I think the aversion to subscribing to a streaming service for a single series has more to do with the recurring nature of the subscription than it does the price. You have to remember to cancel it when you’re done, which is easy to forget with so many things bring for our attention these days. That $10 could easily multiply several times over if it slips your mind, at which point congratulations, you’ve paid a significant portion of the box set’s price to rent the series.

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.

Yeah 100% this. I want to watch Endeavour without ads, and I couldn't get some of it on Bittorrent (which is a first). It's available on ITVX for a subscription but there's literally nothing else I want to watch on there and I don't want to deal with cancellation & time pressure to watch it all.

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.

As if they want to help people sign up for short periods of time. You might as well suggest drug dealers sell non-addictive crack.