The best potential outcome of this would be accelerating potential copyright/IP reform. Netflix is destined to die unless they can find a way to diversify; as you said, the rights holders want to cut out the middle man. The overhead requisite in old-world rental chains like Blockbuster is sufficiently prohibitive that the media companies did not have an interest in supplanting that market, but now that Netflix has proven the viability of online delivery, apparently media companies don't think it prohibitive to set up some servers and stream reruns.

Netflix perhaps should consider transitioning from a consumer-facing service to a white-label technology provider, developing things like the recommendation engine, rental and streaming platform, etc. and licensing to media companies as the basis for their several services. Unfortunately, I think the unified collection in services like Netflix is going to go away as media companies' greed drives them to try to take their own slice of the pie, probably resulting in fewer subscribers all the way around and potentially a resurgence of brick-and-mortar video rental, where, it appears, media companies still are not interested.

All that said, $300 was grossly overpriced for a company whose entire existence depends on the benevolence of a handful of major media producers.