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Would you consider it morally dubious to subscribe to a streaming service for a month, record content during that month, then watch it after cancelling your subscription?

There's no question of morals here. These streaming companies murdered Blockbuster, whose death must be avenged.

This is what I used to do and is definitely the best part about cable to streaming.

People now complain that the services resemble what cable used to be - but there were entire movies and countless sitcom plots about people tryng to cancel service. It was terrible for customers. Free trials of streamers have mostly dried up but rotating can still provide value - and probably better for your own time.

Morality gets grey with growing anti-consumer practices and shrinking regulation. Legally protected doesn't equate to moral. Sure it's good for the content creators to get paid, but by and large, they aren't the ones getting paid.

How dare they spend money to create content and expect people to pay for it!

Oh, ho hum. Music piracy was rampant until iTunes and the iPod changed the game to the extent of forcing (alongside court orders) Napster to go legit. Two decades later, music streaming is ubiquitous, consumers are satisfied, and music piracy is a retro anachronism. This is just applying market pressure to bring about necessary product innovation through other means.

So do you expect all movies to be available for 99 cents or to be available a la carte like Spotify?

Movies cost a lot more to produce than music. Besides, Spotify is losing money and even iTunes was never hugely profitable. It was primarily meant to sell iPods. The music distribution business is a horrible stand alone business

I'm sure that even as technology continues to innovate, and tech companies find all sorts of way to find innovative business models (though rising interest rates might end that renaissance of creative unit economics), they'll find a way to curb piracy by fixing the problem of too many streaming services, that they and the studios invented.

Yes, if only there were companies that aggregated all of the content that anyone wanted and charged more for it. I’m sure since everyone is getting the same content they could send it through a cable…

A money losing low margin business (Spotify) isn’t “innovative”

Yes, maybe eventually they will invent a cable company that carries the streaming service-specific offerings of the Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Disney+, and Apple TV+ libraries.

I mean, that probably does exist, that's probably what Sling TV offers, people just opt to do something even simpler and less morally dubious than piracy: they share accounts with one another. That's been a common practice for over a decade now.

> A money losing low margin business (Spotify) isn’t “innovative”

And yet the iPod was. And without the iTunes Store, the iPod wouldn't have been the success that it was- it would have been dependent upon pirates.

And the iPod became irrelevant as soon as the mobile phone became popular. Even the Roku which was originally created by Netflix and spun off as a company would have failed as a “Netflix box”

The iPod was dominant for almost a decade, without it there would be no iPhone. It is understandable to forget Galileo or Kepler once you get a Newton, but the iPod was absolutely iconic, and once again, the iTunes Store did much to eliminate music piracy.

It goes to show that once a petty crime becomes widespread and normalized among consumers, it becomes a business problem for savvy companies to take advantage. Likewise, Steam, despite its DRM and other hassles, wiped out game piracy for some time. Of course, that same form of piracy is making a resurgence, partly because the video game platform space has become balkanized, annoying users who don't want to subscribe to the stores of EA, Ubisoft, Epic, et al. Much like what we may be seeing with movie and TV content.

Honestly, piracy for video games became less relevant because most of the game revenue comes from locked down platforms - mobile and consoles. Also, much of the revenue of from games these days come from in app purchases.

As far as iPod sales, I won’t editorialize

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ipod_sales_per_quart...

Perhaps the rise of mobile gaming and decline of PC gaming in favor of consoles (if that’s actually happening at all) still substantiates my narrative that technology and businesses arise to address the needs causing piracy. So you’re agreeing with me.

You keep talking about sales when I’m talking about impact on music piracy, the music industry in general, and cultural impact. I hardly think Jobs thought purely in sales and not the latter.

Gaming revenue breakdown

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobile-gaming-proves-to-be-a-g...

As far as “bought digital music” vs music not bought from iTunes right before the iPhone came out, SJ himself said that most music on iPods were not bought from iTunes:

This was originally posted on Apple’s front page when Jobs was trying to convince the record labels to allow everyone to sell DRM free music (it happened a couple of years later)

https://macdailynews.com/2007/02/06/apple_ceo_steve_jobs_pos...

