I disagree - if anything this highlights exactly how inconvenient streaming has gotten:

- Maintaining 7-8 active subscriptions

- Finding the right service that's streaming a particular show

- Hope they haven't implemented some sort of time limitation so you can never watch episode 1 of a show again

- Paying more than cable for that privilege

Signing up for a recurring monthly service one time with a user name and credit card number takes 5 minutes. Folks are now just making excuses to pirate because they like free stuff without any consequence of getting in trouble. It would be a lot easier if folks would just admit it vs. all of this pretzel logic that's getting harder and hard to believe as the years go by and content is easier to legally obtain (but have to yes pay for).

If there were two identical torrent services, with the same content, except one you had to pay, what percentage of people would choose the pay site?

A few confused people would pay. But why should anybody pay if the service is the same?

If on the other hand one service paid the authors for licenses, curated the content, offered consistently good availability, performance, and convenience, and was without malware, I guess a fair share of people would pay. In fact a lot of people do pay for exactly these reasons.