How digital streaming crowds out older movies and art-house films and threatens film and video history

There isn’t much not to like about streaming video. Subscribe to Netflix or Amazon Prime, and you can choose from thousands of film and TV titles with the press of a button. No VHS tapes to get chewed up by a tape player, no DVDs to clutter the living room and collect dust and scratches. Whole seasons of TV series ready for binge viewing. This is entertainment technology at its best.

Or is it? Film historians and film buffs would beg to differ. For them, the rapidity with which streaming has supplanted discs and tapes as a viewing mode is a bug, not a feature. As the mass audience gravitates toward the big streaming services, those services have more incentive to focus their streaming inventory on recent and self-produced titles.

“That crowds out older films,” says David Bordwell, a film historian at the University of Wisconsin. “They’re going to have less and less motive to highlight the classics in their catalogues.” That threatens the economics of film history. “How many restorations of old films will there be?” he asks. “How many foreign titles?”

For classic film buffs, the golden age may have been the 1980s, when the rapid spread of VHS tape players awoke major studios to the commercial potential of marketing their back catalogues for home viewing. The trend continued through the DVD era – Warner Bros, Universal, and Disney were especially notable preservers and marketers of their archives – but it may be fading as physical discs fall out of favour.

Netflix offers more than 4,700 film and TV titles for streaming. But only 19 were released before 1950, according to the search website justwatch.com. Netflix does include a “classics” genre in its inventory, but its definition is loose enough to encompass the 1970s features Jaws and Grease as well as the 1927 Fritz Lang silent masterpiece Metropolis.

As the big streaming services increasingly define themselves as purveyors of mass market fare, the way that many film buffs first discovered the glories of cinema history – through serendipity – is evaporating. Several services have sprung up online to serve the classic film buff audience, but they have to be sought out by those with a pre-existing interest in the field – and they each require a separate subscription.