Damn. You just nailed this. In fact, hearing it this way makes me confused as to why anyone would ever use a streaming service to start.
I live in Canada - which is just an awful country to be in for seeing the message 'this video is not available in your country'. For years, I exclaimed 'this is dumb and just makes me visit the Pirate Bay next, it won't be long before other people do, too'.
You know what I wish was still open? Blockbuster. I miss walking out to a store, picking out a movie, pretty much any movie I wanted (new releases might be picky/choosy) - and renting it for a couple days for $2-3. That...honestly seemed like the best all-around deal for movie producers and consumers.
Replace the "unskippable 'you criminal' you" DVD previews with the descriptions of determining where, what, when, etc.
https://boingboing.net/2010/02/18/infographic-buying-d.html
The 300 separate streaming services need to understand that they need a friction level very close to the "if you are a pirate" box at the top in order to prevent their customers from returning to the pirate route. And having 300 separate services, with disjoint content, is not at all near the friction level of the "if you are a pirate" box at the top of the infographic.
I don't think this is an option anymore. There was never a time when a Blockbuster store's collection could match Netflix/Hulu/Prime. In particular, there's so much more media being created now, that there's no way a physical shelf space could keep up. If you consider just TV, think about how many more channels there are compared to the heyday of Blockbuster. I just checked Fandango, there's over 20 movies opening this week alone. How could a Blockbuster keep up with that? I think the reason it felt that way might be related to the paradox of choice. There were fewer options, we got the "lottery win"/dopamine hit from finding that new movie when there was only one copy left to rent, etc. I think our brains artificially limited the set of things we "wanted" to watch to what was on the shelf, which was surely never that robust of a collection compared to what you get from something like Netflix today.
This is ridiculously often the usual experience outside the US, if the content is legally available at all... Or I can just torrent the same content with my desired subs/dubs or buy a game on steam an play it in my desired language...
You can do this now with Netflix - but they will ship you DVD's.
Try your local library
They often have a significant DVD section.
You can find the good ones, but if my parents were going to torrent stuff they'd either be scared away or end up with crap on their computer.
I go paid services first but many times it's so janky i say fuck it and launch the add-on and it works.
I bought an Xbox One instead of a PS4 even though I like the anime games on the PS4 because the Xbox One has a perfect Plex client and the PS4 client is known to be "janky"
I struggled with cheap Android TV devices and broke down and bought a NVIDIA Shield TV because it has a perfect Plex client too with adequate hardware.
Pending you don't want to watch something in Dolby Vision.
I can either have Dolby Atmos come from the shield and a HDR video, or Dolby Vision through the TV and compressed AC3 audio of some kind from the TV.
Asking for both is apparently too much...
I don't know anything about Plex, but torrenting is pretty effortless compared to figuring out which streaming service what you want to watch is on, figuring out how to get that, evaluating other content it has trying to justify the price, figuring out how to get it to your tv, and figuring out how to use it. The only thing I've seen that confuses people about torrenting is having to open a port.
I think the thing that limits torrenting is the ISP emails, not any of this "nobody cares about your nerd stuff" know-nothing pseudo folk wisdom. People figure it out in five minutes, it looks too easy so it feels criminal, then they get an email from their ISP, so they retreat back to the difficult stuff out of paranoia because they vaguely remember stories about people getting in absurdly disproportionate trouble for it.
For your conspiracy to be valid, I'd have to see significant evidence that internet costs have gone up in the US. Mine have gone down. Evidence that it's cheaper in other parts of the world is utterly irrelevant.