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.
Also, I don't quite know my feelings on this yet, but there is something real about some shows and movies being part of the milieu. Something doesn't sit quite right about repeatedly increasing the pricing via anti-consumer acquisitions on products that are contributing a substantial part of how the society collectively feels and thinks. It feels like you have to make more money to live in the same society.
“There are too many streaming services to choose from and I don’t like having to pay for competing services therefore there is a monopoly”
So it wouldn’t be a monopoly if there was one company that had all of the content you wanted?
> Disney owns about 1/3 of all box office revenue
A third of one channel of distribution is not a “monopoly”
> Something doesn't sit quite right about repeatedly increasing the pricing via anti-consumer acquisitions on products that are contributing a substantial part of how the society collectively feels and thinks
Yes the government must step in for the good of society because having a team of superheroes including a man who turns green when he gets mad is influencing society.
Castigating modern streaming freeloaders might give a feeling of moral superiority, but it seems as futile as yelling at music downloaders back in the P2P days. It's using a bucket to drain the ocean of a widely accepted behavior.
That said, most people don't pirate movies or shows these days, even if they might not have qualms against it- they simply share streaming accounts. Is that illegal, or even against EULA? The platforms don't seem to mind.
Do you apply the same standard to other laws? If too many people do it, we must legalize it?
You seem to operate under the misapprehension that I'm saying that if a crime is widespread then it is not a crime. What I'm saying that it may not be a crime, or the current approach of prosecution of the crime is wrongheaded and should be reevaluated. And most importantly, the root causes should be examined to determine how society should progress.
If burglary and shoplifting is happening everywhere because we live in pre-revolutionary France and the sans-culottes are starving and stealing bread to survive, well. We've all read A Tale of Two Cities. Or for a later period of the same country, we've all seen Les Miz. Crimes must be analyzed in their social context.