This is a good point.

I paid many movies on iTunes, and there's no way to access that content anymore, certaily not from my Linux (main) machines.

Also, people who "bought" 1984 on Amazon only to see it disappear from their Kindle will not have been amused.

Nobody likes to have things they spend money on cluttered across 20+ services with changing subscription fees and licensing terms. It's a mess.

Check out Moviesanywhere lets you sync itunes movies to Google, and other providers including moviesanywhere itself. Its owned by the movie industry iirc so totally legit. Not sure if it will help but it sucks losing an entire movie library otherwise.

Hell, I'd be happy to pay full price to have this option.

All my devices run Linux and apparently there is no amount of money that will let me stream paid content above 480p.

Maybe we'll soon see another round of "piracy as a paid service", just like Napster and the beginnings of Spotify.

That never went away. You still have tons of debrid services.

Shhhhhhhh....

That industry is still worth billions today. IPTV being the biggest one, then there's the debrid sites.

Hell, sell me BluRays that just contain an "unprotected" MP4 file in them, and I'll pay a little extra if I'm allowed to copy it as much as I want. I promise I wont share my files with anyone else, unless they're over my house to watch a movie together. I would go back to buying movies.

We need mandatory licensing. It worked for Radio, it can work for Streaming.

There's no reason Netflix and Hulu couldn't both have ALL media available. Then they could actually compete on features and capabilities, not on media catalog.

I'd buy 720p MP4s for $20, though my tastes in passive visual entertainment are rather niche.