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For me, it's not just affordability and ease. It's quality. I'm a quality freak.
First things first, I live in Poland, and in here pretty much the only decent way of seeing a movie (that isn't playing in cinemas at the moment) is buying the blu-ray (which is pricey).
Of course, you would say: "what about the streaming services?". Well here is the simple truth: Not everything is available there and the stuff that is you have to watch via an embedded player in your browser. I will never, ever accept that.
I need to have my own player. A browser-based HTML5 or Flash player will not give you the same quality, reliability and efficiency a proper dedicated player does.
My weapon of choice is Media Player Classic Home Cinema. At first glance it may look simple. Make no mistake, though, it's a properly advanced movie watching combine. You can change pretty much every aspect of your movie watching experience and that's where quality-enhancing addons come in. Most importantly, you can change your video rendering engine (which is an option I've never seen in even the best browser players). I use MadVR. As far as I know, no other engine comes close to the quality you get from it. Also, I can use whatever codecs I want, which is nice because I want to use CoreAVC, which allow me to take advantage of the CUDA cores on my gfx card to boost the performance during movie playback, as well as set a bunch of things up to my liking in the codec config tool.
Sound is also important. There is a difference. For most people it's indistinguishable but I know it's there. I once made a short clip with a very low-frequency sound and it played great via MPC but once I uploaded it to YouTube, the sound turned into farting because of the processing that takes place after a video is uploaded (which is also the reason why I roll my eyes with disappointment whenever I see someone listening to music off YouTube).
Then, there's the matter of efficiency. When you're watching a movie on netflix, the content has to go through not only the player, but the browser as well. Today's browsers are resource hogs. They inhibit the performance of playback, which may not be noticeable if you have a fairly good PC but if you want to watch something on a low-end or old machine, you can forget about fluid playback. (btw. CoreAVC codecs paired with the Mixer Overlay rendering engine allow me to play 1080p content fluently... on my netbook. Try doing that with Netflix's player.)
Now, another argument you might have is that if I'm such a quality freak, why do I accept ripped movies? Well, let's just say I have enough experience to know which uploads are good quality and which are not. Also, there are 1:1 quality blu-ray rips out there, in which the quality is indistinguishable from the source disc even to my eyes (those are tens of gigabytes, though). Also, those releases aren't any different from how Netflix does it. It's not like every time you want to see a film on there a robotic arm pops in a blu-ray disc into the drive and starts streaming. No, those are ripped files too. Only you have to pay for them, and you don't get to keep them, and you don't get to play them how you want.
So, in essence, there just isn't a market for people like me right now. Here's your chance. Do what GoG did for gaming. Create a platform that, upon a small payment, allows you to actually download the file with the movie and keep it and play it however you want. Until something like that comes around... it's the old yo ho and a bottle of rum for me.