This. I want a streaming service that has more or less every movie and TV show ever made before, let's say ten years ago.

Fair enough if Disney etc. want to keep new stuff exclusive to them. Also, fair enough if certain big evergreen content is kept exclusive (Star Wars, classic Disney movies etc.).

But, seriously, why can't I go to one service and watch every Cary Grant movie, or every movie directed by John Ford, or every episode of Remington Steele, or every episode of Matlock or whatever.

I've been buying DVDs for ... 20 years now? I have quite a few old movies now.

I wrote an app that is playing them (according to a schedule I created) on a Raspberry Pi from a 5TB drive (they're ripped to drive). It's kind of fun to walk by the TV downstairs and see the original "The Fly" or whatever on. No fast-forward or pause, but no internet required either (no ads, of course).

What about the music industry allowed Spotify to happen? Is licensing set up in a way that made it possible whereas Movie/TV makes it impossible/unlikely?

(I remember Classic Netflix, where I could get 99% of what I wanted … or, in many cases, over 100% of what I wanted!)

There are only three major studios and music costs a lot less to produce. There are also various release windows for movies where studios can get paid multiple times.

Also Spotify is losing money and can never be truly profitable with 70% of everything they make contractually going back to the labels. Subscription music is a sucky business and it only makes sense as a feature for a larger platform

Spotify didn't do anything special. Most of the (mainstream) subscription music streaming services have similar content. I assume it's mostly a function of the fact that music royalties were quite centralized so that once streaming became viable it was a pretty natural shift given that pay per play was already well entrenched with radio etc.

Video was much more fragmented and a lot of older content licensing never envisioned non-broadcast availability at all.

(The numbers also probably don't work. I'm guessing a hypothetical all-you-can-eat subscription would be in the hundreds of dollars a month.

> Spotify didn't do anything special.

They were the ~first.

Pandora was a fair bit older but not quite the same thing. Rhapsody was older as well.

ADDED: The basic point is that there was a pretty natural path from radio to personalized radio streaming to streaming that brought a modified version of the same royalty system along with it.

> not quite the same thing

Not being able to pick specific songs is a huge difference.

Rhapsody let you pick specific albums. And, honestly, I mostly use streaming to play curated playlists these days.

You can relisten to music. You don’t want to normally rewatch video. I believe this would make the markets significantly different.

Spotify has a large amount of popular music, but if you end up niche bands like Transiberian Orchestra, for a long time they didn't have most of their music.

They still don't have have 90% of filk songs.

The irony is I was introduced to this through YouTube and Grooveshark (which was still better than Spotify is now), if it hadn't been for these pirate services I wouldn't have known about Julia Ecklar.

Even then, Spotify is far better than the TV streaming situation.