The studios did not have to build their own services. And a lot of them willingly pulled their shows from places like Netflix to build their own services. And there was enough players in the game at the time when Netflix began dropping a shows that someone else like prime or hulu was willing to spend a lot of money to pick them up.

From my point of view, even if overall it was potentially less money. That doesn't factor in just the cost of operating your own content. They have to hire a whole new division to develop the website and app and streaming service and pay all those people. Or they could have just sold it to someone else to do all that work. And said we know what we have. We know you want friends on your service. Lol.

And even on top of that studios had no idea how lucrative streaming services were going to be. So they should have just renegotiated better contracts for the content they were selling. A lot of them ended as it was which is when they got pulled from places like Netflix. And I absolutely guarantee you Netflix would have been able to pay way more for something like Parks and rec or the office if they wanted to. Because Netflix knows just a sheer numbers game on those types of shows.