They do seem to make it easy to push people over any moral objection to piracy. Often more because of fragmentation than price, but pushing the price makes it easier. And the platforms (Jellyfin as one example) make sharing what you have with family/friends easier now also.

I don't have a great view, though, whether this is even visible to the streaming platforms. I suspect they don't really lose much notable revenue from piracy anymore. While it's matured some recently, it's not as easy as "download limewire".

I'm not fully convinced here. Objectively it's a lot easier than it was 15 years ago and that is partially because now more people have the skills to expand the ecosystem and the resources to focus on creature comforts. Since 2022 and the last 2 years more than ever, I decided to cut ties to all cloud providers and host everything myself for 4 reasons:

1. I have 0 trust in software companies to have the ability to protect my data, even if they have the best intentions. Partially because of 2

2. AI: everything has to be fed into it, whatever it spits out is treated as gospel by most tech companies and people that 10 years ago were taught to question everything.

3. Price.

4. It is actually easy to setup and if you put in some real thinking into it, it becomes both secure and easy to pass around. Jellyfin is a good example. I installed wireguard on my mum's computer, "double click this, click this button, open your browser, click on this icon" and she has access to my library.

Part of the reason for the overinflated prices and budget cuts in those exact companies is this exact thing: many people got fed up with minor convenience at an ever-increasing price and "amazon for this, netflix for that". Many of us grew up pirating because we had no other choice. Now we do have a choice but instead of a decent trade-off in price-vs-convenience, we got a price to pay and ultimately a ton of inconvenience.