I admit, I took the bait for a while and subscribed to a few streaming platforms. A few bucks a month to not deal with the inherent risks of pirating, or headaches trying to find a bootleg stream that works? Why not?
Then came the price increases. Shows abruptly moving to other streaming platforms with little to no warning. Ads with tiered services (“pay $10 more to see just two minutes of ads instead of five!”).
Suddenly pirating started to look good again.
I don’t know if it’s still the case, but smart TVs were a bit cheaper than “dumb” TVs at one point, since the cost of the TV was subsidised by all the streaming platforms that paid to be included on the TV manufacturer’s OS, and have a customized Netflix or Amazon logo button on the remote that opens their app.
I don’t know if this is done anymore since there are hardly any dumb TVs out there being made now.