Completely agree. It is frequently the media companies' unwillingness to sell to buyers on their own terms that leads to this problem. Additionally, the fact that most content is irrelevant to most buyers.

Obviously, the traditional model was designed to subsidize creating something for everyone. But, now, it has been subverted to improve margins by creating everything for everybody / lowest common denominator. On the off chance that it fits my tastes, I still have to buy the rest of the crap just to view what I want.

I'll pay for content, but I want to be able to buy what I want. Content creators have always had a tough time monetizing the content vs the mode of delivery. You pay for the theater when you go to the movies, you pay for the bandwidth when you stream, you pay for the dvd printing when you buy a DVD. It would be nice if the licensing per item were fixed, and the mode of delivery were left up to the buyer.

Yep. As Gave Newell says, "piracy is a service problem."

Honestly, I think it's more than that, I think it's an economic problem. Our economic model no longer matches reality. We used to bake the costs of production into the cost of a unit, which makes sense for physical goods. That makes no sense with digital goods. 15 years ago things like Napster were supposed to be the wake-up call for that.

Instead we chose to ignore that lesson, and now we're collectively suffering for it today.

I agree completely. I don't have cable, but I pay for SlingTV, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, and CBS All Access. If a tv series isn't on one of those platforms, I will find it somewhere else. But I won't pay $30 for one tv series.