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.
> that are contributing a substantial part of how the society collectively feels and thinks
First of all, I straight-up don't believe this. I had very little exposure to TV/movies/books/the internet growing up, and yet I feel virtually no disconnect with my friends and co-workers - even when I don't understand a particular cultural reference they make, they either explain it and we engage in a fun tangent about it, or we just laugh and move on.
Second, even if that were true - then the problem is that culture is being built off of copyrighted works in the first place. Solve that. Doing otherwise shows that this is just a convenient excuse to secure access to personal entertainment.
Yet educational books are copyrighted all the same, and scientific journals fight tooth and claw from preventing open access even if morally they should (eg. when publishing results of research paid for by public months).
You just drew an imaginary line (entertainment products) to defend an artificial law (copyright). Prior to 1710 there was no copyright, yet culture, art and civilization flourished. People were entertained, and entertainment products were certainly produced.
Copyright creates an artificial scarcity (literally, in the 21st century, where copying is costless). Compare that with natural laws, such as against killing, stealing, etc, known for thousands of years, with obvious reasons for existence.
We can argue to what extent copyright promotes creation, and we can agree to respect it because of its positive effects (if any).
But we should never mistake the "nobody has the right to obtain copyrighted works" dogma for a law of nature.
> culture is being built off of copyrighted works in the first place. Solve that. Doing otherwise shows that this is just a convenient excuse to secure access to personal entertainment.
What is culture if not total sum of all art, science, and other human accomplishments? And as we now stand, all modern art (and much of science) is being locked up behind copyright for decades.
Solve that.
People, if they were entertained at all, were mostly self-entertained back then - they played instruments and such. There was hardly if any passive content consumption back then. Before 1710 there were no novels (novels as literary form weren't invented yet), obviously no movies, video games or music recordings. There was practically nothing to protect, apart from musical scores or theatre plays.
The sheer amount of work and content you are dismissing as "nothing apart from musical scores or theatre plays" is mind boggling.