Compound this with ever more streaming services, and it is an easy bet people will turn back to piracy. In this case, I think it is an ease of access issue vs a cost issue. Having 3-4 streaming subs is still vastly cheaper than cable, but when shows start vanishing and libraries become smaller and smaller or filled with junk, people will look to alternatives.

These days, VPN's are cheap and it has never been easier or better to set up a media streaming app in your own home. I've seen one that automatically downloads shows and movies with no input from the user. That is the type of ease of use coupled with the notion that content will always be available is likely to be a draw for a lot of people.

I know some people swear they can never go back to anything less after watching one 4K show, but I, for one, have no problem watching lower-quality media when there's no convenient way to get a high-quality version.

Some of us lived through the RealPlayer era.

My DVD player requires a separate input on the TV, controller, and wall socket. The player needs to be physically accessible too, and you need to store physical discs.

Changing DVDs is significantly more involved than changing a movie on Netflix, and finding something that you know you have on DVD Vs on Netflix required someone else to have correctly put the disk away.

Lastly, those things are just noisy as hell.

And anyway, it’s not really competing with Netflix since I sort of gave up on Netflix because it didn’t reliably carry most of my favorite movies and tv shows. It’s a choice between loading a dvd or not being able to watch it, not between loading a dvd vs clicking on Netflix. I’m in Europe so the selection is even worse.

Case in point, AFAIK the most recent craze on TikTok (and subsequently, on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube, as these days they're downstream from TikTok and just rehashing or commenting on it) is "Wednesday dance" and other memes related to the new Addams family show on Netflix.

No, but then neither do we deserve to watch their shows. Just as they have no inherit right to our money, we have no inherit right to their product.

It’s easier to see the moral case for this if we think about cases other than the simple “pirating” of a show. For example, preservation. Doctor Who is a popular show that predates the practice of saving the original tapes. There are several episodes that have been lost forever because the BBC did not routinely record (or routinely recorded over) their own broadcasts. Many other episodes were thought to be lost, but thanks to enterprising individuals who made unauthorized copies, have since been preserved. Is the world worse off or better off with those people?

Or take Star Wars. George Lucas famously hated that anyone could prefer the pre‐Special Editions of the original trilogy, and only grudgingly allowed it to be released once afterward, in a highly compressed anamorphic format on one set of DVDs. No other version has been released since. People who like the original special effects, dialogue, and editing have since done 4k scans of original theater prints from the 70s and 80s. People don’t deserve to be able to watch copies of those—legally speaking, the copyright holder Lucas (and now Disney) is the arbiter of that. But would a world without the option be better than our world today?

And remember, laws are capricious. The movie industry was terrified of home video. They thought it would materially damage them by removing the desire to watch movies in theater, where they made their money. (Remember MPAA president Jack Valenti testifying before Congress? “I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.”) The VCR came within one vote of being outlawed as a piracy tool by the Supreme Court. A 5–4 decision. Because it survived, though, the people received a huge benefit from the new capabilities (like time shifting and media shifting) provided by this technology. And the movie industry benefited too, earning billions of dollars by embracing this new market… after they had tried to murder it in its crib.

How would today’s world look if one justice had voted the other way?

So is physical property ownership. Someone not walking up to your car and taking it from you at the end of a shotgun is a restriction placed on everyone by law. The only natural right you have to your car is whether you can keep it from everyone else by sheer force.

And yes, just like piracy, people can still break the law and take your car regardless. But you at least have the force of the state on your side.

Possession grants no "natural" rights by itself.

Good point. Property implies violence.

Point for the pirates, I mean.

I understand you're using "everyone" in a rhetorical sense but just to level-set about the real difficulties of piracy for non-techie viewers:

- downloading videos via bittorrent or visiting dubious warez websites of illegal videos with the risks of javascript popup malware

- downloaded videos not easily playable on smartphones, tablets, or TVs that have the built-in "smart os" such as Android TV and Amazon Fire Stick.

A lot of viewers don't have media computers or laptops hooked up to TVs to take advantage of downloaded pirated videos. Even fewer will set up a DLNA media server so that their tablets can stream self-hosted videos.

This leaves only the computer-literate geeks as the group that can substitute paid streaming with piracy. This small subset is irrelevant to streaming companies. For everyone else, they just pick 1 or 2 streaming subscriptions (e.g. Disney+ for the kids and HBO MAX for the adults) -- and just live with the fact that their choices of shows are more limited and the existing ones may even disappear.

So "everyone" switching to piracy is a really small group of people.

And then there's the young ones :)

More recently, there's even a new kind of piracy that has arisen: pirate streaming websites, where you just go and watch whatever shows in the browser, and as long as you have a decent adblock, you proooobably won't get a nasty virus.

Where there's a will, there's a way, and there's a lot of will among younger people who aren't already indoctrinated into the idea that we must accept what shows our corporate overlords give us.

These existed a decade ago too, yo be fair.

In reference to the computer literate part of your comment, my parents aren't tech savvy at all, and probably never pirated a movie in their lives until some guy came along with a £200 android TV box that just worked last year.

> there's a lot of will among younger people who aren't already indoctrinated into the idea that we must accept what shows our corporate overlords give us.

This sort of dismissal of "it's the young people" and talking about "corporate overlords" having some kind of magical control is getting tiring here. It's not a meaningful discussion, it's just navel gazing.

You missed one item on your list:

- Any of the free video streaming sites. There's almost always one up at any moment, and all you need to use it is a web browser, and perhaps an adblock to remove the noise (and avoid an occasional crypto miner). These sites tend to disappear after a year or two, but are always replaced by new ones.

(As I understand it, they don't even host the content themselves - they're just a frontend with a search engine, aggregating links to multiple third-party players and video files.)

You might not get 4K quality there, but you'll usually get 1080p, which is more than most people get from Netflix anyway. Such sites are stupidly easy to use, have been popular with non-tech-savvy users for over a decade, and (AFAIK) in plenty of jurisdictions, they're 100% legal to use.

You probably can't get them working on a smart TV (I don't own one, so I can't say), but I guess that's just another reason to buy a dumb TV and a Chromecast instead.

Anyways, appreciate the different perspective, and the alternate use of "everyone". ;-)

Sure.

Will they?

No. Given the obvious counter from a studio is "sure, but we won't pay any residuals on that given we can't commit to a blank cheque for seventy years. And you'll have to be liable for the music rights."

For a moment, Netflix was so great because they had "all" the stuff! (not all, but a lot of good stuff). Now every company and their mother are retiring their contents so they can have their own smaller subscription service. I have a couple of them, and that's my limit on all these companies' greed; for anything else that happens to not be available, I feel no issue with appealing to Jack Sparrow.

Problem with piracy, torrent at least, is that finding older stuff tends to be difficult. But that's exactly the kind of contents companies are removing, so there would be not much to gain by going with them.