I'm sure many others have written about this, but I still want to share some of my thoughts. Streaming services are killing themselves, and consumers are switching back to piracy.
My family always been quite pirate-y. When I was younger, my dad would go to a large market (previously called the "Black Market" but now called the "Bazaar" for obvious reasons) and buy blank DVDs and a DVD burner device. He'd go on Spotnet, download some movies, and burn them onto DVDs. If he was feeling like it, he would print out the movie cover on paper and stick it inside a blank DVD case. Or he'd just write the name of the movie onto the DVD itself.
We'd do similar stuff with games, burning them on CDs or downloading them onto flash cards like the R4 Cartridge for the DS.
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Slowly but surely we kind of stopped doing piracy, though. Mainly because it started becoming more convenient to buy a relatively cheap subscription for Netflix and get games through Steam than to download everything by hand.
And this was fine for a while; Netflix had some good content, and our family could leech off of my brother's subscription. We'd always have cable TV as well.
But then more and more streaming services started showing up, and movies and shows started getting scattered between different services. You'd have situations where, for example, you want to watch Shrek, but Netflix only has part one, and it's region locked to the United States, and where the hell are the other Shrek movies? Who knows?
This really started to become a problem; we'd be subscribed to Netflix, Disney+, Prime Video, HBO Max, and so on. and they'd start upping their prices as well!
I think the final nail in the coffin for me (and probably many others) was Netflix banning password sharing. If I want to watch something on Netflix now, I have to send my brother the code, and he has to be available to send the code back to me so I can fill it in to enjoy Netflix for a whole two weeks before I have to do it all over again.
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(Pretty funny tweet from back in 2017)
When streaming services do stuff like this, they can't act surprised when their consumers cancel their subscriptions and go back to piracy.
"Raised in the land of The Pirate Bay, the Swedish torrent index, I feel, for the first time in a decade, a nostalgia for the high seas of digital piracy. And I am not alone." - Gabriel V. Rindborg
Personally, I've never really stopped pirating; it's not in my nature. But I've certainly started doing it way more now. I found good torrent sites, VPN, and BitTorrent. It's not just that I can get the media for free like this, but oftentimes the quality is better than streaming as well. And many streaming services mess up the aspect ratio on ultrawide screens, which causes "letterboxing." On VLC you can crop the screen when that happens...
Besides torrenting, I've also started using IPTV more often. My dad has been using it for years, but I was never really convinced it actually offered good quality content until recently. IPTV takes away the inconvenience of downloading content by hand and simply offers everything by stream. And often times it's very up-to-date as well!
Now there is something to say about how piracy is bad. You ARE basically stealing and taking away revenue from creators and actors. And as an artist, theft of creative media is a pretty sensitive subject. But then again, should you really lay the blame of a potential media collapse in the hands of the consumer? It's large companies like Netflix and Disney that are making our lives harder, nearly forcing us away from them. Something something capitalism and enshittification 
So yeah, you really shouldn't start pirating content... I don't. It's really bad! Don't do it! You wouldn't steal a car, right?
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