I wonder how much of this is due to there being too many streaming services and/or them being geo-locked.
Why?
Because music doesn't do that much exclusives, so you can just choose a platform and you're ok. Whereas movies and tv shows are ALL exclusives now, so you have to subscribe to multiple places. It wasn't always like this as you remember, and that's why piracy died for a time.. you could just have one streaming service, and you're good.
But people got greedy. They saw what Netflix had, and wanted it for themselves.. not realizing what that would mean
The problem is -- from the content companies' point of view -- that if there is one streaming service and multiple content creators then the steaming service will make the lion's share of the money.
So the big content companies all want to have their own streaming service.
This of course drives people back to the pirates.
With TV and movies it’s highly fragmented. So I think people just don’t sign up to certain services, chop and change services, or resort to piracy. Or possibly the younger generations put the time into YouTube & TikTok.
When I explain to them how piracy works now, how automated and easy it's become to use (setup is another thing), they are shocked. Basically piracy took a kind of microservice approach, where one app does downloading, and another set of apps (each specific to a type of media) handle finding that specific thing, sending it to the download client, and then moving, renaming, when it's done. All you do is use an app of your choice to say I want this, and everything else goes to work .. then when you want to watch it, its streamed wherever you want by another app of your choice.
Sounds difficult but the actual use of it is very very simple. Gone is the manual searching, moving, checking, etc... Heck I don't even manually find and fix subtitles anymore.
The UX in streaming services gets worse with every update, to say nothing of the constant catalog changes. I do want to dip my toes back into the piracy world. What makes me nervous is how to remain anonymous. I know a few people who got hit with torrent warnings. Is it all still newsgroups? What's the state of the art in home piracy setups now?
But there is something you touched on, how the UX gets worse... The UX of piracy keeps getting better.
Also, side note... Why can't streaming services just have ALL the subtitle languages? You can get around this with a VPN, so they have the license... Why not just let us chose? Why have only a couple languages to chose from at best.
And for bad quality yeah shady basic web streaming sites exists though. Keep in mind they are packed with unstoppable video ads and malware js though. I don't poke them with a 10 foot pole usually.
I sub to Apple TV btw. Some originals are very good. UX works for me.
Any VPN service will be sufficient to cover your tracks and avoid those warnings, e.g. Mullvad.