The Economics of Streaming

A streaming service is also a money machine, and its costs shape what you can watch. Licensing fees are the biggest expense — Netflix spends well over ten billion dollars a year on content, with each title negotiated region by region.

That is why libraries differ between countries: a movie on Netflix in the US might sit on a different platform in Europe because the rights were sold separately.

Bandwidth is the second major cost. Delivering 4K to millions of simultaneous viewers takes huge infrastructure, which is why higher-quality tiers cost more and ad-supported tiers exist.