Let's not kid ourselves, finding a torrent for a movie or looking up which service it streams on are both the same level of easy.[] The issue is you have to subscribe to all those different services, which is what most people are probably not willing to do.
Now if a show or movie doesn't stream in your region or isn't otherwise easily online accessible, that's a different story. In that case it's on the industry to do better. When content is readily available on a streaming service, I don't think it's fair to point at the entertainment industry and say they have a problem to solve. In that case 'the problem' might actually be people wanting to watch movies and not pay for it.
More than once I’ve torrented a movie series because of hostile DRM. I used to play things on a Mac that was connected to a TV. DVDs wouldn’t play on an external screen.
Actively preventing me from viewing the content caused me to just torrent it, then after a few occurrences I stopped buying or renting DVDs.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.macworld.com/article/311641...
Heck, I've torrented movies and TV shows that are on streaming services I'm currently paying for. The main reason I do that is to get subtitles which aren't on the streaming services. Did you know that HBO, at least in the USA, has virtually no non-English subtitles on their streaming service? Even for HBO-original content that has been released on DVD/Blu-ray and thus does have subtitles for a large number of languages.
I'll admit to torrenting things I have total access to because the particular material that I already pay good money for doesn't run on the device on which I wish to view the paid for content. If your service doesn't stream to linux devices, and your customer is stuck in an airport hotel with only his linux laptop, either stop complaining about torrents or fix your service.
Probably referring to when something is available only in certain markets due to geoblocking. For example, one of the recent Star Treks was distributed in the US by CBS, and outside the US by Netflix.
1) Having to signup and manage accounts on every streaming service is not easy even if you forget about the money.
2) Most services are not global.
3) Even if they are in your area, they might not be complete. Last week I tried to rent a German movie on Amazon, but realized they only provide English subtitles if you live in the US.
If you're only seeing it once, sure. But if you want to watch it multiple times, you just have to find it once to get it the illicit way, and have to search "where to stream X" every time you want to watch the other, and it might change to something you don't have even in the middle of you watching the series, or even become unavailable entirely for awhile.
I almost exclusively use streaming services now, but it's still annoying to have to search what streaming service everything is currently on, and there are some older movies (been watching a lot of 80s movies I missed lately) in which there is no subscription service it's available, only pay $4+ to rent on Amazon Prime.
I would have agreed with you a few months ago but pirating is moving towards the easier path again. Google had done a pretty good job of letting you know what service something was on, but now something on, say, Amazon Prime Video but require a sub-subscription to whatever this IMDB nonsense is.
Now if a show or movie doesn't stream in your region or isn't otherwise easily online accessible, that's a different story. In that case it's on the industry to do better. When content is readily available on a streaming service, I don't think it's fair to point at the entertainment industry and say they have a problem to solve. In that case 'the problem' might actually be people wanting to watch movies and not pay for it.
[]https://www.justwatch.com