It saddens me that people aren't willing to pay a pittance in cash (about $1 an hour) for entertainment. They're willing to spend their time, but not their money.
This isn't just buying a 100 episode box set, it applies to people complaining "I'd have to spend $10 on $streaming_service to watch that 5 hour miniseries, that's terrible" too.
For background, JMS knew the widescreen transition was coming so filmed everything in 16:9. As he put it at the time, it didn't really cost more, you just had to pay more attention to lighting at the wings. All CGI was done in 4:3 because it was thought to be easy to rerender in the future. Alas, the digital assets were not preserved properly and when the time came for DVD, nobody wanted to pay for more work. There may be places where they used the 16:9 masters, but anyplace where there was CGI, particularly where they were compositing over live action, basically chopped the top and bottom of the 4:3 resulting in a sub-VGA mess.
It made everyone weep.
That's why legal unencrypted availability online is such a boon.
But like the others said, the BDs are fine, by far the best the series has ever looked, even if the difference between the crisp live action and the blurry upscaled CGI is rather jarring.
All streaming services should offer prepaid options, so you can add time in 30/60/90 day increments. Less mental overhead and it better matches how a lot of people pay for streaming anyway.
I did consider buying a Blu-ray player and buying it on Blu-ray but it seems like they never actually released all the series on Blu-ray.
In the end I ended up figuring out how to download it without ads from ITVX. There's a tool which will bypass Widevine, download all the segments and splice them together without ads. Quite a pain to get working but still less annoying than yet another subscription. We already have Netflix, Disney, Prime, and a TV license.
They gave you an option to pay for it without adverts, but you decided to invest your time and energy in bypassing the adverts rather than pay the cost of a pint of beer. You could have paid for it on Apple TV but perhaps you consider it too expensive.
How much do you value an episode? Presumably enough to watch it - so 90 minutes of your time, which at minimum wage is £18. But you don't value it £4 to watch a 90 minute program just once on apple tv, let alone how cheap itvx is.
Justify it to yourself all you want, just don't cry when TV series like that are no longer made.
I think it's about not necessarily getting what you pay for. Shows are constantly leaving streaming platforms which is a problem if you want to watch something specific as opposed to just being happy to pay to watch whatever they feel like letting you see this week. Then they'll also silently censor content or remove entire episodes so you can't be sure if you've even watched the entirety of whatever show you intended to see if they have it at all.
They also like to reorder shows and even renumber seasons which can result in confusion and spoilers. Netflix is horrible when it comes to this. One example is the The Great British Bake Off. For some reason they insist on reordering them so that it starts with whatever the newest series is and then plays them backwards which is a pretty big problem. At the start of one series they even recap all of the winners of previous series spoiling them all for everyone watching the show on netflix.
If you just want to watch "something" by all means pay a monthly fee for a streaming service. If you want to watch a specific show and you want it to be there for you the next you want to watch it you're better off getting physical media or doing a little research and getting everything off the high seas.