Not only that, but the media players available let you use downloaded subtitles, in some cases automatically fetching them.

I have my media collection in Plex set up this way, subtitles are automatically fetched from OpenSubtitles.org for my entire collection.

Before HBO Go people in the US had to wait and buy the DVD or Blu-ray too . You aren't forced to pirate something just because you need to watch it NOW.

This is not about me being forced to pirate anything. It's about offering paying customers a way worse service than people who just download a copy illegaly.

It's not too hard to slap a PayPal or Stripe button in front of an HTML5 video with optional Flash fallback. But no, legal entities need to make sure that you won't rip them off with their digital rights nonsense.

I understand that this is mostly a legal requirement, but the technical implementation still sucks tremendously up to a point where I wonder, why a service that charges money can't afford better developers than a free service.

It bothers me so much that I cant just go to gameofthrones.com, put in my credit card and watch the show.

Exactly. They try to sell you their HBO Whatever thing, which isn't even available outside of the US. The amount of revenue lost because of the unnecessary complex process is mind-boggling.

Also: It's not that piracy is without hassles. The piracy-process could easily be outperformed by making it as simple as payment button in front of a media player or downloadable file.

Because when I want to download GoT as a torrent, I have to install a BitTorrent client, I have to go find the torrent files, I must look at ads for porn sites, I often must find the right download button in spammy-looking sites, I need to distinguish which file I actually want and see if it's a fake or not.

The piracy process is difficult enough for most people, but it's still so much easier than the process of watching the show legally.

I simply can't wrap my head around this.

You don't really have to do that just setup something like sonarr. Select the shows you want the episodes are downloaded as released and you don't have to visit spammy sites etc. It will check and download all the correct files and rename them to a naming convention of your choice etc. Setting up an app like that once is a lot easier than going through the hassle of drm or georestrictions. Netflix used to boast that with them entering the market piracy went down but now with georestrictions they will go back up.