Stricken from the record

I'm not the right person to eulogize Filmstruck.

As a resident of Australia, I never even had my chance to sign up for the streaming service, or if I did, then I never realized it. I certainly would have signed up if I'd been able.

And maybe that's all the more reason why my eulogizing it is appropriate in some way. (I must be in a eulogizing mood, as I just wrote a short eulogy to George H.W. Bush on Facebook.)

The streaming service that shuttered on November 30th after two years was a beloved repository for classic films and films from the Criterion collection, though those two things were not mutually exclusive. Well, it was beloved among cinephiles. Your average joe was not subscribing, which certainly had something to do with its perceived lack of sustainability.

I've bemoaned lately -- to myself if no one else -- how difficult it can be to find even really good movies from the decades prior to the 1970s. You can scrounge and scrape and find things through the library and other sources, but it almost always involves some kind of premeditation. You can't just rock up to your TV and start watching, as you can with even the lesser films of the last ten to 15 years due to their heavy presence on your mainstream, non-niche streaming services.

And it's that scarcity that I blame for my dwindling totals of such films in recent years. Clearly that's not the only explanation, as you can shell out a couple bucks and buy a lot of them on iTunes, which is the equivalent of streaming them except for the per-transaction payment. Even then, though, it's difficult to see all your choices in one place, and just browse through them until you find the exact fit for that particular evening.

Filmstruck did that for many, and would have for me if there hadn't been such obstacles to overcome in rolling it out internationally. In fact, it's so bad with being an international customer for most of these services that I just assume they aren't available in Australia without even investigating whether they might be. Anyway, I didn't sign up for it, and I'm pretty sure I never had the chance.

And now I never will.

It's not like other options won't pop up just because this particular business model didn't work. In fact, several have already been announced, from a Criterion streaming channel to a Warner archive service. But I get the impression that none of them will be as comprehensive as Filmstruck was. If they were, well, then that business model would have worked for Filmstruck. Any service they launch going forward is going to have to be compromised toward the lowest common denominator.

I wish I'd had the chance to write about Filmstruck before its demise. I wish I'd been catching a classic a week, or at least every fortnight (might as well use the Australian term), through this great service.

Now I'll just have to hope that whatever takes its place is successful enough to reach me overseas ... rather than just following Filmstruck to the cinematic graveyard.