I also think the current copyright system is insane, but streaming genuinely is more convenient than buying physical media. If anything, DRM makes media available through streaming _less_ convenient.
IF you have children, you're probably familiar with the concept of streaming Frozen for the 50th time. If you're using netflix or spotify or similar, you're probably also familiar with the concept of something that was previously available just vanishing because of circumstances outside of your control.
Streaming is mostly a DRM/copyright enforcement tool. The only time streaming is actually adding value is live streaming.
4G is perfectly fine for that, but if I Street watching a 40 minute video before I go on the tube, I can’t finish once underground
If it was line speed, a 40 minute episode would download with current 4g while I was waiting for the next train. On WiFi it would be down before I walked out of range.
That's like saying "people don't need to listen to the radio for the same pop songs, they can just play a CD with them"
Stuff being available exclusively through streaming is certainly a way to enforce DRM, but that doesn't mean people wouldn't still largely be streaming even if stuff was available for download without DRM too.
Streaming takes that choice away from the user in the first place. With nothing gained in exchange.
It would be way less convenient, though. So I don't. I don't know which device I'll end up watching on, and don't want to deal with syncing and all that shit.
Which is way more expensive than streaming services. Prohibitively so for wide swaths of the general population who don't have tech industry salaries. The cost of one TV show from iTunes can approach the price of several months of Netflix.
With copyright reform, that needn't be the case.
(Note that for many consumers, Netflix is already considered too expensive. Several people sharing the cost of one account is pretty common from what I've seen.)
Fact is that streaming is just convenient. Like really convenient. I wish there was more stuff that I could download and listen to offline, but it's naive to suggest that streaming has no advantages. We stream while data connected because we download things in an ordered manner (vs how normal downloading is done). That's nice that I don't have to wait for a full movie or song to be completely downloaded to listen to it.
Maybe you don't subscribe to channels and the system could never anticipate your whims and desires... but I wager it would work great for most users.