Once, not so long ago, streaming was more convenient than pirating. But, as expected the commercial services went through their Standard Cycle of Enshittification and now we either let ourselves get flogged by 50 competing predatory services or just take the easy way and sail the high seas.
The choice is not that hard. Yarr.
Of course this returns us to the state where the streaming companies who have literally "enshitted their own beds" now turn to legislators and policymakers (who they hated, just couple of weeks ago) to ask them to provide some "law and order" to this unruly mob and to defend the corporations right to put thumbscrews on the population for ever increasing profits.
I'd love some kind of federated streaming service. So that different content providers can sell their stuff, you pay once monthly into a pool, and you can choose different clients to access all content services. Then the money gets distributed depending on your viewing habits.
Legislators could just offer a very easy solution. They could simply mandate copyright holders to offer the copyright to all interested parties at a fair price. If content ist held back or only exclusively distributed through one party it should go public domain, as the holder of the rights clearly does not intend to profit in a legitimate way from.
The intend of copyright is to make sure, that the holder of the right can get a fair compensation. It is not the intend that his work is abused to manipulate the markets.
I came to the exact same conclusion as you. The way copyright currently works creates monopolies. Just allow anyone to distribute the media while paying the copyright holder their fair share and don't give the copyright holder complete control over who can distribute it and the issue is fixed.
Edit: quick research is looking like I'm entirely misremembering and entirely wrong. Quoting my original comment for posterity
If I'm remembering my history correctly, they actually had a similar problem in the early 20th century with movie theaters and movie studios. Studios would strong arm theatres into restrictive contracts for what they could screen, and when it looked too much like a federal law would drop restricting their behavior the industry instead opted to self-regulate and formed a private regulatory body
Fully agree. I‘m shocked though that corpo shills are not all over this post as they are in every other community. They probably stay out of this community or get banned quickly.
I‘m getting blasted regularly on memes and other communities.