I would be happy to pay to buy or rent a single show or movie. The problem is that a lot of that content is only available with a monthly subscription. Screw that, those monthly bills eat you alive. I hear that the For All Mankind series is pretty good but there's no way I'm signing up for Apple TV just to watch that. So I'll skip it and watch something else.

> I think the services part they really dislike is just the part where your credit card gets charged when you click the buy or rent button.

You think wrong. My Steam account has 300+ games on it. I pay for several streaming services. I have a physical media collection that even includes a copy of windows vista, to my eternal regret.

> Doing all of the piracy stuff with VPNs and navigating torrent sites and getting a setup where you can play files on your TV is an order of magnitude more work.

And yet that's what you have to do if you don't want to pay to get total garbage in return for your money.

The pirates compete with each other to release the best encodes, to the point they mix multiple Blu-Rays together into an ultimate release because some region somehow received a better version of some scene or whatever. Normal files you get to play using mpv.

Netflix ships horribly compressed nonsense where color gradients are so full of artifacts it hurts my eyes. Highly dynamic segments are painful to watch. Amazingly enough it's still the least bad option, the other services have even worse quality and a borderline unusable video player software to boot.

Service isn't just about ease, it's also about quality. If you want quality, piracy isn't just easier, it's almost always the best option, if not the only option. It's sad that the copyright industry can't seem to match what's essentially a bunch of amateurs but what can you do?

Sometimes I read these mental gymnastics comments about being leashed to half a dozen providers for “convenience” and wonder if these people have actually tried to learn how to use something like a NAS.

I think the part they really dislike is the undermining of the moral superiority they claim by donating their money to corporations that contribute ~nothing to the actual evolution of culture. Inventing strawmans about how difficult it is to click one button in Jellyseer and have a max-quality, buffering free copy of what you want to watch in perpetuity is an order of magnitude more work than renting a poor-quality subset of the media that publishers consider it profitable to provide.

you bought a smart tv maybe you got a dumb tv and then plugged in a dongle? Or maybe you bought a smart tv and also purchased another home media device thingy and you gotta remember to switch to w the apple tv for this thingy. you signed in to it you created dozens ? Hundreds? Of accounts to watch all the content you want, try to figure out what plan you need to watch the content? Will you subscribe for a bit and cancel later ah ok siri set a reminder to cancel the subscriotion ill take care of that. Wait oops i went on vacation and netflix is mad that im. Not watching from home do i need a different plan? How do these amazon prime video channel subscriptions work how many do i have?

All that instead of a jellyfin server and a single search? It’s all gymnastics just different gymnastics