As Gabe Newell said,
> If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable.
Nowadays I exclusively pirate movies and shows, because just the thought of having to spend 30 minutes to figure out where some movie is, then trying to navigate the respective service's interface, just to be presented with a not-empty-but-actually-doesnt-show-what-i-was-searching-for-because-stats-said-people-might-watch-more-if-you-mislead-them-in-search-results-pages because it is not available on my region, and then trying to figure out what combination of VPN and region incantations won't block me behind a million captchas, is too much work to be bothered with.
Instead, I just open Stremio, put in the movie or show name, and even if it is some obscure Javanese arthouse film from the '20s (I don't know if such a thing exists, but you get the point) it will find it. Sure, finding a source with good availability is sometimes not the first-click experience, but it's still at least 10 times faster than all the above. And I can put on screen sharing to watch it with my friends without DRM blacking out the screen.
Worst of all, the pricing structures of streaming apps are very opaque, so if I were to do the still-illegal-but-morally-correct thing of paying for the official product and pirating anyways, I don't think any of my subscription fee would actually go to the company that made that film.
I wish we had a functioning rental model still. Go to some storefront, pay a small amount of money to get any publisher's title, get a video file to play "at home" (in your preferred video player), pinky swear you didn't rip it, done. The closest you get is the Youtube rental thingy, but at least over here it is incredibly overpriced, costs more than a cinema ticket. Or buying physical media, but then you have to pay the physical distribution costs, keep around shiny plastic donuts and specialized machinery.
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And besides, I'm still not sold on algorithmic recommendations, and watch things mostly based on meatspace recommendations.
Subscription services have one simple goal: provide just enough value to keep one from cancelling their subscription. There is no real incentive to do better if all the competitors have the same goal and behaviour, which is the current situation. So they raise the prices a little bit, skip on user-motivated UX, and double down on mediocre "just good enough to idly waste time on" content, and slowly bring down the user expectations about content and how to find it, placing them in a "learned helplessness" state of not being arsed to find what they like themselves.