Media corporations beware, piracy is starting to roar back

The Herald Scotland

2 days ago

But corporate greed and the battle for market share have recreated a lot of the same conditions where piracy once thrived. For film and television, the battle for rights is often an exclusive agreement, meaning having access to everything requires paying subscriptions to multiple services. If you want everything available that you wish to watch, then make sure and subscribe to Disney+, Netflix, Max, Apple TV+, Hulu, Amazon Prime, and an assortment of others.
It all becomes reminiscent of the expensive and burdensome cable packages that plagued the 2000s. The lessons learned from the past become easily forgotten through the tunnel vision of quarterly profits, and the decisions of media corporations seem to always be taken at the expense of their users.
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Except now, in 2025, people are poorer, and household entertainment budgets are nonexistent. Where convenience once dictated user behaviour, now affordability is a major factor.
The streaming model has become unsustainable – if it ever was sustainable – and it will only get more complicated and less appealing as the expectations of endless growth cannibalise streaming services further. Moves like widespread crackdowns on password sharing and other harsh decisions made to punish users just make the openness and freedom of piracy all the more alluring.
And prices for streaming services steadily climb, too. The price of Netflix's standard plan has more than doubled since 2011. Plenty of streaming services have subsequently introduced a cheaper plan equivalent to their original asking price, but with adverts included where there were none before. The constant flow and lack of interruption were once an arrow in streaming's quiver, but now media corporations seem intent on bringing back all the pitfalls of traditional television and radio that initially drove people to the convenience of pirating.
Piracy was at its most insignificant during the height of streaming's dominance in the pandemic, but it has risen in use dramatically in the following years, up to 216 billion website visits in 2024 from the low of 130bn in 2020.
Several factors are converging to make piracy an attractive option once again. The promise of streaming was simplicity – one or two services for everything. Now, it's a labyrinth of paywalls and subscription fees, and there is increasing fatigue towards such fragmentation.
Want access to all your favourite shows and films? You might need to subscribe to quite a number of services (Image: Unsplash) And the illusion of endless choice has begun to run dry. As studios pull their shows and movies to bolster their own platforms, users find that what was available yesterday is gone today. HBO Max's infamous purges, Disney's vault strategy, and Netflix's ever-rotating catalogue mean that even loyal subscribers can't reliably access what they want. Why subscribe in the first place when your watchlist might disappear next month, once the licensing and rights terms change (which is often the case)?
Before, piracy was framed as an attack on artists, that downloading a song is equivalent to personally taking food out of the artist's mouth. The erosion of the moral argument against piracy is perhaps the biggest danger to streaming's dominance. Because it's now not the artists facing the harmful effects of piracy but the industry itself, the faceless corporate middlemen who are already busy exploiting artists through streaming.
In the old industry model, there was a bit of truth to piracy decimating the artist's share. But in the streaming era, where artists are compensated so little, it's much harder to make this case.
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A trend of straight-out advocating piracy has been building, with musicians, filmmakers, and even actors openly criticising the inequities of streaming payouts. Some artists are encouraging piracy as a way to stop an unwanted license holder from benefiting from their work. When the system feels rigged, piracy becomes its own form of protest.
The resurgence of piracy shows a failure of trust. Media corporations spent years conditioning audiences to believe that streaming was the ethical, sustainable alternative to piracy, only to replicate the same exploitative practices that pushed people toward illegal downloads in the first place. The difference now is that consumers are more aware than ever of how little their subscriptions actually support creators, making piracy feel less like theft and more like bypassing a broken system.
The industry's response so far only accelerates the problem. If corporations refuse to adapt, history will repeat itself. The golden age of streaming was built on the illusion of consumer-friendly access. Now, as that illusion shatters, piracy is poised to reclaim its throne – not because people want to steal, necessarily, but because the industry has left them with no choice.