I regret convincing my parents to subscribe to Netflix instead of using Torrent or Emule.
Fuck these fucking companies that now cost more than bluerays and broadcast content with crappy quality if you don't have a platform that knows how much you're shitting yourself
I have to find the time to do it, I had seen jellyfin as a solution, but I also have to find something that acts as a server, my raspberry pi 3B+ is not powerful enough for 1080p+ streaming
If you parents have a standard TV stick or Apple TV their devices support a variety of codecs.
This means that you can "direct stream" content from Plex / Jellyfin with minimal CPU impact.
At 1080p it should at least support ~4 direct streams when it doesn't have to "transcode".
That said, even if it is weak by today's standards it's a good platform to learn the setup on. Then you can move to something else more powerful (but still cheap) once you understand it all.
At least that's how I did it, 3b+ -> Pentium J5040
I find this to be an option with Movies/TV Shows but a struggle with Music. At least once my kids were older and listening to stuff. They were constantly asking for stuff to be downloaded, my mom and wife were asking for stuff, my brother, etc. Had a subsonic server set up and just got tired of actively managing it. Spotify isn't great but it works and it saves a headache. I just wish there was better options because I don't like the Spotify app. YouTube Music is even worse, especially since it subscribes to everything on YouTube too so all my subscriptions got jacked up.
Give them a search tool as a web app (for said music server and scraper setup) and allow them to ask it for the music. When they're over their limit, have it return a temp unspec error. Dust your hands and walk away proud.
I don't have access to my music torrent site anymore due to the first one shutting down (W.CD) and then going idle on the other one for years. Don't feel like re-downloading everything either since I lost all my music in a hard drive crash. Could probably recover it from my Cowon X7 but don't know where the cable is for that anymore.
if you want DRM-free, bandcamp is the best way, but for "exploring" subscribing to spotify is the best way in terms of quantity, and it doesn't pay much less than other DRMs even if it has a monopoly, and is not from the USA or China
otherwise if you don't want to pay, youtube + soundcloud with adblock is the best solution.
or if you really have a lot of time you can make your own self-hosted pod on funkwhale: https://docs.funkwhale.audio/administrator/index.html