Piratebay may not work as smoothly.

Content doesn’t appear effortlessly on all your devices. Some subtitle languages may be missing. Less mainstream content may be of low quality, slow to download or missing too. Plus, you have to plan ahead or wait for the download to finish. At this point I would double check the streaming plan price (as long as there is an ad free tier).

I haven’t used pirate bay for a long time as I can simply buy or rent the material I want

However start putting adverts in that and it’s changes, it’s either “don’t watch at all” or “get from pirate bay (or elsewhere)”, because the product I want isn’t available.

20 years ago I used to get tv from places like irc because it was the only way to get the material. 25 years ago I hd no choice by to wait for the vhs to come out.

It’s a service problem, not a price problem. Sadly it seems companies want to make the service bad, which means they throw the baby out with the bath water.

The core problem is that, as a amorphous class, consumers are more price sensitive than quality sensitive, and those that aren't tend to have very little price sensitivity. So the profit-optimal solution is to charge your minority of price insensitive users through the nose, and extract value from the price sensitive by enshitiffying your service.

This sucks for those of us in the middle ground (having taste but not unlimited budgets), as we get shoved into "eat shit and smile" group.

I like this summary, seems spot on.

This enshittification part looks especially interesting to me. For that you need a user base. So I guess any rules promoting fair competition would be relevant and pro consumer in this context. If the users can easily migrate to a non-enshittified provider, then all is well.

If you are watching your Linux ISOs on your self-hosted setup that uses a Roku; presumably they can still inject ads; regardless of where/how you obtained the media.