> Today’s most popular iPod holds 1000 songs, and research tells us that the average iPod is nearly full. This means that only 22 out of 1000 songs, or under 3% of the music on the average iPod, is purchased from the iTunes store and protected with a DRM

Perhaps I've over-credited the iTunes Store's impact on music piracy, so I will concede that point. But for whatever reason, after the revolutions unleashed by the iPod, and the subsequent rise of Spotify and other paid legal music streaming services, music piracy is just not as significant as it was in the decade. So either these technologies were instrumental to stopping it, or consumers just moved on for whatever reason. Perhaps the same will happen to movies and television piracy, once consumers get over services/platforms fatigue.

https://theconversation.com/the-end-of-the-beginning-of-musi...

I would give most of the credit for piracy going down in music to mobile phones where especially with the iPhone, there is no method to add music not bought from iTunes without using a computer.

Streaming music is a much better experience. Jobs was right, convenience beats free.

It’s the same way for video. If I told a normal person how they could save a few bucks by getting video for free going through the steps that people hear or suggesting, they would look at me like I’m crazy. You can usually find someone to give you their streaming account.

This is the only correct approach.

It takes barely any time to rotate services (ten minutes per month max, and you could probably even automate it - I'd pay for that automation, ironically), and it provides an extremely strong feedback signal to studios/services that you're not putting up with the fragmentation.

Piracy is a tragedy of the commons situation that provides the wrong feedback signal (industry will just assume it's because people don't want to pay for things), so it actively makes the situation worse.

Good idea, except a lot of people including me do not have time to do this every month.

Personally I pay annualy for peacock (at a promotional discount price of $20, to watch premier league), prime (also annually because shopping) and Disney (because kids). I also have access to Netflix, Paramount and HBO etc. subscriptions for free- via fnf or promotions. If I badly want to watch something, I either check on Justwatch if it is available on a service I subscribe to, or I just pirate it.

This is what we do also. I have many streaming subscriptions. If a show is not available or is only available with ads (Prime Video does this a lot), then I feel zero remorse torrenting the show.

Additionally, if a show was ever on a streaming service while I had a subscription, I feel zero remorse for downloading that show once it is removed from that streaming service.

These license holders are getting more greedy by the year. If they don't want to provide the content for a reasonable fee through a streaming service, then they don't get my money. Simple as that.

It’s also not convenient for me to go to work everyday. But yet I do because I have an insatiable addiction to food and shelter. It would be much more convenient if people gave me food and shelter for free. But for some reason they expect me to pay for it.

Classic American mentality of conflating basic human rights with luxury.

So being able to watch streaming content is a “basic human right”?

> a lot of people including me do not have time to do this every month

This is ridiculous. If you don't have ten minutes of time every month, you certainly don't have time to be watching any television.

I will go out on a limb and assume you do not have kids.

… do you think this somehow strengthens your position? On top of being unfair and condescending, you just gave everyone another reason you should not have the time to watch enough streaming services to warrant spending the time to administer all the subscriptions in the manner suggested.

I’m going to go out on a limb and assume other parents reading your comment don’t sympathize with your position. At least this one doesn’t.

Well I find it unfair and condescending of you to suggest I, as a busy parent, should not watch TV :) I did not ask anyone not to pay subscription fees.

It is just a matter of priority. Even before becoming a parent, I would find it hard to justify spending time on optimizing my subscription expenses, especially being forced by large media corps, and completely unnecessarily.

The number of other 10 minute jobs I passively ignore a month could probably take up a significant portion of my free time, and many of those would probably provide more reward then trying to send a signal to a billion dollar corporation this way (shopping around for slightly better contracts, accounts, finding the cheapest variant of a product, etc.).

There's enough to do in life that everyone makes trade offs on what they're willing to spend their limited time on, personally I'm not willing to spend my time solving a problem that can absolutely be solved technologically but is prevented from being so by intransigence