I am quite curious to know the existence of such services or hardware. Any pointers?

I'm not really looking to provide a piracy tutorial here and I don't use these services myself, but another poster is correct in that they're Kodi addons. Kodi runs on pretty much everything but most of the streaming boxes are cheap Chinese android boxes or Amazon FireTVs.

Everything but iPhones, iPads, AppleTVs, most smart devices and Rokus......

Which again doesn’t help when so much video streaming is done on mobile devices....

Ever heard of Kodi? That's a set-top box OS but that also is an Android App.. Then watch some youtube videos on how to install the magic box addons and you have access to millions of movies for streaming.

As hendersoon noted, nowadays, piracy is extremely low-friction.

Two problems -- middle class households in the US are overwhelmingly iOS -- not Android and that still doesn't solve the problem of mobile and having to depend on cellular connectivity to stream. Disney+ and Netflix allow you to download shows.

Middle class households are not overwhelming iOS. But even if that were true Kodi works on iOS and the streaming add-ons have an option to download it also.

Studies show otherwise:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/toddhixon/2014/04/10/what-kind-...

https://gizmodo.com/want-to-appear-rich-buy-an-iphone-182743...

https://buildfire.com/ios-android-users/

Kodi is not available for non jailbroken ios devices.

So, just pay for a good VPN provider and get all content for free?

You don't really need a VPN if you turn off the addons torrent feature. Standard Kodi doesn't share unless you use an add-on with that feature

There's plenty of streaming sites, and since web browsers work so well on mobile devices nowadays...

See my previous comment...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21005204