Recently a friend of mine started a D&D campaign playing in ancient Egypt at the time of the pharaohs. I know just a little bit about that period of time, so in the interest of making the game a bit more authentic, I wanted to know more. Once upon a time I would have turned to a library, but between me having less time and the ongoing changes of how people get information from the internet these days, I looked for documentary films on ancient Egypt instead. And I made a surprising discovery: Netflix was a real let-down, not providing anything useful, not even an old version of "The Mummy". Amazon Prime on the other hand had several different documentaries and series on ancient Egypt.

In a way that isn't surprising. The core business model of Amazon is "the long tail". It started with books, where Amazon's distribution system simply can hold many more different books than your local bookshop. So while the local bookshop only has the most likely sellers on their shelves, Amazon has many of the books that the bookshop can't stock, "the long tail" of the demand curve. Yes, each of those books is in less demand than the bestsellers. But once people get used to buying at Amazon because the choice is so much bigger, they end up buying the bestsellers there as well, and the local bookshop is going out of business. It isn't really that surprising that for video streaming the same principles apply. Amazon Prime already has an advantage over Netflix because you get advantages like free delivery besides the video streaming. If in addition Amazon has a much bigger library, they gain yet another competitive advantage.

I use newsreaders in which you put keywords of stuff that interests you, and I get a stream of news about these subjects. Having put "Netflix" as one of my keywords, I got used to seeing articles of the kind "What's Leaving Netflix in June 2017". What I don't understand is the "Why?". I would think that the main cost for Netflix is actually streaming videos, while in comparison storing those videos costs relatively little. Is it the commercial agreement with the license holder which makes it too expensive for Netflix to store a "long tail" of rarely watched films? If that is the case, why wouldn't they make a deal in which the license holder gets paid in function of the number of times a film gets watched. Yes, that would be a small income only for both Netflix and the licensor, but a small income is better than no income at all. And a large enough pile of small incomes adds up to real money. Yes, I do watch "hot stuff" like House of Cards. But sometimes I want to watch something older and/or less popular. And "you need to watch this now, then it's gone" is annoying, because it feels like a chore. Netflix would do better with a long tail.