How Streaming Broke Itself — And Why I Went Back to Piracy

I’m probably not the first person you’ve heard say this — maybe not even on this platform alone — but this is something that has been on my mind for a while, and I feel like I have to share it, even if it’s just to put it out there somewhere.

You see, I’ve always loved movies, series, cartoons and the like, like most of you, I’m sure. And like most of you, I was super excited when Netflix came onto the scene and changed the way we accessed those things. We all know the story, and we all know what happened next, with the tens of other services that surfaced over the last decade or so, so I’ll spare the details of that part and share my own experience with it — which might be yours, too.

I live in South America. The Netflix catalog in this region is smaller than the one in the USA, but more importantly, the shows available are wildly different. When I accessed Netflix US with a VPN, I was surprised to see movies fresh out of cinemas and TV shows that have never been available around here — not to mention some that we had here but were one or even two seasons ahead in the US.

I, too, saw the need to pay for multiple services to be able to watch all the things I wanted. So, for about a year I subscribed to: YouTube Premium, Netflix, Max, Apple TV+, Disney, Star+, Prime, Paramount+, GloboPlay (a Brazilian streaming service that also has international movies and TV shows), Mubi, and Curiosity Stream. Yes, all at the same time. I was spending almost $100 a month. Does that sound like a lot? Yeah, it was. Especially if you consider that the minimum wage in Brazil (where I was living when I subscribed to all of those) is about $250.

So after about a year of letting a large chunk of my money go out the window, I decided to just cancel most of them, stick to Netflix, Max and YouTube (which I also use for streaming music), and resort to piracy for the content I couldn’t find on those platforms.

Am I proud of pirating the content I love? Not really. But what are the alternatives, really? Streaming was supposed to be an alternative to both expensive cable and piracy, but with so many options available and the content scattered across basically all of them, it’s become nearly impossible to keep up with the prices — or even find what you want to watch. And don’t even get me started on the ridiculous ad-supported plans that sometimes throw up to ten ads in one 45-minute episode.

Why can’t the industry find a model more like what has happened in music, where even though you have multiple services, almost everything is available on any of them and it becomes mostly a matter of preference more than anything else?

I don’t know what the future holds for these companies. Netflix has never done better, with both revenue and stock value being the highest they’ve ever been, while Apple TV+ is going the opposite direction. But if they don’t get their act together, piracy will be the more logical choice.