Max is taking 4K away from its legacy ad-free subscribers

It's not that baffling. For a time, they were trying to grow their subscriber base and luring them in with low prices. Now that they have their subscriber base, they want to get back to the revenue they were getting before. Realistically, entertainment companies weren't going to accept lower revenue than they previously had for their product. As the industry transitions from physical media and cable TV to streaming, they needed to get users over the hump of signing up.

It isn't harder to pay than to pirate. It's just getting more expensive. Max's move to charge $4 extra for 4K doesn't make it harder to pay. You say that people will pay for media if it's easy and a good experience. C'mon, Max isn't changing the ease or experience. They're just changing the price.

We got used to paying less for entertainment and now we're all annoyed that they're trying to get us back to paying what we used to pay 20 years ago.

I'm not suggesting that cost isn't an important factor. It is. But an argument many people made was "I'd pay for it if they'd just make it available." Turns out, we don't like the price. Tons of people with cable used to pay $15/mo for HBO. Max has more content and is more convenient than what HBO offered 15-20 years ago.

It's really not baffling and they aren't making it harder. They want more money and we don't want to pay as much. I'm not saying that it doesn't make the price hikes garbage. It's just not baffling: they want to get back the revenue they're losing in declining physical media sales and declining cable TV subscription rates.

I had a 30" sony wega from 2001. I didn't care about 4k. It finally died and now I have a 65" sony Xsomething. Now I care about 4k.

On a good TV, 4k really is impressive.

Y'all would be shocked if you knew how many new and upcoming blockbuster movies are mastered at 2K even though you can buy them in 4K or watch them in IMAX.

The only TV I use is a 32'' Vizio from about ten years ago. I guess I'm just not the target audience.

Netflix used to have a rich selection of content because content creators licensed it to Netflix without realizing how streaming was going to eat into physical media sales.

$15 Netflix wasn't going to replace a $75 cable TV package, $30 for a couple premium channels, and a $10-15/week Blockbuster habit (around $150/mo) over the long term. Once studios realized that licensing their content to Netflix was cannibalizing their revenue from other sources, they weren't going to decide they didn't actually want revenue.

$150/mo buys you way better entertainment today than it used to. If you remember the 90s, you should remember the absolute dearth of content to the point that you'd end up watching infomercials - we'd watch commercials as entertainment because there was nothing better. Yea, the current situation definitely isn't perfect and it sucks any time companies are trying to grab more of your cash. I mean, $73.50 buys you Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Max, Paramount+ and Showtime all without ads and with way more and better content than a cable package offered in the 90s or 2000s. Plus, it's easy enough to sign up for one, watch a bunch of its content for a month and then jump to another service (paying for only one or two at a time).

It was unrealistic to believe that we'd have one extremely cheap service that everyone would license their content to over the long run.

For those born in the late 90s, you wouldn't remember the absolute garbage that was entertainment before the mid/late 2000s. It isn't perfect today, but there's so much to watch at your fingertips in a way that there just wasn't back then. If it was 11pm, there was just nothing on TV and if you didn't have a DVD you were just out of luck.

Being realistic, the copyright holders would have "defeated themselves" if they continued licensing content at low rates when they realized that streaming was cannibalizing other revenue streams. What we're experiencing sucks - it was better when Netflix had a richer selection and things were cheaper. No one likes companies getting more money out of them - especially when we had better years before they realized we were all moving to streaming. However, it was bound to happen. The alternative would be them seeing their revenue drop to an incredibly low level.