Streaming: A Love Story, a Betrayal
In 2017, Netflix tweeted: “Love is sharing a password.”
The post went viral, presenting Netflix as friendly and community-driven. They understood that people were sharing accounts with the people they loved most, with their families, partners, and closest friends. Outwardly they appeared to embrace that as the hallmark of a successful product. Sharing and watching content together is love.
Behind the scenes, executives already viewed sharing as lost revenue.
A few years later, Netflix betrayed their own customers. The crackdown started in 2023 and users who logged in from a different address now had to prove the account holder lived there. Students away at college got locked out of their parents accounts. Adults traveling couldn’t access their own accounts.
Once Netflix did it, Disney+ followed suit, then so did HBO Max. The entire industry turned against password sharing overnight. This betrayal broke something fundamental in the producer-consumer contract. No, not the terms of conditions, I mean the real implicit contract, the one customers felt emotionally when they first subscribed.
By claiming 100 million households were stealing from the company through password sharing, Netflix literally turned their customers from “lovers” to “criminals.”
Now the comment section under that same tweet stands as a monument to false promise, like a key’d car after a bad breakup.
The implicit contract was simple: streaming companies preserve unlimited quality content by giving us access for a low fee, we make those companies rich for the convenience.
People care about the art they consume. Art is how we preserve culture, it’s important to society. That’s why multimillion dollar Rothko paintings hang in publicly funded museums. Quality art is valuable to us. That’s why it costs so much to create it.
HBO Max invested millions in Westworld. $10 million per episode, four seasons, Emmy wins, prestige television. Then it was deleted. The entire archive of one of HBO Max’s flagship shows, the company’s follow-up to its Game of Thrones success that helped establish it as the platform for valuable high-quality content, is now gone like it never existed. This is not because viewers didn’t want it, but because Warner Bros didn’t want to pay residuals.
Warner Bros decided it was better to let no one see their masterpiece than to continue to pay the actors, writers, and staff who made it possible in the first place.
In February 2025, HBO Max removed 80 shows in one day, including Cartoon Network classics. Families who wanted to share old favorites with their kids found them gone. Once again, once action is taken, the rest follow suit. Like HBO, Disney deleted entire archives without explanation. Series that families had been watching together simply disappeared mid season.
This new strategy has a name: Content Impairment. Destroy art to save money. The result? Consumers no longer trust streaming platforms to preserve the culture they promised to deliver, so now customers are breaking up.
The Bad Boy Rebound
Visits to piracy sites had actually hit historic lows in 2020 at just 130 Billion. In 2024 that number had exploded to 216.3 Billion visits, a 66% increase and more than the populations of every country on earth combined. This mass migration was mostly spearheaded by Gen-Z, 76% of which admit to pirating content even while paying for subscriptions.
They’re not leaving streaming services completely, they’re taking advantage of both systems, legal and illegal, to get what they want. Like a teenage girl trying to impress the wrong guy, young people everywhere are rebelling.
50% of Gen-Z and Millennials have already canceled one streaming service in the last 6 months. Popular platforms betrayed their customers, and their customers are responding. The industry is expected to lose $113 Billion to piracy by 2027. The United States alone loses between $29B and $71B annually to digital piracy. That’s the equivalent of an entire state's economy vanishing into a void.
Comments indicate that what most people love about piracy is that the content doesn’t go anywhere. They appreciate having a library of content on the internet, a safe place where art is preserved and able to live permanently in one place.
The problem is…because it’s illegal, that promise of digital permanence is just as much of a lie. We’ve already seen how this movie ends.
Streevo: More than a Shoulder to Cry On
If Piracy is the rebellious bad-boy taking advantage of a broken heart, Streevo is the nerd studying quietly and going to the gym.
That permanent digital library preserving art? That’s our core offering. Our patented technology allows you to build your own locally preserved content library using the services you’re already subscribed to. We work with licensed content, not against it.
Piracy sites today may have sleek, minimalist UIs, but our patents and our hardware build make us defensible and irreplaceable. Besides, with the right funding and development, we can look sexy too.
At Streevo, we’re just getting started. When the public is ready for us, we will be too. Because we know we’re the only ones who can really make their dreams come true.
