Yes; because publishers license movies this way. It&#x27;s a fundamental part of how media properties are funded. Here&#x27;s a basic explanation:<p>A production company wants to make a movie (or TV show; the differences are small). Production companies are small and have limited assets (less to be sued for later) so they have to go out and raise money to make a movie. To do this, they sell distribution rights for the movie. Movie distribution has traditionally been done regionally -- one company will do it in the US, another in France, and another in China. Everything is done on a percentage basis -- the production company gets X% of gross, the distributor gets another Y% plus expenses, etc.<p>The distributor&#x27;s goal is to maximize the revenue they make from the movie. To do this in an organized and standardized way, distributors have come to consensus around a number of different &quot;windows&quot;. The first window is usually theatrical release -- screenings are tightly controlled, ticket prices are high, etc. The second window is usually pay-per-view, about 6 months later. A year or so after that will be the &quot;Premium&quot; window (i.e. all new movies get divvied up between HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, Starz, etc.) Another year or so after that, a show&#x2F;movie will hit catalog status, and will be sold as part of a &quot;package&quot; of shows&#x2F;movie that the distributor feels they can get more money for together than they could alone. They sell different types of distribution rights as well -- streaming rights, broadcast rights, etc. Just because you paid for one doesn&#x27;t mean you paid for the other. Catalog content is &quot;graded&quot; for popularity and sold in a package to networks like TBS, TNT or even companies like Netflix.<p>Now, all of these windows are coordinated with advertising (which is why distribution is localized -- advertising plays differently in different countries). The distributor is also usually in charge of promotion as well. But because there are already large distributors in different parts of the world with relationships to sell content to their region, it becomes hard for any global player to displace them. Add to this the fact that many countries have laws requiring local ownership of media rights and you&#x27;ll see that it&#x27;s very unlikely that this will happen soon; if ever. You can also get situations where Fox owns the rights to a movie in the US, but Universal owns the rights to the same movie in the EU. If Fox negotiates their contract with Netflix, and Universal with Amazon, the movie will be on different services in different countries. Even more confusing here is that sometimes the studios will assign transferrable rights within certain windows to distributors that can be resold -- as happened with Epix (a &quot;premium&quot; cable channel) licensing their movie catalog to Netflix (and now Hulu).<p>The content owners (or rather, the companies that own distribution rights) absolutely do not want to see their content available forever on one service. You have to create urgency with users, or else they get complacent and develop an expectation that content has no value because they just pay this one subscription and get access to everything. By using short-term licensing deals and shopping them around to multiple companies, they 1) re-negotiate pricing terms regularly 2) shatter the consumer expectation that content is available forever and 3) retain ultimate control over their content catalog. Movies in catalog are never sold as individual films, always as part of a content package. The studios figure out internally what money gets allocated to what show (this is intensely political and often very dirty business -- you see lots of law suits as a result).<p>Netflix also has their own proprietary viewing data -- they know how many people started the video and did not finish, what % they dropped out at, etc. Netflix does not have to share this with the studios, and in fact they do not. Netflix will renegotiate contracts based on better data than the studios have -- and often Netflix will decline a contract because there&#x27;s just not enough projected viewership lift (i.e. either too many of their subscribers have watched already and are unlikely to watch again or just that the content never found traction). So the idea that this industry will move to a &quot;pay per view&quot; model is optimistic -- the content industry is built around the fact that certain movies are worth more to consumers than others, and Netflix is taking advantage of this model. Even Netflix &quot;original&quot; shows are not immune to this -- Netflix often owns distribution rights for those shows in only part of the world.<p>Regardless, there are too many entrenched interests here for this to change any time soon. Netflix is simply a different distribution channel, but the media industry has come up with these complex ownership schemes to spread the risk of a single media property out among several partners. Without this type of complexity, you couldn&#x27;t fund a $100 million movie -- no one entity would be willing to take the risk without assurances on the distribution side that they can get the movie to market without trouble. Unfortunately, it means that it can be complex for consumers outside the major media markets to acquire media content. Piracy needs to exist to force these companies to address these markets, so I view things like Popcorn Time as ultimately a good thing for the industry.