Remember when Hollywood thought it had won the piracy wars? Remember when Reed Hastings declared that Netflix was the cure for piracy, not the symptom? Well, congratulations everyone—we've come full circle.

According to The Verge, streaming piracy is experiencing a full-blown renaissance, with consumers turning to rogue streaming boxes at rates we haven't seen since the early 2010s. And honestly? The industry has no one to blame but itself.

The math isn't complicated. In 2019, you could get Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime for about $30 a month total. Now? A full suite of streaming services—Netflix, Disney+, Max, Paramount+, Peacock, Apple TV+, Hulu—will run you well over $100 monthly. That's more than cable ever cost, with the added annoyance of having to navigate seven different apps to find anything.

So consumers are doing what consumers always do when pushed too far: they're finding alternatives. Rogue streaming boxes—devices that aggregate pirated content from various sources into a single interface—are selling briskly. They're getting more sophisticated, more reliable, and frankly, easier to use than legitimate services.

This should terrify the industry, because we've seen this movie before. Literally. The music industry spent the 2000s suing teenagers and grandmothers for downloading Metallica songs, right up until Spotify arrived and made piracy more inconvenient than paying $10 a month. The solution wasn't enforcement—it was convenience and value.

But streaming services learned exactly the wrong lesson from cable's collapse. Instead of offering consumers a better deal, they've recreated cable's worst aspects: rising prices, content fragmentation, and the sneaking suspicion that you're being taken for a ride.