> the $20/$30 minimum cable packages in the US were more than Netflix is today

I highly disagree with that sentiment. Cheap cable packages maybe had 40 channels which barely expanded on the local broadcast availability, littered with advertisements. No real dedicated movie channels, movies were often cropped and edited to fit the time slots and ratings allocations for the channels when they did air. Time shifting meant having to keep a VCR well stocked, or later buy/rent a DVR. And if your VHS or DVR was full, well, you're out of luck, you just missed that episode. Decide you want to start watching some TV show that's been on for a few seasons? You're out of luck, better go rent some tapes or DVDs to get caught up. Want to watch on the go? Sorry, you're out of luck, the only place you can consume this is at home, or lug around a TV, VCR, and VHS tapes with you.

For less than half the price of your supposed $20 cable package (before adding additional expensive hardware) I can watch literally thousands and thousands of movies and shows at a moment's notice anywhere I have an internet connection.

No. In NZ we only got what the local broadcasters had licensed.

In retrospect, they did a great job of curation.* I seem to spend more time looking for something to watch than watching, and often just give up and go to bed.

* Up til subscription satellite TV became available. Quality was inversely related to the number of available channels.

But any payment to Netflix is on top of the (significantly higher) ransom one pays to Comcast/Spectrum/etc for leasing bandwidth on the pipes (which cable bills include in the default). So cost of streaming content today is Netflix + internet connection with enough bandwidth.

Yes, but the cost of N streaming services is not N * (Netflix + Internet), it's (N * Netflix) + Internet — and the internet has utility outside of streaming services as well. The internet price is the same whether you subscribe to 0 or 100 streaming services. If you just want to stream from one provider and otherwise not use the internet at all, I guess counting them together that way as the "price of entertainment" makes sense. But I don't think that's a very common situation.

I don't disagree with anything you said. But I should add or clarify to parent post that there is some difficulty in installing and maintaining infrastructure that affords a company power over the customer. Said power is how they "easily" achieved a monopoly.

I think the focus should be on keeping the market fractured. If content is of poor quality that just means the population is ok with poor quality. There is business to be made on poor quality. /s

Once upon a time I worked as a CSR for a cable company, and a couple customers, old honest people, opened the conversation along the lines "I only come back because, impossible as that might appear, the other company is even worse than you are"