> Piracy is a Service problem And in the context of video streaming, the service gap keeps widening. Music exists in an alternate universe of IP where no crea

> Piracy is a Service problem And in the context of video streaming, the service gap keeps widening. Music exists in an alternate universe of IP where no creator or rightsholder truly has exclusive control over anything except commercial distribution of physical media. It's crazy but that's how we got to a place where any streaming or subscription service we choose likely has all the music we want to listen to and piracy stopped being a rational decision. Movies and television don't have that. Netflix thrived for a while as the streaming platform of choice for content owners, but their catalog was never anywhere close to exhaustive. Then there was Hulu for the content owners who didn't want Netflix ruling distribution. And Prime for who-knows-why. And now everyone with exclusive rights to content wants to put anything of value on their own exclusive platform. Combine all their fees and cutting the cord legally approaches the price of a moderate CATV package and if you want any of the CATV things that aren't available with on-demand streaming platforms, such as cable news networks, that's another much pricier subscription from Sling or AT&T. Meanwhile, piracy keeps getting easier and better. Anything running an Intel CPU from the past 5-6 years with an integrated GPU will make a perfectly adequate Plex server that can transcode 4K content. In appliance form from Synology that starts around $300, or DIY for half that with used PC from eBay. The software stack to completely automate piracy is a handful of Docker containers that any modern NAS or appliance-style Linux distro makes simple enough for a non-geek to muddle through installing and configuring, and some expressly target that purpose. A paid USENET service and indexer cost about the same as a single streaming subscription. Content selection isn't limited to what content owners have chosen to make available for streaming, content never disappears so long as you're willing to store it, and everything is consolidated to a single "streaming service" that supports pretty much any platform that can access Netflix. And, as it has been for years, people who don't want to put in that effort can probably find a friend who's willing to share.