I think the inconvenient truth here is that when anyone has got close to doing such a thing the price has been high enough that it turns out nobody actually turns up to pay for it, not at least outside a small niche.
I have a background in city planning, and in the US, you’ll constantly hear about how trying to make cities more friendly to pedestrians, bicycles, or public transit is a waste because no one uses it. But the truth is, most people will end up using the system you design. If you build a system just for cars, people will use cars. If you build a city around public transportation, people will happily use it. If you build a walkable city, people will walk.
No, they won't. If you build a walkable city and then make it impossible to do anything else, then people will walk.
It's a subtle difference, but it's there.
That said, there is more to a walkable city than a bunch of sidewalks. It also has to offer what people want and what they want must be easy to access. Something similar can be said about piracy. It wasn't streaming services that stymied piracy, it was cheap and easy access to legal sources of music and video. Even then, cheap was likely a secondary factor (as long as the price was reasonable).
Once every media company became a streaming company and started using anticompetitive licensing practices in an attempt to drive viewership to their own platforms, the market fractured too much for it to be profitable.
Something smells “prisoner’s dilemma” about it: the best move for any individual streaming service is to have exclusive content (and the best-positioned players to do that are the studios), but when everyone does that, it decreases the overall profit available in the market more than it increases their slice of the pie.
That's the part that might not be true, unfortunately. If each individual content producer sees more return on their own streaming service than they did sharing revenue from one of the independent services, then that's better for them, even if the total pie got smaller. If that wasn't the case, you'd think we'd see some of them shut their services down and go back to independent services once their income drops.
Sacrificing a wide audience to extract more from the most dedicated portion of the fanbase isn't an entirely new concept, and it financially makes sense short-term (until you start losing some of those dedicated fans over time and don't have the mindshare outside your bubble to attract new ones).
Once Netflix isn't the only one that doesn't share their monthly subscriber numbers anymore, we'll know that they're beginning to at least question why they own everything instead of license their content out
The streaming service itself doesn’t need to be profitable.
You can't talk about those rules when a single publisher corporation commands exclusivity deals and dictates pricing essentially forever.
Pray they do not alter it further.
Authors and inventors. Authors and inventors.
Not companies. Not entities, or even individuals, who purchased the "rights" and now "own" works. That has nothing to do with the intent here, which was to encourage actual authors and inventors to make more stuff. Walt Disney has been gone for more than half a century; he's not going to be able to come up with another Mickey Mouse.
"Intellectual property" is an oxymoron. Pray, tell me, which part of my brain does Disney own? Do they own the part that knows what Mickey Mouse looks like?
This idea that "markets will provide" is eccentric, and obviously empirically wrong.
Markets are there to extract value and reinforce power imbalances. Consumer happiness is reliably at cross purposes with that.
e.g. someone calculated/believes that having a big catalog from Disney at X/month is more worth more for Disney than sublicensing to Netflix at Y/month.
If they had to be separate, that gives content producers the ability to cross license and those licenses to be better deals. We’d actually have competition in distribution companies as distribution providers would then be competing on price, quality, convenience, and other things that matter, not locking content away.
We have laws like that for beer and cars, and they're disasters in both cases.
Why would we want to implement an incredibly stupid idea a third time?
And I still can’t help but think that if there really was a large market of people willing to pay a premium for a more permissive access model then we might already see trends in this direction. My hunch is the most folk don’t really care and price remains the dominant factor.
The essential point of the article was that it’s higher prices that’s pushing people towards piracy (either through price rises or fragmented subscriptions). It wasn’t that it is the restrictive streaming model that is pushing people towards piracy.
I’m fact it was precisely this restrictive streaming model that was the one to finally beat piracy. At low prices, that’s already been proven and it’s higher prices that is brining piracy back.
Or how much is really just the simple rational economic idea that piracy is better value for money.
But sometimes that leads to really stupid things. At one time all Star Trek TV shows were on Paramount while all the movies were only on Max. I believe they're all owned by Paramount, but apparently the shoes are the big draw (the new series "Picard" was exclusively on Paramount) and they could get more profit by putting the movies elsewhere and collecting a bit more than if it were all on their service. GAK!
There are (possibly) two streams of demand:
1) How much customers are willing to pay.
2) How much pirates are willing to risk legal consequences.
Both represent sides of the implicit and intrinsic demand that drives acquisition.
They won’t license content to third parties. So market forces can’t work.
