The majority of people either have a moral issue with 100% piracy or cannot easily figure out how to do it.

Public torrents lead to getting piracy emails from your isp. Private torrents are annoying and difficult. In general you have to deal with shady organizations and without experience it’s hard to know what’s a scam and what isn’t.

And I suspect the vast majority of pirates never stopped. And wouldn’t stop unless the price was well below fair value. Winning over pirates is shitty business strategy.

Also Netflix’s 12 bucks a month isn’t enough to fund all the media that’s created. Netflix would have to charge a lot more (indistinguishable from multiple services that charge less) or less tv/movies would get made. Netflix’s larger catalog of old was subsidized by network and cable companies. They sold rights for pennies on the dollar. But Netflix is killing those networks. The business method isn’t viable.

I suspect they're gambling that once people have sampled the "don't get off the couch" convenience of streaming, piracy won't be an appetizing alternative. I did always think that piracy was more about convenience than price for people who aren't broke college students.

> I did always think that piracy was more about convenience than price for people who aren't broke college students.

True, I would pay 1 or 2 streaming services (as I do the right now) - but more? No thank you, this becomes cluttered, confusing and inconvenient.

Today, I still torrent stuff even if it's available on a streaming service I already pay for (which I don't see as piracy), for 2 main reasons: guaranteed quality and ease of use.

My Plex server is the go-to place for most of the better quality shows we follow, and Netflix is for a lot of the 'meh' content you browse when you're not sure what to see, or what I call 'throw away' content we would never watch a second time. I do want to encourage them to keep making good content however, so I don't mind paying for it.

So far, Netflix has been rather consumer-focused and as a company has - afaik - done nothing to damage my trust, but that's not something I can say about all those companies having or planning to offer streaming services.

I would gladly pay for an HBO subscription if it were available here, since they produce some serious quality content - but it isn't. I would however most likely still torrent their shows.