Netflix used to have a rich selection of content because content creators licensed it to Netflix without realizing how streaming was going to eat into physical

Netflix used to have a rich selection of content because content creators licensed it to Netflix without realizing how streaming was going to eat into physical media sales. $15 Netflix wasn't going to replace a $75 cable TV package, $30 for a couple premium channels, and a $10-15/week Blockbuster habit (around $150/mo) over the long term. Once studios realized that licensing their content to Netflix was cannibalizing their revenue from other sources, they weren't going to decide they didn't actually want revenue. $150/mo buys you way better entertainment today than it used to. If you remember the 90s, you should remember the absolute dearth of content to the point that you'd end up watching infomercials - we'd watch commercials as entertainment because there was nothing better. Yea, the current situation definitely isn't perfect and it sucks any time companies are trying to grab more of your cash. I mean, $73.50 buys you Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Max, Paramount+ and Showtime all without ads and with way more and better content than a cable package offered in the 90s or 2000s. Plus, it's easy enough to sign up for one, watch a bunch of its content for a month and then jump to another service (paying for only one or two at a time). It was unrealistic to believe that we'd have one extremely cheap service that everyone would license their content to over the long run. For those born in the late 90s, you wouldn't remember the absolute garbage that was entertainment before the mid/late 2000s. It isn't perfect today, but there's so much to watch at your fingertips in a way that there just wasn't back then. If it was 11pm, there was just nothing on TV and if you didn't have a DVD you were just out of luck. Being realistic, the copyright holders would have "defeated themselves" if they continued licensing content at low rates when they realized that streaming was cannibalizing other revenue streams. What we're experiencing sucks - it was better when Netflix had a richer selection and things were cheaper. No one likes companies getting more money out of them - especially when we had better years before they realized we were all moving to streaming. However, it was bound to happen. The alternative would be them seeing their revenue drop to an incredibly low level.