Supply and Demand

 Don't be too hard on Netflix.

"You Netflix folks might remember a little episode recently where a whole gob of Sony movies disappeared from Netflix Instant. The company gave a suitably vague reason why it happened along with an assurance that the situation would be fixed soon. That incident was actually the first sign of a very big problem for Netflix that’s only going to get worse unless it takes fairly drastic action, like, say, a rate hike.
Several years ago, Netflix made deals with several movie studios to buy the rights to stream those studios’ libraries for relatively little. Since then, the streaming movie market exploded, to the point where Netflix is worth a couple hundred million and other companies like Hulu and Amazon are looking to expand their own presence. You know what happens when you have more than one bidder for a product, right? The price goes up. That’s exactly what’s happening with Netflix. One estimate has Netflix licensing costs rising from about $180 million last year to almost $2 billion in 2012 – an elevenfold increase."

 More here.