Why are you presenting a straw man and making people seem entitled based on that straw man? That's not at all the issue and has never been. In the channel subscription days, people wanted to be able to select certain channels, like let's say Discovery Channel and History Channel, without having to pay $X base + $Y for the package that has both of those channels. In that case, you're also paying for channels you'll never watch, whereas you want to pay for select channels only. But cable companies never offered that option because they're using bundles to subsidize less popular channels.

Now we're back to the same issue. Previously, Netflix and maybe Hulu were the options. Still sorta bundling, but at least if you like X show and Y show, they might both be on Netflix and you can stay in one subscription. Now with every company making their own subscription, and forcing shows to be exclusive, you're having to subscribe to multiple services just to watch X and Y shows. Same problem as before.

Don't make it seem like people are entitled just because they want simplicity and choice.

It's fine to want those things, but I think the "entitlement" idea comes from people who believe it is okay to have those things without paying for them.

It is analogous (or maybe identical) to stealing something you don't need because you think the price is too high. The appropriate response is not to steal it and also not to buy it.

The entitlement idea comes from the fact that bundling undermines market mechanisms and is sometimes illegal. Consumers are not entitled to free products, but nor are vendors entitled to unlimited discretion in the way they sell their products. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce)

I'd be happy to hear a legal argument about this type of bundling, but the issue I was talking about was what to do when you're faced with a bundle you don't want. I don't think you should steal (or "steal" if you prefer) unless it's a crucial need, like food or shelter.

I think there is a world of difference between stealing a bicycle and making a copy of it without paying for the design. The same holds true in content. Taking a blu ray off the shelf is theft, downloading the movie via torrent is software piracy.

Personally I have 4 streaming subscriptions but I watch none of them, I pirate it all anyways. Nobody is at a great loss because I didn't walk over to my TV to watch Netflix in 4k. Netflix is actually saving money by having me torrent it to watch in 4k on my PC. There are extremely large groups of people that feel "entitled" to a usable product in this sense, whether it be on the go watching, quality on their devices, the rampant "bundling" issues getting worse with fragmentation, or other reasons.

People don't feel entitled to content for free it's just becoming harder to pay for it via streaming the same as it was after a while on cable. Either way people aren't stealing content, at worst a fraction of the people copying it aren't paying when they would have otherwise.

This is genuinely a great comment. I'd never thought about this issue in this way before, and I don't think most other people have either. It seems to be commonly accepted that streaming services are a move in the direction of pay-for-what-you-what anti-fragmentation.

As you've pointed out, it's just a different form of fragmentation. Streaming services aren't like channels that you can pick and choose from (they're much bigger and more expensive than individual channels), they're effectively "packages" that include a couple channels / shows you want, and a ton you don't.

It's as if people back in the day were saying about cable packages "you can pick and choose the ones you want, it's totally up to you, there's no fragmentation!"