[samlevine]

It's hard to bootstrap some models without a lot of money. Even with money, it's not obvious there is a market until people prove it via piracy.

For example, Crunchyroll is the least terrible anime streaming site and they got started by stealing anime that was "stolen" by folks that wanted to put decent subtitles on shows from Japan.

They eventually hired some of the folks they were stealing subtitles from, and got licensing deals from the content owners once they had revenue. But they never would have been able to negotiate a deal if they'd have asked for permission instead of forgiveness.

It's entirely possible to imagine that another streaming company (Netflix, Hulu) would have looked at all of the great quality subtitles being produced by non-content owners and figured out that there was revenue to be had. But I fail to see how they would have seen the demand if people hadn't been stealing and making good subtitles to begin with, and producing huge numbers of stolen downloads/streams.