That would be the case without DRM. With DRM my options are:
- Pay $20 for a copy that I can't play on all of my devices, and that I may be unable to play at some point in the future if the producer decides they don't want me to anymore.
- Pay $10/month for a streaming service that won't allow me to watch at full resolution on several of my devices, and has no guarantee that the content I want will continue to be available.
- Not consume the media at all.
- Download it from a shady pirate site, but then assuming it actually is what I think it is (which is questionable) be able to use it however I want.
The piracy option is not all that shady at all (there are good sites, and even the bad sites just need you to know what a magnet link is and not clicking on other download links), and you can get DRM-less copies in any combination of size/quality/encoding you want. It always boggles my mind how people in developed countries have not (all) caught on to this. You can even easily stream the content, using, e.g., peerflix. There is even opensource software that creates a media server, though I have not tried them. And these are all just the mainstream stuff. There is lots of niche piracy, e.g., Telegram channels and groups that post books, movies, TV series, etc. Telegram bots that just give you any music you request (I personally found them better than a premium Spotify subscription). Google shared drives that have everything. Sites that offer direct download links of everything (these sometimes specialize to a certain category, e.g., games). Piracy is so mature that it was and is much better than the best money can buy.
Any peer-to-peer solution is very likely to (at least in my country) contain honeypots to find the IPs of people downloading (which is not illegal afaik) and seeding (which is illegal) copyrighted media. They then take those IPs to the respective ISP to obtain your identity and send you "pay us or we sue you" letters.
Just buy a VPS/VPN that is okay with torrenting. (My suggestion is to try the different services and stick with one that doesn't ban you.)(I have never encountered one that cared, but some VPNs did feel like they throttled torrent traffic.)
Plex + Sonarr + Radarr + Deluge running on a seedbox is far far beyond what most people think piracy is. That setup can search for shows for you across multiple public and private trackers, download them, sort them, watch for new episodes or movies, notify you when they are downloaded.
I personally have settled for the 3rd option and I don't feel any loss for that reason. The really create FOMO in people, just look at how many paid Disney to watch Mulan early even with a subscription.
The market is littered by art like products driven by analytics and it is hard to find good art. Sometimes I play some new releases on Tidal when I am working and there is rarely something that would make me store it in my own playlist. Everything is the same and they protect it like these were some nuclear plans.
- Pay $20 for a copy that I can't play on all of my devices, and that I may be unable to play at some point in the future if the producer decides they don't want me to anymore.
- Pay $10/month for a streaming service that won't allow me to watch at full resolution on several of my devices, and has no guarantee that the content I want will continue to be available.
- Not consume the media at all.
- Download it from a shady pirate site, but then assuming it actually is what I think it is (which is questionable) be able to use it however I want.
No good options.