Comment by ndriscoll

If not for excessively long copyrights, streaming might not have taken off in the same way. You could instead buy e.g. $250 HDD that's loaded with 2,000 movies from 20+ years ago or whatever. A company could sell a NAS-like appliance that's designed to slot in drives that are pre-loaded with tons of media along with a card library like this to play them. Since they'd be out of copyright, there's no need for DRM and HDCP and all that, so the system might actually work without tons of fiddling. You wouldn't need high-paid techies to maintain a gargantuan delivery platform; you just clone drives at manufacturing time and ship them.

There's definitely a business case to be made with this if it were legal. There's sketchy Chinese pre-built mini PCs with emulators + 50k-100k ROMS that you can buy for ~$100 on Amazon right now, so basically following this exact business model. I'm actually surprised that there aren't similar products for movies (from what I can tell anyway).