RIP Filmstruck

[silverscreenselect]

I know Melly will be sorry to hear this.

AT&T is shutting down Filmstruck at the end of November. It's a streaming channel for vintage films that AT&T inherited from Warner Media in the Time/Warner merger. The channel included the Criterion Collection (which was on Hulu for a while then moved over to Filmstruck), as well as films from TCM and the Warner Archive, which was a Warner's channel that was merged into Filmstruck a couple of years ago.

For those looking for films from the 30s through 80s, there's slim pickings on Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime (unless you want to rent films individually from Amazon), so Filmstruck was a viable alternative, but apparently not enough people were interested (at $10 a month) to keep the service going. It will shut down at the end of November.

[mellytu74]

I know Melly will be sorry to hear this.

AT&T is shutting down Filmstruck at the end of November. It's a streaming channel for vintage films that AT&T inherited from Warner Media in the Time/Warner merger. The channel included the Criterion Collection (which was on Hulu for a while then moved over to Filmstruck), as well as films from TCM and the Warner Archive, which was a Warner's channel that was merged into Filmstruck a couple of years ago.

For those looking for films from the 30s through 80s, there's slim pickings on Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime (unless you want to rent films individually from Amazon), so Filmstruck was a viable alternative, but apparently not enough people were interested (at $10 a month) to keep the service going. It will shut down at the end of November.

Funny you should mention it. I am sorely disappointed by this.

We are new to Filmstruck and it was going to be a cornerstone of our plans to cut the cord (but still keep the Comcast Internet) at the shore some time in 2019.

We plan on spending more time down there in my retirement but we'll also be traveling. We'd keep the Comcast very basic - we have to because you cannot get television without cable in Wildwood - for the local channels then have the internet.

We figured between Netflix, Amazon and something else (Hulu? Sling?) -- plus Filmstruck -- we would be set with the stuff we usually watch.

[silverscreenselect]

A couple of updates here.

The Criterion Collection, which is a significant part of Filmstruck (and which used to be offered through Hulu), will have its own Criterion Channel next year in the spring. It's going to cost $11 a month, $10 for charter subscribers (less on a yearly basis). In addition to the films (which include It's a MMMMW), the channel will have exclusive documentaries and short features. That seems pricey for the content that's available.

The Criterion films themselves, minus the bonuses, will be available of the Warner streaming channel, which will launch at the end of 2019. Filmstruck was spun out of the Warner Archive channel, which had a lot of vintage WB films that would otherwise rarely show up on any platform, so there's a lot of quality content available there. Warner has also recently launched the DC channel, featuring all the Superman and Batman movies and all the animated series (along with some new animated series they are developing). It's unclear if Warner is going to pull all this content from outlets like Netflix and Hulu either. My hunch is that Warner will merge the DC channel into the larger channel. Warner also has HBO, Lord of the Rings, and the Harry Potter franchise, so they've got a lot of valuable content and possible TV spinoffs of their material.

There is a limit to how much money people are going to want to spend for all these specialty channels, especially if they don't include enough new material to keep them watching every month.