It is reductive to say that piracy is just a service problem. There are lots of people who will try to save the money. But a lot of those people wouldn't spend much if any money either way. They would just skip most content, or watch with friends or similar. There is a huge group of people (myself included) that would happily pay a significant amount for content if they provided a good experience. But they are too busy failing to stop piracy to bother giving a good experience.

Yeah I mean you've basically got three district groups at play.

The first group, either have no money or no interest in your goods or services. They might turn to piracy if it's available, but even if it isn't they're still not buying anything from you. DRM is pointless to this group because it's not stopping anything.

The second group are the marginal cases. They potentially have the money to buy your products, but maybe they're pinching pennies or they aren't convinced your products are worth the price you're asking for them. A lot of pirates of Adobe PhotoShop a couple decades back would have fallen into this group. DRM might be effective on this group, but there's a strong argument to be made that it's going to cost you just as many sales as it earns you, and ultimately doesn't actually stop piracy, merely delays it a bit. You'd likely see as many or more sales from this group if you removed the DRM and added more features or cut your prices

The last group are your paying customers. They're already happily (or at least grudgingly) giving you money. The only thing DRM is doing for this group is making their experience worse and likely pushing them towards that second group.

There's basically no group where DRM is really improving things. At best you're breaking even, at worst it's costing you sales, to say nothing of the development costs of implementing the DRM in the first place.

Exactly. Now just to watch something, I first have to figure out on which app it is. Then I have to check if I have a subscription for that app, maybe as part of the parents cable bundle, maybe it comes with prime but with ads. Oh that show was sold to another streaming service.

Then you launch it and you have the opening jingles and ads. Then the menu takes forever to load. Then you find your show. It crashes because most TVs come with decade old hardware running Android TV at 4K. You try again. You hit pause to go pee, you come back the TV went to standby and closed the app so you start all over again.

My media collection? 10 seconds and it's streaming off my NAS over SMB. It's literally easier, faster and better to pirate the content. By the time we're done logging into 5 different apps the show finished downloading on the PC. By the time you're done you're wondering if you still want to even watch the show, and it's in glorious 720p as you learn you have the base plan only.

I’m working on implementing that as well.

I pirated a game yesterday. That game was a console game for a console that hasn't been sold in 20+ years. I don't feel bad about it.

If the publisher had wrapped it in an emulator and stuck it on steam for $5 I'd probably have just bought it.

Anymore, I only pirate as a demo service for games that I don't think are going to be worth the spend (Starfield is a prime example). That being said, the majority of games I've pirated over the last decade were purchased once I knew the game was enjoyable. But fuck dropping $70 on any game without a demo or pre-release reviews in full