Preaching to the choir, when I first went the internet route I was a poor college student, now that I can afford to go with the other options, well, like you're saying they aren't providing any better service than these free sites so why the hell would I? That's the big problem with a lot of these types of things. The worst is music and their DRMs. Buy a song on iTunes and I can share it with 3 devices IIRC, or I can download or rip it to my computer for free and put it wherever the hell I want to. Of course downloading is illegal and you can get in big trouble for torrents, but streaming something online is not something you can be punished for, and there's no way I know of yet for them to track simply recording things to your computer, so for now I'll take the better product. I love what Radiohead did with "In Rainbows" or at least the first part, and Louis CK did similar just charging $5+ for one of his stand up shows, both of them made a killing on it. I'm sitting here with a few collectors edition records of bands I do like, I had no problem dropping $60 for them, but I'd NEVER pay even $1 to Itunes for my favorite song when they make it that much of a pain in the ass to use.
There's a reason I always liked the original Law and Order (screw SCU) just realistic, sometimes it was sad, sometimes disappointing, but in the end it always came off as real. Still one of my favorite shows for that reason.