A Pirate's Life For Me

I had an interesting experience the other day with Amazon Prime. It could have been any of the several streaming services to which I subscribe. In addition to Amazon, we have Netflix, Disney+, Criterion Channel, Apple TV, Peacock, Hulu, HBO Max and Shudder and, who knows, probably some other ones. (Which reminds me: that’s ridiculous and I need to cancel half of them.)

I googled “stream evil dead 2013,” which is still how I try to figure out how and where to watch things. There are several websites and services that meta-search the streamers; I don’t know whether Google uses one of those or does its own, but it works as well or better. None of them are perfect.

I had never watched the remake of Sam Raimi’s horror classic—which is now referred to as the 4th film in the Evil Dead “franchise” although it’s not a continuation of anything. In other news, it’s absolutely brutal and drowning in gore, so pretty generically satisfying.

I watched the first hour during my exercise bike ride on August 31, streaming on Amazon Prime. Then, I planned to finish the rest in the morning. That was September 1. When I went to resume my movie, it was no longer available on Prime—I could rent it for $4, to watch the last 30 minutes, or buy it.

It was playing on one of the ad-supported streaming services—Pluto TV, I think—but in order to jump forward to an hour into the movie I would have had to first watch all of the ad breaks from the first hour. I declined to do that.

So I torrented the movie. I never feel less than justified doing this. The mysterious lack of availability of the thing you want to watch is a frequent problem, and I don’t owe these corporations my obedience to whichever business model they use or licensing agreements they’ve made. I am a huge movie consumer; I own more than a thousand disks and, obviously, my streaming availability is out of control. I don’t know if I’ve ever felt so justified torrenting as this time.

Streaming is convenient, often, but it remains particularly unfriendly to its paid customers for this kind of bullshit.