The seven seas welcome ye matey

That's a fair point. The issue is cost, then. If all of the services were 90% cheaper, I think we'd be okay with that.

I tend to agree here. But it has been interesting watching the proliferation of streaming services and trying to figure out what's gonna happen next.

Like Netflix was a big first-mover, then everyone realized they could keep more money if they built their own streaming service, then everyone realized that building and running a streaming service is expensive and complicated, then everyone had to get onto the Original Content treadmill to try to keep folks subscribed which has led to somehow even more commodification of art, and now that running at a loss and pouring cash into original content to bump up numbers has gotten too expensive some services are pricing themselves out of the market.

I'm fascinated to see what the next big move is for these businesses. With more and more people starting to choose month to month which one or two services to subscribe to rather than keeping them all, I wonder if we're gonna continue seeing the return of ad-supported plans or some services only offering yearly contracts or what the next move will be in pursuit of endless growth.

T'Ana looks so done with everything lol

Also, Revolution. Canceled at the exact moment it was getting insanely good with their big reveal. sigh…

I tried to watch Lower Decks that way (on Prime) but it detected the VPN and didn't let me. 😭

No, because the market has become so fragmented, no streaming services are profitable, so there's no show on one that will ever last. Average shows last on TV channels because of ads. A medium performing TV show can last forever on TV with ads. A medium performing TV show on a streaming service gets canceled after a couple seasons to transition resources to a new show. They're looking for that next big flashy thing to draw subscriptions.

In the current broken system, the only options are to continually churn shows, or push ads on streaming services. Both are happening.

So, if you pirate a TV show today, you aren't killing it, and you aren't part of the problem. Paying for the service won't keep the show around, and not paying for it won't kill it either. The show is already dead, you're just not forking over your hard earned cash for a bite at its dead corpse.

This interaction reminds me of an Always Sunny episode. The gang are mad because their favourite movie franchise sold out and got bad, so the whole episode is about them complaining with the movie execs about how the changes made to the movie (to attract different audiences in order to try to make the franchise profitable again) all suck, and what they should be doing differently. But the punchline of the episode is they have all along been streaming the movie series and not paying to watch it, so they are part of the problem.

Never expected to see it played out IRL though, and the fact you're being downvoted makes it all a bit less funny...

E: and now me :D maybe the dissenters would like to enlighten us as to how piracy doesn't affect capitalism?

True, but if you're not going to subscribe regardless then why not?