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a screenshot of a techdirt.com story: Piracy Is Surging Again Because Streaming Execs Ignored The Lessons Of The Past Culture from the doomed-to-repeat dept Wed, Jan 10th 2024 05:31am - Karl Bode Back in 2019 we noted how the streaming sector risked driving consumers back to piracy if they didn’t heed the lessons of the past. We explored how the rush to raise rates, nickel-and-dime users, implement arbitrary restrictions, and force users toward hunting and pecking their way through a confusing platter of exclusives and availability windows risked driving befuddled users back to piracy. And lo and behold, that’s exactly what’s happening. After several decades of kicking and screaming, studio and music execs somewhere around 2010 finally realized they needed to offer users affordable access to easy-to-use online content resources. They finally realized they needed to compete with piracy and focus on consumer satisfaction whether they liked the concept or not. And unsurprisingly, once they learned that lesson piracy began to dramatically decrease. That was until 2021, when piracy rates began to climb slowly upward again in the U.S. and EU. As the Daily Beast notes, users have grown increasingly frustrated at having to hunt and peck through a universe of different, often terrible streaming services just to find a single film or television program.