> They'd have to pool all their intellectual property into a single holding and offer access to all of it at once.

Reading this triggered a (for me) very interesting observation - my feelings about video streaming services are not triggered by the price, but to the scamminess of it:

I've been paying for both Apple Music and Spotify for months - and I know it - and I don't care.

Contrary I did not sign up for HBO Max even at their low offer of around $5/month for life, and it annoys me that I have two video streaming sites already.

I think it is because both Spotify and Apple Music are OK: they contain almost everything I want from commercial music, while the video streaming sites feels like an elaborate scam: pay just as much as I pay for Spotify to an increasing number of services where none of them are good.

I want creators to get paid, but I don't want to support scams, so being somewhat principled I only watch whatever I have on DVD + what is available on the services I subscribe to (and I'm planning to get rid of one) and the few that I bought from Apple.

I can clearly see why people pirate though and if I worked in law enforcement I'd probably do my best to work with something important and useful, not to support large scale scams.