After temporarily solving piracy by being more convenient than torrenting, streaming services have fragmented so badly that piracy is surging again. The industry solved this problem once and then deliberately unsolved it for profit.

Remember when Netflix was "everything, anywhere, $10/month"? People stopped pirating because streaming was easier. One app, one subscription, everything you wanted to watch. Piracy dropped dramatically because the legal option was genuinely better.

Then every media company decided they wanted their own streaming service. Disney+, HBO Max, Paramount+, Peacock, Apple TV+ - the list goes on. Each one costs $10-15 per month. Each one has exclusive content. If you want to watch everything, you're paying $100+ monthly. Suddenly, piracy looks pretty good again.

This is a perfect case study in how technology doesn't solve business problems - it just postpones them. Streaming didn't make people want to pay for content. It made paying more convenient than not paying. Once that equation flipped, so did consumer behavior.

The economics are straightforward. Media companies saw Netflix making money on their content and wanted that revenue for themselves. They pulled their catalogs and launched competing services. Rational business decision, right? Except they forgot why streaming worked in the first place: convenience.

Now we're back to the cable bundle problem, just distributed across apps instead of channels. You need multiple subscriptions to watch what you want, each with its own interface, its own billing, its own app. The user experience is terrible. Piracy is a single interface with everything.

I've watched enough tech companies optimize for short-term profit while destroying long-term value. That's what's happening here. Each streaming service is optimizing its own revenue, but collectively they're making piracy attractive again.

Is there a path forward? Maybe some kind of universal aggregator that makes legal streaming as convenient as piracy. But that requires companies to cooperate instead of compete, which seems unlikely. Or maybe we just accept that fragmentation is the new normal and piracy rates will climb accordingly.

The technology exists to make streaming work. The business incentives prevent it from working well. And consumers are responding rationally to a bad product by finding alternatives. The industry created this problem. They're the only ones who can solve it.