"Do not expect five 9's from my Plex Server" (https://player.fm/series/accidental-tech-podcast/ep-309-do-n...)
And you still have the abysmal state of upload bandwidth in the US and what are the chances that they will have all of the Disney movies?
Not everyone in the US is starved for upstream. Not everyone is going to lose their mind if their friend's Plex doesn't have Five 9s availability -- and let's be real, with all the things that can and do go wrong between a user and a service on the Internet, Three 9s is optimistic for anything.
And whose subscription service has Fresh Prince of Bel-Air? Saved by the Bell? Countless other shows and movies that aren't available with any of them?
Disney movies? Add a Trakt list to Radarr, done.
People want a reliable service and will pay for it. I have no idea why this concept is forum. Hulu and Netflix publish their numbers every quarter and about 60% of households have Amazon Prime Video (https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-prime-members-59-perce...)
76% percent of households use Netflix (https://www.bestappletv.com/news/more-u-s-households-now-hav...)
It’s also estimated that 40% of households will get Disney+ by 2022 (https://www.fiercevideo.com/video/a-lot-people-are-planning-...)
It doesn’t take too much to understand that enough of the American public values convenience over price to make paying for a service over the hassle of piracy worthwhile.
That's the thing. Needing more subscriptions to access the content everyone in a household wants to view is going to lower convenience and raise the (collective) price. Disney+, next is Peacock, and who knows what's next after that.
Nobody's suggesting a mass piracy uprising. But more people will look in that direction and decide that piracy can substitute for another subscription or replace all of them.
Running my own Plex server costs substantially more than subscribing to the major streaming services. I'm paying for the convenience -- it pretty much runs itself, new content appears "by magic" (Radarr/Sonarr/Trakt lists), content never goes away, I have content that no streaming subscription offers, and there's only one place to look for content.
But they probably have a friend who has a friend who put in the effort and is willing to share.