I wouldn't say it's funny. They had most of the stuff people wanted - easy payment monthly. Good ux. Lots of movies and tv. then they figured they could get a few more pennies than Netflix was giving and that they could do it better. Read: so far no
Seems like it's a universal law of media companies: They constantly and seemingly deliberately won't allow any distribution channel to get good enough to beat "piracy".
As soon as something comes along that has the potential of being a one-stop shop, they fuck everything up by splintering into many services you have to pay for individually.
As soon as something comes along that offers a huge catalog, they fuck everything up by fighting among themselves over IP rights and exclusivity and randomly removing random shows from random seasons.
As soon as something comes along that is cheap enough to make the risk of piracy not worth it, they fuck everything up by jacking up the price.
As soon as something comes along that delivers piracy-like video quality over streaming, they fuck it up by over-compressing it and otherwise nerfing the video quality.
It's like these media executives are meeting every year to ensure that their products are all just shitty enough to keep piracy alive.
Netflix saw the amount of cash going out the door to studios and thought, hey we can do what they do, started shoveling their own content and overnight became the richest studio in Hollywood.
They also saw the writing on the wall when the president of HBO said that they would never license their content to Netflix. The reaction to create their own content was in response to that, among other things.
