The streaming economy is shotgun malinvestment into the arts.
The subscriber pays a flat rate for unlimited choice within the catalog. They're not paying for the media they think they like the most. While technically the streamer is on the hook for this, they have competing optimization criteria - churn, hours viewed, etc.
The platform pours money into a lot of experiments. Platforms optimize for revenue and retention, get signals based on hours viewed, etc., yet none of this directly maps to satisfaction. Viewers will often mindlessly play stuff in the background. Expensive content reduces the number of cheap experiments that can be run. Weird stuff is long tail.
The old model of paying for what we think we'll enjoy was a better match that resulted in much higher quality film and prestige television.
I'd pay for House of the Dragon and The Last of Us. I'd probably pay $50 - $100 for each good TV show. I don't want the rest of it.
In my ideal world I pay creators directly with an upfront deposit. If I watch certain percentages of the show or film, they get a percentage of that deposit. I'd gladly pay a lot more for content this way.
New content should be paid for directly, à la carte. Old content should be streamed.