This is because the free market is a killer for monopolies, unless government regulation kicks in. I'd rather pay for the single item I'm consuming than for th

This is because the free market is a killer for monopolies, unless government regulation kicks in. I'd rather pay for the single item I'm consuming than for thousands I'm not paying. The big innovation streaming services really brought was lowering the price for the crap content people watch and subsidising with people who buy the service and don't use it a lot. That's how they become better than piracy, not by centralisation (piracy is also incredibly decentralised) but by offering content at a reasonable price. Let's say netflix costs 10$ a month and I watch 20 movies a month. 50c is a reasonable amount so I'm happy with my netflix subscription. Of course if I could pay 0.50$ to watch a movie I like I would just outright buy it - and not pirate it. The problem with the industry is that content is overpriced. When piracy was a thing that just meant people were valuing the content at less than it was being sold. Sure, a percentage would convert anyway no matter the price, the rest would pirate it. I sincerely hope we get rid of centralised services and we just end up with micro transactions to buy movies for cheap. I think once AI will be used more in content production we will get there.