Streaming is bringing in similar/better money compared to cable TV, but the income pillars for movies used to be “theaters, rentals, cable TV” and now the pillars removed the rentals part.
Yes, sure, you still can rent and buy movies on the Apple TV Store, Vudu/Fandango, Amazon, and Google Play, but I get the sense that these income streams are a lot smaller than Blockbuster and Hollywood Video used to be.
This also seems like it was entirely the movie industry’s fault. They basically gifted leverage to Netflix by agreeing to license movies and TV for their monthly streaming service. By the time they realized what they were giving away it was too late: Netflix had enough money to produce their own content and they proved the business model to Apple and Amazon.
If I was going to argue against my own point I would perhaps say that the internet was bound to devalue content regardless of business model. Content used to be artificially limited by the channels available on our TV and the movie selection at our local video store. Now I might be happy to watch a show on YouTube for free instead of paying for an expensive streaming service. That wasn’t really even an option before unless I wanted to watch a small selection of terrestrial antenna channels.