People think physical media has much higher costs than it does. Don't know about movies, but about $2 of a hardcover book costs are associated with printing and distribution--and that has far less infrastructure associated with the digital version.

Netflix has never had a great streaming movie catalog. As a senior Netflix exec told me, "people come for the movies and they stay for the TV." So, to the degree Netflix streaming ever claimed to be about having all the films, it was always something of a bait and switch.

Theoretically, a fairly good subscription video catalog plus live TV is probably possible. But as I said elsewhere, it would probably be more like > $200/month than $20. Recreating the cable bundle streaming is already pushing north of $100.

I'm happy to be corrected, but I don't think costs of distribution or physical media creation actually add up to that much in comparison to the cost of actually producing the content which pretty much only ever gets more expensive.

>without the costs of distribution and physical media creation, it would actually be possible.

Did anyone seriously think just because you don't need to make blu-rays any more a 50 million dollar TV show or movie can just be sold for next to nothing? It's probably not even 1% of the production costs.

Even weirder because I've never seen anyone think that Red Dead Redemption would coast 5 bucks if they only sold it on steam