In the late aughts, the iTunes Music store showed that if songs were made available at not-far-from-reasonable prices and in a way that was convenient, people would pay for music instead of downloading it from peer-to-peer filesharing networks or YouTube-to-MP3 conversion sites.
The success of streaming music services like Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music shows that if it's easy and accessibly priced, people are even willing to pay to listen to music without actually owning files like they could in the heyday of P2P music sharing, YouTube-to-MP3 converters, ripping CDs, the iTunes Music Store, and Amazon's no-CRAP music store (CRAP = Content Restriction, Annulment, and Protection, the more-correct term for what the entertainment industry insists on euphemistically calling DRM). (Oh, and FWIW, while Apple did include some CRAP in music files on the iTMS, it was really easy to circumvent, and I suspect that was intentional... but I guess I should mention here that while I know how to do it, I never actually had to do it myself, because I never bought any music from the iTMS)
In the 2010 decade, Netflix's streaming service showed that if you made video content available at a reasonable price, people would pay for that content instead of downloading it from peer-to-peer filesharing networks or watching on "pirate" video web sites. But then the owners of much of the content on Netflix decided they didn't want to share the new revenue stream with Netflix, so they moved to create their own streaming services.
The thing is that while people were willing to pay $8 per month, then $12 per month, then $15 per month,
etc. to have a single streaming service with most of the movies and TV shows they'd ever want, people correctly get annoyed when they see that in order to see all the content they might want to see, they'd have to pay a similar value for
each of several streaming services among which the content has now been spread out. Additionally, as
@knownone points out above, it's now a pain in the ass to manage all the separate applications, and "piracy" actually offers more convenience.
It's like the entertainment companies
want people to go back to P2P networks and "pirate" video sites.
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In the 2010 decade, I was living on a grad-student stipend that would have allowed me to live comfortably anywhere in Brazil except for the greater São Paulo area and the greater Rio de Janeiro area, but since I was in São Paulo, I had to manage my money very carefully in order to be able to eat for the whole month. As a result, I watched NFL games on "pirate" streams. One pleasant surprise that came out of that was that a lot of the streams I got for Seahawks games were from Sky Sports UK, and I quickly discovered, to my utter shock, that the people in the studio talking about the games were way better than their counterparts in the USA. In 2018, I started making enough money that I could comfortably sign up for the international NFL Game Pass, and even though I've been a Seahawks fan since 1976, 2018 was the first season when I was able to watch every single Seahawks game. Not only are the streams from NFL Game Pass more stable and of better video quality than most of the pirate streams I got, it's much easier to find the game I want to see (or Red Zone) and open the stream than it was to find and open a stream for a game on "pirate" sites. So NFL Game Pass gave me better video quality,
much easier access to the games I wanted to see, and at a price I consider reasonable ($99 in 2018-2022, then something like $83 for the 2023 season when NFL Game Pass was migrated to DAZN). That's why I'm currently in my sixth year subscribing to NFL Game Pass.
The fact that I'm outside the USA and have access to every NFL game through the international NFL Game Pass at a reasonable price has made pirate streams irrelevant to me for the last six seasons. But for the vast majority of NFL fans, who are in the USA and facing the situations described in this thread, the conclusion about the NFL is like the one I stated above about the entertainment companies and their balkanization of film-and-series streaming services. It's like the NFL
wants people to seek out and use pirate streams.