Cheaper & easier - not by much. Australia blocks all the good torrent sites, so now I need a VPN, a reputable one. Also need terabytes of network connected storage, and usually I need more and more of it over time. Better and more networking equipment to buy and maintain. Media management and streaming software that works locally and remotely, to (maybe buy) and maintain.

Or I can usage discount offers for the various streaming platforms, and pay for each one I want to watch something on from time to time.

The streaming services also don’t come with who knows what malware like pirated media can.

And a YouTube Premium subscription because you get ad free YouTube Music and ad free YouTube.

This is true for music because the labels decided that they would upload their catalogs to every streaming service.

It's not true for movies, because the movie industry decided to sign exclusivity deals or make movies only available on their own platforms. Thus piracy is still the only reliable way to watch movies: you might get access to some subset of movies depending on which streaming service you subscribe to, but certainly not to all of them.

It’s cat and mouse game. Australia blocks sites, sites move urls. If you don’t keep up, then they have caught you too.

Streaming sites can just delete your purchases whenever they want to. Sony already has.

It's only a DNS block fwiw. If you set your DNS to 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8 everything works fine.