I'm not arguing in favor of the status quo, I am in fact very much against it. I'm simply realistic enough that I don't think that HBO simply selling their shows to the world as downloads from their website will magically lead to them making more money.

As to the music industry it responded to a serious decline in sales and for all their attempts at going digital their growth is at best pretty flat and they are still far off their pre-crash peak. So streaming and DRM-free downloads at best helped the music industry slow their decline, it certainly didn't lead to them making more money.