I don't think this comment deserves its downvotes. Rights holders get 70% of the revenue and they pretty much set all of the terms. Disney in particular has arg

I don't think this comment deserves its downvotes. Rights holders get 70% of the revenue and they pretty much set all of the terms. Disney in particular has arguably the most valuable content portfolio in the world and has tremendous influence. If Amazon, Apple, and Google didn't want the terms, the licenses wouldn't have been struck, and we'd probably be shopping for these kinds of videos at atrocities like imedia.disney.com and sony-evideostation.com. The only reason why this is happening is because online sales is still a very small portion of their total revenue. Check out slide #31 of this deck [x]. EST = electronic sell-through ("buying" a movie/show), and it's completely dwarfed by the other channels. (FYI: BD=Blu-Ray, VoD/PPV = cable rentals). So rights holders can screw over their tiny, small-revenue user base in exchange to keep the larger ones happy and profitable. Also, the consumer reaction will be largely inelastic. No matter how bitter Corey Doctorow is bitter at Amazon and Disney, he's going to still going to buy/rent/pirate the content because his kids will want to watch it. This is why Disney is so powerful. In the next decade or so, as consumers continue to shift their viewing habits, we'll start seeing the options be more consumer-friendly and probably cheaper. Remember it took the music industry 10-15 years from the rise of MP3s to today's DRM-free iTunes, VEVO, and Spotify options. Hulu didn't come around until 2008, so I think we're probably at about year 6. [x] http://www.slideshare.net/mpalank101/2012-state-of-media-presentation http://www.slideshare.net/mpalank101/2012-state-of-media-pre...