It was for a long time, the thing that "killed" it was Netflix being very good for a brief moment, while at the same time many pirate sites got shut down and content creators went after people who didn't use a VPN to torrent.

Many VPN services are one click to install and $2-5 a month, and the pirate sites are very resilient at this point, so anti-consumer practices could easily drive a resurgence in this form of mass market consumption.

It sure is me-market viable though.

You can keep a copy of every track of music on spotify on a single 4U server, 20 drives or so. That's ~100TB, assuming 5MB per track. Every movie or tv show episode is another couple of PB in 720p or so.

Extrapolate the last 20 years of HDD capacity growth (around 300x), and assume that will continue, every single piece of media will fit on a single drive.

I know those assumptions aren't a given, but it sure feels like we're heading towards a world where you can just have a local copy of everything always.

Plex has things it lets you legally stream for free. Whats in your personal library is a whole other story.