including multiple Treks

And yet they're the one that pulled Prodigy. IDK how popular that was, but if they pulled S1-3 of Discovery for "similar reasons" or whatever Trek you were planning to watch later on... that really kills the whole pay for streaming as a back catalog.

I otherwise agree - you need to make paying you easier than pirating, while actually being affordable - and.... they're not. Outside of NetFlix, everyone else has some streaming problems, UI problems, etc. You know what pretty much doesn't? Having a mp4 file. You can play that in any of a number of competing players with UI etc that are actually directly competing on the UI and performance.

I just think Netflix is kind of screwed now that they don't have the licenses from most of the media companies. They now have ever increasing costs (inflation) and yet - demand is down (end of pandemic) and people don't really like price increases even if they're even with inflation (not saying theirs is, but they can't shrinkflate) - but 2009 $7.99 is 2023 $11.36 - but that's the government CPI / inflation, that many people think is kind of skewed. Shadowstats claim it's $27.96. But for just one service, that's more than a cable bill ad-on for HBO was last I checked (the Shadowstats amount). So, assuming 2009ish was actually profitable, which it may not have been, and inflation - even if everything else stayed the same there'd need to be a noticable to LARGE price increase to break even. And everything didn't stay the same - competition, license pulls, and running their own studios / funding their own shows. And as the price goes up, people see less value, and less people are likely to join to see how it is.