> I don’t see how this can be true. Reduced copyright terms mean price for old stuff goes down (to however much hosting and bandwidth costs). This means more funds are available for new content.

Because this syllogism doesn't hold. There's not a fixed pot of money that must be spent on content. If now every streaming service has access to a bigger pool of old hits, then they don't need to buy as much new content to satisfy their customers, and total spending on content will go down.

> If everyone can sell the popular reruns and holiday movies, then they stop being exclusive to Disney and Comcast and Warner Bros and so the only thing they can compete with is new stuff, forcing then to invest in new stuff.

Each service will just become sameier and compete more on their UX than their exclusive content. You can see this in music, for instance, where the big streamers already have more or less identical catalogues. Nobody is picking Spotify over Apple Music or Youtube Music due to exclusives, because there are none; so putting the content into the public domain is hardly going to change things.

> Each service will just become sameier and compete more on their UX than their exclusive content.

This is an incredibly good thing.

> then they don't need to buy as much new content to satisfy their customers, and total spending on content will go down.

Why would they have customers in the first place if all they offer is reruns, which everyone else also offers? Streaming only old content will be a very, very low profit margin business.

> Nobody is picking Spotify over Apple Music or Youtube Music due to exclusives, because there are none; so putting the content into the public domain is hardly going to change things.

Creating and streaming audio is not a comparable business to creating and streaming video, due to the vastly different sums of money, and hence risk, involved.

But, also, people have to pick only Spotify/Apple/Amazon/Alphabet and a couple others because of excess copyright terms. All the old hits people want are controlled by Universal, Sony, and Warner, and so if your audio streaming business does not contract with those 3, then you’re dead in the water. Which means every audio streaming business, and hence every audio streaming customer, is always paying rent to those 3 businesses that own copyrights.

That means there is less money available for new audio creators. And this holds true for all rent seeking. If it weren’t for excessive copyright, there could be much more variety in audio streaming.