I find the arguments about pirating interesting; they often go into arguments about "intellectual property", but what we're really talking about here are different <i>publishing methods</i>. BitTorrent is one fairly effective publisher that does offer content for free, but it does require a consumer to take on some costs: risk of going to a sketchy site and risk to their computer (viruses). If a streaming service is good enough and cheap enough, it can offer enough value to a consumer that the consumer will choose the streaming service over BitTorrent.<p>Considering that this is going to require streaming services to really reduce the cost to the consumer, how can the streaming services have a sustainable business model over the long term to support themselves? The subscription model is one way, but the gaming industry may be ahead here: charge for each individual item, but make it really cheap. For example, a consumer might scoff at paying $3 per episode of GoT, but $1 or $.50 might be pretty nice... add that up for a season, and your streaming service has made almost as much as a subscription would have made. Of course, this requires streaming services to continue to offer new, good content to continue to entice consumers, which they might not like having to do.