Booomberg has that same “API key” problem. It really requires an institutional procurement and legal team to get all the market data feeds you need.
However, if I was a Taiwanese trader or market maker, I'd likely pay Taiwanese exchange fees to get access to richer, real-time data (specifically, non-delayed quotes and more market depth.)
I can get this access in under 5 seconds by opting into the desired exchange privileges under EXC<GO> or most likely just pinging my Bloomberg rep. If I remember correctly, I have to log out and back in for the new permissions to permeate my terminal. The cool thing is that all functions automatically leverage the highest level of subscribed data.
Whether I need to jump through more procurement hoops than that depends on where I work. If I am in a small hedge fund, I can just "do this" and if I am in a big firm, we likely already have this data subscribed for.
One of the many reasons Bloomberg exists and continues to be immensely valuable is that it prevents you from having to mess around with individual exchange permissions and data in a one-off way. And don't get me started on normalizing data across exchanges - the fact that Bloomberg does that for you is worth the price alone.
Source: Former Bloomberg employee, former Bloomberg market data client.
When someone subscribes to elevated levels of market data, Bloomberg passes 100% of that money to the exchange. It is a major convenience factor that Bloomberg abstracts all your market data usage for you.
On the flip side, if you use data in your own systems, you basically sign up for a world of pain in terms of exchange fees and pricing compliance. A small example: exchanges may change you per consumer application. So if you have two trading systems, you lay double. But this gets thrny in distributed applications - you may have multiple data connections but it's really just shards of systems parallelized for performance. As a consumer, you face the choice of overpaying for exchange data or risking having to prove that your systems are technical compliant by design depiute the seemingly extra consumer connections. This is a nightmare, which is why firms try to do everything they can on Bloomberg if possible to avoid stepping into this space.
Because there is a marketplace. If Gamestonk is successful, there will be a marketplace for low latency feed + commercial support to configure them for you.
This is likely going to continue for a while. However, at some point, we may want to add premium features associated with these APIs. Because if the user is paying such subscription, it makes sense to provide that data on the terminal. Since this will only benefit a small subset of our users, we are deeming this as low priority