With the theater you're buying a very different experience than Netflix, though. A more apt comparison would be to movie rentals, which you consume on the same screens and with the same people.

Amazon will rent you most movies for <$4, so 4 movies per month is the number for Netflix to beat, not 1.

This is always going to be a very subjective assessment. I don't doubt that the comparison makes sense for you, but it's not the way my spouse or I see it.

Also, most movies I might go to a theater to see cost substantially more than $4 on amzn.

Paying monthly to Netflix vs. paying per use with Amazon isn't a subjective difference. If you are only watching 2 movies a month of average, then Amazon is objectively a better deal than Netflix as you not only pay less, but have more options. (Amazon movies are generally $4 or $6 to rent.)

Given that we do both, the actual question is whether Netflix manages to offer us one exclusive offering per month that ticks the box. This particular January, it is setting itself quite nicely for the year :)

Movies yes, but often a single episode of a show is say $2. That means if you watch a season in a month, you're up to $16-20 pretty quickly with 8-10 episodes.

This is why I legit jack sparrow shows.

You can rent movies on many services like google, itunes, youtube, etc... But for shows, you only have the option to buy each episode, which makes no sense.

I rent any movie I’d like for like 3-4eu instead of a monthly subscription with a tiny offering.

From where?

Not the OP but I know I can rent both from Google and from my ISP, I imagine there are more services available.

Google will stream a huge number of films for less than 5 USD each. You can see the list of countries here: https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/2843119?hl=en#z...

go to JustWatch.com. They'll tell you where to stream or rent/buy any movie/show you want

Netflix isn't just competing against movie theaters though, it's competing against 10 other similarly priced streaming services. If they let their quality degrade too much people are going to start choosing other services as their movie theatre alternative (likely already happening).

I rent individual movies for $3-4 apiece, and that turns out to be a big win over Netflix because I typically only watch 1-2 movies per month, and the rental service has a bigger library.

But I think that I'm a very unusual consumer in that respect. If I liked to watch TV series more then I'd be bingeing those, and that's where I think Netflix really attracts consumers, not movies. I don't think there's an economical way to do a la carte viewing of TV series on a regular basis.

Someone I know who was a fairly early-on high level technical person at Netflix (and later AWS) once told me that people came to Netflix initially for the movies and stayed for the TV shows.

And, yes, on an hourly basis they're probably comparable but renting a film now and then feels reasonable to me whereas paying per TV episode feels expensive.

Buying a DVD on Amazon isn't much different in price and paying for an a la carte streaming rental if available is probably cheaper.

With the fragmentation, streaming services start to make more sense if you're someone who likes to have the TV on as background. They make less sense if you watch a few hours of deliberately selected video a week.