While I probably should have found this in my search for sources when I wrote yesterday, I’ll chalk this one up to being rusty behind the wheel of a blog.
It looks like there is a lot more going on with the titles being removed from Netflix, and oddly enough, many of the titles that I could not access yesterday (May 1st) appear to have returned.
Here’s the meat of what The Verge had to say about the roughly 1800 titles that Nexflix is losing:
…the service will be saying farewell to 1,794 different titles in May. That number includes 15 seasons of South Park, old horror movies like Audrey Rose, and James Bond classics like Dr. No and Goldfinger. According to Slate, the drop comes because several licensing deals Netflix has in place with studios like MGM, Warner Bros., and Universal are expiring.
While it has been posited that the titles were disappearing because they were heading to the Warner Instant Archive streaming service, that appears to not be the case. Warner Instant took to Twitter today to emphasize that… …it [does] not carry titles from MGM or Universal…
With that said, it looks like I’m off in search of some other minor conspiracy theory. Good day to you.
-z