My mind is blown that these sites were actually getting paid subscribers. I thought the beauty of piracy is the whole "not paying for it" thing.
I refuse to pay for more than one subscription service, I'm not going to end up paying more than I did for cable tv. Hulu still wins for me because it has the live/local tv, and I'm not giving Disney anymore money.
The beauty of piracy is that you can watch/listen to what you want to, how you want to, when you want to. People are more than happy to pay reasonable prices for content, so long as they can use it how they want; see: Spotify.
I'd pay $50/mo for a streaming service that had a significant number of movies and television shows that I want to watch. As it stands, I still need to pirate movies because they are not available on stream services, or they are only available for "purchase" at like $14-17 when I know for a fact that the same movies are sitting in the Walmart DVD bin for $5.
You're correct of course, because I have consistently paid for services when they have stuff I wanted at reasonable prices. It's worth it just to relieve myself from the hassle of downloading and filling up my hard drive with stuff. The entire King of the Hill can fill up a HD.
It's just been my experience that these 'popcorn time' services are janky and law enforcement magnets, it's surprising anyone would pay for it. But I suppose I live somewhere that doesn't have as many roadblocks as some places.
Oh that sucks, thanks for the heads up. I wonder if this means Hulu will be getting phased out? I'm definitely not in love with it, it has some really awful original programming, but it gets the Orville and King of the Hill.
I think people are getting spoiled by getting what they asked for. People have been asking for a-la-carte cable for years (instead of the massively expensive bundle deals where you only want N channels out of 2000), and that's basically what all these competing streaming networks have become.
I refuse to pay for more than one subscription service, I'm not going to end up paying more than I did for cable tv. Hulu still wins for me because it has the live/local tv, and I'm not giving Disney anymore money.