Or all services will do this, and students will just pay.
Sure, there will be college students who are more technical and comfortable paying for a VPN and who will invest in an external hard drive and will download torrents in advance of watching, as there always has been.
But that's way too complicated for most folks. And between the price of a monthly torrenting-friendly VPN and enough storage, the ad-supported tier of Netflix probably winds up being cheaper anyways.
I think you've forgotten what the community at college was like. If one person on your floor knew how to pirate, the entire floor knew how to pirate by the end of the first semester.
Streaming had begun to fill the niche of being convenient enough to not needing to bother, but broke college students are going to save money in all the places they can.
> If one person on your floor knew how to pirate, the entire floor knew how to pirate by the end of the first semester
This is not how it worked. Some percentage, say 20-30% knew how to pirate, and everyone else on the shared network profited because the 20-30% made public folders.
Sure, there will be college students who are more technical and comfortable paying for a VPN and who will invest in an external hard drive and will download torrents in advance of watching, as there always has been.
But that's way too complicated for most folks. And between the price of a monthly torrenting-friendly VPN and enough storage, the ad-supported tier of Netflix probably winds up being cheaper anyways.