I have this hair-brained vision of a world where all of the content is available on all the platforms that want to distribute it.
In this world, instead of having an exclusive distribution deal with a single company, content creators (tv studios, journalists, sound cloud musicians, youtubers) would price their content at whatever they think it's worth, and make the viewing key available via e.g. smart contract or some other payment system and API.
Apple/Netflix/Hulu/Youtube/Popcorn Time could each have their own pricing model: ad supported, subscription based, usage based, pay as you go with a self-custody wallet. They can also distribute the content they want to carry. They can compete by reducing their hard costs for distributing the content, or by having better recommendation engines or content search, or delivering a better experience however else they like.
In this kind of world these platforms become more like interfaces to a universe of content that exists outside the walled garden. You can choose the interface you like and still have access to any content. You could use a community-supported FOSS interface that you self-fund, that kind of interface might give you access to the whole firehose, or you could subscribe to a hyper-curated Montessori-approved children's portal to content that is educational and not over-stimulating, for example. One can dream!
You may know this, but if not, fantasies like this in the digital world date back to Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson (who is still alive!). The unfortunate reality is that they are based on a different networking physics, whose primary purpose is to enforce Intellectual Property. Such a physics in practice is unusable. "Worse is better" dominates both in media as well as in engineering.
What you want is compulsory licensing. It exists for e.g. music. Radio stations generally can play whatever they want. They pay a (sometimes flat) licensing fee. All those station fees are pooled together and redistributed to the artists/distributors. I exists in other forms too, like the blank media fee in Europe (not sure if that still exists?)
I would love for something like that to exist for video and news. It would mean that a service like Netflix could offer all content.
I suppose you mean that content creators can't decide which platform can or cannot distribute their content, right? Because obviously, if they can, then they can sell exclusive rights and that's the system we have today.
I suppose you need to enforce that all the distributors pay the same price for the content (otherwise again, we end up with the system we have today, where some distributors can pay more and get some kind of exclusivity through that).
Then how do you imagine it goes when the content creator gains a lot popularity? Do they raise their price for all distributors? Then do the distributors have to forward that price to their users, or can they do what they like? You mentioned having their own pricing model, so again Netflix could buy content from a popular artist at a good price, but provide it "for free" to their subscribers (in which case, again, that's the system we have today).
TL;DR: I don't see how that can work. Even with smart contracts (which are known to solve most problems /s).
I was about to write a similar post. I think the only way it can work is a distributor paying a fixed price for every user that views the content. This way both big and small players can have access to it and you can even imagine some pricing it higher than others if the overall experience on their platforms is worth it for the users.
The author sets the price for every bit of content they offer. They can set it separately for every bit of content they offer or even change it after a while (although that will likely require some waiting period as without that promise buyers are unlikely to commit).
The problem here seems to be enforcement and accounting as there would be a big incentive to not report the number of users in an honest way.
We already kinda have that with FRAND for patents. That still has its issues, but the idea is workable.
The main question is what you want to prevent. For me the answer is "the stuff you want is spread over 15 different subscriptions". Preventing that was the main selling point of netflix or steam over piracy.
In this world, instead of having an exclusive distribution deal with a single company, content creators (tv studios, journalists, sound cloud musicians, youtubers) would price their content at whatever they think it's worth, and make the viewing key available via e.g. smart contract or some other payment system and API.
Apple/Netflix/Hulu/Youtube/Popcorn Time could each have their own pricing model: ad supported, subscription based, usage based, pay as you go with a self-custody wallet. They can also distribute the content they want to carry. They can compete by reducing their hard costs for distributing the content, or by having better recommendation engines or content search, or delivering a better experience however else they like.
In this kind of world these platforms become more like interfaces to a universe of content that exists outside the walled garden. You can choose the interface you like and still have access to any content. You could use a community-supported FOSS interface that you self-fund, that kind of interface might give you access to the whole firehose, or you could subscribe to a hyper-curated Montessori-approved children's portal to content that is educational and not over-stimulating, for example. One can dream!