Intellectual property is not real property.

The idea that media is "consumed" is an artifice. When you consume a media product, it actually still exists and nothing is meaningfully physically depleted.

Intellectual property is an artificial law construct meant to "promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries" according to the Constitution.

Sitting on your ass and collecting rent every time someone watches a movie from the 1940's for the next 150+ years--which is an action on a copy of a work and not really equivalent to anything involving real property--is not promoting the progress of anything but the wealth and power of media conglomerates. Combine this with the ability of money to buy laws and you are looking at establishment of permanent legacies through copyright.

The issue is owning copyright and distribution.

This isn't some kind of new idea, in the 1930s the US government forced movie studios to be separate companies from movie theaters on antitrust grounds.

I have mixed feelings about this one because rightsholders essentially have a monopoly on their content. 5+ video streaming platforms is bad for consumers, and this exists because rightsholders are allowed to control their content. It doesn't happen in the music space because Spotify was there first, had everything, record labels had a stake, and record labels were desperate post-Napster, so the Warner Music App would be a joke. Hulu was the industry's chance to get it right and have a viable Netflix competitor, but content owners weren't desperate enough, so the landscape became balkanized.

On the other hand, it is their content.

> I have mixed feelings about this one because rightsholders essentially have a monopoly on their content. 5+ video streaming platforms is bad for consumers, and this exists because rightsholders are allowed to control their content.

I find this to be sort of self-contradictory. On the one hand, monopolies are bad, but on the other, having 5+ platforms is bad. Which is it?

My (perhaps unpopular) opinion is that having more and more streaming platforms ("balkanized", to use your term) is extremely good for consumers. The low barriers to entry and the near-zero marginal distribution costs make this the perfect industry for competition (and as a result, consumer welfare).

It's a common misconception that having N streaming platforms necessarily means that consumers spend N * subscription cost dollars per month, but that's not a sensible user pattern. Nobody consumes from every single streaming service at the same time. Instead, we have a sort of TDMA style consumption of media that allows us to constantly subscribe/unsubscribe/resubscribe from services as we chew threw our respective TV show backlogs. Savvy consumers have benefited the most from this reality, and it's only a matter of time until we see subscription management products that extend this benefit to un-savvy consumers in seamless ways.

One day, streaming services will look to consolidate so as to be able to extract monopoly rents. These are horizontal acquisitions that would be terrible for consumer welfare, and those are the kinds of acquisitions the US FTC would likely police.

> On the one hand, monopolies are bad, but on the other, having 5+ platforms is bad. Which is it?

The problem isn't that there are 5 platforms; it's that they don't have the same content.

Right, and that's exactly the point. No one ever consumes the set-union of all content at the same time.

Having multiple platforms have different content is not all that different from having multiple TV channels have different content, except now I'm not forced to subscribe to a giant bundle of channels when I only realistically use 2-3 at any given time.

Spotify killed music piracy and Netflix did it for video content. Now that copyright holders got greedy and there’s 5+ services, none as good as Netflix, none have all the shows anyone wants people are turning back to piracy in a big way and services like plex and Emby make sharing easy, people even setup serves and sell access!

It’s their content and they can do what they want; but you can’t stop piracy

There's a ton of stuff that was never on Netflix streaming. In fact, when Netflix started charging separately for streaming I dropped it and just kept the DVD rental option. It took House of Cards to get me back on.

And Amazon Prime Video is quite good. Certainly HBO stuff was never available elsewhere (except for purchase or physical rental). Yes, Disney siphoned some stuff off the other services, but again much of that wasn't available for subscription streaming pre-Disney+ (which at current pricing is actually a pretty good deal).

I really can't be bothered with piracy unless I really want to see something and just can't find it elsewhere.

I didn't say they shouldn't control the copyright.

I said we shouldn't uncritically allow massive copyright holders to both produce and distribute their media.