Remember the Long Tail? It’s Dead.
In April, a little more than 25 years after Netflix shipped its first DVD, co-CEO Ted Sarandos announced that the company would be shutting down its disc-mailing business for good at the end of September. The company’s once-iconic red envelopes aren’t even a distant memory for Heartstopper-bingeing Zoomers, and though physical rentals were still bringing in profits, revenue dropped 50 percent in 2022. Sarandos, who admitted years ago that he “never spent one minute trying to save the DVD business,” was only too happy to swing the ax. But a small group of die-hards are riding it out until the end, watching their mailboxes for their final shipment and one last chance to clear the queue.
The vast majority of Netflix’s subscribers won’t even notice the change. But Ryan Godfrey will. Godfrey, who I’ve known since we worked together at a now-defunct alt-weekly, steps onto his porch carrying a 6-inch stack of thin red envelopes, a token of the 900 discs he’s rented from Netflix since he signed up in 2000. Back then, he recalls, Netflix’s DVD rentals “sounded like a cool way to supplement the local video store.” Blockbuster might run out of a hot new release, and even the most well-stocked specialty video store had its blind spots, but Netflix seemed to have everything, with a collection that at its height boasted more than 100,000 different titles. My white whale was The Mahabharata, avant-garde theater director Peter Brook’s three-hour adaption of the Sanskrit epic, which probably would have just gathered dust at my local video store if they’d purchased a copy. But there it was on Netflix, ready to show up at my door with only a few days’ notice.
Netflix also had the queue, a godsend for methodically-minded cinephiles intent on working their way through the spiritual explorations of Robert Bresson or the martial-arts catalogue of the Shaw brothers. “They had things that even the big chains weren’t getting,” recalls Steve Carlson, who also joined the service in 2000. “I was really getting into horror at the time, and they had all these great releases from places like Anchor Bay, Image Entertainment, and Synapse. If you wanted to be able to see those films without having to buy all of them, that was where you went.”
The queue, Godfrey remembers, “was revolutionary at the time,” a fluid and intuitive way of organizing your movie-watching in the short and longer term. (It didn’t eliminate household arguments about who got to pick last time, but at least now you could have them at home instead of at the store.) But the whole idea behind it feels archaic now, and not just because, after porting the queue over to its streaming platform, Netflix phased out the term in 2013. The change from the queue to “My List” seemed like a minor adjustment at the time, but it prefigured a more profound shift from the comprehensive expansiveness of renting discs by mail to the patchy instantaneity of the streaming era.
In the early years of the new millennium, internet theorists and tech startups were fixated on the long tail, the idea, popularized by a 2004 Wired article and subsequent book, that on-demand manufacturing and digital distribution would disrupt the winner-take-all logic of monopoly capitalism and allow businesses to profit by making a nigh-infinite variety of products available to any audience, no matter how small. You could sell one book to a million people, but you could also sell them a million different books, especially once you were freed from the storage constraints of a brick-and-mortar store. The problem is that this theory, that “the future of business is selling less of more,” turned out to be, at least in some cases, almost exactly wrong. Faced with the internet’s overwhelming range of choices, people retreat to the familiar, or flock to the latest TikTok trend. In a 2018 study, researchers found that increasing the number of available movies by a mere 1,000 titles decreased the market share occupied by the bottom 1 percent of DVDs—the ones the long-tail effect should benefit most—by more than 20 percent. Faced with even more options, people just gave up entirely. “When instead of 20,000 DVDs you can choose from 50,000 or 100,000 or 1 million,” the study’s co-author, Wharton professor Serguei Netessine, explained, “what happens is demand for all movies goes down.”
In the years before Netflix started producing its own content, its streaming offerings were an indiscriminate mixture of trash and treasure. My earliest streaming history includes Robert Redford’s 1970s political satire The Candidate, Charles Burnett’s To Sleep With Anger, a now-canonized classic that at that point had never been released on video, and long stretches of Damages and Dexter, the latter mainly watched via iPhone with a sleeping toddler on my shoulder. But as their members migrated from discs to streams—by 2012, there were already about twice as many people watching Netflix over the internet as via DVD players—Netflix’s offerings increasingly reflected the understanding that, while people may think they like the idea of having tens of thousands of options a click away, in practice, they’re only interested in watching a handful of them, and they’re not especially picky about what that handful contains. The movies in Netflix’s weekly Top 10 are such a grab bag of recent hits and justly forgotten bombs that it sometimes feels like the product of a secret behavioral experiment to test just how many people can be simultaneously persuaded that they’re in the mood to watch We’re the Millers.
