Piracy is the only viable option. The problem isn’t the concept of a streaming subscription service, the problem is how many of them there are. A couple would be fine I guess but if we consider the fact that all the content is divided in more than 10 major services, it’s no longer a viable option.
And then there’s the problem with stuff suddenly disappearing or never being there in the first place.
That happened to me before with Prime. Bought a movie, forgot about it for while then I remembered and when I went to look for it, it was gone. I checked my emails and I still had the confirmation of purchase. Maybe they thought they could remove it since I didn’t watch it right away.
I spent over $1000 on Steam in the past few years and I’m scared one day they’ll pull some games.
Do you really want everything centralized to a single actor, though? If Netflix had complete monopoly, that would have been catastrophic.
That’s not what I’m saying. Take cable tv subscriptions for example. Multiple companies offer different subscription tiers at different prices but you can get the highest tier subscription which includes all the channels.
Now imagine having to subscribe individually to each Channel, this is essentially what these streaming services are doing.