One minor issue I've noticed with streaming is the quality. I went to watch A Bridge on the River Kwai the other day. I could borrow it from my library on Kanopy for free, but the audio was only in stereo. The $4 iTunes rental supported Dolby Atmos, which took advantage of my speaker system, and the video quality was comparably better. I ended up paying despite the library having it because iTunes offered a better experience that was easy to access.

iTunes movie rentals seem to almost always win out when it comes to streaming specifically. I don't know why I would want to watch something on Prime Video at a lower quality and sit through ads. I've also encountered a number of services such as Peacock that absolutely refused to run on my Linux laptop even though I was a paying customer.

Further, the iTunes versions of movies often come with special features (e.g. The making of the Lord of the Rings). They also earned a lot of goodwill from me when they upgraded a number of my HD movies to 4k for free.

I do maintain a Jellyfin server with movies and shows I have legally purchased because I didn't like how the digital version of my James Bond movies had the final movie on a different streaming app. It's really hard to beat that setup if you know how to configure it. My Jellyfin server contains an episode of community from the DVD I own that was removed from streaming services, and that's where it really shines. I also have higher quality versions of Star Wars than the VHS copies I own.

Nonetheless, I think iTunes proves what an effective model is in a similar vain as Steam is to gaming. Shame that unlike Steam's relationship with Linux, iTunes is much more tied to Apple. At least the Apple TV is genuinely a good streaming box.