Farhad Manjoo, for The New York Times:

“In the music business, Napster’s vision eventually became a reality. Today, with services like Spotify and Rdio, you can pay a monthly fee to listen to whatever you want, whenever you want. But in the movie and TV business, such a glorious future isn’t in the offing anytime soon.”

There's nothing new in this piece, but it does drive home the depressing state of affairs in online video streaming. Manjoo puts the problems mainly down to "windowing":

“The main reason you won’t see a comprehensive, all-you-can-eat movie plan soon is something called “windowing,” the entertainment industry term for the staggered way movies are released to various outlets.”

This is probably true to an extent, but I think he misses - or at least understates - another important aspect of this debate. The film studios actively, consciously, deliberately do not want Netflix to succeed. They do not want Netflix to have new or popular films. They do not want Netflix to be the ‘go-to’ place for the best TV shows.This isn’t (just) because Netflix cannot or will not offer them enough money to be moved further up the "windowing" priority list. It’s because were Netflix to be the ‘go-to’ place for TV shows, were it to have the newest and most popular films, were it to succeed, then it would have too much power, would grow too big, would have the upper-hand. It would remove the studios from the (public-facing) picture. It would do to film and TV as Amazon did to books.

Manjoo uses Spotify as a comparison to show what Netflix could and should be, and indeed the music industry has had a large part to play in creating the situation Manjoo describes. The reason Netflix is not the Spotify of video is because the music industry is five years ahead of the film and TV production business. That is not to say, though, that in five years we will have a Spotify for films. Piracy hit music before it did video, because the bandwidth required to download a song is far less than it is to download a feature-length movie. This meant that record labels were under threat much earlier than film studios, and has given the studios the opportunity to avoid the mistakes made by the music industry, an opportunity that they have seized.

The rise of internet piracy and the consequent and speedy decline in CD sales sent the music industry into tail-spin. Desperate, the record labels grabbed a hold of the life-belts thrown to them by services like iTunes and Spotify.

Life-belts of sorts. By so readily allowing their content to be sold through Spotify (and similar services) they have relinquished the upper-hand. Now if Spotify don’t have your song, it will be hard to make it a hit.

The film studios are clearly eager to avoid the rock-and-hard-place situation that befell the record labels.