Disney is banking on a password crackdown and spate of sequels as it pushes to make its streaming business profitable.
The company, which is under pressure as audiences move away from traditional pay-TV and cinema, said it was on track to meet its goals after new subscribers and price rises helped to narrow losses in its streaming business.
There is a lot of selection bias here on lemmy. The majority of us are technical enough to either know where to find free streaming sites or torrent.
The large majority of customers aren’t.
It’s why these crackdowns work. They’ve done the math. They know they’ll make more money then they’ll lose.
It’s also that they basically raised a generation of users who never had to pirate. Truth is 20 years ago there was literally no alternative to pirating. So you either figured it out or you’d have to drive to the store.
Nowadays, most consumers have gotten complacent, which is understandable given how good the legal alternatives were at one point.
However, while the initial steps might be a bit more difficult nowadays (I strongly advise against torrenting without a paid VPN), getting to a convenient setup is much easier nowadays. The *arrs, jellyfin, Kodi, docker, Android devices connected to a big screen etc. enable anyone willing to spend the time to create a setup that can rival commercial offerings.
Just to emphasize, I don’t condone piracy here, but the direction the industry is going is unsurprisingly off-putting.
Even with the arrs, jellyfin, et al, it’s still not a turn-key solution. Fmovies and the like are more “user friendly” as they don’t require any special software outside of knowing the URL.
Unfortunately, sharing those urls are often against website rules and you sort of have to learn them as you explore piracy in general.