The thing is that major live sport is now the only category that is successful in the broadcast TV market. Without that, many (most?) broadcast networks may as well shut down. We saw the best evidence of that recently in Australia when the Foxtel pay TV company was sold to European sports streaming service DAZN.

Foxtel has dozens of channels including the “agenda-setting” Sky News but in the end only its major sports rights deals (which it’s been bidding up and losing money on for years) held any value.

One day we’ll all accept that broadcast TV is dead and everyone can just have a personalized content feed streamed to them, but for as long as broadcast TV license holders keep up the fight, it’s going to be a frustrating endeavor trying to see the sports we want, wherever we are.

> The whole point about Netflix was that it proved that customers know what they want if you make it available.

yes, but the media rights owners want the maximum money from their viewers, where as netflix model leaves money on the table.

It's why i almost always resort to piracy, now that netflix has lost a lot of their licenses for stuff as media rights owners start their own walled gardens.

Does it leave money on the table? Genuine question...

Would traditional media have been able to produce Squid Games? I remember Disney suddenly falling over themselves to "Me Too" that they did the Korean thing too.

I can see for certain things like sports where there's big money, but still seems like having "Domestic" oriented distribution management leaves money on the table. When you can broadcast to the entire planet what new opportunities can you get, will they offset what you give up under the old model

> "Does it leave money on the table? Genuine question..."

Yes it does, 100%.

Once you've got content that people in multiple countries want to watch, you've broadly got two options: let everyone watch on the same terms, or split it up by region. Even Netflix chooses the latter - each country that Netflix has customers in has a different price for subscribing. (They also have different libraries of media that can be watched, but that's mainly as a result of the companies they license it from doing different deals for different countries, as far as I know Netflix do release their own content in all regions at the same time.)

This is because if you don't price it differently, you either price it for countries like the US, and make it unaffordable - or too expensive to be worth paying for, at least - for much of the world, or you price it more cheaply and leave money on the table from Americans (and other rich countries) who would've been willing to pay more.

If the media industry hadn't existed before the internet then probably all companies would look more like Netflix and the other streaming companies, and it would be simple for all content to be licensed globally to the same streaming platform. But because both historically and still today we have broadcast companies which are country specific, any time they get involved (which is pretty much every time with the exception of content made by the steaming companies themselves), you now not only have custom pricing per country but also custom where-can-you-watch per country. And while this can be annoying, it ultimately leads to the content owners earning more than if they didn't do specific deals with specific broadcasters and instead sold a single package to a single streaming company.

> "Would traditional media have been able to produce Squid Games?"

I'm not sure what aspect of it you think required Netflix, but for decades media companies have been producing things with more than a single country in mind - whether that's BBC's Top Gear being syndicated to a huge number of countries, or Friends being dubbed in French, or whatever. I don't see any reason that a BBC or Apple or whoever else couldn't have done it, the only difference is that BBC doesn't have a global distribution platform like Netflix does, so BBC would have had to do deals with broadcasters (or streaming companies) for any country they want viewers in other than the UK.