would be a large motivator if they did

I tend to agree. It's my opinion that if the media companies would have put half the effort into developing and implementing a fairly priced and reliable (needs to be - broadband is still pretty unreliable in a lot of places) streaming media solution (sort of like pay-per-view but over a broadband connection instead) that have have with their "whack-a-mole" policy with the P2P'ers, the majority of the folks would signing up with them instead of downloading poor quality partial movies/mp3 from a P2P site (I know I would.

I have downloaded a few mp3's, but found it took too much effort on my part to get a good complete copy of what I wanted. I'd rather pay a few bucks to get it knowing that I'll be delivered a complete high quality copy in the background while I spend my time doing what I want instead of nursing downloads.

Paying for the right to view/listem to the media (pay-per-view/subscriber fee) then having to pay to transport it (bandwidth) will effectively kill streaming media for me. I'll buy the DVD locally instead.