[PaulHoule]

If the content owners are sane at all they are going to license content on a "per seat" basis, that is, $X per sub.

If Netflix produces its own content, it is going to pay $Y to produce the content, and that quantity does not depend on the number of subs.

If the number of subs increases, eventually (subs) * $X is going to be more than $Y and in that case it makes more sense for Netflix to own rather than to rent.

Now content owners might have wanted to increase $X when they saw that Netflix was a good business, but I think the real driver behind the change was the increasing number of subs.

[Nasrudith]

The problem is that content owners have often proven abundantly insane. They use staggered release schedules while piracy allows their "saved for later" markets to rot when they could do simultaneous releases trivially.

Their release schedules often obey no ryhme or reason like "all by language, all by highest cost per unit first", etc. This is the industry that referred to VCRs, a clear new market for their freely broadcasted releases as the Boston Strangler.

[PaulHoule]

Many of the "insane" situations were rational in the past or involve a conflict between multiple parties.

For instance, there is not a lot of ownership between movie theaters and movie studios. For movie theaters, an end to theatrical windowing is seen to be an existential threat. Movie studios probably wouldn't care a lot but they sell a lot through theaters so they don't want to harm the interests of theaters.

Piracy during that window (seemingly people who want to watch a movie at home when it is not yet available at home) does seem to be popular. It staggers me how many people are connected to torrents with horrible audio and video quality (often in a language you don't know until you watch it) when they could wait a while and download a pirate Blu-Ray rip.

Windowing across countries was a big deal when it was expensive to produce film reels so it made sense to put the audio track on CDs that could be distributed separately from the film, then organize showings to minimize the number of reels.

The transition to digital in theaters helped with that but also revealed the kind of conflict their is between theaters and movie studios. The distributor pays to make the reel (and save money in digital) and the theater has to get an expensive digital projector. The costs and benefits don't match and the sides have to compromise to make it work.

It is like how movie theaters for a long time have wanted to lower ticket prices because they figure they'll make it back at the concession stand, but the studios won't hear it.