alt Hacker NewsExactly this.
Streaming services have become the worst of all worlds.
As an EU citizen, even tho I pay for Netflix and Prime, I cannot access most of the content there as even tho it exists on the service because it's not available in my country.
Amazon prime has 2 good shows and just a bunch of D-tier movies or some 35+ year old ones. It's mostly worthless.
Netflix region locks a whole lot of content or removes it after some time. I can't watch some great movies and TV shows because "oh we don't have rights for this region".
Meanwhile, piracy provides a user experience that not just lets me access all of their content - one I'm already paying for - anywhere, but also lets me access movies and shows that would otherwise not be found anywhere else, including regional movies and short movies.
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Netflix had an advantage with own productions which is dying now. Shows are cancelled left and right so people don't want to invest time. Also looks like full season dumps is affecting the long term profitability of productions. People watch a season in a couple of days and forget about it, if a new season is planned it takes 2 years to be released by which time viewers forgot the show existed.
Content rights are micro managed too, unlike ever before so you get things like a streaming service buying a title in one language but not the one you want. This doesn't stop them from returning it in your search results though