AMERICAN entertainment giant Netflix descended from the heavens (aka the internet) last week to bless us all with a small library of streaming movies and TV shows.

For those of us who prefer to live our lives through fictional characters (and normal people who like to be entertained in the evenings after doing something social), the past 12 months or so have been interesting: the fight against piracy has become more serious, with the makers of the movie, Dallas Buyers Club, suing iiNet to get the names of customers who illegally downloaded the film.

Not to mention the Government’s ridiculous mandatory data retention laws, which will prove ineffective against terrorism and only mildly more effective against piracy.

At the same time, however, some of the actual causes of piracy have started to be addressed by the three main streaming services in Australia: Presto (which is owned by Foxtel, which is part owned by News Ltd, which owns the Herald Sun), Stan and Netflix.

The way people want to consume entertainment has changed completely in the past 15 years. No longer are they content to choose from the limited number of options available live to air at a specific time. People with favourite shows have worked out how to watch them at their earliest convenience, legality be damned, and not months later when free-to-air Australian TV gets around to it.

Netflix’s Ted Sarandos is aware of who is the company’s real competitor.

“The competitor that we think about all the time is piracy, that we’ve got to build a product that’s better than free.”

Sarandos also understands the biggest motivators for piracy and is trying to hit it head on. “People probably find workarounds to get access to content because the studios use the internet to create awareness and then don’t use it to generate access. In between the awareness and the access is where the piracy comes from.

“We use the internet to make people aware of our programming, but also to deliver it to them and deliver it to them at the same exact time.”

While everyone is aware of the causes of piracy, many of the shows that Australians want to watch are still tied up in long-lasting deals that prevent any of the online services from being able to stream shows the same day as they air in the US. For example, US hospital drama Grey’s Anatomy airs on Seven more than three weeks after it’s shown on US television. Fans who want to be able to interact with other fans online without being spoiled either need to find a workaround to access an American streaming site or turn to piracy.

There is no doubt that Netflix is going to change the way we watch television, especially with how successfully it’s harnessed the binge-watching model. But at launch, its library is comparatively small. That is deliberate on the part of Netflix, starting small with the content being increased every day as they get more viewer data, until the library is more than doubled after 12 months.

But until the Netflix library gets significantly bigger, there is no killer streaming service that covers enough of what everyone wants to watch, with many people happier to subscribe to all three services, which patches many of the gaps.

Meanwhile, Foxtel is also doing its best to evolve with the times. Until the Netflix library has everything we want, the Foxtel IQ3 box seems like a better prospect for the entertainment junkie with money to spend. After all, the IQ3 box gives suggestions, has a huge library of on-demand content and allows you to start shows over or reach back up to 24 hours to see something you missed, with the Platinum package offering the most content available in Australia.

Unfortunately, traditional Foxtel is not available to all homes and apartments and some might find the higher subscription costs prohibitive.

The three streaming services we have now are great, especially as their content libraries grow, and they’re going to go a long way to reduce piracy. But until they’re able to make the shows people want to watch available worldwide within a few hours of them airing in the country of origin, piracy is going to remain a huge problem for rights holders.

ALICE CLARKE IS A FREELANCE JOURNALIST

Twitter: @Alicedkc