It’s become a commonplace that streaming services are treacherous. You put your faith in them to provide you with content, and they pull it according to bean-counter whim and puritanical outrage. Physical media is the only way to preserve culture! Even directors are getting in the act:

Christopher Nolan recently made headlines when he humorously urged fans to buy a physical copy of “Oppenheimer” on Blu-ray so that no “no evil streaming service can come steal it from you.”

Guillermo del Toro then echoed Nolan’s sentiment on X (formerly Twitter) by writing: “Physical media is almost a Fahrenheit 451 (where people memorized entire books and thus became the book they loved) level of responsibility. If you own a great 4K HD, Blu-ray, DVD etc etc of a film or films you love…you are the custodian of those films for generations to come.”

“‘Looney Tunes’ Mistakenly Put on Max’s List of Shows Exiting the Platform, Streamer Says ‘Show Will Continue Streaming’ After Fan Outrage“, Variety.com

It should be pointed out that stuff being made unavailable is entirely normal in the world of television. Shows get canceled. Things end. Looney Tunes has been around since the 1930’s. It’s okay for it to be over. All the really funny ones were made in the early years, anyway.

However, that’s not how streaming works. Streaming means “everything’s available whenever I want to watch it”. When shows broadcast at certain times, it made sense to limit the goods. There’s only so many hours in the day. But the whole point of streaming is that the audience picks the viewing time. So there’s no reason for anything to ever be off streaming, ever. At least, that’s the way audiences see it (the actual cost of server space and broadband connectivity is an issue unexplored, because the services have maintained opacity over who’s watching what, when)

In reality, of course, stuff gets pulled off streaming services all the time. It’s only popular stuff, stuff with fandoms, that ever gets rescued:

Warner Bros. Discovery’s streaming platform Max caused a bit of stir on Monday when it sent out its list of films and television series being added to and leaving the service in December. Included on the list of shows being taken off Max was “Looney Tunes,” one of the studio’s most cherished properties. The news sent “Looney Tunes” fans and Max subscribers into a frenzy on social media, with many infuriated at Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav for seemingly stripping Max of “Looney Tunes” content after his recent decision to scrap the “Looney Tunes” movie “Coyote vs. Acme” despite filming being already completed.

Was this the latest step in the total erasure of “Looney Tunes” at Warner Bros. as many fans feared? Not at all, according to Max. The streaming service later sent out an updated list and the following statement: “Please note – a revised What’s New on Max This December press release can be found below. ‘Looney Tunes’ was included in error as a title leaving the platform. This is not the case and the show will continue streaming on Max.”

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There are a few ways one can interpret this event. The first way is that this occurred exactly as written: Warner Brothers accidentally put Looney Tunes on the cancelled list, then quickly corrected the error. The second way is that Looney Tunes really was on the chopping block, but fan outrage forced the company to change their mind, whereupon they pretended that it was all “a mistake”. Customer is always right, and all that.

I ain’t buying that. First off, the time frame is too short. This all went down on Monday. Companies don’t just change their mind that quickly. There have to be meetings, so that the scapegoat can be properly identified. If this had occurred over the course of a week, maybe. One day? Nah.

Secondly, if the fans had that kind of power, they’d have stopped Warner Bros. from shelving the “Coyote vs Acme” movie mentioned in the Variety article. Instead, the thing is being turned into a write-off, then auctioned to other services. This is absurd: if you’ve already spent the money, and you already have a streaming service, just plug it in and let the fans watch what they’ve paid for. But NO, we make more money declaring it a flop ahead of time and then seeing which content-hungry service wants to pay us enough to cover the costs. This is what the business wants. What the fans want is irrelevant.

Which means, of course, that Nolan and Del Toro are absolutely right. If you really want to watch something whenever you want, you need a physical copy of it. It’s the difference between buying a house and renting one.