What the End of DVDs Looks Like

It’s hardly a secret that Netflix’s discs by mail service is not long for this world, and that the company is shedding no tears as that business continues to decline. For people who care about cinema, though, and for people who worry that the selection of content readily available to the public is getting less and less eclectic, the truism that with every new media format we lose more and more films is particularly difficult to witness.

This article from Jon Brooks of Northern California public radio broadcaster KQED details in painful detail the increasingly unreliable selection of Netflix’s disc catalog, and how in many cases the service has become useless for accessing some of even the most widely praised and relatively recent films—largely swaths of Woody Allen’s filmography are missing, for instance. It’s a usefully frank look at a situation that’s deteriorating even as we speak, and yet we’re all more or less incapable of doing anything about it.

Read it at kqed.org.

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