While I use the streaming services and like them and appreciate how much they’ve improved so far, calling it a better product is still a bit premature. They still have a long way to go.
Cost
Pirating: Free
Streaming: Not bad individually, but several services add up, some shows or movies charge per watch. ^1
Search
Pirating: Basic search field, as simple as Google
Streaming: Login to each of a half-dozen different services and then awkwardly navigate your way through each one’s clumsy user-hostile UI.
Quality
Pirating: Typically excellent; usually has subtitles available.
Streaming: A bit of a crapshoot, though gradually improving. Still has problems with buffering, artifacting, audio/video/subtitle streams getting out of sync, and ads.
Reliability
Pirating: Once you have a file, you can consume it anytime and easily pause/bookmark and pickup where you left off, minutes, days, or years later.
Streaming: Content that you find today may no longer be available tomorrow. Internet issues may interrupt your consumption. App upgrades may break the system and prevent it from working. Resuming from pause is like a new feature that mostly works but not always, and bookmarking and returning to that point isn’t an option yet.
Consumability
Pirating: You can consume it whenever you like on whatever you like, using the player of your choice configured as you prefer.
Streaming: You’re limited to consuming it only while you’re online, on limited devices, using their limited and unconfigurable proprietary app.
Discoverability
Pirating: Find out what you want elsewhere.
Streaming: Browse and recommendations features introduce you to things you might never have known to look for.
^1) We used to think we would prefer to only pay for what we want instead of having to pay for a bundle with hundreds of cable channels that we don’t watch. Now that there are many streaming services each with a different set of content, and some with per-episode rental fees, we’re realizing that all those fees add up and we might have been wrong about that.
Despite all those relative negatives of the streaming services, they are pretty good. They do radically decrease the demand for piracy. And their browse and recommendations features are a win. (Someday they may even be configurable and easier to use!)
