That's a terribly first-world-centric view to take. I live in Lebanon, definitely a country that does not qualify as "developed" by any standards and people here are in group (b).
Your options here for watching movies are (a) cinema(which doesn't work for TV shows), (b) wait for them to show up on crappy cable services, (c) buy pirated DVDs for 1~2$ a pop and (d) torrent. Buying legal DVDs is possible but extremely hard, not simply due to the cost but also the availability. If I wanted to buy a pirated DVD there are at least 3 different shops within 2min of my home in an eastern Beirut suburb whereas if I wanted to go the legal option I'd need to drive down to Virgin in downtown Beirut(15min drive) and pick from an extremely limited selection.
The only viable solutions if you want timely and not incredibly inconvenient access to movies or shows are (c) and (d). Internet connections are incredibly expensive relative to Europe or the US(50$/mo for 4mb and a 25GB cap) and yet I know a lot of people who go with option (d), mainly because traffic at night isn't subject to the cap. People will simply cue up their torrents and download them between 12am and 7am and watch them the next day. If you keep a buffer of unwatched movies/shows this can work quite well. My personal approach is to torrent to a digital ocean droplet and then download over regular HTTP overnight. Most people are not technically savvy enough to do that but they would be able to use put.io. I happen to use my droplet for other things, but if I didn't put.io would be cheaper as well.
Your options here for watching movies are (a) cinema(which doesn't work for TV shows), (b) wait for them to show up on crappy cable services, (c) buy pirated DVDs for 1~2$ a pop and (d) torrent. Buying legal DVDs is possible but extremely hard, not simply due to the cost but also the availability. If I wanted to buy a pirated DVD there are at least 3 different shops within 2min of my home in an eastern Beirut suburb whereas if I wanted to go the legal option I'd need to drive down to Virgin in downtown Beirut(15min drive) and pick from an extremely limited selection.
The only viable solutions if you want timely and not incredibly inconvenient access to movies or shows are (c) and (d). Internet connections are incredibly expensive relative to Europe or the US(50$/mo for 4mb and a 25GB cap) and yet I know a lot of people who go with option (d), mainly because traffic at night isn't subject to the cap. People will simply cue up their torrents and download them between 12am and 7am and watch them the next day. If you keep a buffer of unwatched movies/shows this can work quite well. My personal approach is to torrent to a digital ocean droplet and then download over regular HTTP overnight. Most people are not technically savvy enough to do that but they would be able to use put.io. I happen to use my droplet for other things, but if I didn't put.io would be cheaper as well.