Hope you finished catching up on Pawn Stars on Netflix Streaming last week because if you went back this weekend, it was gone. 800 hours of content from A&E and History was removed from Netflix Friday as the companies could not come to a new agreement over terms of service. According to reports, this not only marks one of the biggest deletions in Netflix history, it might mark the beginning of a shift in company priorities from non-fiction to fiction programming. Read what shows were removed and more after the jump.
Variety reported the news of the removal and say the following shows were among the ones taken off the service. There are at least 40 with these being some of the most popular.
Pawn Stars
Ice Road Truckers
Storage Wars
American Pickers
Dog the Bounty Hunter
Gene Simmons: Family Jewels
Hoarders
Intervention
Some History and A&E programming will remain, such as things that aired on the Biography channel. Also, in a semi-related development, programs that aired on the National Geographic channel will also soon be removed from the service.
Variety surmises that just because these shows have been removed from Netflix doesn’t mean they’re gone forever as new deals could be reached. Still, it seems with the growing commitment to original and exclusive programming – Lilyhammer, House of Cards, Arrested Development, Ricky Gervais’ Derek, etc. – and all these major reality shows leaving, a fair hypothesis would be Netflix is favoring fictional programming over non-fiction.