Well, you can navigate de UI freely and watch the first video for free without any account. What else would you need to know the platform? There’s a free trial of Nebula called YouTube. Everything in there except the exclusives. When you’re convinced they have the content you want, it’s 3€/mo so… whatever.
You can’t encrypt anything without a key. This is the key. If it wasn’t in plaintext then it would be encrypted. Then you’d need a key for that. Where do you put it?
Phone OSs have mechanisms to solve this. Desktop ones do not.