Come May 1st, many of our Netflix queues are going to be much lighter due to 1794 movies disappearing from instant streaming. According to a story over on Slate, all of Warner Bros, MGM and Universal’s properties will become exclusive domain of the new Warner Bros. streaming movie service which, while disheartening to us longtime Netflix fans, makes business sense. What with Netflix, Hulu, Vudu, Crackle, Amazon Instant, Ultraviolet, Warner Instant, etc. consumers have tons of services to choose from, so why would any company want to give their competitor any kind of help in this multi-billion dollar market?
Business sense aside, this further screws over customers, and while it will most likely hand Warner higher profits than they would have received via Netflix, I can’t help but think there will be a lot of angry people who will completely eschew this new service and won’t be willing to give them a dime (this group would include me).
Unfortunately, Netflix subscribers aren’t exactly surprised by this kind of thing happening. When a deal with Starz fell through a few years ago, a ton of content was removed in one fell swoop, and while some of it has trickled back in, most are now only available via other services.
You can see the full list of movies that will be taken down over at Instant Watcher, and while there is a ton of crap going away, there are some great films as well. You have until the stroke of midnight to before they vanish, so you’d better get watching!