DRM is just security theater that makes us all culturally poorer. Give me the name of a movie on Netflix or any of the other mainstream streaming services, and I'll find you a high-quality copy of it, often with subtitles in many different languages, for the cost of a usenet subscription (you don't even need to worry about a DMCA notice from your ISP for torrenting). DRM is not stopping anything. The studios and streaming services have made it just convenient enough to pay, with nice UI/UX on top.

The reason people pay is the convenience! The DRM isn't required for that. If they dropped all DRM tomorrow, they would lose far fewer subscriber dollars than they spend on DRM implementations, license servers, key management, etc. They're just greedy, want control, and want to keep it illegal to break out of that control.

Meanwhile, any media "purchases" you make are gone in a blink if the company you bought them from goes out of business or just decides they don't feel like offering the service anymore. The funny thing is that most of the buy-to-"own" (where you don't actually own it) prices are similar to the cost of a DVD or blu-ray disc. Ditto for Kindle books and their paperback counterparts. All the promises of digital distribution giving consumers lower prices were predictable lies.

I despise DRM as much as the next guy, but its existence makes perfect sense. The moment someone explains to a C level at a studio how easily the content could "leak" from a site without it, it's out of the question to not have it. As the parent poster implied, yes it's security theatre to a large extent, but it does block the very easiest forms of content sharing (i.e. just sharing the video manifest or simply saving segments).

Regarding purchases and licensing, those are still stuck in the same business model and pricing as in the analogue days, this is true. But saying overall consumer prices are the same is ridiculous, since all-you-can-eat content subscriptions is a massive transition with no comparable offerings in the analogue past.

If you want to culturally enrich people, there has never been a better time to consume huge amounts of quality stuff for barely any money.

Thanks to napster and co., who forced the fat cats to look for a solution mind you.