Which choice could they have made differently here? They took the "pay for it" option that you suggested and then you still blamed them for giving the company negative incentives.

They didn't though. Every single streaming service bar Netflix loses money. On top of that, they've all poisoned the well by creating as many subscription tiers as Dell has laptop SKUs and raising the price every 9 months so nobody knows what the service should cost.

This ensures that people start and stop subscriptions just to watch a single series, instead of sticking with a single service all year.