As the film industry is changing, so are the production and distribution companies, the emerging markets will force companies and laws to follow the path the consumer set today. Many are trying to keep up and change their way of distributing their content some are talking about producing their own content. Unfortunately for some, it is too late or they don't have the resources necessary for such a change. This will be a costly change and since the streaming services are still a fairly new service, there will be a battle of who can accumulate most customers in shortest time.
The demands from the customer is already pressing the market to come up with new ideas and new content. Instant gratification and easy accessible products, together with "having all in place" will be expensive for many subscription based services. While some will aim at covering all types of content (for example Netflix and Hulu) others will aim towards their respective "originals" from their own company. A good example in this case is HBO. This will in turn put heavy pressure on high quality content and might be a dangerous game when competing for users, producing Film, Games and other types of entertainment is extremely expensive and will need a steady cash flow or investors willing to go all the way.
Kevin Noonan wrote about this in Variety - Hulu, Fullscreen, Maker Studios Execs Talk Subscription Streaming Challenges.
As usual, Kevin writes interesting pieces and it is nice to see someone talking objectively about the new market that is steadily growing. Look at the music industry where Spotify is clearly making it's users happy but also how much effort and investments are needed in order to get something like this of the ground.
“I don’t think the demand has quite caught up to the supply yet,” Strompolos said. - Variety
The interesting part about subscription based services is that you, as a consumer, don't own the product, but merely the right to watch, listen och play the content. This is also the reality for the companies today and that is a though nut to crack.
For example, I use Spotify for the simple reason that they where first and with that, have the means to keep it's content (today). The worst thing that could happen, is for a consumer (me) to discover that their favorite song or movie is not in their library or lists. Netflix is close to work this out but it is far from good. Today I´m worried my that my lists and libraries wont stay intact and that is a deal breaker for me as a consumer.
For an update on this subject, please take a look at the streaming industry in 2017.