Netflix Streaming Content Disappears?

We were working through a British (I)TV Series, Wire in the Blood, on Netflix Streaming. Kind of a guilty pleasure, but anyway it goes over 6 seasons, 4 episodes each, about 1.4 hours per. We were in season 6, two shows from the end, and we went to watch it Saturday night, and it's gone. Murphy's Law, right? I fired up the computer, went to see why it wasn't showing up, and it had been moved to the instant queue unavailable. No sign of it in streaming form, DVD only. Now, if I were a streaming only customer, I guess I'd be really annoyed right now, not that I'm particularly happy, but I kept the DVD service and so eventually this is a solvable problem. But it does bring up some questions:

1. Is there a listing anywhere of why things go off streaming?
2. Is there a schedule anywhere for things coming off streaming?
3. Anyone know why stuff comes off streaming in the first place?

I had seen the thing with Netflix and Starz, but I thought that was in February 2012. And I realize that Netflix and the content providers are somewhat at war. And I, like apparently like a lot of Netflix customers, wasn't too happy when Neflix upped all of the rates so drastically. I cut back on the number of disks, to keep things at approximately the same per month charge. To be fair to Netfix, over the years there have been tons of service improvements, streaming for essentially free (although initially there wasn't much content), disk turn around time improvements, so generally I've been a happy customer, at least until recently. But I guess I was assuming that aside from the Starz thing, mostly once content was on streaming, it would not disappear on me. So hence the questions (I don't want to get into a TV series if it's going to disappear on me before I'm able to complete it).

Here's a link to Wire in the Blood:

http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/Wi...3?trkid=496624

on Neflix, so that you can see what I mean. No mention of streaming, that I could find.

Thanks.

I took a look at my queue. Mostly I've been managing the instant queue, as such, from my Oppo or PS3 (where I watch the streaming), or Android phone/tablet app, and I could not find any sign there of expiration dates, but when I went back and looked at my PC, you were right: 3 shows in my instant queue show red expiration (first tomorrow, latest 4 days from then). Luckily nothing I had my heart on seeing, but one I would have liked to see eventually: My Flesh and Blood. Looks like it's on DVD too, so I'll probably just move it over to that queue. Makes me kind of happy I kept the DVD option (I was an early Netflix subscriber, so had been grandfathered on a lot of the earlier tweaks on their pricing model, but did get caught in first the Blu-Ray and then Streaming split price increases, so I reduced my costs by cutting back from 4 to 2 discs, figuring that's the most we'd watch in a weekend, and kept the Streaming, figuring if the family went over 2 discs in a weekend, well, we were watching too much , but that we could use Streaming or Red Box to fill in. I considered going discless, concluded there was still just too much missing from Streaming, going over to Red Box (not enough selection + lazy, but so much cheaper than Netflix, it will probably see some visits), and Blockbuster (which is actually cheaper on Blu-Rays, which I mostly watch when available, so that one I'm pondering still, but for now I'm lazy and don't want to deal with transferring queues and redoing preferences, mostly paid the price increases).

I was working my way through another TV series, this one Canadian, that's still listed as OK for Streaming. Mostly I just watch these things when I have some time to kill, but my spouse got fascinated with Wire in the Blood, so it's disappearance was rather annoying. She is not happy. Doesn't look like they give you any useful sort of warning, from what I can see. Still, the episodes are not many, they're movie length, so getting the last couple as discs is no huge deal. However, I would be really annoyed if I was half way through some regular length (45 minute) type series, and it disappeared. That would take forever to work through on disc.

Not a bad idea generally, but no, wait, I did have it at the top of the queue (or actually end, but streaming watched via Oppo or PS3, it's easy to check for last added by looking at the bottom or most recently watched). Did not make a difference. The queue thing works only from the PC, and mostly I was ignoring it there for streaming. Lesson learned.

This coming and going thing must be a fairly regular occurrence. There's 100 on my Instant Queue, Saved (i.e. not available for streaming). Not sure how it ever got that far (I would guess I've never added 100 to the instant queue, period, so must have been things that came over from the DVD queue, and/or were available for Streaming at one time). So it could be a LOT of shows come and go over time. Interesting.

I had a look at feedfliks.com, thanks for the suggestion, I had not been aware of the site. Quite some interesting info out there.

Looking at Most streamed:

http://feedfliks.com/most-streamed

Looks like the first two slots are TV series, and 3 of the first 5. I wonder if people realize the risk they're at in terms of these disappearing. But I guess it also goes to show, people are using streaming to watch TV series, at least the ones that subscribe to feedfliks.

Looks like Wire in the Blood is at:

http://feedfliks.com/search?title_na...od&commit=Find

Nothing much useful showing up there. The Icons don't show Play, so I reckon they agree, it's gone offline, but it doesn't seem to show dates. Perhaps it did.

I had a look at the other TV series I'm watching, and it shows an expiration date of 01-Sep-2012, so I have plenty of time there, if the date can be trusted. Interesting that Netflix doesn't list anything.

Couple of follow up questions:

1. How reliable are the feedfliks dates?
2. Is there a Queue manager that will let me show a sort with the expiration dates?

Well, I went ahead and signed up for a free feedfliks.com account, figured I was letting various phone apps muck with the queue, what's another. feedfliks took quite some time to read in my Netflix data, took maybe 5+ minutes, I was a little worried because I've been a Netflix subscriber for a while, so there's quite a history (10+ years), but it crunched through it eventually.

In terms of the views, the expiration one is quite useful. I think that will mostly do the job, in terms of trying to manage around the expiration problems. It does indeed list Wire in the Blood as expiring 10-Sep-2011 (just missed it apparently), and gives a list of the upcoming expirations. A ton are coming off availability in November, wonder why that month. Overall, the scope of the problem becomes at that point unmanageable, no way I'd watch that many by that point. I guess I just never really appreciated how many movies were coming off of the instant queue availability list. I would have thought that Netflix would just reach a deal with the studios where they got paid when someone watched a movie, and things would just stay available forever, long-tail cloud sort of thing. With DVDs, that's seemed mostly the case, no rush, just let it sit on the queue until you worked your way down to it. But for streaming, apparently a different proposition.