Movie Distribution Rights

The first sale doctrine protects this business model so even if all studios stop all rental contracts with you, you can still legally purchase retail discs and rent those out. Unfortunately there is no such thing for streaming.

Piracy is the reason you can't stream a movie the day it comes out. Movie theaters are the best DRM available.

In my opinion, the real issue is more along the lines of "How do I purchase and watch a film that I would like to see." The solutions are many and varied, but none provides access to all of the films one might want to watch. A given film may never be available in a theater near you and once they leave, may never become available online (via Netflix, iTunes, etc.) Just like the record companies, the production houses are hoping that if they fight progress long and hard enough, people wi

Just get a DVD/Blueray player. The content is there for you to legally get and pay for. Heck, you can buy pretty much any movie from Amazon digitally. There is really no excuse not to pay.

That's almost certainly a rights issue. Even if legal, movie studios probably wouldn't be happy about not getting a cut of the action and would stop releasing movies to that theater. Which is too bad because it seems like there could be a system where you can select from a studio's library of past releases and pay a fee for viewing. Just like their opposition to VCRs which ended up greatly improving their bottom line instead of killing them off like "the Boston Strangler"

The copyright applies to a specific viewing of a movie, not the purchase of a license. They can't enable their users to break license or they'll loose their right to distribute content.

Maybe they are republishing the movies in the cheapest way to keep the rights?

You can resell the rights to watch that no-longer-available movie to someone else...

You don't need any special rights to rent out physical copies of movies. Video stores, Netflix, Redbox all could just buy disks and tapes from the local market and rent them out directly. Sure, they can make a business deal to get better pricing and cut out the middleman, but this effectively puts a cap on that negotiation because the local market is always a fallback. When streaming deals fail there is no fallback, see Netflix's depleting catalog.The problem is that the experien

It could be in their agreements to sell movies on google play, youtube, etc. e.g. A financial reason to make the MPAA happy.