To be fair, I oversimplified the problem. Every film's rights are owned by someone, and the problem wouldn't be solved entirely by Netflix merely throwing money

To be fair, I oversimplified the problem. Every film's rights are owned by someone, and the problem wouldn't be solved entirely by Netflix merely throwing money at it. But the fact remains that there are a lot of great films from this period that as far as I can tell (and for some I've looked pretty hard) are not available for streaming on any platform - YouTube, Mubi, Netflix, Prime, iTunes, etc etc. [0] The problem is worse if A) you're not in the US and B) you are interested in stuff that wasn't a box office top 100 hit. It's an empirical question as to whether, as you say "the remaining few indie or abandoned flicks are not really worth it." Netflix has certainly decided that this is the case, but it's not obvious to me that they're right. [0] https://www.engadget.com/2018/08/10/missing-movies-not-available-for-streaming https://www.engadget.com/2018/08/10/missing-movies-not-avail...