This Millennium's Best Picture Oscar Winners Are Not On Netflix

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• A recent study commissioned by Hollywood shows that with 120 legal online services, movies and TV-shows are more accessible than ever before. Unfortunately, however, content remains scattered and the dominant streaming service Netflix doesn't have any of the best picture Oscar winners of this century in its U.S. catalog.

  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)

   

  Year	Movie	Available US?	Available elsewhere?
  torrentfreak.com
  2015	Spotlight	No	No
  2014	Birdman	No	Yes, Canada
  2013	12 Years a Slave	No	Yes, Japan and South Korea
  2012	Argo	No	Yes, Afghanistan and 115 others
  2011	The Artist	No	Yes, Aruba and 10 others
  2010	The King’s Speech	No	Yes, Venezuela and 51 others
  2009	The Hurt Locker	No	Yes, Cuba and 58 others
  2008	Slumdog Millionaire	No	Yes, Samoa and 23 others
  2007	No Country for Old Men	No	Yes, Guyana and 58 others
  2006	The Departed	No	Yes, Antarctica and 34 others
  2005	Crash	No	Yes, Suriname and 45 others
  2004	Million Dollar Baby	No	Yes, Holy See and 3 others
  2003	The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King	No	Yes, Azerbaijan and 131 others
  2002	Chicago	No	Yes, Haiti and 45 others
  2001	A Beautiful Mind	No	Yes, Norfolk Island and 21 others
  2000	Gladiator	No	Yes, Montserrat and 45 others
  1999	American Beauty	Yes	Yes, Bhutan and 210 others
  1998	Shakespeare in Love	Yes	Yes, Puerto Rico and 6 others
  1997	Titanic	No	Yes, Canada
  1996	The English Patient	Yes	Yes, Martinique and 52 others

  The Oscar-winner limitations don’t seem to be tied to the Best Picture category either. Of the twelve films that won an Oscar in 2013, only two are listed in the U.S. Netflix library.

  The two films are “The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life,” which won an Oscar for the best short documentary, and “The Great Gatsby” which won the Oscars for best costume and best production design.

  We can’t and won’t point any fingers as to the source of this availability “problem.” It might be that the studios are reluctant to put their most acclaimed titles on Netflix, or perhaps Netflix isn’t willing to pay enough.

  However, the above does illustrate that in its current form, Netflix alone is certainly not going solve Hollywood’s piracy problems. This is an important note, as Netflix is by far the most popular consumption platform for films and TV-shows.

  Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter whether there are 12 or 12,000 legal video platforms in a country. More services may actually mean that it becomes less convenient for consumers, as long as the content is scattered.

  https://torrentfreak.com/this-millenniums-best-picture-oscar-winners-are-not-on-netflix-160402/