I saw in a YouTube video once, and I'll paraphrase because I forgot, something that resonated well with me about piracy.

They said piracy is never about cost, but almost always about a service issue. Basically people flocked to Napster (and the likes) at the time because it let them browse an infinitude of music which was, back then, incredible.

That was just market demand validation, a latent problem waiting for a solution to address it. Piracy just did it first. Once someone solved it, a little bit better, like Spotify did with realtime (instead of p2p waiting), and with indexing/filtering/curation/etc. It automatically won over piracy.

Then, the one fun argument it brought after, is that the same tools that ended piracy are likely the ones making it rise again. Netflix made everyone happy, but now we have a subscription circus. There's N streaming services, and keeping up with subscribing/cancelling/finding the one that has your content created a ... service problem!

So we're bound to see piracy rise again, not because folks don't want to pay $20/mo for streaming, but because they don't want to deal with the hassle of jumping across N subscriptions and keeping track of that.

I think some of the big media is trying to solve for that, which is why you see all of them now becoming "channels" inside each other, but I'm curious to see how this will evolve.

This may have been the origin of the quote you are remembering, from Gabe Newell in the context of Steam.

"We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem..."

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/11676496-we-think-there-is-...

Two times now that I've recently signed up for a streaming service to watch a show I'm interested in, I find out after signing up that I can only get 720p since I'm streaming to a browser. Money is part of it, but when it's easier to torrent 1080p than to pay money to get it, it's a service issue.

It's never just one thing either. People will try to narrow it down to one thing, and say cost or service fatigue is the dominant factor, but it doesn't work like that. The cost is an issue. Having to have 4 different streaming services for the shows you want is an issue. The quality of the apps are an issue. How much easier is the service compared to just torrenting is an issue.

At some point spending some time finding a seeded torrent sounds more pleasant than dealing with all of that. I can usually find a torrent, start a download, and begin watching a show faster than it takes me to figure out which streaming service it's on, decide if it's worth the price at that moment, and actually make an account with them and pay for it.

Doesn’t really explain why piracy rates are much lower in Japan compared to other countries. It is mostly a cultural issue, and a lot of people will go above and beyond to justify their actions.

Just to note, I’m not even that anti-piracy, but if something is not being sold, or conveniently provided, you can just… not get it?

> which is why you see all of them now becoming "channels" inside each other

But you have to pay for those 'channels' separately, so subscription hell is still there. That explains why it's not a solution! Ideally, service providers should share revenue, and then it could be called a unified or frictionless experience.

I can teach pretty much any film I want for £3 through Apple tv. That’s the same price I paid at the video store in the 90s, Except inflation means it’s half the price in real terms and the quality is far higher.

Hell I rent films I own on blueray as diving through the cd wallets while the pizza goes good isn’t worth the saving.

I’m sure there are people for whom the main problem is keeping track of N streaming services.

But I’d wager the combined cost of those N services is a much, much bigger factor for most.

I pay for Youtube premium, which gives me unlimited Youtube Music usage with no ads.

Yet I've built myself a yt-dlp-based system to pipe audio into my multiroom audio system (built on Snapcast). It will cache things locally so they play instantly, and I can mix my own music library with stuff from Youtube Music seamlessly, which is impossible with non-piratical means.