Subtitles are crucial for me, since I'm deaf.......
Myself I barely download anything but games. I think we've been to the movie (or rented a movie) more often than I even downloaded movies... Besides, my point is: Pirates often don't experience the downsides of anti-piracy measures, more often the legit customers do.
In my P2P scene I've heard a lot of whiners about the Steam service, mainly those with negative experiences. For example, with Steam all your games are on one account (unless you create multiple accounts...) so if your account gets banned because of a failed payment through PayPal, you've lost your games (which for some can get into the hundreds of games!). Which again is a point for a subscription-based model.
The main issue with moving to a subscription-based model is that several major publishers will insist on their own platform so they can save money and that is exactly the reason why it is doomed to fail: It needs a neutral (or established) publisher behind it, like Valve/Steam currently does, with a major list of games.
An advantage of such a subscription-based model is that the customers don't have to choose, you just need to convince them to give your game a chance if your customer has the 'new and hot stuff' subscription. Instead of having to pick between (for example) BattleField and Call of Duty you can just play both. My main concern is the monthly fee though: €60 for just a game or two a month is definitely not gonna cut it, it'll have to start with a big library of games and a reasonably fee. For example, look at what Steam currently has. They even have a game publisher catalog and during major sales they even had a package where you could buy all games from publisher X for a strongly reduced price. Just like their own
Valve Complete Pack (I actually purchased the Unreal complete pack for €15 or so last major sale even though I already owned UT3...).
The only issue with a subscription-based platform is: Download caps. Australia, Belgium, just to name a couple countries with download caps. There will still be a need for retail purchases and such. I think that for a console it'd be already a lot more easy to create such a platform....
I wonder whether Valve can be pushed to try to persuade publishers to join in such a subscription based platform based on Steam.