[breakfastduck]

You're missing the point.

The music comparison is not driving to the store compared with downloading.

It's pirating to downloading legally. iTunes made it just as convenient to buy as it did to pirate, which is the main reason people pirate anything - inconvenience. Steam did exactly the same thing for PC gaming. Netflix did the same for TV and Film. (Only now stuff is split between so many streaming services pirating is becoming the path of least resistance again).

[Forgeties79]

Sort of a tangent but your parenthetical about streaming services is why, after roughly 10 years of “keeping my nose clean,” I’ve found myself slowly firing up my home server more and more frequently with “very legal and very cool” content I am slowly (but increasing in speed) acquiring. I don’t mind paying for my content. I have several subscriptions. But the constant shuffles and searches for where i can watch anything is becoming a bigger and bigger obstacle. I’m going to pick the easiest route, not the cheapest one. Hell it’s why I don’t download music - I don’t love Spotify as a company, but damn they make it easy to listen to my music. If they were to fracture or 20 other competitors pop up and licensing starts getting all spread out/hard to follow, then you can bet music will be in line for me too.

[jkubicek]

This doesn't completely fill your needs, but the Apple "TV" app does a great job with cross-app searching. For most any content I want to watch, I have one place to go to search for it, I know if it's available on any of the streaming services I subscribe to and if it's not available for free it's trivially easy to rent / buy a high-quality stream.

It's not perfect, as far as I know Netflix content isn't indexed and frequently it suggests I watch a movie in an app that doesn't actually serve that movie, but it's mostly OK.

[Forgeties79]

It’s funny you mention Apple TV. I was considering that just yesterday as a way to simplify things. It just seems kind of silly to buy a (somewhat) redundant piece of hardware though in the age of smart tv’s. I’ve got an LG C1 and I just find it silly I may need to go around the onboard apps to access the exact same stuff. But maybe it’s at least a stop gap idk

[ElFitz]

What is lovely too is how content comes and goes depending on licensing deals and where you physically are.

Want to finish that tv show? Too bad! We didn’t bother telling you, but we lost the deal.