The Wonder Years not on Amazon Prime anymore?

I signed back up for prime a couple weeks ago and noticed that The Wonder Years is no longer available. When I had prime a year ago it was there. Does anybody know what happened? I saw they have a DVD set but it seems wildly expensive.

 

Amazon Prime probably had an agreement with the company that holds the rights to The Wonder Years stating that it could only carry the show on its streaming service for a set period of time.

 

Still on Netflix.

 

My guess is that it was licensed to streaming services to help stimulate demand for the DVD sets. Those are typically limited duration deals.

 

And this is why streaming sucks. Content can disappear at any time.

 

Amazon has also expressed interest in only carrying shows that are exclusively available on their service. They are going to begin letting contracts lapse if the show is already available on Netflix or another service. They have exclusive deals for series like Hannibal, Orphan Black, The Americans, etc.

 

I'm still amazed that each individual studio doesn't have their own streaming service making available everything they ever released. If you could get Wonder Years direct from Warner Bros., there's no middleman: direct from the studio to you. I'm baffled why they don't do this.

 

I dunno, I think that would be a terrible trend (and we're already seeing some of it). Who's gonna want to have to maintain a million different subscription services every month? One just for Universal titles, one just for WB, one just for Paramount, etc. I think people would just get frustrated and go back to downloading.

 

$$$$$ Too much cost to setup and maintain.

I also seriously question whether people would go for this. They would have to search and then go to a different studio website for what they want to view. Also pay multiple subscriptions - one for each studio. With Netflix it is one stop shopping.

 

Most people don't know - or care - which studio produced a show, they just want to watch it. Also, why would the studios set up their own infrastructure to stream these when they can get paid by Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, etc. for streaming rights?

 

They do have the Warner Archive service. No Wonder Years, but they do have Flo and Dumb and Dumber: The Animated Series.

http://instant.warnerarchive.com/index.html

 

Great. Now, imagine if they added the other 35,000 hours of entertainment they own or distribute. Everything ever commercially released deserves to be saved and made available in some form to the public.

Because if the studios did that, then they could keep all of the money and not have to split it with Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, iTunes, etc. As long as every show was available, you could just search until you found what you wanted.

 

Nobody wants to make $8.99 payments to a dozen different streaming services every month so you can have access to anything you might be interested in. We don't need a dozen branded "channels" to access content, what consumers really want is an all-you-can-eat-buffet where all the choices are available at a single destination.

 

That's coming...

 

It doesn't suck, it's just more reliable than broadcast TV used to be, and less reliable than owning every single DVD/BD on the planet.

Shoot, I can still remember the agony of having my favorite afternoon lineup of syndicated shows shaken up, or seeing a long-desired movie show up on TV at a time when I was not going to be able to watch it (and before it was possible to tape it). Granted both those situations were a long, long time ago, but streaming is an infinite step up from that even if content is only temporary.

 

People misunderstand what streaming services like Prime and Netflix are. They are not "libraries" of stuff that is there forever, they are TV channels like countless others whose programming changes with contracts with the copyright owners, demand from viewers and other market factors.

 

Exactly! They are on-demand TV stations where you can watch whatever you want to watch out of the hundreds/thousands of titles they offer, whenever you want to watch it. To say it "sucks" because content isn't guaranteed permanent is ridiculous.

 

It's been coming for 10 years that I know of, and is still not happening. Studio-owned streaming services were announced to be in development several years ago, and as far as I know only Sony is doing it... and what they offer is just a tiny trickle of what Sony owns through Sony Pictures TV, Columbia, Tri-Star, and all their various divisions.

 

But even if consumers could figure out what shows/movies were produced by which studios, would the profit between setting up/running your own servers, cost centers and customer service outweigh the advantages of just licensing it out to Netflix and others?

I don't know the numbers so this is rhetorical but I can't believe the difference would be that much, especially If you license it out to multiple outlets.

 

Naaaa, studios have billions and billions and billions of dollars, and the cost in bandwidth and in setting up the websites and/or connectivity would be trivial. I've seen it done and I know exactly what's involved. A large part of why they don't do it is that there are revolving doors among the "Digital Entertainment" executives at the various studios, and streaming efforts like this are announced, then a year later they fire whoever's in charge and bring in new people.

Another adjunct to this would be that (say) Sony Pictures could put up their 15,000 feature films and TV series (or at least the ones they can legally clear, master, and encode), and not only have them available on their own website, also make them available at slightly higher fees on competing services like YouTube, Amazon, Netflix, the whole shmear. Say, an episode of Leave It to Beaver is 69 cents from Sony, but 89 cents from Amazon... that kind of thing. There's a million ways to market this stuff, and I think it's far better than the alternative of releasing boxed sets of this material on DVD that sell to maybe 4000-5000 people. And it'd do well if there were discounts involved: 69 cents per show, or $5 for an entire season, or $25 for the entire series -- that kind of thing.

My point is that thousands and thousands of TV shows and movies are languishing in vaults and making zero money for the studios, zero money for the actors, directors, and writers, and are just getting lost in the mists of times. Hell, there's a ton of stuff from the 1970s you can't buy or see, at least legally. And that's not that long ago. Whether I personally like the shows and movies doesn't discount the fact that somebody out there might want to see it, and all of it deserves to be preserved and should be made available for the public.

 

This may be what these services are but that does not mean that there is not demand for a service that offers "everything" all the time. There are people who would buy into a service that offers this and frees up having to buy and maintain a library of DVDs.

 

Exactly. If you could find and stream any movie or TV series from a list of several million films, and do it easily and inexpensively, I think people would go for it. But the sad reality is that the studios are content to just plod along and let Amazon, Netflix, and the other companies shoulder all the work. I think less than 25% of popular films (and maybe 5% of all films ever made) are actually available right now. The number I saw was 10,000 films on Amazon and about 10,000 films on Netflix. This is not even a drop in the bucket, given that every major studio owns or controls at least 10,000 feature films and another 15,000+ TV episodes. Then add in the independent and foreign films & TV shows, and you're definitely into the millions of hours.

 

Yeah, and I agree too - it's what I'd want...it's just not what these guys are or what many think they are.

 

Wow. I just checked out the Warner instant out of curiosity. Talk about the obscure, bottom of the barrel offerings.

They want $10 a month for that? THankfully I can stream TCM as part of my cable deal.

 

To each his own. For Warner Archive customers, the fact that their deep-catalog offerings are obscure and in many cases long unavailable on video is the primary selling point for their service.