Perfect control isn't possible and never has been but there's still control. Otherwise anyone could distribute copyrighted material any way they wanted. An easy example is movies being only available at theaters until six months after they're first released. During that time there's generally no option to pirate other than shitty cam versions. If a distributer can say, "This is only legally available at this location (physical or digital) at this price," then a lot of people will choose that option over pirating for a whole host of reasons. The trick is balancing availability/price to make the profit. The popular approach on Reddit is make it universally available for the lowest imaginable price, but that's obviously not necessarily the most profitable approach. Plenty of people here think renting a digital movie for $3 is too expensive. Just because you lose sales to pirating doesn't mean the name of the game is to capture back the highest percentage of piraters, it's still to make a profit. Right now there's still people subscribing to cable and premium channels and buying DVDs and BluRays and undercutting that market in order to appease people who will take it for free at the slightest inconvenience or cost isn't the best idea. In the future that will change, and media companies will have to find another way to make a profit and maybe it'll work fine or maybe the market will shrink, but if they can make more profit now doing it this way then that's what they're going to do.

The comparison to music is always a poor one because music is much cheaper to produce and there's a huge market for them to charge $50-$200 a head for live performances with $20 t-shirts and other cheaply made merchandise.