From elsewhere i have gotten the impression that some central legal figures within the business have some kind of stuck up idea about counting copies.
There was a company trying to offer cloud based DVR service, and found that the only way they could get big media legal approval was to not use deduplication of any kind. This meant that their storage costs skyrocketed.
I think this is to do with media controllers (the managers of the megacorps) predicating value on number of copies reproduced. Shows are not to be allowed to be given only the value of production but must be talked up to have a value according to the number of copies - the more expensive the copies can be made to appear the more realistic it seems that a copy should cost more.
Charging $20 per viewer for content that cost $0.20 per viewer to make is hard; you have to pay off politicians to maintain that sort of control.
If content creation is pushed to a point where the actors, production team, etc. just get a seriously good wage and no further profits are produced then there's no place for media magnates. They must do everything to push against the concept of economy of scale.
I'm imagining a utopia in which a $50M movie takes $100M, everyone gets a bonus (down to the caterers and toilet cleaners), the people who front it get 10%, the rest is fed back in to other projects and the movie is now in the public domain.
We need to support content creators not make those who control the media even more ridiculously wealthy.
Then we have people like the car manufacturer controllers not happy to make piles of money from the effort of the people who work beneath them they want to cripple the product and make cars impossible to repair ...
If you ever buy a supercar society should have you stripped naked and left to beg for scraps in a favela whilst all your personal assets are liquidised to feed the poor.
/rant
[Dammit, I'm really ready to go off on one, enjoy the rants of an over-tired slightly drunk person. Free at source! License: CC0!!]
This is a very risky business. People won't put money if reward is only 10%. And you are talking about successful products. The overall return would be far lower.
Low percentage returns aren't anywhere near as sexy as high ones are. Right?
But then again, a sure thing carries a lot more weight than it does sex appeal.
The people making blockbusters won't be happy with that, but the people telling stories totally will. Serial programming that pays consistently is attractive to those people wanting to tell stories in exchange for a nice life.
IMHO, if we actually did go down this road, we might be surprised at what people would pay for and why.
Along those lines, if you're interested in the legal history of distribution and "copies," Ars Technica put out a great summary article during the Aereo fight last year.
Well yeah, counting views, or more recently copies, has been a central tenant of show business since its inception in antiquity when minstrels played on stage. No wonder the media business is resistant to changing on that point.
There was a company trying to offer cloud based DVR service, and found that the only way they could get big media legal approval was to not use deduplication of any kind. This meant that their storage costs skyrocketed.