A lot of comments mention it has been a thing in various forms through the internet’s brief history. The interesting question is why didn’t it take off—especially when the technology was there.

One possibility as you allude to is licensing. In a P2P streaming model “rights” holders want to collect royalties on content distribution. I’m not sure of a way you could make this feel legal short of abolishing copyright, but if you could build a way to fairly collect royalties, I wonder if you’d make inroads with enforcers. But overall that problem seems to have been solved with ads and subscription fees.

Another data point is that the behemoths decided to serve content digitally. Netflix and Spotify showed up. The reason the general population torrented music is because other than a CD changer, having a digital library was a requirement in order to listen to big playlists of songs on your… Zune. Or iPod. That problem doesn't exist anymore and so the demand dried up. There was also an audiophile scene but afaik with Apple Lossless the demand there has diminished too.

And finally, since people were solving the problem for real, we also entertained big deal solutions to reduce the strain on the network. If you stream P2P your packets take the slow lane. Netflix and other content providers build out hardware colocated with last mile ISPs so that content distribution can happen even more efficiently than in a P2P model.

In short: steaming turned into a real “industry”. Innovators and capitalists threw lots of time and money at the problem. Streaming platforms emerged, for better and for worse. And here we are today, on the cusp of repeating the past because short sighted business mongers have balkanized access with exclusive content libraries for the user numbers.