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| We use our phones, computers, and TVs to browse the Internet. But how much is good? |
If you have a large screen TV and an Internet connection to a computer like we do you may have experimented with watching movies online. This can be a great alternative to packing the family up and going to the local theater. When money is tight we cook up some "movie food", connect the TV to Netflix, turn the lights down, and watch a great movie in our home theater.
But I have a secret guilty pleasure too. I sometimes watch movies for free on the Internet. Maybe this is illegal. I don't know where that fits in to the greater scheme of things.
I know there are public domain movies that anyone can watch for free. One place I sometimes visit is the Internet Archive's free movies page. There are some real strange movies in the archive.
I also sometimes watch movies for free on YouTube. People upload a lot of old movies to YouTube, sometimes in pretty good quality. I don't know if that is legal but they stay on YouTube for years and hundreds of thousands of people watch them. So I guess it's okay for me to watch them too.
Watching free movies online saves me a lot of money. I don't buy DvDs any more or go to the theater as much as I used to. But I feel guilty about this because I know that the film industry has been complaining about online movie watching for years.
On the one hand they are making a lot of money off their big movies. On the other hand I don't want to lose those older movies that I still watch. If the film companies take down those YouTube uploads I may never be able to see the movies again.
There are cheap online rental options. We do watch Netflix but even their library doesn't have every movie I would like to see. And you can rent a lot of movies on YouTube but the rental fees are really expensive.
The Internet has changed the way we entertain ourselves. We don't go out as much as we used to and when we do go out we spend as little money as possible because we feel like we are spending too much for a full-priced theater ticket.
Maybe the answer is to find other forms of entertainment. There are a lot of free movies to watch that people upload. These are independent films and some of them are pretty good. But it's not the same as watching a big budget movie on the wide screen.
I don't have the solution. I just wanted to get that off my chest. Thanks for reading it.
