If US clients would have the tiny tiny catalogs they offer e.g. in most of Europe, you would also be scratching your head how this could ever justify the subscription cost.
Valve turned a huge profit on Portal 2. Yet they refuse to make Portal 3. Why? Because compared to Steam, Portal 2 generates a tiny ROI by comparison.
Option A: invest $1 in Steam and get $10 back
Option B: invest $1 in Portal 3 and get $2 back
which do you do?
Same goes for movie industry. A movie promises returns for decades as it is milked and re-released in various formats. If the movie can only make money for 20-ish years, ROI goes down significantly. Read: "The Disney Vault" [1]
Seems like hollywood is already on board with this. What do they need Ghostbusters to have a 100 year copyright on when they could just release a new Ghostbusters every 30-40 years like they're pretty much already doing.
IMHO there are fundamental differences between that and something that was purchased to satisfy the needs of yourself or your close associates.
There's also a world of difference between a new paperback copy of The Fellowship of the Ring for $10, and a movie from some old company that went out of business in the '70s and whichever company bought up all the scraps never bothered to capitalize on the IP, and the movie can't be purchased (new) for any price anywhere. If it's been ten years since your media was commercially available, it should be at least temporarily public domain. If you want to assert that copyright, start selling it, then you can have exclusive access to selling it again.
It's dumb how much of 20th century history has been lost because of the march of ever dumber copyright laws.
Of course, with digital distribution, the cost of actually making them available in the US should be extremely low, so it should still be profitable given there's a very small number of Americans who would watch them, surely more than the puny number who watch crappy old B-grade movies that are now available on YouTube. So I'm not sure why they don't bother.
Unless you share it with family so more people get value out of it, it is indeed hard to justify the subscription for many people.
Edit:
> make the shows and movies available on servers in Canada
Is this a real protection against getting caught? I would have imagined Russia or the Ukraine to be better options for being outside of the reach of the FBI.
(I am a Youtube Premium and an Amazon Prime subscriber btw)
I think original titles and foreign distribution (ie getting content from not your nation) are quickly becoming the only differences. That's what cable was when I moved away.
I have, quite honestly, consumed everything I'm incredibly interested in on the majors. None of them turn out originals fast enough to keep my interest and new/returning content comes in a trickle so I've recently turned to just buying old shows I like and watching those. It's just like the nineties/aughties all over but without the hope of what was then cable cutting.
For as long as I can remember now, every Netflix experience boils down to spending 15-30 minutes looking for something remotely interesting before finally giving up and reading a book or playing a video game instead.
I'm not sure how much of the problem is them not having enough content, versus just their (at least on Android) godawful UI making it impossible to find, but the end result is the same.