Do Netflix or Apple license the content, or just offer some kind of revenue share with the publisher? In the music industry it's the latter.

That model has been a disaster (for music companies) as they take all the risk for the failures, while Apple gets a relatively large proportion of revenue from the winners.

Afaik they license.

Netflix is at least not available in Germany. ( And AFAIK iTunes can have regional limits.) So there is no truly global distribution channel. ( Except torrents.)

Neither Netflix nor iTunes are as global as torrents, which is sad. But they are much, much better than US-only.