And even if I was swimming in money, it's often easier to just download the shows I want and watch them on Plex/Jellyfin than trying to navigate the (often ad-riddled) interfaces of the various platforms and finding where the content I want is.
One example is Rick and Morty, it's made by Adult Swim, but they don't have a streaming service in Canada. It seems to be on Primevideo but under a different system than their regular content. The other way to watch it is to buy it from my cable provider (I don't have cable). So to watch a 20-minutes animated show I'd have to take a +40$ subscription.
pirated sports are even a better product. they dont have ads. so if i pay for sports on tv, im actually paying to watch ads?? it should be the other way around, and if it were, i would probably sign up. also give me all your money
She's gotten really good at finding various streams for the games she wants to watch, and just watches those, usually with no ads. To keep the system we had to watch them "legally" was... I think "only" $90/month - $60 something plus more for 'basic sports'. Oh... but you want HD? That's even more. And you need a new satellite dish. That will be an extra $200/installation.
But had we just been a new customer... I'm sure they'd have thrown the world at us for free for the first 3-6 months.
I don't do sports, but I do remember that sky sports was on in a pub I was in recently with a football game. I don't remember seeing any onscreen adverts (there was the score, the time left, a sky sports logo etc in the corner which seemed fairly unintrusive -- certainly the score and time left are an essential viewing when I do watch England in the finals)
Obviously there's also the adverts around the actual ground, and on the players shirts, most of which seem to be for betting (when I was a kid my grandad put a couple of quid on the pools each week, but this modern stuff seems quite the scourge)
Now at half time sure, they are dripping with adverts -- despite I believe sky sports costing somewhere in the order of £600 a year, and advertising raising just 10% of Sky's revenue from the last annual report I saw.
Were you paying a legitimate provider?