There was a period, roughly a decade long, when the pitch made sense. One subscription, an enormous library, everything you might want to watch in one place for less than a couple of cinema tickets a month. Compared to renting DVDs it was miraculous.

That period is over, and the thing that ended it wasn't price rises, though those happened. It was that the libraries got smaller and nobody mentioned it.

What actually changed

Three separate contractions, happening at once.

Licensed content went home. In the early years, the big streaming libraries were built largely from other studios' back catalogues. Then those studios launched their own services, and naturally they wanted their own films on them. Enormous volumes of licensed content simply left.

Originals started disappearing. This was the genuinely surprising one. Shows that a service had commissioned, produced and released were removed entirely — not moved elsewhere, removed. In several cases they became unavailable to buy or stream anywhere.

The reason is tax and residuals. Writing off a completed production as a loss can be worth more to a company than the revenue it generates, and removing it also stops residual payments accruing. That's a rational accounting decision that treats finished creative work as a balance sheet item, and it's produced some genuinely alarming outcomes.

Regional rights got messier, not cleaner. The same service in two countries can have radically different libraries, and titles rotate in and out as territorial deals expire. Which means "it's on there" is now a statement that requires a country and a date.

The measurement problem

Part of why this went unnoticed is that nobody publishes the numbers. Services don't announce removals in advance, don't maintain public catalogues of what's been taken down, and don't notify subscribers when something on their list vanishes.

Third-party trackers exist and they consistently show catalogue sizes on major services declining from their peaks, even as spending on new production has risen. Fewer titles, more expensive titles.

Which is a coherent strategy — a smaller number of high-profile shows to drive subscriptions — and it's the opposite of the original promise, which was breadth.

What it means practically

The practical consequence is that streaming has stopped being a library and become a schedule. You watch what's available now, because it might not be next month.

That's a return to something very like broadcast television, with the addition that you pay for it directly and it's still full of adverts on the cheaper tiers.

It also means that anything you actually care about is not safe. A film you love, a series you rewatch every couple of years — its continued availability depends on a licensing negotiation you'll never hear about.

The preservation angle

This is where it gets more serious than a consumer irritation.

Physical media had an unglamorous property: it persisted. A DVD in a drawer is a copy that exists regardless of what any company decides. Libraries and archives collected them. Enthusiasts kept them.

Digital-only releases have no equivalent. A show that only ever existed on one platform, and is then removed from that platform, may have no legitimate surviving public copy at all. There are documented cases of exactly this.

Archivists have been raising this for years and the response from the industry has been minimal. There's no legal obligation in most jurisdictions to deposit a copy of a streaming original anywhere, and no commercial reason to do so.

We are, quietly, in a period where a meaningful amount of television is being made and then permanently deleted. Future historians of the medium are going to find a hole.

What you can do

Not much, honestly, but some things.

Buy physical copies of things you genuinely love, while that remains possible. It's more expensive per title and it's the only form of ownership on offer.

Where a digital purchase is available, understand what you're buying. In most storefronts a "purchase" is a long-term licence that can be revoked if the seller loses distribution rights, and this has happened to real customers with real libraries. The terms say so; nobody reads them.

And keep a list. If you rely on a watchlist inside one service, that list is a set of pointers that quietly break. A plain text file of things you want to watch, held by you, survives the platform.

The wider pattern

What's happening with streaming catalogues is a specific instance of something general: the replacement of ownership with access, and the discovery that access is conditional in ways ownership wasn't.

It applies to music, books, games and software as much as to film. In each case the convenience was genuine and the trade was real, and in each case the terms of the trade were disclosed in a document nobody read and are being adjusted gradually in one direction.

I don't think this reverses. The economics favour it too strongly. But it's worth being clear-eyed that the thing being sold in 2026 is not the thing that was sold in 2016, even though the branding and roughly the price point are the same.