You would think so. You would properly say "em pirates won't pay for content, no way they would pay for online services". The existence of bittorrent would seem to indicate this.
Let me introduce you to hotfile.com, megashare.com, duckload.com, fileserve.com, filesonic.com.
All of these people makes money of pirates by charging for downloads. They can do this because it is convenient and easy for people to download through them.
Erm... at least once every few months I need to transfer multiple GB of data between computers, and it's not pirated media. Photos/video from my camera, music that I actually own, etc..
I know my way around computers, so I can set up the FTP server on my wife's MacBook Air (for example), but it might be trickier for a "regular" person to do it.
Well, on second thought -- thumb drives are pretty big and pretty cheap nowadays. It'd be tough to sell two USB devices for sharing data when someone can just buy, say, a 32 GB thumb drive for $30.
You reckon? I think there is quite a large market of people who are 1) totally price insensitive up to say $100/yr and 2) could not give a shit about copyright, they just want to be able to share things they like with friends.
PS. Can I ask you to stop using country-specific slang like "a wee bit" on HN?
A business model based around people who have difficulty agreeing to pay more than eight bucks a month for something is probably not a hugely profitable proposition. And as Patrick said, people who "could not give a shit about copyright" by definition will not have any qualms about flat-out stealing your product if they get half a chance. Such a high-risk market tends to drive prices up, which will just drive copyright infringers to try harder to steal your product.
And it's not really relevant, but since it's probably the part you're getting downvoted for, I figure I should explain: Your objection to "a wee bit" seems really weird. It's not particularly region-specific anymore — my mom from Mississippi uses it — and even if it were, it's not hard to grasp the meaning. I can't think of any good reason to avoid it.
Netflix proved this idea incorrect. People pay for movie access they could still torrent because of the access and peace of mind.
As for the parent above, if an easy USB-USB device that was easy and existed, I'd buy it. It isn't just movies anymore, it is also about giving grandma the HD video of her granddaughter's dance recital as easy and quickly as possible.
As far as I know, Netflix didn't primarily target serial copyright infringers or the destitute. Most of the Netflix early adopters I knew were reasonably well off middle-class film aficionados, and movie piracy over the Internet was not very common in those days (as the majority of the country was still on 56-kilobaud modems and even pirating music was a time-consuming task).
There seems to be a wee bit of an adverse selection problem with the people who are likely to be customers for this.