Decreasing Netflix Films Leaves College Students Bored

By Victoria Robertson on March 29, 2016

College students love to procrastinate, and what better way to do that than to watch Netflix on an endless loop? Netflix is the greatest invention since sliced bread, and I think we all can agree.

So it only makes sense that there’s outrage when it comes to Netflix’s major decrease in what we can and can’t watch on the site. We can no longer sit back and enjoy endless hours of movies because, well, there just aren’t as many on the site.

What many don’t know however, is that this is all part of the company’s grander plan.

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According to an AllFlicks report, Netflix has a total of 6,494 movies and 1,609 TV shows in the U.S. as of January 2014. Now, Netflix has a total of 4,335 movies and about 1,197 shows.

For those of you that aren’t math majors, that’s about a 33 percent drop in films and a 26 percent drop in TV shows in a period of about two years.

Netflix has earned itself a reputation for showing Hollywood films and shows so viewers can binge-watch, but has also even transformed into a distributor of original content as well, including famous shows such as House of Cards and Orange is the New Black.

While this is great for those of us that watch these shows, this is also a large part of the reason that the non-original content is slowly diminishing over time. Basically, as the original content increases, the Hollywood content decreases.

And to make matters worse, Netflix hasn’t renewed its deal with Epix (the movie channel), which means that some of the bigger hits, such as The Wolf of Wall Street and World War Z, are no longer available.  

Plus, with competitors out there now such as Hulu and Amazon, getting rights for programming is much more difficult, and much more expensive. And because Hulu and Amazon are more aggressive in procuring these rights, licensing costs are increasing exponentially, leaving Netflix to decide whether or not it’s worth the extra cost.

So in this way, Netflix doesn’t appear to have a problem with the shrinking video library.

Ted Sarandos, Chief Content Officer, said that the company wasn’t interested in licensing shows that weren’t exclusive to Netflix. So the company has, instead, 600 hours of original content slated for release this year.

Plus, the company feels that their sophisticated “recommendation” algorithms, used by matching shows that a specific user has watched to shows they haven’t yet, but might enjoy, will be able to direct users to the content best suited for them.

So while there might be less content all together, users should still have no problem finding content that they actually like.

And so far, aside from all the complaints about a decrease in library films and shows, Netflix isn’t experiencing any problems: people are still subscribing.

In fact, based on the data from the AllFlicks study, Netflix has actually added about 12 million subscribers in the U.S. alone.

So while you might not have nearly as many films and shows to choose from, you’re still choosing to watch Netflix because it’s inexpensive, it’s there, and there’s still a great variety of content, even if it isn’t as full as it was before.

So don’t be afraid of this decrease just yet, you can start worrying when the content isn’t up to par with what you’ve come accustomed to watching.

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In the meantime, sit back and watch The Office for the millionth time — it may not be new content, but it will never stop being funny. And, more importantly, it’s going to cure your boredom.

Netflix may be on a diet, but it’s still the fun-loving, binge-watching machine you’ve come to love.

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