>Or even more critically, everyone has seen everything they want to see on Netflix, and Netflix itself cannot produce enough original content fast enough to justify the sub. Especially when they are competing with what is often free and immediately accessible.
What difficulty exactly would they have to produce "original content fast enough"?
Content is produced by independent teams. It's not like one show is holding others back.
I believe the question is posed in the world in which all the premium producers of content decide to run their own services rather than let Netflix aggregate it.
Personally I expect that after a period of everyone trying to run their own service, quite a lot of them are going to fail and discover that letting Netflix have its competitive advantage in streaming while you focus on content production may not be such a bad idea. Or there may be several aggregators and an industry-standardized way of shipping their older content out to them all at once. (This has the advantage of keeping any one of them from getting too powerful.) Perhaps some of that competition will come from specific companies realizing they can improve their own offering by letting other companies on board and then... oh... you've built a Netflix competitor, rather than a Disney platform. Go$h, how $hall we deal with failing with such $ucce$$?
I'd still like to peer in on a parallel universe where Netflix had a subscription model but also sells/rents additional premium content. Not because it would necessarily solve all problems, I'd just like to see the differences when the dominant player makes such a fundamental change. Eventually they'd still try to use their position to extract more rent than the content producers would tolerate, but the resulting changes in timing and value proposition would still have interesting effects.
What difficulty exactly would they have to produce "original content fast enough"?
Content is produced by independent teams. It's not like one show is holding others back.