I'm going to speak only to US law here since that's the country I live in. What drives me crazy is that in the music industry, US lawmakers figured out years ago (thanks to player pianos) a little trick called "compulsory licensing." That is, once a song has been written, I am allowed to record and sell my own rendition ("bundling") of the song, so long as I a pay a "compulsory licensing" fee of 12 cents for each copy sold, and the song's copyright holder isn't allowed to prohibit me from doing so (hence "Compulsory").
What I can't figure out is why we haven't brought this model to streaming services, say, for "movies." Why was Netflix great in the beginning? Because it had (virtually) EVERYTHING. Then every studio saw Netflix was making money and they wanted to to cash in. Because every company wants to maximize profits, Netflix (a company) and studios (other companies) fought for 100% of profits when it was time to renew the rights, and (nearly) every studio eventually decided, "if we make our own streaming service, we don't have to negotiate with Netflix - we can get 100% of the profits."
This meant instead of having everything in one streaming service, we now have X streaming services, each with approximately 1/X of the movies, and as X increases the value of any one service goes down. And since every service has about the same cost for maintaining and improving its platform, the amount of money available to improve each platform is reduced to 1/X.
In an ideal world, there would be compulsory licensing for movie streams. The government could essentially say, "any business is allowed to stream any movie as long as they pay 12 cents (or insert other number here) to the rights holder for each time the movie is streamed." The library of every streaming service is now "everything" again (as it was in the early days of Netflix) and now instead of competing on "we have exclusive access to content X" you would see streaming services forced to compete on having a good platform - the app/interface/stable stream/recommendation algorithms, etc. - in other words, all the stuff that is hard to do right but actually makes the experience better for the end user.
As the worst platforms die off because they don't compete on features with the better platforms, the better platforms go back to capturing a bigger percentage of the available subscription money instead of being limited to 1/X and have more money to invest in making their platforms even better (and are incented to do so because the moment you stagnate and let someone else come along with a better platform, your platform is out of business).
This probably leaves us with two or three major platforms at the end of things, but since every platform would have all the content available on it, that's probably not a huge loss to consumers. It's not a huge loss to studios because now by law they get paid in compulsory licensing but DON'T have to try to be software developers running platforms as well. The lawyers and accountants will love it because lawsuits from content owners will constantly be flying at the platforms accusing them of cooking their streaming numbers.
Good luck getting companies to this as a win for themselves in any way, though, because it means relinquishing not "money" but "control" and it is human nature not to want to give that away. But I can dream, right?
