handful of films, the ones I know I’ll want to see again in ten years, and I use a library whose catalogue doesn’t shrink at every renegotiation.