alt Hacker NewsFor a golden decade or so, piracy was less convenient than paying: Xbox had subscriptions offering on tap games, there was only really one streaming service to speak of that had high quality content, music came from Spotify or YouTube, etc.
We are back to where we are in the 2000s: the gatekeepers of large tracts of culture are behaving so badly that piracy is probably going to end it's lull. It is a shame for artists, developers, and anyone else who needs to get paid that companies running genuinely very good services have chosen to behave so badly.
The services aren’t really that great IMO. They don’t always get you the quality you pay for. They hide their libraries either to keep you engaged with their app or to convince you it’s larger than it is. Most of them charge you even when you don’t use the service that month. But they’re doling out seasons an episode or three at a time to make sure you don’t unsubscribe during any given month. Some have renegged on their previous statements regarding password sharing. You pay for “screens” but those screens have to be for your household only. Their UIs and apps are often broken and are inconsistent between devices. Even when you pay for ad free sometimes there are ads “due to licensing issues” and almost all of them advertise their own shows or apps or podcasts before the content you want to watch.