My guess is because they did all the pirating for you so you didn't have to worry about dealing with the technical hurdles of doing so.
If a service like this came around that allowed me to pay with Monero and did not require any personally identifiable information, I would totally fucking use it.
The entire system exists for the benefit of business, not customers.
Just look at what happens with accused theft in a store. You get accused of theft? Cops are there in no time, take you to the ground, throw you in the back of the cop car. only after they've gotten the humiliation and brutalization in might someone come and take your proof that you didnt steal anything.
You accuse the store of stealing from you? Due to not following their own policy on returns, or overcharging and an item and not fixing it Police won't even show. just tell you its a civil matter and to suck it up.
My guess is It's probably cheaper and has much greater variety. You can watch anything from any streaming service through one single interface at the price of one service.
because IPTV is like $6 per month and has every single channel known to earth.... it's a tiny fraction compared to any cable especially if you watch sports (the only real reason to pay for cable anyway)
The pirates provide a better service with more content for cheaper than the legal options; and pirating yourself takes effort as well as cost (hardware, trackers, usenet, etc).
Some people are happy to just pay for decent service; others like to learn about the process, then setup and run their own servers.
I dont subscribe to any streaming service (except the occasional free prime trial, to be full disclosure), not even the one in the news story... but I can still answer your question..
Because I want to pay a single service to watch everything. Like Netflix used to be. Watch everything I want, for one monthly price that was reasonable.
But its not like that anymore. Every company looked at how well Netflix used to do, went "Fuck them! I want all that money for my self!" and took their content off Netflix, and made their own streaming services.
Now if you want to consume any media, You have to subscribe to 50 different subscription services, for hundreds of dollars a month, Which is just Cable 2.0 but with worse service and options.
You pay like $5/Mo for the content of all streaming services and more instead of the $500/Mo it would cost to subscribe to each of them individually. Plus you're not taking any legal risk as a customer.
Man this one chaff's me the most. I way a paying Netflix customer like 8 years ago. I had IPv6 setup as a 6rd tunnel through HE (Hurricane Electric) because my ISP didn't offer IPv6. Netflix treated that as a VPN and blocked me as a paying customer... Even though I lived/payed from the same fucking locale. It's not like I was using a VPN to bypass a Geoblock. I was just making IPv6 available to myself. I cancelled because of that. You do not get to tell me how I access the internet at large, especially when I'm not even being shady about it.