I mean, it's sort of obvious. If a movie has a big enough pull for you to go drive to a theatre to watch it, the company that owns the movie realises you're willing to pay a direct rental fee for the movie off itunes or something. I'm going to wing it and say the studio might make 2-3 dollars on a single movie digital rental, but maybe 20-30 cents of your 8 dollars a month if they stuck it into a streaming service.
Do you really expect to get a pile of movies and TV you'd willingly pay, idk, 30-40$ a month for if bought individually in an 8$ streaming package? Netflix doesn't have big films because the people who own big films know that on the bottom line, their product has enough draw to be worth more when sold alone. And I mean, sure, a subscription model has more reliable cashflow sometimes, and maybe they can trade product worth for popularity and bulk sales and make more money, but who knows what might happen? Combined with the fact some of these studios have enough content to make their own web distribution services and remain in control of their web presence, and the worry that putting too much content on the web might kill the money they make from TV, it's just an iffy decision to shake up everything and put stuff on the streaming web until somebody comes around and makes a netflix people are willing to pay 20$ a month for - maybe even the 40-50$ you'd pay for a nice cable package, and can offer them some real royalties.
Do you really expect to get a pile of movies and TV you'd willingly pay, idk, 30-40$ a month for if bought individually in an 8$ streaming package? Netflix doesn't have big films because the people who own big films know that on the bottom line, their product has enough draw to be worth more when sold alone. And I mean, sure, a subscription model has more reliable cashflow sometimes, and maybe they can trade product worth for popularity and bulk sales and make more money, but who knows what might happen? Combined with the fact some of these studios have enough content to make their own web distribution services and remain in control of their web presence, and the worry that putting too much content on the web might kill the money they make from TV, it's just an iffy decision to shake up everything and put stuff on the streaming web until somebody comes around and makes a netflix people are willing to pay 20$ a month for - maybe even the 40-50$ you'd pay for a nice cable package, and can offer them some real royalties.