Licensing being a giant mess for media is not exactly news? Netflix reportedly got some really good deals early on, but of the kind that nobody was willing to do again.
They didn't have the luxury of first sale to protect their market, though. Which is a very sharp contrast to how they ran the DVD side of things.
So, it isn't that they were wasting money on licensing. Licensing kept getting more and more expensive. Not fully for nefarious reasons, but that doesn't change that it was so.
I mean, I just have to point out how that isn't even close to the pricing models that are in use. That is, if you "rent/buy" through the places that offer it, you don't pay more the more that you watch it. Similarly, if it was that straight forward, then you could make more as a content owner by basically bot farming out a steady stream of watchers for your content.
But the point was that the older "pre streaming" deals would be on catalogs of films and would apportion out royalties based on several factors. This is why some shows have been forever on late night television. Turned out, getting that catalog to offer on streaming was valuable, but not if you started having to pay primetime rates for every single view.
So, the "uproar" was that Netflix got a deal that was very valuable to them at the start, and then refused to cave to a deal that was not at all valuable to them when the studios had a chance to renegotiate.
To be clear, it was fair for the studios to want to renegotiate. It is also fair for Netflix to question if it is worth it to them in some of the newer negotiations.
They didn't have the luxury of first sale to protect their market, though. Which is a very sharp contrast to how they ran the DVD side of things.
So, it isn't that they were wasting money on licensing. Licensing kept getting more and more expensive. Not fully for nefarious reasons, but that doesn't change that it was so.