I heard of a family, one of the wealthiest in a small town. When their son got married they hired a photographer. This was back in the day when smaller proofs were sent. A bunch of 4x6 I think. The family bragged about all the money they saved taking a picture of the proof & making copies. Similar today when people remove water marks or just flat our steel & share photos.
As the partner of a photographer, this is indeed extremely shitty. Wedding photographers are expensive, but the work is a real bitch and they deserve every penny. My GF has sworn to never ever shoot a wedding again.
I used to be stringently anti-piracy when it came to media, but I've become convinced that it's an essential brake on bullshit business practices. Right now I have subscriptions running to three separate streaming services, purely because I want to watch Game Of Thrones, Queer Eye, and the Giro d'Italia. I'm taking a long, hard look at a fourth, because Good Omens, Preacher and The Expanse are all serious draws.
I'm the complete opposite here. I think piracy was a symptom of a service problem (shoutout to Gabe Newell) that's mostly been solved by now, at least in the US.
Twelve years ago if I wanted to catch up on House or The Office my options were:
1. Plan my life around catching reruns on Fox/NBC in order like some kind of animal. Commercials.
2. Record reruns on VHS. Have to deal with planning out VCR programming, but could at least skip commercials when watching.
3. Pay $2/episode / $25/season to download the episodes on the iTunes store, using garbage iTunes software, non-HD, with DRM making it hard to get it onto a TV.
4. Pay $30-40/season to buy the boxed DVD sets of each season of each show. Unskippable pre-menu ads but no commercials during episodes. Need to change discs every few episodes. Typically need to wait almost a year after airing for it to be available. Not HD.
5. Click download on your favorite BitTorrent tracker and have the first episodes ready to watch within minutes, in HD, with no ads, and no DRM. Typically available within minutes after airing. Could watch on the computer, or on a TV easily with XBMC or similar.
Number 5 was the best option, even without considering cost. And at the time I was a young tech-savvy 16 year old making $8/hr part time, so of course that's the option I went with.
Now, let's say I'm in 2019 and want to catch up on Game of Thrones, The Expanse, The Good Place, Better Call Saul, Stranger Things, and Shameless (deliberately picking shows from all over the place provider wise as an example).
Options are:
1. Have cable/satellite TV service of some kind, paying a billion dollars a month for fancy cable and HBO/Showtime. Catch reruns, maybe use a DVR. This would get us 4/6 (GoT, The Good Place, BCS, and Shameless). It'd be gross and expensive and incomplete. And with ads outside of premium channels.
2. Plug in an antenna and catch reruns. This might get you The Good Place on NBC if you figure out the schedule. Only 1/6. And gross.
3. Pirate everything. It's easier than ever, and download speeds have only gone up in 12 years. You'd have to wait until after release for new episodes though. Reasonably easy to watch on a computer, smartphone, or TV.
4. Subscribe to the appropriate streaming services. You get the entire back catalog of GoT, The Expanse, Stranger Things, Shameless, and fresh episodes immediately as they are released (on HBO Now, Prime, Netflix, and Showtime accordingly). You get The Good Place, Shameless, and Better Call Saul back seasons (Netflix), plus the current season of The Good Place on Hulu. The only hole here is the most recent season of BCS, which would set you back $20 on Amazon if you don't want to wait until it hits Netflix. You'd get next-day-after-airing episodes of The Good Place (Hulu) and again you'd have to buy BCS to watch the new season as it airs (probably another $20 for a season pass). All can be watched in a normal web browser on a computer with no garbageware like iTunes installed, or on a smartphone or TV with an easily usable app.
Suddenly options 3 and 4 are neck and neck, even including cost. Main downside of piracy is not getting shows like GoT immediately upon airing, and watching stuff on a smartphone or TV being a little kludgy if you're not a nerd about it. Main downside of streaming services would be that things are spread across different streaming sites/apps. And cost.
But the cost does not have to be insane. Let's tally it up. HBO Now (Game of Thrones) is $15/mo, Amazon Prime (The Expanse) is $10/mo ($120/yr), Netflix is $13/mo (TGP, BCS, Shameless backseasons, Stranger Things), Hulu is $12/mo (The Good Place current episodes), and Showtime is $11/mo. Egads, that's $71/mo! Fuck!
Except that it doesn't have to be. There are no contracts or yearly commitments or any of that garbage with streaming services, and they make it super easy to cancel. If there are only a handful or a single show on a service you want to watch, you only have to subscribe for a month or two at a time to watch the season. Let's call it two months out of the year on HBO, one month on Prime, three months on Netflix, four months on Hulu, and two months of Showtime. We'll throw in a $20 season pass for BCS as well. This puts you at $169 for the year, an average of
~$14/mo for the year to legally and easily watch your six shows you care about that are all on different services/networks with no ads on nearly any modern computer, smartphone, or TV. And since this puts you across five different streaming services during various points of the year, you have plenty of other variety to watch if you want along the way.
I'd call that a bargain. This isn't quite exactly what we do at home, but it's the same idea. We probably watch way too much TV, but it doesn't cost us very much.
I don't see much of a reason to pirate anymore unless you're getting media not available legally in your country or you're just a cheapass.
There is no good reason for programs to be exclusive to a single streaming service: if I want to watch Game Of Thrones legally, I have only one provider I can go to (and Netflix cancelling Marco Polo after two seasons and twenty million dollars tells you how realistic substitution is in these situations), which makes it a pretty near total monopoly except for piracy.
I don't really understand how this is a monopoly. Of course there need to be exclusives, or there's no reason to subscribe to Service A over Service B. Exclusives are not monopolies. Do you expect to be able to buy any book from any publisher? Is Kroger not selling Walmart brand peanut butter a monopoly? If you really want a particular show, a particular book, or a particular brand of peanut butter you will go to the company that sells it, which is why they sell it in the first place. This is not a Luxottica or Comcast situation.
The Expanse
You should watch The Expanse. Everyone should watch The Expanse.