An often heard excuse from pirates is that they can’t find the content they’re looking for in their home country, at least not for a decent price.
In recent months Hollywood has started to attack what they see as a myth, pointing out that movies and TV-shows are more widely available than ever before.
“The number of online platforms for legally viewing movies and TV shows continues to grow steadily, making more creative content from all over the world available to more audiences than ever before, ” the MPAA’s Julia Jenks wrote last week.
“There are now more than 480 unique legitimate online services available in countries around the world and 120 such services available in the United States.”
This is correct and backed up by a recent MPAA-commissioned study. But there’s also an important element missing from the analysis. Unlike the music industry, where subscription services such as Spotify offer the most popular content, the video market is much more scattered.
Perhaps the public doesn’t want to use dozens of different services to watch movies and TV-shows?
And what about the news that the content library of the dominant video platform Netflix is shrinking rather than growing? Earlier this week Allflix showed that the U.S. Netflix catalog has shrunk by more than 2, 500 titles since 2014.
This prompted us to conduct a small survey, looking at some of the top movies made over the past two decades – the winners of the Academy Award’s Best Picture category. Quite surprisingly, none of the films that won the prestigious award this millennium are available on the U.S. version of Netflix.
We have to go all the way back to 1999 to spot the first Best Picture Oscar winner on Netflix, American Beauty.
Interestingly, many of the more recent Oscar winners are available in other regions, such as Afghanistan, Antarctica, Aruba, Canada, Guyana, Haiti and Venezuela, to name a few.
As can be seen in the table below, the only Best Picture-winning film that’s not on a non-U.S. version of Netflix is Spotlight, which makes sense as it hasn’t been released for the home-entertainment market yet.
Best Picture Oscar Winners on Netflix? (April 2016)
