Video streaming has seemingly become the go-to way to watch movies. There are thousands of titles available at the touch of a button. Every device with an internet connection and a screen, or that even attaches to one, contains apps for watching movies. Among all of the available options, Netflix is still viewed as the king of all streaming services. However, this is perhaps a title that they should give up, as it turns out they don’t have nearly as many movies as their major competitors.
When you run the numbers, it turns out that Netflix actually ranks third in the total number of titles available:
Amazon Prime: 20,386Hulu: 10,244Netflix: 7,008
The data comes courtesy of Instant Watcher, Justwatch.com, Somethingtostream.com and Barclays Research and was compiled by Business Insider.
Netflix's library of movie and television titles has been slowly shrinking over the last few years. Much of their focus in recent years has been television. And Netflix does have more TV series available than Amazon Prime, but Netflix still loses to Hulu in that category as well.
Of course, winning the battle for quantity is only part of the war. If you get most of your TV and movies online, you’ve probably come across a number of streaming services that have lots of content, but very little of it you’d actually want to watch. Netflix has been throwing more and more of their money behind original content, as opposed to the contracts that bring in TV and movies from other places. While many of these shows have turned out to be great, and there are even more on the way, time will tell if it’s enough to keep people tuned in. All three of these services produce some volume of their own content, and as those shows and movies will always be exclusive to their service; the better it is, the more people will continue to pay in order to have access to it.
Still, while quantity may not be everything, it does count for something, and these numbers show a huge difference. Amazon’s catalog is nearly three times the size of Netflix. If you’re somebody who can’t afford to subscribe to multiple services, and needed to make decisions based solely on which one was likely to have things you wanted to watch, it might make sense to default toward Amazon Prime. Besides you get two-day shipping on top of it which doesn't hurt.
Which streaming service(s) do you subscribe to? Which ones do you find have the things you want to watch? Let us know in the comments.
