While I directionally agree, I don't know how to reconcile this with antitrust. I wouldn't want Netflix to be the one company with all the content, with no competition. I guess what would be better is if all content was available on all the streaming providers, and then they'd compete on platform quality and price.
I do. There needs to be one international company who is co-owned by all these media companies. They need to "nationalise" streaming amongst themselves.
That way users only have to pay one streaming service, the content is available in every country, the rightsholders are paid fairly by the content consumed instead of these never-ending monthly fees for one show and ignoring the rest of the library.
If they don't do this, piracy again becomes the best option and media companies will only ever get stupid disengaged customers and that's a bad business model because those people eventually leave.
The time of predatory streaming service bullshit is over. Provide a service which puts customers first or they'll all go back to piracy. They already are.
Nationalization is too extreme. What you want is compulsory licensing where the government sets some price by which any streaming service can pay to license the content. How that price gets selected is... complicated and easy to fuck up[0], but I can imagine some metrics that could be used to target prices. e.g. the compulsory license cost must not exceed some multiple of the average negotiated rate.
[0] Notably, radio has a compulsory licensing scheme, but the government turned up the license cost on Internet radio so high that nobody can make a profit unless they sell their soul to the RIAA ala Spotify.
The reason I put "nationalise" in quotes is because any such partnership needs to be a global commercial partnership between companies. It can't be actually nationalised by any country because then it would focus only on that country and that place's copyright laws (and potentially censorship or content laws).
This garbage of the same streaming service in different countries having different content also needs to stop.
People can torrent any show anywhere and they'll do that if it's not available on a reasonable streaming service. If which there are few or none anymore.
Maybe we could ban exclusive licensing. Why should Netflix be able to pay $$$ for a show and block other services from buying access? Instead pass a law that if Netflix buys for X then any other service can also license for X.
There will definitely be some difficulties (Netflix estimated 4M views but you are expected to bring in 6M views so clearly you need to pay $$$$$, or you are only going to bring in 2M views but you still need to pay $$$) but I think they can be overcome.
