Large aggregation is also to a certain degree a moat. Most creators have quickly found that people won't pay for one creator's content unless that creator is a huge volume creator (at the scale of maybe Disney). No one subscribes to a platform with 20 movies and 5 TV shows.
Re:But what if I want a faster horse?
by travisjungroth on Friday April 11, 2025 @06:20PM
(#43659313)
Dropout.tv is a counterexample. They're not 20 movies and 5 TV shows, but they're closer to that than they are Disney. There are also all the people who make a living on Patreon.
Which is also how rent works for physical locations, by the way.
Which is why back in the 1930's, there's anti-trust legislations preventing movie studios from owning cinemas. This prevents the ownership of IP from dictating prices in the cinema.
The situation with streaming platforms are exactly equivalent, and these content production studios have learnt to prevent this sort of anti-trust legislations from forming.
in fact, the cinema ownership decree has been ended i think: https://www.laineygossip.com/with-sonys-purchase-of-alamo-dr...
Only Netflix-produced shows apply here. Before Netflix started producing content they had *no moat*.
That's the big problem with media streaming - the content owners have all the leverage. Any profit you make they can see and simply increase licensing costs to transfer to them. If you don't want to pay they can (and will, and have done) start their own competitor since the technology isn't a moat - content ownership is.