It feels the same as back when the music industry thought that those that pirated music would automatically purchase it if the "free" version was removed. They were wrong then and the streaming services are just as wrong now.

I think Netflix (and others) are looking at that 10-20 x $18/month and salivating, not realizing that the money just isn't there. They need to take a page from the Microsoft book and let people "steal" some of the content so they can have a least some paying customers. It beats having no paying customers.

iTunes was very successful before the age of streaming and for awhile was the number one Music Store.

Today, who would waste time pirating music instead of paying for a streaming service?

I'm pretty out of the loop. Is pirating still easy? I thought tbp isn't reliable any more, and finding reliable torrent sites is kind of hard now? Younger people aren't really on the computer anymore. Like your not going to be torrenting off ipads and stuff

TBP is now proxy software that anyone can install[0] which talks to a central API[1] for torrent listings. Each provider can tailor the experience and add ads or donation buttons as they desire. You can search for "TPB proxy list"[2] to find a list of TPB sites. I currently use tpb.party which I find the fastest and least intrusive.

[0] https://piratebayproxy.info/setup.html

[1] https://apibay.org It has no public-facing site, probably to keep it off the radar.

[2] https://piratebayproxy.info/ is what I use.