As it gets increasingly hard/expensive, not to mention the bickering between services and platforms and services and markets to watch them on, customers are resorting to piracy as a way to get the content they want.
I think a middle ground would be shareware-like pay-per-view type model. Are you creating a new series? Make the first episode freely watchable, and then don't price excessively the entire season.
As a consumer would make sense for me to pay 5$ for a season of show X on Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max/etc. But allow me to watch the thing I payed for perpetually in the future, as long as the show is still on the platform. And when I'm looking for something new to pay for, allow me to see the first episode of existing shows for free.
Would that work for all consumers? I don't know, most people I know with streaming subscriptions, barely actively watch shows and very often those are standins for background noise.
I wish the internet ads worked the same way. I'd happily pay any website 2x whatever google or similar ad networks pay, to avoid ads. Seems like it would help reduce clickbait as well.
Fragmentation in VOD is taking us back to the cable era where you had to pay extra for different content packages.
High quality content is spread across multiple platforms so users have to pay more for other services or simply miss out on that content.
1) Choice fatigue.
2) The annoyance of wanting to watch a specific thing and then hunt it down, hoping it is on your service.
3) The costs (financial, time, irritation) of subscribing to multiple services to combat #2.