> This is an artificial scarcity.
This is a foolish truism.
(1) Intellectual property creates an intentional natural monopoly over the rights to sell that good. That's the whole point of a copyright. Thus, by design, they can make it as scarce as they want.
(2) Since the good is digital, the good is, by definition, non-rival in economic terms (i.e. consumption by one consumer does not prevent simultaneous consumption by other consumers).
Thus, ALL digital intellectual property is "artificially scarce" unless it is made totally freely available on the internet.
However, the entire point of a copyright is to enable the content creator to get maximum value for their product (obviously subject to competition with other products).
This is handled through distribution deals AND price discrimination. If Netflix had to make ALL content available EVERYWHERE for the monthly SAME PRICE, then most of the world would suffer. By being able to charge different amounts for different content, they are actually resulting in less dead-weight loss compared to normal monopolistic pricing (which again, the copyright grants a monopoly).
> Splitting series across platforms is such a shitty, anti-consumer maneuver
You could analogize this to "not releasing a movie for streaming at the same time as it is released in theaters is such a shitty, anti-consumer behavior". You aren't wrong that is true, ceteris paribus (i.e. with other conditions remaining the same). BUT you are ignoring that producer revenue effects of this simultaneous release. If a movie cannot force customers who have the highest demand to go to the theater first and pay a premium and then release it for home streaming, they would make substantially less money. That would (and is) totally devastating the film industry (currently) as they cannot afford to produce a big blockbuster.
James Cameron summed this up well when reflecting on if the Avatar sequels (which were green-lit before the pandemic) will end up making any money:
"The big issue is: Are we going to make any damn money?" Cameron says of his planned sequels. "Big, expensive films have got to make a lot of money. We're in a new world post-COVID, post-streaming. Maybe those [box office] numbers will never be seen again. Who knows? It's all a big roll of the dice."[1]
Similarly, TV distribution follows a model of first-run distribution paying the highest price for the exclusive rights within a certain market.
I totally get (and agree) that it is incredibly frustrating to have this kind of system. The problem is that, by design, these copyrights are monopolies. And if you don't enable some kind of price discrimination when you have a monopoly, then the incentive of the monopolist is to charge the HIGHEST price / most exclusionary set up so that they can get the maximum profit, at the expense of substantial dead-weight loss. Using things like the time-value of money to separate your customers into a cohort that doesn't want to wait and will pay and one that is willing to wait for the content to come to streaming months later is quite effective.
So my question to you if -- how would solve this otherwise given the monopolistic nature of copyrights AND ensure we don't have a substantial decrease in available content? This question deserves serious attention by the entertainment industry. The music industry basically had piracy annihilate artist revenue from record sales 20 years ago and then they settled on a system that seems great to customers (i.e. virtually all music is available on any single streaming service) however it has created a situation where artists make virtually no material income from streaming and make most of their income from live concerts. That seems like a bad outcome for the artist. Basically their monopolistic rights to their copyright were shattered by a standardized pricing scheme for streaming.
The difference -- music is extremely cheap to make and can be made by the band themselves at home. Sure, plenty of video content for things like tiktok or youtube can be done that way as well. But movies and higher production value TV shows absolutely cannot. They require several hundred people to be paid wages for specialized roles to make.
[1] https://ew.com/movies/james-cameron-teases-avatar-sequel/