The biggest challenge to creating an indie Netflix is solving the "do I have the right to see this?" problem. It wouldn't be wise to strong-arm every movie into being free. That's an entire industry, and just as they don't have the right to tell us how to build software, we don't have the right to tell them how to distribute their movies.

So, we need the ability to represent a contract, and to tell the owner of the movie who has watched it. Potentially, money is in the mix, meaning we'd need to solve the microtransaction problem. I'm not interested in filling out a credit card number every time I want to watch something.

Then, there's the matter of representing the movie itself. Netflix creates 100+ streaming versions of each title, in order to best match your internet connection and device. It then dynamically switches between those versions depending on your changing Internet connection characteristics. I'm not sure what Netflix's switching window is, and I suspect they change it over time.

So, there's the ability to serve the movie quickly, and in a way that uses your Internet connection efficiently (and is cost-effective for everyone involved).

Finally, there's the ability to find it to begin with (and, in my case, spend 45 minutes deciding what to watch). So you'd need some kind of hub that intelligently filters / categorizes movies. You could write a client that queries this database, so there'd be no need for the hub to remember your preferences or keep track of what you'd watched - that would be on your own site.

Er, I vote someone else writes this. But: this kind of distributed media system could be a boon for indie movies in particular.