I don't know how much sense an ad-supported service you still pay for makes, business wise.
Like...I dabble with one or two of the subscription services that have ads...When they're
free. I can't imagine paying a subscription fee--even if it was just a few bucks--to just have
content-access without the ad-elimination that such plans previously earned you. Content just usually is not that good as far as I can tell--and once again it's become divvied up between a dozen different services. Why waste your time when there are competitors with ads that will have stuff--they won't have the new hotness content, but at this point who cares?
Chances are one of the streaming services that's free and does ads has stuff on it someone wants to watch. Peacock has Law & Order. PlutoTV has CSI and Walker, Texas Ranger. Roku has House M.D and Leave it to Beaver. Retrocrush has Bubblegum Crisis. And that's just seconds of net-searching and scanning their front pages for big names that people recognize and might be attracted to (except the last which I know just from use
). It
baffles me how willing people are to pay subscriber fees for the little bits of new or exclusive content it gives you...Especially with how panned that content oftentimes is anymore.
And, worst-case, while password-sharing might be getting more difficult...Doing watch-parties with some things might work out anymore, especially as streaming shifts to scheduled content release instead of mass drops of everything, and that kind'a watch-party constrains the shelling out of money to faceless corporate entities to one household (This is the method yours truly harnessed to watch The Mandalorian...Though it may actually have ended up costing me more in beer and other party-favors, so, in hindsight...
)
Or, sideways-case, someone just bites the VPN subscription bullet and sails the seas for whatever their heart's desire.
But that requires technical know-how so...Steep buy-in.