It's not a conspiracy, there's no backroom deals made through a haze of cigar smoke. The value of streaming rights is increasing, non-streaming revenue for the same content is slowly shrinking, there's multiple streaming services out there bidding up the rights to content, and the rightsholders are behaving appropriately according to their incentives.
Remember, part of what made Netflix possible to begin with was the fact that the content they were licensing had already made its money through theatrical runs, cable deals and home video for movies, and original network fees and syndication rights for TV shows. So the content holders only had to worry about marginal revenue over negligible costs -- you can get very little for the content and still come out ahead. As streaming becomes a bigger and bigger piece of the pie, it canibalizes those other revenue channels, and more and more streaming money is required to make it revenue-positive. The market is reacting.
Remember, part of what made Netflix possible to begin with was the fact that the content they were licensing had already made its money through theatrical runs, cable deals and home video for movies, and original network fees and syndication rights for TV shows. So the content holders only had to worry about marginal revenue over negligible costs -- you can get very little for the content and still come out ahead. As streaming becomes a bigger and bigger piece of the pie, it canibalizes those other revenue channels, and more and more streaming money is required to make it revenue-positive. The market is reacting.