What’s funny is that’s how it started. Apple sold movies as early as 2007 before Netflix or Amazon video or whatever and expected you to host the files locally either on your computer or your AppleTV (which had a hard disk drive at the time) and stream it locally over iTunes. If you lost the file, that was supposed to be it.

Of course, you still had to authenticate your files with the DRM service, and eventually they moved libraries online and gave you streaming access to any files you had purchased.