There was a decent 5 year span in my life where the only time I ever pirated was to see British TV shows I wouldn't be able to watch in the U.S. And if I could have paid the British TV license fee to see those, I would have paid it too. Because that would have been a total of two streaming services.

Even now that we're down to one income we can afford two streaming services- one for video and one for music. But we sure as fuck can't afford the dozen streaming services you need to have if you expect to watch all the programming people rave about as amazing.

I can't afford Max and Disney+ and AppleTV+. If I want to find out why The Last of Us is so good and why The Mandalorian was a terrific show and how funny Ted Lasso is, and have the temerity to expect no ads when I'm already paying to watch, that alone would cost me almost $40 a month. Add Netflix and Amazon to that and it's another $30+.

That is what I was paying for cable except with far less programming. On-demand and no ads are definitely advantages, but pay the same amount for a fraction of the programming advantages? Not for me.