In case you can't tell, movies are a huge part of my life. Luckily for me, my wife loves them as well. For the first several years of marriage, I think we spent more time at Blockbuster Video than we did anywhere else. When we moved out of the city and into the suburbs, we were giddy at the fact that we had a Blockbuster a block away and a family video a little further. We were in movie heaven!
Like everyone else, we jumped on the amazing deals Netflix was offering for their DVD service in the early 2000s. Eventually, the Blockbusters were all shuttered and we exclusively relied on Netflix. We loved it. We had a never ending stream (no pun intended) of movies coming to our mailbox. And then there was an announcement that they would be phasing out DVDs and relying more on digital streaming. I lost my shit! I was furious! I was convinced the quality of the streaming service would be horrible and I would not be able to get through a movie without it dropping. I also figured I would have to go back to the old days of watching a scramble version of National Lampoons Vacation on a wavy Spectrum TV broadcast in hopes of catching something R rated. I predicted that Netflix would be out of business in a year and Blockbuster would come roaring back.
Ummmm luckily I didn't put my money where my mouth was. Thank god I did not buy any Blockbuster stock.
My current world history unit that I am teaching is about world religions. Because I love to use pop culture as a way to hook kids into my lessons, I figured I'd check out what I could find on Netflix. Spoiler alert, I didn't settle on anything yet. And it is not because I couldn't find anything. It was the exact opposite. I found way too much. In fact I got sidetracked by doing a little research on how much content they actually have. Netflix has over 5600 Movies and TV shows on the platform in the U.S. That isn't counting individual episodes. When you do that, you are talking about more than 30,000 episodes and movies. THIRTY THOUSAND! That is amazing.
Sure enough, they have tons of choices for the 5 major religions we teach about: Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism. I was actually surprised by how much religious content it has. But that's the amazing thing about Netflix, because they cast such a huge net, there is a ton of content I didn't even know they had. Instead of being a TV station that must capture millions of viewers all at once with one specific show, Netflix can rely on catching the interest of a few hundred thousand here and a few hundred thousand there and it all adds up. Its actually quite ingenious. Instead of focusing on one genre or demographic, they can appeal to all genres and demographics.
This actually got me thinking about my students. They come from all demographics including race, religion, country of origin, sexual orientation, disability status, socioeconomic status, and age. No matter who they are, they can turn on Netflix and see a show that speaks to them. As a special education teacher, I am especially attuned to finding content that shows people with disabilities in a realistic and positive light. Netflix has so many shows that provide positive representation of people with Autism, physical disabilities, learning disabilities, and cognitive disabilities. Kids light up when they see "someone just like me". They feel validated. They feel valued. They feel seen. With only three networks when I was kid, that simply did not happen. Many people never saw "someone just like me" on TV.
The numbers of this are still quite mind boggling. I haven't counted, but I'm guessing I have seen about 1000 pieces of content on Netflix. This means I have only seen 1/30 of their library. And actually, that is not a static number. Movies and shows come and go, so I have seen less than 1/30 of their catalogue since the streaming option began.