There's a bunch of analytics tracking and cloud integration in Plex. They are interested in what users are watching, which is concerning.

https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/7bim8n/plex_analytics_analyticsplextv/

Switch to Jellyfin or another open source server.

The solution is not one many people want to hear: reduce production costs.

Content is expensive to make mostly because the people making it keep demanding more pay for less work. While it is understandable that people want this, this is not sustainable for an economy. When the economy fails, prices go up. Demanding employers pay more will immediately raise prices the same amount the wages increase, effectively leaving employees who got a raise in the same place they were before but eith bigger numbers, and severely damaging the economy at the same time.

A show can be produced on a shoestring budget. Yes, the quality is lower than a million dollar movie. However, that doesn't make the show bad. The X-Files was a great show produced on a tiny budget in its first season with phenomenal writing. Yet in the final season, it had a bigger budget but the writing was awful. In fact, most shows these days have awful writing. And the writers of these shows with bad writing are demanding more pay, yet their writing quality does not indicate they deserve increased pay. Certainly if a writer is outputting great work that should be rewarded, but increasing the pay of writers outputting garbage writing can only lead to more expensive garbage.

Then you get to costume, props, and visual effects. First, the damaged economy from before appears in costumes and props material cost. This is unavoidable. In many cases, I would say that good practical effects are cheaper and more convincing than cheap CG. My solution is simply go back to the way films were made in the 70s and 80s. Ditch the bad CG and go for more practical effects.

Last we have actors. Actors do not need more than 100k per film, and thats for the huge actors. Simple to understand, really. So many actors live opulent, overpaid lives, when they could live more simply, more normally, off of much less.

The above aalso applies to directors, producers, streaming company executives and CEOs.

Fix all these and your show production costs plummet. Now you can offer your streaming service at the same cost or cheaper than before while having a larger profit margin.

i just want to know how people think this could work in a way that balances out

They don't. They just think content is generated in a vacuum and it's their right to consume it in whatever way they see fit.

Netflix caused movie pracy to nearly case, because was affordable and convenient. People preferred to pay than hunt and download movies.

Once other studios started creating their streaming services, applying exclusivity for shows, jacking prices for their content (encouraging ads) all went to hell. They successfully managed to ruin the experience, and make it as shitty as cable.

The thing about intellectual property is that you create it once and then you can copy it infinitely and generate profit. The studios want to maximize the profit, it isn't (as you are suggesting) how hard was to create content, but it is how much people are ok paying. It always was.

They can do this, because there's monopoly due to crippled antitrust laws in the last 50 years.

Piracy is a natural response to this, but they are using copyright (which was originally meant for different reason).

Antitrust laws as well as laws like copyright, DMCA etc needs to be fixed.