Over the weekend fans of director Neill Blomkamp were given a new way to watch some of his work with the Oats Studios catalogue brought over to Netflix.
Oats Studios is a company with a unique business model as it created high quality sci-fi short films and put them up previously on YouTube for anyone to watch for free.
Aside from ad revenue Oats Studios also sold its short films on Steam. Those who want to make their own content using work from the studio could also buy asset packs, also from Steam.
All of this was happening around late 2016 with the YouTube channel uploading as recently as November 2020, so seeing it pop up again in late 2021 is a bit of a surprise.
The Netflix catalogue is available under the Oats Studios name so you won’t need to search around for it. A direct link to the Netflix listing is here and the full list of what’s available is below.
- Rakka – 21 minutes
- Firebase – 26 minutes
- Cooking With Bill: Damsu / Prestoveg / Smoothie / Sushi – 10 minutes
- God: Serengeti / Chicago – 7 minutes
- Zygote – 22 minutes
- Bad President: Oil Spill / All My Sh*t – 6 minutes
- ADAM: Episode 2 – 6 minutes
- ADAM: Episode 3 – 8 minutes
- Gdansk – 4 minutes
- Kapture: Locust – 7 minutes
The entries with multiple names are very short videos which have been combined to form a longer piece. The Cooking with Bill videos, for example, are very quick watches on their own so it makes sense to show them all at once like this.
Despite being a lower budget project the Oats Studios films still have some big names in them such as Dakota Fanning and Sigourney Weaver. The in-Netflix trailer that plays for Oats Studios is for the first film Rakka which Weaver stars in.
Finally it must be mentioned that all of the Oats Studios films are still available on YouTube for free and can be watched on its official channel. The Netflix move is not a replacement but just an alternative.
Those wondering where the first episode of ADAM is can also find it on YouTube. ADAM was a demo for the Unity game engine in 2016 where it showed off the real-time rendering capabilities of the software.
OATS is on Netflix! https://t.co/G4zEJ3yEGG
— Neill Blomkamp (@NeillBlomkamp) October 3, 2021
