That's not how streaming worked, ever. You had to deal with what Netflix had to offer and that was it. These were the happy monopoly days. It was simply the lack of choice and nobody felt left out at watercooler talks.

The paradox now, is that if you're FOMO inclined you feel the need to subscribe to multiple ones at all times to satify all needs in a household. You don't have to. You can keep baseline Disney if you really have to, but everything else can be easily rotated or just cought up on for a month or three on the usual discounted offers. The social pressure was not some invention of the streaming companies.

Also pirating has a hardware and energy cost, that's not trivial and mostly subsidized by parents. On a ROI basis of adults with disposable income "buying" (aka personal licenses, ideally shareable with some other accounts what some might call a family) 4-5 movies for like 5 dollars on platforms like Apple TV each a month is actually cheaper than pirating. Streaming is not everything. And don`t kid yourself that your DVD or Bluray collection is worth something or usable in 20+ years. That's a niche hobby. Go visit a flea market. People are that lazy when it comes to couch and home entertainment stuff.

Now you are delving into small intricacies and "gotchas" which are just meaningless.

The problem is simple. People don't want to switch between 10 different streaming services, pay 10x a month, swap every second month, unsubscribe from X and re-subscribe to Y after going through a torturous process of unsubscribing. Different sites with different DRM, some might block Firefox, some might not work on an older MiniPC, some might not work or exist on the built in apps on my TV.

We as consumers shouldn't have to go through all these hoops just to watch stuff. Originally, I would buy a DVD (or even rent it) and then plop the DVD in the DVD player and it would work. It would work 10 years from now (assuming no disc-rot). It would work on my PC's DVD player, it would work on my TV. It wouldn't tell me my OS is out of date or that my internet connection is unstable. I could then go give you the DVD and you could watch it. It was simple.

For the sake of your argument, even if piracy was 100x harder and 10x more expensive than Subscriptions services (which its not), watching the entire series of Pokemon is still a pain and is still stupid and deserves to be called out for it.

> On a ROI basis of adults with disposable income "buying" (aka personal licenses, ideally shareable with some other accounts what some might call a family) 4-5 movies for like 5 dollars on platforms like Apple TV each a month is actually cheaper than pirating.

Yes, and I still pirate. It's more expensive, but the user experience is substantially better. It has always been a supply issue,

You think pirating videos will raise your electric bill by $25 / month?

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