Amazon did this from the start with Prime Video. CBS now does annual pricing. Speaking of CBS, I have a discounted CBS+Showtime bundle via Apple. HBO is “free” as part of my AT&T phone plan.

The annual discounts and bundles are already here!

And.... then piracy.

I don't know if you follow the piracy news much, but the crackdown has only increased in viciousness.

Tools like youtube-dl get banned from github, and private torrent servers are taken down, and the data the site has is used to subpoena email providers and ISPs for individuals to sue.

I know we all come from the background of imagining information wants to be free, but it's only going to be another 20 years or so until having a general purpose computer in your house will be as suspicious as having a chemistry lab in your basement.

The next step I'm expecting is some blurring of the line between civil and criminal penalties for piracy, and for police to seize someone's house because it was used for piracy.

Piracy is still thriving. Living in a country that only Netflix and prime are available we use piracy for everything else that's worth it. The availability is still there as easy as it's always been.

And yet here I am happily using Stremio in the 3rd world. Even then, with all the content available I average at most 1 episode per week. 99% of the content produced is crap. Youtube offers better free options, try the DW documentaries for example.

Until foreign VPN companies become illegal, all of that is solvable with a $2/month VPN subscription.

Not in the long term since more and more services do VPN detection which is trivial any time a VPN has static servers.

Though even residential proxies (https://luminati.io/) are being detected with greater and greater frequency.

Bittorrent & Piracy DGAF about VPNs