So given how easy it is to get exactly what you want legally, is piracy just people being tight these days?
I can only speak for myself, but that’s certainly part of it.
It’s a really bad excuse, but a lot of films are pretty terrible these days, I think they always had been, but back in the day when you went to the Shop to rent a tape/disc for £4 or whatever you’d jolly well watch the sucker even if it was shit, now with virtually limitless options if I get a wiff a film is a stinker, I’ll turn it off after 20 mins. £4.5 is a bit of a gamble for a tight arse like me.
Films I’m really desperate to watch, I can get sooner via nefarious ways, and I’m not talking about some terrible Handicam footage or some grainy ‘HD’ copy with Korean subs or anything – most stuff is available 2/3 weeks before it is on iTunes et al in perfect, or near perfect HD for a sub 2GB download, that’s about 5 mins at home for me. 4k stuff is a little rarer, but with a bit of work it’s down the pipe and in my external HDD in the back of the telly in about half an hour. You can’t even get most of them unless you want to order the 4K disc from Amazon and wait a few days.
I think the ‘Industry’ knows they’re in trouble with home viewers, physical media sales are down and downloads are too, eventually it’ll all be via subscription streaming, but at the moment the studios don’t want to work with Prime or Netflix, they want their own service, but does the public want a disney sub, a universal sub, etc etc.
It’ll work itself out, I used to torrent music too, but since Apple music I don’t, if I had to wait 2 years to stream a song and then hope they didn’t drop it after 3 months I still would.