How about doing something for streaming services that add commercials and special pricing for anything that is worth a shyt. Then there’s the premium pricing for 50 year old crappy scifi movies that have been free on tv for years.
I am amazed at the number of movies that streamers have placed behind paywalls on their own platform despite that movie being available for free elsewhere.
Are they are counting on viewer laziness, or perhaps lack of knowledge of alternatives? Before I pay for anything via PVOD, I will check Letterboxd to see where it might be available free or for a lower price. (And I will pay an upcharge for better picture quality; SD might be free while HD or UHD requires a rental.) I have never subscribed to a streamer just to watch X. On a couple of occasions, I’ve waited until a streamer had five or six movies I actually wanted to watch, subscribed for a month, and then cancelled. That’s more movies than I usually want to watch, but I don’t want to pay a streamer any longer than necessary.
The streamers hate churn, but that’s a potential remedy. If everyone learned to watch whatever and quickly cancel, the streamers would realize they would make more money by putting movies in the theater, and streaming would collapse.
Their insurance policy right now is to buy up the sports programming. Fans feel a need to watch in real time. They will subscribe to do it. The streamer then has them at least for the duration of the season.
But on movies, I suspect that the streamers are just waiting for long term leases on movies to expire, and then the streamers will pull them from open access. Streaming is relatively new. But as time goes on, I see more and more stuff becoming harder to find and perhaps only available on one site. The rights to a movie ultimately belong to the studio that made it, although those rights are often sold (not leased) to someone else. Most of the big legacy studios either set up their own streaming platforms (e.g. Disney) or were bought up by Big Tech (Apple, Amazon, Comcast).
Netflix originally was just a distributor. It already ruled the rental market after it drove Blockbuster and other bricks and mortar rental operations out of business. As the first mover in streaming, it leased impressive numbers of good (and less than good) movies from the legacy studios. But as the big studios set up their own streaming platforms (or were acquired by bigger players), they started siloing their own movies.
Netflix suddenly found it more and more difficult to lease good movies. That’s when it tiptoed into production, where it quickly became a huge producer of notoriously mediocre generic slop. That’s why it wanted to acquire WBD: to get control of its legacy catalogue, and to acquire a traditional powerhouse production studio to up its game on production.