Now they are fighting a battle they can't win. HBO, Disney, etc. have huge back catalogs that immediately makes their streaming services more valuable, in addition to all the new content they make.
They shouldn't have given up so quickly on physical media. Physical media does not have the licensing issues. They could've invested heavily like the way Amazon did on lowering delivery time. Maybe they could've gotten physical media delivery down to one hour or same day. This would counter the studios back catalog because while Disney can instantly stream their back catalog, it's only Disney. Netflix would have access to back catalogs of all studios (at the tradeoff of waiting for the physical media) That's a tradeoff that many customers would make (access to more back catalog diversity in exchange for the delay of waiting for disks).
At the same time, they could produce streaming content with a different business model. How many times do customers complain about favorite shows getting canceled after a season? What if there was a way for customers to select which shows they want supported? Like pick your top five every month and your subscription money will go to that show.
Instead, they went the route of just spending a lot of money making new content as if they're a studio. But they can't beat the studios at being a studio, Disney and the others are the best at that.