Speaking of Ozymandias . . . (The Fate of Netflix)

Reading of Netflix's recent woes I have found myself thinking of how much what the company has to offer has changed.

The original idea was that it was a giant video rental that sent you DVDs through the mail. You joined, and then had access to everything, more or less.

It wasn't perfect, of course. The queues, the mailing, were limiting and cumbersome compared to being able to stream anything they had in their collection all day long from anywhere you happen to be. Even before getting into such headaches as discs which were mismailed, or damaged, or how gaps appeared in their offerings that never got filled (as with a TV series where some disc you wanted right in the middle became available), you got only X number of discs at a time, and if there was something in particular you wanted to see now at the top of your queue you could end up waiting quite a while before getting it.

Still, there was that they-have-everything aspect.

Now, at least where streaming is concerned, a service that has everything is not even an idea, the whole media universe ever more fragmented. This is not only a matter of the "exclusive" content so many are creating, and which prestige TV lovers can't get enough of, but simply a matter of seeing even the higher-profile of Hollywood's wide release feature films.

The poptimist-minded entertainment journalism crowd, of course, doesn't acknowledge that anything has been lost that way. But I, for one, think that the idea of signing up for multiple subscription services (and paying their fees) just to see what we were able to get in one place is not very attractive. And all the original content, which even some of the entertainment journalism crowd seem to be starting to acknowledge isn't somehow intrinsically and eternally the magic they made it out to be for so long (the words "Netflix is the New Cable" are fast becoming a cliché), seem poor compensation for the fact.

All the same, I have a hard time picturing Netflix's troubles doing much to bring anything like the old Netflix back, either under the Netflix label or anywhere else.