The licensing of the music on certain movies didn't anticipate the internet. And the studios never came to an agreement. As a result you can buy DVDs of movies like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Fair_Lady and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullets_Over_Broadway, but you can't rent them off of any streaming service. Given that most of us no longer have DVD players, they seem destined to only survive in pirated copies. If that.
But the second tier ones don't. There isn't so much money to be made from fixing them, nor is there the public pressure. So they languish..indefinitely.
https://www.amazon.com/My-Fair-Lady-Audrey-Hepburn/dp/B08NDY...
https://www.amazon.com/Bullets-Over-Broadway-John-Cusack/dp/...
A couple of years ago it wasn't true. I know because I tried to watch both and not a single streaming service, including Amazon, had it.
Plus it's not like CD's/DVD's are incredibly resource-intensive. Remember AOL CD's you got sent for free? A quick Google says one billion of those were sent out. There's about as much plastic by weight in an average Chinese takeout, or a single plastic clamshell of fresh greens at the grocery store.
Awesome for the environment? Of course not. But "disgustingly greedy"? Nope, just a tiny drop in the bucket of plastics usage.
I loved the story of DIVX. As a format, it never actually got hacked to unlock unlimited viewing of the far-cheaper-than-DVD discs.
It never got hacked not because its security was great (after all - a static disk which received unlock codes over dialup, had to have some significant attack surface), but because it sucked and wasn't worth hacking.
Video quality was lower than that of DVD's and soon enough after release, the pricing of used DVD's was close enough that buying DIVX made no sense at all. To say nothing of paying a premium price for all of that in the players.
Having now read about Red tapes, it seems like pure folly that DIVX should have been attempted.
It didnt make it out of the test marketing stage, thankfully.
Does that mean I own every book I've checked out of a library? Every hotel room I've stayed in?
Realistically - there is a considerable difference in the resources required to create a digital copy of a good vs a physical copy. The digital good has the slight upside that when companies abuse consumers through predatory pricing practices (literal rent-seeking...), they are destroying slightly less of the environment in the process.
Most consumers aren’t going to rent a movie they can only watch a few for a 10% discount off the price of unlimited views.
For example, Apple typically prices movie “purchases” around 4x of a 24 hr rental (75% off), and that has essentially zero marginal cost of production. With physical media there would be no profit.
But other than that I can't think of a lot of examples.
Producers rent seek. More at 11
