"Paying money in return for receiving goods" still works fine. Most people are willing to pay if given reasonable terms and ease of access. Steam is a pretty big flagship of how to make a business that competes with pirating.

Media companies are stuck in the dark ages where instead of trying to increase value of their product/service, they instead double down on increasing revenue per viewer with horrible anti-customer policies like 10-minute unskippable ads on a DVD you bought.