It’s not “everything available everywhere for $13”, it’s “most things available some places for $13 plus $7 plus $97/12 plus...”

That is, even if you get the Disney premium package, you still need to rent netflix, Amazon prime, Hulu’s ad-free experience, CBS, NBC, HBO, and ever other nickel and dime streaming service out there.

Yes, what OP is mentioning in that folks are pirating again not because of "convenience", but because free is cheaper and this was always the real reason.

I disagree - if anything this highlights exactly how inconvenient streaming has gotten:

- Maintaining 7-8 active subscriptions

- Finding the right service that's streaming a particular show

- Hope they haven't implemented some sort of time limitation so you can never watch episode 1 of a show again

- Paying more than cable for that privilege

Signing up for a recurring monthly service one time with a user name and credit card number takes 5 minutes. Folks are now just making excuses to pirate because they like free stuff without any consequence of getting in trouble. It would be a lot easier if folks would just admit it vs. all of this pretzel logic that's getting harder and hard to believe as the years go by and content is easier to legally obtain (but have to yes pay for).

If there were two identical torrent services, with the same content, except one you had to pay, what percentage of people would choose the pay site?

A few confused people would pay. But why should anybody pay if the service is the same?

If on the other hand one service paid the authors for licenses, curated the content, offered consistently good availability, performance, and convenience, and was without malware, I guess a fair share of people would pay. In fact a lot of people do pay for exactly these reasons.

"Folks just don't want to spend the money per month it would take to watch everything they like." Exactly my point. I get why they are doing it, but not for the idealistic reasons OP referred to. People will always choose free over paying for something. It has nothing to do with whether they can afford it, or it has DRM, or they want to "try" it before they buy it. Before the internet/torrents, everyone had no problem dumping tons of money into cable. When VHS came on the scene, everyone began copying movies and distributing them.

I don't think it's for idealistic reasons either, but I fully believe piracy is a service problem and not so much free vs paid.

I honestly can't remember the last time I pirated a PC game. Steam is just more convenient than pirating a game. And okay, when I was a kid i pirated games because I simply couldn't afford to buy them.

I had a spotify subscription for quite a while, but they seem incapable of making a working music player. So now I'm buying albums on bandcamp and 'find' the missing ones online.

Netflix here is so garbage, it just flat out made me stop watching movies and TV shows, I just watch youtube/twitch instead these days.

As soon as your service is better than piracy, people will pay for it.

So the question is this, if there was two versions of a popular torrent site, equal in every way, except you had to pay for one to get the same content. What percentage of users would choose to use the pay site? I suspect a small fraction.

> So the question is this, if there was two versions of a popular torrent site, equal in every way, except you had to pay for one to get the same content. What percentage of users would choose to use the pay site? I suspect a small fraction of a percent.

That's not the question at all, no. I said you need better service than pirates. And that's absolutely possible, as steam shows.

Meanwhile spotify is busy losing my offline songs for no reason when i'm abroad and can't really stream because of roaming and netflix refuses to give me the original english audio.

I never had a problem with downloaded songs just disappearing when i bought an album from bandcamp or a youtube video refusing to play in english.

Using netflix and spotify is way easier than some kind of setup with Kodi or whatever people use, but they need to stop crippling their services. Some people pirate stuff instead, I mostly just stop consuming content where i'm treated like shit even after paying.

Unfortunately, it's not Netflix so much crippling, as it is all the content creators trying to get a bigger piece of the pie. It was inevitable, there will never been a single place to get all of your media. Even Steam has lost high profile games to Origin, Uplay, and whatever other half dozen or so nonsense services there are out there. I'm sure as shit not going to torrent pirated copies, so I reluctantly install them all if I want to play the game.

Agreed.