Except people would happily accept variable pricing for content provided it was centralised.

Steam gets this so right - games change price all the time, go on sale etc.

It's the same phenomenon you see with landlords - rental properties go unoccupied for huge periods of time because they believe they'll get a better deal just in the future - with media we've let absurd copyright durations do the same damn thing, and probably at the expense of artists and content creators who I want to support.

Valve have absolutely nailed the consumer-centric business model. Gabe Newell was the first person I heard the concept of "piracy is a service problem" from and they've turned it into their core competency.

However, centralization of the marketplace, even from a publisher standpoint, isn't a Good Thing. Steam's degree of control over the game publishing platform market is pretty pathological from the view of developers.

A better solution from the content creators' standpoint is a marketplace with competitors. In gaming, this doesn't really exist (maybe GoG/Humble?) but in streaming media delivery, it does (Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Video).

Sure. Consumers like this and Steam likes this, because they get a cut of everything on their platform. But game makers are maybe not so interested in having their industry collapse into a monpsony situation, where their choices are 1) give Valve whatever Valve wants and accept whatever Valve gives them in return, or 2) don't make games.

Free markets don't promise perfect efficiency in each case. They promise to be reasonably efficient on average. They also don't promise perfect happiness for just one side of the market; they're a means of reaching a compromise between all participants.

What if the correct licensing entity could receive the micropayment made by the viewer?

What hidden complexity am I missing on the delivery / payment side?

Not speaking of making content free, but making content easily accessible, at a nominal price.

The easily accessible part has been proven solveable, by hobbyists, already.

You are missing that movies are not primarily paid for through direct sales and micropayments. Movies have an extremely complicated system of distribution to many audiences and through many media. The point of this system is to maximize producer revenue. If they don't do that, they can't afford to make movies.

US movie studios are reasonably good at making movies. They are maybe not so good at translating them into Chinese, figuring out how to market them in China, and distributing through the many channels there (first-run theaters, second-run theaters, VOD, DVD, streaming, and probably more). So they sell distribution rights to other companies.

If you want to replace that, you have to come up with a system that is better both for consumers and producers. Yes, hobbyists have figured out part of what's better for consumers. (Although those technologies are terrible compared with Netflix, so only a part.) But optimizing for one criterion is way easier than optimizing for two or more.