Dear Lifehacker, I am a Stan user. I had a TV series in my list that I had not finished. The other day I went to resume where I left off and found it has disappeared out of my list! How can this happen? Please help. Thanks, Helena
Dear Helena,
I suspect you may have been at the worst place and the worst time you can end up while marathoning a series on a streaming service — the refresh.
Although not widely advertised, content on streaming services such as Stan is, unfortunately, not there forever. A periodic “refresh” of the catalogue does occur on a regular basis, and this means that some shows are scrapped from the service.
This isn’t isolated to Stan — other major streaming services all do the same thing. The current exception is Netflix Australia which has committed to keeping its content indefinitely. (This is sure to change once its library grows, however.)
When asked about its refresh policy for an earlier article, Stan explained:
The vast majority of the content we have is on long term licenses, including Stan’s first-run shows such as Better Call Saul and Transparent,” said Stan’s Content & Product Director, Nick Forward. “Our first-run shows will remain on the platform for a minimum of 24 months so subscribers can watch anytime.
We have also licensed ‘life of series’ for our most popular first-run shows, which means new seasons will also be returning exclusively to Stan year after year.
So while there is a guaranteed two years the first-run shows will be available to watch, the rest is up in the air — and it looks like your series may have been one of the ones that were cut.
To keep tabs on this so it doesn’t happen again, you can check OzStream’s “expires soon” list.
To check that this is indeed the case, and nothing more random is occuring with your account, Stan’s online help service is actually really fast at getting back to customers.
Cheers
Lifehacker
Got your own question you want to put to Lifehacker? Send it using our [contact text=”contact form”].
This story originally appeared on Gizmodo.
Comments
6 responses to “Ask LH: Why Do Shows On Stan Keep Disappearing?”
My wife and I recently binged Dexter over a couple of weeks and on the final episode of the show, which I assume was a double, Stan only had the first half. It was a disappointing night.
Typical crap Australian service.
This is a constant problem with Spotify: content is withdrawn from the Australian catalogue and any playlists with that content will crash Spotify on load. Yay bad programming!
Happens on Kindle, I bought one book of a pair and the second one was not available on kindle but I had to buy a paperback from the US which cost $1 but $22 to freight it to Oz.
I’m sure Netflix have removed titles from their Australian catalogue. I went to watch The IT Crowd a couple of weeks ago and it was gone! Luckily Stan has it now.
One reason i haven’t joined the streaming crowd yet, the whole point of streaming is to have control of when you watch things. If they keep pulling shows, why should i bother, especially if there are other avenues of obtaining things to watch.