&gt; From a content creator (studio) perspective, I have to imagine this is ineffective.<p>It&#x27;s effective if you consider what their real goal is: to keep any one streaming provider from becoming too popular, and then in a position to start making demands from the creators. They&#x27;re deathly afraid of streaming ending up like music did with iTunes, where Apple had the record companies in an iron grip until they were broken by streaming. Thus, they want to keep each service as weak as possible, so they can remain in a position to yank popular titles if any of them get too uppity.<p>And, honestly, it&#x27;s working. For a while, it looked like Netflix would be <i>the</i> movie-and-TV streaming provider, and everyone else was going to be an also-ran, but now Hulu and Amazon Video are respectable competitors. I don&#x27;t really like that, but their success means that there will definitely never be one service which has everything. Everyone would just switch to that one to pay only one subscription, and that service would have way too much leverage over the creators.