I'd rather have one good streaming service with everything on it than the dozens of crappy streaming services with their ever-shifting patchwork of available licensed content we have now. Rightsholders seem like a bigger problem than licensees to me.
Challenge is we ended up with one really bad streaming service but lots of capital slurping up all the licenses. In my ideal world, the regulator would prevent using exclusivity as a moat to prevent smaller operations competing.
Australia is a tiny market but before the big american companies bought them out, our local AnimeLab offering was one of the worlds best. If a new similarly oriented offering could launch and compete I’d love to see it, but sadly only pirate operations can do so, and are doing so effectively.
There's a reason it was law in the US that movie production companies couldn't own movie theaters: distribution should be required to be separate to ensure choice on the viewer side due to the inherent non-fungibility of entertainment media. In other words, if through copyright we grant a monopoly, then it's not a sustainable situation for the distribution to also be allowed to consolidate.
Ideally we'd have both benefits: many platforms each with (more or less) all the content, where they compete on consumer-focused streaming features rather than on their (transient) licensed content libraries. But right now we have plenty of "competition" yet it's all just a race to the bottom.
> many platforms each with (more or less) all the content
Which is what we have on the music side of things. You can choose Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music etc based on how their service works for you rather than what music you want to listen to.
Worth noting though, those monoliths themselves come with tradeoffs; artists don't earn shit for streaming, which is why the only way to really "support" one anymore is concerts and merch.
And don't get me wrong I love concerts and merch, but I'd rather people earn a reasonable living without needing to be on tour basically in perpetuity.
How much of this is actually new to the streaming era? Radio stations may have paid better per play/listener, but they had finite airtime and so fewer songs got played and fewer artists got paid. Physical media may have paid better compared to streaming the same songs once, but the media could be copied and replayed infinitely.
There was a lot of unrealistic hype that software magic could make everything between the consumer and the producer practically free, and that just hasn't happened and probably never will. Engineers need to get paid and infrastructure needs to get maintained too.
> Rightsholders seem like a bigger problem than licensees to me.
completely agree - i think the gov't regulatory body should change the landscape to what film and cinema have; such that distributor of media cannot own and monopolize the broadcast rights on their own platform, and publisher of media be forced to sell/license at the same price to all distributors.
This way, a streaming service can always know and pay for a broadcasting license for _any_ media, and all media must be license-able for any streaming service (at the same price), thus no monopoly can exist under this system.
I tend to agree with this take - look at the book or music industry, where you can buy most media in each category on most platforms, with some exceptions.
Ideally, like music, we'd get multiple vendors offering downloads that are high quality copy of video that isn't DRM encumbered.
But currently, we don't get this, and the closest legitimate way (modulo the DMCA...) to get video as a file is to buy physical media and rip it.
Serious shades of Gabe Newell's "it's a service problem, not a pricing problem" around all of this.