Netflix Cofounder Mark Randolph Has Done a Reddit AMA

This is a consequence of their earlier distro contracts and their failure to account for netflix succeeding to become a worthy competitor and those rights-holders saying "hey wait me too". As a result, a lot of this content costs more to license, especially for global sector, and finite term lengths.

I suspect it's impossible to be the general streaming platform without offering content for an exorbitant price.

Content creation is an expensive industry, historically content consumers might need to drop 100-200 a month for access to everything via cable, theaters, advertising, DVD sales, and rentals. While there were more middle men, it's likely that a good chunk made it back to the production side.

8 bucks a month was probably always to cheap for what Netflix was offering without breaking the content production side. For Netflix to be what they were, they might need people to pay 100 per month or more and hope they can always produce good content.