[michaelt]

> Netflix paid for the rights to everything and gave access to everybody for a reasonable monthly fee. Then the studios got greedy and thought "why should we let a middleman take a slice of our profits?"

To be fair to the studios, sticking with Netflix would have been suicide.

Put yourself at the mercy of someone else's distribution monopoly and you end up a powerless, penniless sharecropper - like people who develop mobile apps.

[another2another]

A good strategy might have been to pool their resources and create a new global channel that they all part-owned and distribute their content there. Like a big new Global TV Channel.

[vel0city]

While not global, that was essentially what Hulu was originally for the US. A single streaming platform co-owned by many of the big networks. You could watch FOX, NBC, ABC, and other shows all on a single streaming platform.

Notably absent at the time though were many of the big cable networks and movie studios.

[xen2xen1]

Which got bought by Disney.

[vel0city]

After the other companies largely let Hulu languish to focus on their own individual streaming platforms, yes.

Disney was one of the original partners of Hulu through their ownership of ABC.

[WorldMaker]

Interestingly Disney was not an original partner of Hulu and was late to the game. ABC was added several years into Hulu's history. The original partners were GE (before they sold NBC Universal to Comcast), News Corporation (Fox), and a private equity firm. That Hulu did not just become Peacock (or really that Comcast didn't need to create Peacock because it might have already majority owned Hulu in that alternate timeline) and is now a Disney property is a fascinating story in GE's mistakes, Disney's ambitions, and Hulu's seeming lack of ambitions, with a soupçon of the usual private equity meddling.

[vel0city]

You're right about Disney not being original, I was wrong about that. But they became a partner two years into its existence. I don't know if I'd call that late to the game.

[smsm42]

This system is not stable though. Every participant would think "why should I be content with X/N divided revenue if my content is so hot that if I pull out I would get much better revenue because everybody watches my content anyway?" Of course, they miss the point that everybody watches their content as part of the "one subscription" deal but it would be much different when it "50 subscriptions, all alike" deal - but everybody thinks they would be the ones that everybody would subscribe to, and the others would be the ones who will be left out.

Also, such channel would likely attract attention of the regulators as a clear example of a cartel.