I’m not here to shoot down your comment in response, but you are confusing a few different things here. My point was just to demonstrate how the actual cost for streaming from a provider when you throw all the extra junk they do on top of it. You can have very reliable, distributed systems without all that mess, they just choose not to go that route. Selling a user subscription is just the beginning down a rabbit hole of upsells, price hikes, content lures, marketing gimmicks, data capture and sale programs, Ads (for a service you already pay for in most cases)…it’s expansive. Each one of those things has a team behind it making decent money.
If they just wanted to stream things they could with much less cost and effort, AND make money doing it. It’s been done before. They all just choose to go the route of squeezing their audience for every last ounce of possible monetization they can, which costs a ton of money.