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Issue link: https://digital.macdirectory.com/i/1496181
Pirates Address the Problem, Provide a Better Option By Andy Marken Awhile back – quite a while – we spent frustrating days divorcing our cable bundle of hundreds of channels (we only watched a few, the rest were just “there.”). It wasn’t a messy divorce, just tough. We had begun moving to watching VOD - what we wanted, when we wanted, on the screen we wanted. Monthly subscriptions with Netflix, Disney +, Amazon Prime, Apple TV+ (daughter) and on again/off again relationships with Hulu, HBO Max, Paramount +. Then there were casual relationships with free with ads services – Tubi, FreeVee (formerly IMDbTV). We’re not proud, free is free and the ads weren’t that bad. The problem was the subscription costs seemed more frequent than our old Pay TV bill – probably not, but… we moved most of the subscriptions to their lower-cost, ad-supported services and that solved the budget issue. We were still faced with an obstacle that reminded us of Freddy Fender’s song – Wasted Days and Wasted Nights. Finding just the right movie/show was/is a freakin’ hassle! It shouldn’t be this hard … but it is. Of course, there’s a solution studied – and supported – by “academics” from the Universities of North Carolina and Delaware that came to the conclusion that watching pirated movies/shows in many ways is not as bad as one is led to believe; and in many ways, is a good thing perhaps overall. Their conclusion was that folks who watch pirated content spent more money on high-speed internet, broadband, access to access the streaming video and that’s a good thing for the ecosystem … right?