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The release/street date window is nothing new. I worked in video rental stores in the late 90's when VHS was still king. Back then, the studios would sell the store one copy of the movie for around $100, give or take the specific title!
This gave the rental chains an opportunity to have "exclusive" rights to renting the movie for a 30-60 day window. Once that window expired, you could then purchase the movie at your local retail store for $15-20, which is how the previously viewed rental sales approach started, because by that time, there was no need to have X copies of a movie cluttering the shelves, and they could recoup some of their costs by undercutting a brand-new price at your local brick and mortar store.
When DVD arrived, it was obviously more convenient, but the studios went away from the previous arrangement. The rental store could buy the movie for the same price, and the same day, as the consumer did. For awhile, it wasn't a big deal, because a $5 rental was still a better value than buying a movie for $20. But when those bargain bins started showing up with $3-5 discs, it signaled the beginning of the end.
During this time, the minimum wage was upped from $5 something to $7.15 in my home state and our rental prices increased to nearly $6 (or more with tax) to make up for the increase in labor cost. People didn't want to pay $6 for a movie they could end up buying for $10 (or less if they were patient.) Used discs also skipped and were unreliable, so that market dried up as well, all but killing businesses like Hollywood Video and Blockbuster, because they were already in debt from expanding so quickly and putting up many of their stores on borrowed money.
So in essence, the studios had their golden goose and killed it in the name of greed as usual. But when Netflix and Redbox showed up (at the tail end of the dying video store era) they shattered the convenience and cost of the renting from a chain or buying a movie, which cut into the studios bottom line, because Netflix isn't in Any City, USA and doesn't need to buy 100 copies of Crap Title Part 2, they can have 5 copies total and ship them around the country.
The $1 rentals also hurt the studios selling movies, and now you have the return of the 30/60 day window, but in reverse, so they can try to sell their high margin discs and make more money than they ever would renting movies.
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