I tell you this will happen more often and people are willing to pay. But not pay for everything. Good thing they had going. Well it was still illegal, but hey it will happen again i tell you.
Pirates offer you everything for free. You select a movie from their website and it starts playing on your phone or computer.
Why would any customer pick the more expensive product? Netflix and Friends need to offer a better service and experience at a low price. Notably that will have to include one subscription for everything.
Steam from Valve has been extremely successfull because they offer a very good service for fairly good prices. Now that EGS is trying to bleed customers, video game piracy is going up again because nobody likes exclusives except those that get money for them.
Netflix and Stadia (or something like Xbox game pass) are more comparable in my opinion
Netflix has a much lower bar on providing that service.
I don't think Stadia has much options for pirates.
Big fat citation needed on the piracy numbers there...
I honestly don't mind timed exclusives because they provide stability and income to the studios that make the games I like. While there's a lot to criticize Epic for, the fact that they essentially guarantee a certain number of sales means devs like Coffee Stain studios can make a risky bet like Satisfactory (basically a 3D Factorio).
As a consumer, it's really not material to me whether I'm launching one or two stores, whereas these studios can be freed from the worry of boom/bust cycles, layoffs, etc.
The (this is imaginary and made up for legal reasons) use case was I was in a limited network environment, trying to watch game of thrones when I paid for an HBO subscription. The HBO subscription offered my access through the app on my phone, but only streaming it, and with a horribly designed buffering system. It would only buffer a small portion after the current part of the video, so basically, and I could not download it to my phone through their app, so it was impossible to watch game of thrones when I wanted on release date and risk possibly running into spoilers the next day.
I would have had to resort to downloading it illegally over torrent because the subscription systems "say they solve your problems" and offer a completely legal way to watch your episodes, but miss the use cases for the small few of people who want to watch in limited internet situations. I am not a common user, I am power user, and I have not just had this type of situation happen once.
So my question now is, why even pay for the subscription service when it doesn't work when I need it most?
Now, it's way easier than ever to be able to do it all legally and quickly, and it's not even that expensive. If you want to watch old seasons of a show sure it's a hassle to sign up and then cancel a subscription to a specific network, but it's not that hard and it's like $6-$15/mo with no contracts. It used to be that a DVD box sets were like $30+ for one show.