Hardly, piracy exists because people can't resist getting something for free when the consequences are non-existent. It's fundamentally a moral issue, but practitioners are dexterous at avoiding that line of thinking.
Exactly this, people complain about how many different services there are...
Most of them individually have more content than you can watch in a lifetime.
What about the concept of, picking the shows you have access to watch?
If the service barely has anything you watch, what happens if you don't get access to it?
People compare this all to cable, the problem with cable is you couldn't just pay $10 and get something. You payed $10 for a cable box, then you payed $30 for standard definition, then you added 20 dollars here and there for packages and HD, and a fee for mobile viewing.
Now you can pay $30 for one or two services and get access to more content than people were paying hundreds for!
But then the complaint becomes "yes but I can't watch literally everything"?
i don't want to watch everything. i watch about one hour of tv per day. maybe a movie once a week.
i have a very specific list of things i do want to see. favourite shows, certain actors, prefered genres. but what i want to see is spread over half a dozen services.
for $30 i get a lot of content that i don't want, and with every additional service i get more content that i don't want. and yet i'd have to spend more than $100 just to get 40 hours of the content that i do want.
you are effectively suggesting that i should not be picky and just watch what i am offered.
if i needed more content than i can watch in my lifetime, i could just watch youtube for free.
"Everything" doesn't refer to every show in existence...
You want a 5 course dinner with items from 5 restaurants.
You don't want to eat everything on each restaurant's menu... but you want to eat "everything", * you want a plate of everyone's content*
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I'm saying you're allowed to want that, but if you can't afford it don't blame the restaurants for not huddling under one roof and making this imaginary buffet with "everything" under one roof.
We had that setup and it sucked worse than this, this new paradigm works better for people who understand the concept of... not getting everything you want?
It's like people don't get the concept of not getting to watch something because you can't afford it or something.
You're free to pirate it, really it's no skin off my back. I'm not even judging you (unless you try and give it some lame validation other than "I didn't want to pay for it" or in some cases "It's not available to pay for")
But then don't pretend it's the studios fault! It's literally easier (and cheaper, and more flexible) than ever to pay for access to their shows.
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A little over 10 years ago a $200 cable bill wasn't unheard of after regional fees, per set top box fees, HD channel fees,
special packages for movies.. and it wasn't until last year these fees even had to be disclosed up front, so after a sketchy sales call you'd wait a few weeks for it to all get set up, then get your first bill and start a developing a new skill: negotiating your cable bill. And good luck canceling it if you needs changed
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There's this strange sense of entitlement people have that lets them overlook how much better the current situation is because they just need be able to watch everything they have a whim to watch.
I mean your response of "you want me to just watch what I'm offered?!?!" is so funny to me.
I mean yes? If by "offered" you mean what you paid for then yes lol. Sometimes I want to watch a show but it's not on a service I have and I don't fond any value in that service so I just... find another show to watch!
Is that really so mindblowing?
I don't see it as oppression, I don't see it as something so fundamentally unfair, I think "good thing there's these cheap services I have that have so much content I don't think I'll ever not find another show".
Now people who couldn't afford cable packages can get more content than they did before for less, on more flexible payment terms, with more flexible access, it really is a good thing if you can get over the fact sometimes you just might have to give up some gratification...
i didn't have your experience, but then i only lived a few years in the US, so i didn't really have much opportunity to familiarise myself with the options.
in my home country cable was available for a decent price without hidden fees because such trickery is illegal there.
for the restaurant: food courts do exist, and they can have surprisingly high quality food, so yes, it is possible to create a market where everyone can pick and choose.
sure, for you the current situation may be an improvement. and if you are satisfied with that, that's fine.
i am not satisfied because i know we can do better.
Food courts exist and often have very lower quality food at higher prices than individual restaurants because it turns out the overhead of having everything under one roof, and having to compete with redundant choices, takes away from the bottom line.
So I'd say you're over thinking the analogy, but actually that's the perfect representation of what's wrong with cable.
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Not to mention, my comment isn't just saying "it's good because it's better than cable", that's just focusing on an aside lol.
My comment is "it's good period as you're (god forbid) willing to watch something else once in a while, or pay for it." Hell like I said I don't care if you pirate it just again don't pretend the studio made you by not making a bespoke service with everything you want.
People often confuse raw sales with revenue, even Bollywood revenue the pails in comparison to American revenue
That being the case a simple comparison of "I paid less elsewhere" doesn't represent the reality of things. You were either paying for less overall content, or paying for a lot of content produced and heavily funded by the US payment structure and much more cheaply licensed to your country.
The complication being of course, if it was values at that pricing locally then the shows wouldn't exist.
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And it's not like the US was alone in their cable situation so I'm very surprised to hear it was better else aside from the fees. The fees were problematic, but by it's very nature cable involves hardware and often has termed contracts
I've lived in multiple other countries (I wasn't born in the US) and 10 years ago I find it very hard to believed any country has cable (or even worse satellite) TV at "decent price" without the "pay us more for HD" and bundled packages mess unless there was just straight up a barely any content compared to the kinds of packages I'm talking about.
