I'm about as law-abiding a person as you'll probably ever find when it comes to copyright vs. piracy. I don't mind paying a fair price for creative work I enjoy and I expect that obtaining it through authorised sources will ultimately support the people doing that work and the creation of more work that I enjoy in the future. And I find it absolutely infuriating that the experience of paying customers has once again degraded to be so much worse than what the pirates are presumably enjoying.

Content doesn't stick around reliably. I glanced at my "watch it again" list on one of the several streaming services we subscribe to in my household the other day and well over half of the items on it were now tagged as paid options. Those movies and shows were no longer available on the service where I had watched them sometimes only weeks ago.

Content isn't even added reliably to begin with. I've seen the first and third movies in a franchise on the same service but not the second. I've seen TV shows that are part of the same world and occasionally do crossover episodes and a streaming service that has one show but not the other so you can't watch the whole story.

Then there are the ever-increasing ads and the "premium" tiers being introduced to remove them again as if they're doing us a favour. Spare me. And then tell me why I should sign up to the "premium" service when there's no guarantee about the content it will make available or the level of advertising it will also include in the future.

And finally there is a personal irritation that won't affect many people but really upsets me. Some services still insist on crippling the quality of the streams away from big name platforms like Windows and the main phone apps. Some people suggest this is because of DRM junk in their contracts with rightsholders but that doesn't really hold up when other streaming services seem to have no such problem or when the movie/show was an "original" from the same service. It's particularly irritating that the current worst offender seems to be Amazon Prime Video crippling playback on Linux. You know - the same Amazon who have made obscene amounts of money via AWS largely thanks to Linux.

One possible way to overcome these problems is to go "old school" and buy favourite movies and shows on disc. I still do that plenty. There are some that I do expect to rewatch later or lend out to a friend occasionally. But also discs work fairly reliably as long as you don't get caught by region locking or other similar junk - and usually if you do it's obvious immediately and you can send the product back as defective. (Amazon are once again a recurring villain in this story having sent several products that were in fact for different regions than the one ordered and in some cases literally had "Not licensed for distribution outside {somewhere I don't live}" printed on the box.) But this strategy is becoming harder with many distributors only making discs available for a relatively short time after a movie/show is released or only making them available in some countries/regions and not others. And again sometimes they change their mind between a movie and its sequel or from one season to the next of a TV show.

It's really hard to have much sympathy for an industry that offers such a bad experience to its paying customers. Particularly so when a lot of these problems are completely avoidable and avoiding them is realistically in the best interests of the big players when there is an ever-present "free" alternative that obviously a lot of people will be willing to choose even if some of us still prefer not to.