When it comes to the entertainment industry, the more things change the more they stay the same: Traditional TV is dying, ad revenue is raking in pennies, and streaming isn’t profitable. Now that the lights in Hollywoodland have been turned off for the first time in 60 years in light of the SAG-AFTRA strikes and production has come to a grinding halt, streaming services may not only become our only source of entertainment for the near future, but also the only source of income for production companies. These developments could also trigger policy changes in the landscape, including the pricing of services and regulations on how we consume entertainment on these platforms.

The password-sharing crackdown has already begun: Netflix has been taking steady steps towards crushing the password-sharing era, making an about turn from its earlier days of saying that “Love is sharing a password” towards limiting account usage to a single household. And while many streaming companies have been tinkering with their business models in the face of competition — many hiking their prices significantly, with some packages seeing 20-27% increases — only Netflix has come after account sharing so aggressively.

What’s been leading to this shift? Netflix’s seemingly unstoppable success — up until last year, when they saw a decline in subscribers for the first time in a decade — caught the attention of several media conglomerates who were suddenly dissatisfied with licensing their content to the streaming service, seeing potential revenue streams in creating their own platforms. Netflix’s drop in subscribers, now that licensed shows were being pulled from its platform and paying customers had to decide which services to subscribe to, are starting to push forward major changes in the company’s policies.

Instead of being able to find all your favorite movies and shows on a single platform, you now have to subscribe to Netflix, Disney+, Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video. If you use a VPN, you can watch popular media that you would’ve otherwise missed on Hulu, Max (formerly HBO Max), and Paramount. If you watch anime, add Crunchyroll and Funimation to the list.

We’ve come full circle back to the days of yore: To tackle the ballooning price of monthly subscriptions, these streaming services — many of which are owned by the same companies — have come up with an ingenious, never-seen-before, innovative solution: Cable TV. Oops, we mean streaming bundles. You can subscribe to Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+ for USD 20 per month. You’ll still need to download each app separately though. Even the highest-priced bundles don’t actually exempt you from having to watch ads.

The decision to make sharing accounts that much more inconvenient has been so widely unpopular that online publications everywhere are sharing tips on how to circumvent it . Netflix has reversed course on many of its initial stances that made it alluring for subscribers, first by adding an ad-supported tier after ardently asserting that they would never resort to ads on their platform. Shedding the relatable “brands are our friends” persona they cultivated on Twitter (ehm… X), users may feel a breach of an unspoken (and parasocial) mutual loyalty. For several reasons, mainly accessibility, users may find themselves questioning the corporate ethics of piracy. It’s unclear whether streaming services are taking this into consideration when making these decisions, but the reality is that they will definitely have to face it.

That raises the question: Is piracy really even unethical? The consensus on the interwebs is… Yes, but sometimes no . There’s much to be said about media piracy and how technological advancements have shaped our understanding of the ethics of content consumption. Most of us grew up with the rise of online media, and you’ve probably seen this anti-piracy trailer playing over a thousand times ahead of films on DVDs or even VHS tapes. Ultimately, piracy is not only a debate centered on the lawful limitations on media consumption, but an inherently philosophical one.

Even the lawyer world isn’t fully against piracy: A study conducted among Harvard lawyers found that most lawyers believe that casual piracy is ethically acceptable. More than 100 lawyers were tasked with evaluating various piracy scenarios and the results were presented on a five-point scale, 1 being very unacceptable, and 5 being very acceptable. These scenarios covered downloading legally-unavailable content (uncomfortably relatable for those of us living in countries where many streaming services aren’t accessible without VPN), pirating simply to save money, accessing educational material hidden behind paywalls or found in overpriced textbooks, to downloading content for commercial purposes.

The broad consensus is that piracy is situationally ethical: “We find that digital file sharing ranks relatively high in terms of ethical acceptability among our population of lawyers — with the only notable exception being infringing copyright with a commercial purpose.” The most acceptable reasons behind piracy, according to the results, were the lack of lawful accessibility, lack of financial resources, and pirating for educational purposes.

More questions than answers: There remain many questions about the balance between prioritizing a company’s income and allowing for the accessibility of experiencing art and media. What we can say for certain is that the major changes to how subscriptions work, which have affected the compensation writers and actors receive and the convenience of streaming services have sparked a philosophically, legally, and economically complicated debate that will reshape the way we consume media in the years to come.

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