We take a look into the frustrating phenomenon of films we want to watch disappearing from streaming platforms.
We’ve all been there. We spot that film we’ve long wanted to see, set aside time to stream it later and then, when we’re ready to go, we find that it’s disappeared. Gone and seemingly forgotten. In a digital world in which storage is almost infinite, platforms have seemingly bottomless pits of cash, and the market just keeps growing (according to Grand View Research, the global video streaming market is expected to be worth $224bn by 2028), why does material need to be deleted? And why so apparently suddenly? These are questions that many of us may have pondered.
The answers lie in the arcane world of licensing.
How films arrive
It all begins here. Filmmakers and studios enter into licensing contracts with the streaming platforms, through which we view their work. On the face of it, you might think that such licences are straightforward. A studio allows Netflix or Amazon for instance to show its product – how complex can that be? Well, ‘very’. This is largely because agreements reflect a number of variables including… a limited time period. Normally a period of years, rarely ‘in perpetuity’.
A limited geographic territory: rights to films in different countries may be held by different companies so, just because a friend in the US can watch a film on Netflix US, we shouldn’t assume that we can on Netflix UK.
Exclusivity or sharing: platforms will pay way more for exclusive rights of course because it makes them the only game in town if we want to see that film. In 2016 Disney did an exclusive deal with Netflix which meant that if you wanted to see the latest Disney film anywhere else, you were out of luck.
Commercial terms: primarily a fixed single payment or a variable pay-per-view revenue share. This is important to the specific platforms because of their differing business models which include subscriptions (e.g. Netflix, Britbox, and BFI Player), advertising (e.g. Channel 4 and ITV) or pay-per-view transactions (e.g. Google Play Movies and Dogwoof on Demand.)
The combination of all these inevitably creates complexity and volume. A single film will likely have many licences.
These licences are acquired by the streaming platforms: a) directly with the creator companies such as the film studios, b) via distributors, or c) via automated content marketplaces (it’s a measure of the complexity of the process that these exist at all: like the financial comparison sites we all use for our insurance and the like, they’re there to take the legwork away).
Negotiations will undoubtedly reflect a tug of war between the content creators (who likely see themselves in the driving seat given that the platforms have nothing to show without them) and the platforms (who similarly likely see themselves in the driving seat because the creators have no audience without them). The extent of this will of course vary according to the films themselves – are they current hot property or older material being relicensed? Oh, to be a fly on the wall.
It’s clearly very much in the interest of the bigger platforms with the necessary resources (such as Amazon Prime and Netflix) to create their own films and TV shows so that most of this goes away. There will be significant new costs in production as well as residual payment commitments to actors and suchlike, but the resulting film becomes a company-owned asset. We can see this shift to owned ‘content’ everywhere we look.
And how they depart
Looking at the terms of licences above makes it pretty obvious why some films disappear: the contract expires, the creator sets up their own streaming service (such as Disney’s creation of Disney+ or NBCUniversal’s launch of Peacock, both of which meant that their material on other platforms headed for the exit), or the platform decides that the cost is too high.
Where platforms decide to walk away from film content, they will have calculated the risks and benefits. Like so much right now, this is largely down to (big) data.
As the leader, Netflix is a good example. The company’s data mining teams access users’ viewing history (what we watched, how long we watched it, the device on which we watched it, whether or not subtitles were used, how we rated it, what we search for, that sort of thing) and use it to make suggestions to us personally for what to watch next. Importantly here though, it also uses the aggregate data to set the price that it’s willing to pay when it’s in the market. This process of course identifies winners and losers: you may personally love a film, but if Netflix users overall don’t then chances are it’ll ultimately disappear.
When is a purchase not a purchase?
Discovering that a film is no longer available just as you’re about to watch it is one thing, but how about finding out after you’ve bought it? That’s the very situation that led David Andino to sue Apple in 2020, after a film he bought was no longer available to him. He argued that, had he understood that licence withdrawal could remove what he’d purchased, he would not have chosen to pay the premium charged to ‘Buy’ rather than ‘Rent’.
