You know what I would like to see... a bright-line separation between production of content and distribution of content. Some good old fashioned regulation, sort of like what we used to have in the financial services industry with the Glass–Steagall act, preventing commercial and investment banking under the same roof.
Companies like Netflix would have to divest their studios, Disney would be prohibited from owning its own "me too" streaming services, Comcast would have to give up its ownership in Philly sports teams, etc etc.
I think that's a terrible idea and I hope nothing like that ever happens. I would be happy,
very happy, to see more direct-with-fewer-middlemen content, where the content makers are selling directly to me. I don't mind doing business with dozens or even hundreds of providers, as long as it's done right.
(But they need to remember the word in th above paragraph is "selling."
Sell me a .mkv file. I am not interested in paying a flat fee to get to use a proprietary client to play from your catalog for a month. I want to buy files, paying roughly in proportion to how many files I buy.)
It's just like how I prefer to buy beer directly from the brewery than from a law-mandated distributor. The crazy situation with alcohol distribution (here in the USA, at least) is probably why I hate your idea so much. ;-)
If we're going to solve our video annoyances with regulation, then the top-priority regulation should be standards enforcement. Let's return to the interoperability of analog cable in the 1990s, where you can plug the cable into anything (any brand TV, any brand VCR, any brand PVR) and it Just Works, without the user being railroaded into
anything else.
