Technology

I'm glad to finally see someone else mentioning this aspect. Streaming services creating their own content is Vertical Integration and it's a big reason for a lot of the problems with streaming. It's essentially a conflict of interest where the platform wants to create as much content as fast as possible, which puts them at odds with the realities of creating quality content: it takes time, and is heavily dependent on the artists involved; there's no simple formula to make something good consistently. Netflix originally had some good shows at first with House of Cards and Orange is the New Black but then both shows fell off and Netflix switched tracks to putting out a much as they could and cancelling anything that didn't catch on (which is most things).

I think this also contributes to lowering payouts to the actors involved because of the lack of licensing agreements. I have seen a few news articles about how bad the pay is for residuals on streaming sites, and it's not hard to imagine ways that a streaming platform could massage the numbers to make any specific show seem less profitable since all content is behind the same paywall. However, when a show is licensed, like the big popular shows such as Friends or Seinfeld, there is a public announcement for how much money is paid for the rights to stream that show, and this makes it much more straightforward to calculate how much money goes to everyone involved.