Users who have to sign up to multiple streamers to get the content they want have been facing random restrictions, a baffling mix of exclusives, and availability windows. The result is that they are going back to piracy.
After several decades of moaning and groaning, studio and music bosses realised in 2010 that they needed to offer users cheap access to easy-to-use online content sources. This competed with piracy and focused on consumer satisfaction - and it worked.
Piracy dropped massively until 2021 when piracy rates started to go up slowly again in the US and EU.
This happened at the same time as every last broadcaster, cable company, broadband provider, and tech company locked down "must-watch" content behind an ever-changing number of exclusivity silos across an ocean of sometimes rubbish services.
At first competition worked, but as the market got full and the most powerful companies started to silo content, those benefits have been lost. Now users have to search and pick between Disney+, Netflix, Starz, Max, Apple+, Acorn, Paramount+, Hulu, Peacock, Amazon Prime, and countless other services in the hopes that a service has the rights to a particular film or programme.
When you've already paid for five different services, you're not keen to sign up for another just to watch a single 90s film.
According to the European Union Intellectual Property Office, piracy hit rock bottom in 2021 - before going up again.
The EU said that current piracy levels are still nowhere near what they were five years ago, but a trend change is noticeable.
Geography is a factor. Studios sell media distribution rights by territory for set spans of time. One distributor might handle North American distribution for a particular film for ten years while another sells the same movie in Europe or Asia, but only for five years.
Some media is available in certain countries at certain times. These licensing "silos" help explain why, for a while, you could watch Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight on Netflix in the US, but not in the UK.
Film critic Travis Bruce told The Daily Beast But the industry's own fickleness is to blame, too.
"Streaming services have the power to promote or bury movies or TV series based on their goals."
It might not make sense to movie fans that Warner Bros. would rather bin the finished Batgirl than release it, even after spending $90 million on the film. But it made sense to Warner Bros. The company said the binning was part of a wider "restructuring" it hoped would help it save $2 billion.
Most people don't care about corporate restructuring. They do care about movies and TV shows - and the growing difficulty of finding some films and programmes.
Subscribers feel tired and annoyed when they can't access 'their content,' or when titles - even titles made for a streaming service - are dropped from that streaming service, or when titles jump around from one streamer to another.
Not everyone turns to piracy when a streamer suddenly drops a movie or show. While overall sales of DVDs and Blu-rays are still falling - and could take a big hit next year when Best Buy takes the last discs from its shelves - some movie distributors report a growing interest in physical media from the most keen cinephiles.
BayView Entertainment VP Sam Napolitano told The Daily Beast that people are always surprised when they are told that DVDs are still sold every day in quantity.
"The market will hit a bottom, but for quality movies, we are not there yet. The market will start to pick up again as a new generation of film lovers with spare cash will find that they can actually own a physical piece of their favourite movies."
But not every distributor bothers to release a new movie or show on DVD or Blu-ray. And some older films or programmes might be on some out-of-print DVD but aren't on the newer, higher-resolution Blu-ray format.
If a movie or show isn't on streaming or currently in print on some physical media, what's a fan to do - if not nick?