Netflix won’t say how many movies are on the service at any given time, but estimates put it at fewer than 4,000, less than 5 percent of the vast universe it once provided.* Where Netflix’s disc-by-mail service promised you could watch anything you wanted, its streaming incarnation merely promises that you’ll always be able to watch something. In the DVD era, Netflix’s queue would not only show you what was available but what wasn’t—if a disc ended up lost or damaged, the title would be grayed out and it would sink to the bottom of the page. But if a title on your list leaves the site, as dozens do every month, it just disappears: off of Netflix, out of mind. I rarely look at my list at all these days, but when I do, I’m vaguely annoyed that it’s full of things I’ve already watched, as if one time through Army of the Dead wasn’t enough. It’s no longer an agenda, something to be meticulously arranged and checked off one item at a time. (The cinephiles have Letterboxd for that now.) It’s just a pile of stuff.
When Hollywood’s legacy conglomerates launched their own streaming services in 2020, they followed Netflix’s initial model: one low price for a mountain of content. For less than $10 a month, you could access every movie Disney ever made, plus all the Marvels and NatGeo specials you could stuff your eyeballs with. Twice that, and HBO Max would serve up a vast trove of Hollywood history, from Batman to Casablanca, not to mention Game of Thrones and Friends. But they followed Netflix’s arc at an accelerated clip. Two and a half years after HBO Max launched, it started pulling down titles by the fistful, and six months later, Disney+ and Hulu followed suit. “This whole idea of warehousing content on Max, on a streaming platform, in retrospect is incomprehensible,” the CFO of HBO’s parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery, recently told investors. “A small percentage of titles really drives the vast majority of viewership and engagement.” Any title outside that small percentage is at risk of being removed, and while a movie or a TV show that went off the air might once have still been available on disc at your local video store, now, not even the people who create the content own their own copies.
The unchecked sluice of streaming can make it seem like you’ll never run out of things to watch, but that doesn’t mean you can watch anything you want to. When the director William Friedkin died last month, many people were unpleasantly surprised to find his cult favorite To Live and Die in L.A. unavailable to stream at any price, even as a digital rental or purchase. The movie is available on Blu-ray, but while Netflix once had a copy in its library of discs, they didn’t in August. (My local library, at least, does.) In the streaming era, we’ve come to accept such artistic lacunae as a way of life, and if To Live and Die in L.A. isn’t available, you can still watch The Exorcist and The French Connection—not to mention Sorcerer and Cruising and Killer Joe. How much William Friedkin does one person need, anyway?
The digital era was supposed to leave the answer to that question—just how much do you want to watch?—up to you, not the vicissitudes of licensing agreements. That’s one reason Ryan Godfrey has held on to Netflix’s DVD service, even as its importance to his overall viewing has diminished. “Now, we have this explosion of available movies, and it’s not so crucial,” he says. “Most things you can find online if you subscribe to enough services and/or are willing to rent them. But that’s not everything.” In his final months of Netflix-by-mail, Godfrey has been concentrating particularly on movies that aren’t available online, like Greek director Theo Angelopoulos’ Ulysses’ Gaze, starring Harvey Keitel, and Why Change Your Wife?, a Cecil B. DeMille comedy from 1920 starring Gloria Swanson. Technically speaking, the latter is available on YouTube in a blotchy public-domain transfer, but it pales beside the DVD version from 2005, a moment when the flood of money to the home-video market spawned a flood of archival restorations that would be all but impossible now. (The dwindling of physical media has also all but killed the market for supplementary features like director commentaries, which many filmmakers who came up during home video’s peak have called the equivalent of going to film school for free.) Netflix’s physical catalog may have dwindled dramatically, but they still have “all these 20-year-old DVDs that the long tail determined someone was going to want,” Godfrey says. “And it’s true, because I want them.”
The sheer number of movies that are easily accessible to the average viewer has skyrocketed in the streaming era. If you’d told teenage me that, instead of waiting in line in a suburban storefront to see if Blue Velvet was back in stock, I could someday browse the Criterion Channel for hours on end, my head would have exploded on the spot. But even though David Lynch’s masterpiece of small-town malaise is now just a $3.99 iTunes rental away, I get the sense that’s a bridge too far for most people—even though, with the price of streaming subscriptions perpetually on the rise, the cost of renting a movie is essentially the same as it was in the 1990s. With so much available on the services people are already paying for, why go looking for the things that aren’t? Surely they’ll turn up on Netflix or Hulu or Prime or Max or Disney+ someday, and in the meantime, there’s already more close at hand than one person could watch in several lifetimes.
In a strange and unexpected way, we’ve come full circle. A Friday-night trip to the video store could be a voyage of discovery, but unless you thought to call ahead, it was more often a matter of settling for whatever happened to be on hand, making the most of a limited selection. Streaming services now offer a similar experience. In 1998, the average video store had between 1,500 and 2,500 titles; Max currently has just over 2,200. Some might match your wish list, others sound vaguely familiar, some merely look promising enough, a gateway to discovery or disappointment—but one way or another, they’re there. And if you’ve got your heart set on a specific movie, you can always rent it, or just ask Ryan Godfrey. It turns out Netflix still has The Mahabharata on DVD, and as we talked, Godfrey moved it to the top of his queue. If it comes in before Netflix stops sending out discs, he promises I can borrow it.
