I never said it was sustainable, but the chain of events definitely is that simple. Netflix ran into the fact that it offered literally too good a deal for othe

I never said it was sustainable, but the chain of events definitely is that simple. Netflix ran into the fact that it offered literally too good a deal for others to not cash in on by making the ecosystem worse so that they can charge people to make it convenient again instead. The fundamental principle behind making money is having something that people want, and then making sure it's inaccessible to them unless they pay you for it. The "making things terrible" comes from content companies going "we have a licensing system in place, we've used it for cable providers for decades, and we even used it for streaming services, but now we're going to cancel that and start our own vertically integrated lock-in service because we'll make way more money that way". While it makes sense, and everyone could have, and very much did, see it coming, it's still the kind of move that historically would have gotten your company broken up. But that's a power modern government seems to no longer want to wield anymore, despite our wishes they did.