Are you suggesting a case in which it's funded by some billionaire who does not need to charge money in order to cover the cost of hosting?

This is a fair point. I doubt anybody would do this, or the monetization would be done through ads which might fall into the commercial aspect? Don't actually know, but this is already a thing and not something I was really thinking about. Relating to this actually, it would be interesting to know how much licencing fees are in comparison to server costs for the current streaming services.

I was thinking something more like a program that just pulls data from torrents directly, so no need for a central server. Yes, probably not feasible using the current system as everyone would just leech, but maybe one would have to also share things you watch or something. Yes, again, this would complicate things but I don't think that is necessarily has to. I feel like there has been a service like this (popcorn time or something), I think I used something like this aaaaages ago.

Definitely there would be technical challenges for something like this but to me it does not sound impossible. I just feel like that if something like this system would exist (if piracy were legal), it would completely nuke the cash flow for tons of companies. It would not remove all of it, some people would donate just like they do for open source projects.

At least for me personally, I am willing to pay for stuff in order for it to be legal. Should the need to pay be removed, while keeping things legal, I'd have no incentive to pay. The only incentive would be convenience, but I don't think there would be any reason for piracy to be less convenient than non-piracy; it's already more convenient for tons of use cases I'm sure.

When iTunes came along, it instantly ate up the vast majority of Limewire/Frostwire/IRC traffic for music.

Definitely true, just as happened with movies etc when Netflix and the like popped up. However, one can also argue that this was not due to convenience, but due to now there being a legal way of doing things. In reality I'm sure that everyone weighs legality and convenience (and the cost of the service) differently and makes their own decision.

Currently the convenience factor is going down due to enshittification (among other things), while price is going up. I feel like piracy is up but it's not like I can get a non-biased view from Lemmy (or reddit) and I have not actually looked into it.

It'll be interesting to see the direction in a few years.