The artists and staff who worked on the content want to be paid fairly.
It's great that consumers want cheap stuff, but we can't have it both ways.
If we go down this route, either the content will be crap (and AI-generated), or people won't be paid fairly.
Then, they deleted a bunch of first-party content to get a dubious tax deduction.
Finally, they doubled prices.
Last i checked many of them in US are on strike because they're not being paid fairly and it has nothing to do with piracy.
They aren't having their pay doubled by this. Some executives are getting a bonus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Writers_Guild_of_America_...
One of their main issues was residuals from streaming.
Executives deserve to have pay slashed and massive executive position layoffs before consumers, artists, or production staff feel any inconvenience. That will never happen, so it's on us consumers to overpay to keep artists fed.
So I'm pretty sure the streaming services are charging whatever they can get away with, aka the market equilibrium price, regardless of their executives' salaries.
As a customer, I might be okay with paying more if there was a transparent effort to cut expenses and a renewed focus on their core business.
From the article
I refuse to do do all that so guess what….