First off, this post isn't intended to encourage any illegal activity. It might have something to do with the fact that despite being free to operate above the

First off, this post isn't intended to encourage any illegal activity. It might have something to do with the fact that despite being free to operate above the table and having large revenue flows, user experience is often better on the dark side. Which is just baffling. With a decent ad/popup blocker and browser setup, some shady server in Vietnam called "watchallseriesonline.interbutt" or whatever is simply more pleasant than hunting down which streaming service has your content, having to buy all of them anyway, dealing with strange and futile DRM plugins, deal with industry drama, deal with hostile "engagement-driving" user interfaces, etc etc. The IP owners are nearly always a convoluted web of big telecom corporations who are battling with each other to ensure that all users are losers by wantonly Balkanizing all our culture's media. Add to that the fact that almost all legit streamers immediately triple-dip on their customers. They charge subscriptions, they shovel ads at their users despite the fact it's a paid service, and they suck up and gargle all their user's personal data and sell it to the highest bidder or fumble it to some hacker. Some torrent site will also try and do all that, but in a way that's a lot easier to sidestep. I mean I guess it sucks for the content owners (often not the actual creators as stated above, but that's another story) but there needs to be at least some good faith from them before they expect an unorganized mass of millions of independent users to return good faith to them. Masses of people respond to incentives and are basically deterministic. Telling them "you should really do this, it's the right thing to do" and expecting a demand-side miracle is just irrational.