“Piracy is not a pricing issue,” Gabe Newell, the co-founder of Valve, the company behind the world’s largest PC gaming platform, Steam, observed in 2011. “It’s a service issue.” Today, the crisis in streaming makes this clearer than ever. With titles scattered, prices on the rise, and bitrates throttled depending on your browser, it is little wonder some viewers are raising the jolly roger again. Studios carve out fiefdoms, build walls and levy tolls for those who wish to visit. The result is artificial scarcity in a digital world that promised abundance.

This hits the nail on the head...

I wonder if these greedy fuckers know this but don't give a shit in favor of short term profits,or if they're actually so dense and holed up in their own world disconnected from reality that they don't see it?

The problem is that all the competitors are enshittifying the same way at the same pace. If there was a holdout in a position to grow their platform we may at least go back to the days of "Netflix is all you need".

As it is, it makes more sense to go back to physical media purchases, and I blame absolutely nobody if their disposable income and lack of box fetishes makes them think downloading the content is perfectly equivalent. The Plex server where I store all my physical media backups is by far the best streaming library I have access to, at least if you discount novelty as a factor.

It's not just a pricing issue. It's an ownership issue.

Too many of the things we buy are not ours.

Yesterday I saw the article about VW cars which need a subscription to use the built-in capabilities. The car you bought doesn't belong to you.

These articles are great but I believe there are also people like me. Folks who don't pay for any streaming services and don't pirate. So if somehow they stamped out piracy folks like me won't be coming back and I think many of the pirates would still opt out which would lead to basically the shows becoming even more irrelevant as much of the talk around a show and reviews and such are from pirates.