With streaming, who knows? Maybe Netflix loses the rights and it disappears. Maybe their encode is garbage and it ruins the dark scenes. So, I still pay for streaming services but anything I actually care about I download and archive.
That is interesting because it happened to me in the most annoying way possible:
I was watching Donnie Darko, a rather obscure movie that requires (or at least for me required) a bit of brainpower to watch. So I watched the first half of it and planned to watch the remainder the next day. Come the next day, and where is the movie? Nowhere to be found.
(By the way, I know this doesn't actually happen, but I swear Netflix sticks in my bookmarks movies and shows I never bookmarked!)
https://www.radiotimes.com/news/on-demand/2020-07-14/derry-g...
At least, until Steam goes offline, or maybe your account gets lost. I for one still use Steam, but I do wonder if I'll be able to play my favorite games in 20 years.
A plain EXE from itch, GOG, or some other source will work as long as compatible hardware lives on.
if this is somehow "too complicated" for the average user, just make the default an "auto" setting that does whatever it does now and bury it in a menu somewhere.
Admittedly some services, like RedBox, are more frustrating than torrenting though.
That danger is almost exclusive to software piracy. The probability of being infected by an evil pdf, mp3 or mp4 is really low if you know what you're doing (i.e. updating and using decent software).
This included RDR2. Totally worth it.
TV series on the other hand I still pirate to this day (if they aren't on the couple of streaming services I sub to), because buying them is way too complicated (even impossible with a large portion of shows that aren't current, and a fair number of current shows too).
Movies are a mixed bag - grabbing cheap dvds or blu rays of pretty much anything is easy online so I usually do that, but I imagine if I preferred digital media or watched enough movies for my physical collection to be unwieldy I'd resort to piracy because buying digital copies of movies is just as complicated as TV.
Give me "Steam for Movies and TV" or a streaming service that aggregates licenses from everyone, and doesn't only host the content that they think will be most popular and I'll probably stop pirating those too.