The golden age of streaming was when you could get most good or popular shows and movies on Netflix. But then, as is tradition, everyone else got greedy and decided they had to have their own streaming services. Now streaming is basically just cable TV with extra steps and the value proposition for the consumer is getting to be just as bad as it was with cable, maybe worse. There were quite a few years where I stopped pirating. I didn’t really feel like I had to. Those days are long gone. It took me five minutes to download a movie my wife asked for yesterday, from the time I punched the title into qbittorrent to the time it was playing on our TV. For me this is mostly about convenience with cost as a close second. Film studios like to whine about pirating but as far as I’m concerned they are the main cause of pirating. They make mostly shitty, overpriced content anymore and then make it so inconvenient for the rest of us to get to what little good stuff they put out. Their repeated attempts to squash pirating have not only failed, they’ve indirectly made pirating more sophisticated and increased the quality of pirated content.