And thus begins the fragmentation and slow descent of streaming platforms into madness.
The best way to think about it is disintermediation. The content owners taking over distribution and monetising their content directly. Ultimately, consumers win massively.
Consider how TV and film content was distributed and monetised just recently, and still is, for a little while
1. Licensing to local broadcasters. Local broadcasters would then have a sales organisation to sell advertisements for products that were inserted between the content, to pay for it. Or the state would pay for the content, and collect payments via taxes or license fees. This structure was repeated in each country, involving thousands of people, at the very least.
2. Selling through retail. The content pressed on media, and shipped to the far corners of the world. A retailer would take a cut of the content price to pay for the space, staff and risk for stocking the content. A distributor in every country would have sales staff to handle the retailers locally, and would also take a cut to do so.
3. Licensing for different online services. These services would take a cut of the price to pay for their services and marketing.
4. Selling to theatres. Huge real estate investments with staff and equipment to play the content for people. And usually, local distributors handling the distribution to theatres.
5. Selling to cable and satellite companies. These companies would distribute boxes that they often needed to send an engineer to install. The companies would collect payments for bundles of content, and take a cut for running the operation in each country.
All these intermediaries, structures, devices and physical objects will disappear as content providers begin directly monetising the content. Theatres aside, they never added anything positive for the consumer. On the contrary, they added huge costs and limited availability.
With Netflix, Amazon, Apple and Disney all doing content, distribution and monetisation, the entertainment world is radically simplified, made more efficient (cheaper), and more convenient (immediate global availability).