Photo [Brymo/Flickr]

Come on, internet. Just bring us proper movie streaming already. If any more proof were needed that physical media needs to go, and soon, we bring you exhibit A: The Netflix Outage.

The DVD-by-post service collapsed last week, leaving a morass of confusion in its wake. And the worst of it is that Netflix doesn't appear to know what went wrong. Fully one third of Netflix customers are not being shipped DVDs. Those affected should have received an email offering credit, but confusingly, some people who did receive the mails have also been receiving deliveries.

We're sure it will get sorted out, but it shows that, even if the glitch is in the Netflix computer systems, shipping movies by post is an old-world way of doing things. With just about everything internet enabled these days, there's no technical excuse not to ditch plastic disks entirely and move to downloads.

Sadly, our iPhones, laptops and games consoles are being starved of content due to greed. Sure, Netflix offers a streaming service (which is still up and running just fine), and iPod owners have the iTunes Store for movies and TV, but choice is limited. We need a range of services that offer everything, not just movies from one studio, but all movies ever released. We want the back catalogs of the music studios online, and we want to buy ebooks for less than the cost of the paper versions, and at the same time they are available in the shops.

And we want them on all our devices. As a Mac and iPod user, I'd be happy to use iTunes as my TV station and video store, but I can't get movies or TV shows yet in Spain. I can't use Hulu (I'm not in the States) nor Netflix streaming (the same reason). Obviously this is a negotiation issue: copyright owners need to do deals with the online stores in every country. But the studios and labels (and soon, no doubt, book publishers) are making it hard and generally screwing things up for themselves as well as us.

Imagine this: You have an iPhone, or an Android phone, or any other smart phone. You can browse a catalog from your device and find anything you want; any media from any period. If you have the bandwidth, you get it straight away through a progressive download. If not, you hit a button and when you get home you find it ready for you on your home computer. All content is cheap, encouraging a spendthrift atitude (look at the App Store to see what a candy shop the internet can be when payment methods are almost invisible).

We don't say that there should be only one place to buy these things. There could (and should) be many. What we do want is the end of fragmentation. Companies have content to sell. We want to put it on our computers and media players. How hard can it be?

Ironically, not hard at all – if you take the studios out of the equation. My dream service (with some gaps in inventory) is available right now. It's made up of two parts. They're called YouTube and BitTorrent, and they're cheaper and better than the competition.

Netflix suffers biggest outage ever [Reuters]

Netflix Goes Dark And Finds It's No Place To Be [CNBC]

Previously on Gadget Lab:

Netflix Goes Down For 11 hours, Wall Street Pushes Its Stock to All-Time High