TenForward: Where Every Vulcan Knows Your Name

I think the issue started long before that. Netflix always had issues with content owners licensing it for one country but not for others, or asking huge fees to license for multiple countries. They'd also limit which shows Netflix could have at any time.

This meant Netflix had to manage many different catalogues for different regions and constantly cycle shows on and off just to make the content owners happy

Once content owners started realising they could milk Netflix for all it had, Netflix really had to start making content to reduce its risk and dependence on other studios

The issue is and always was corporate greed, on every level

There was multiple mess ups from many different places. Netflix making their own content was just an excuse.

First off the government allowed consolidation of the studios. All of the buyout and mergers reduced the number of players.

Netflix, video stores, and theatres before them were/are distributors. They did not create any products but acted as a local point of sale.

A distributor only makes sense when the producers and customers have a high level of segmentation and they can't economically or efficiently connect directly. When the producers are consolidated enough, cutting out a distribution network in an attempt to generate more profit is inevitable. It never works out as expected.

In general the producers can not offer the level of service that the distributor did. So the customer always suffer from a decline in service. It also always becomes more expensive for the customer with shittier products. The producing companies try to make up for losses in revenue from sales with lower quality cheaper product.

Now if the government had blocked the studio consolidation we would have likely have seen the rise of distributor competition. Distributor competition is very, very good for the consumer. When multiple companies are offering the same product but offering differing levels of service the consumer benefits.

The producers if they are smart make the same amount of money from all of the distributors and focus on making high quality products they can sell at a premium.

They made their own content because Hulu was a partnership between 4 different content companies intended to screw Netflix out of money.

Well it's also a somewhat natural reaction of the market. We went from basically just one service provider with many different publishers, to almost 1:1. I've seen some speculation that some of these services may collapse. It may be wishful thinking, but if for example Peacock fails and CBS just licenses their properties out that seems like an improvement.

What I really would love to see is the end of exclusive content. I want to see service providers compete more on the quality of their service than the content of their libraries. A variety of tiers that allow different numbers of simultaneous screen watching, different quality levels, the ability to download and view offline, better UI's, different content sorting, filtering, and recommendation options. Different pricing structures: maybe pay-per-view, ad supported, and of course monthly and annual subscriptions. Maybe even partner with low to mid-budget content creators like Nebula. Steam and Epic can have the same games on different platforms: why can't Netflix and Hulu have the same shows?

I'm also tired of seeing stuff completely vanish. Disney's "vault" has always felt like a flaw in copyright law. If it's not available for the public to consume, that should qualify as failure to defend IP and automatically become public domain. But that's a whole other issue