What Prime Sold Me

The internet has made me into someone who can’t do one thing without running a show in the background. Work, games, just sitting around—something always has to be playing or I feel like I’m wasting whatever time’s left. It’s ridiculous but that’s how it is now.

I got into Gilmore Girls hard. Seven seasons of people talking at each other, kissing, breaking up, talking some more. Perfect background noise—nothing happens and everything matters.

I decided to try Amazon Prime Video for this, actually pay for it instead of screwing around with pirate streams. Over 12,000 movies and episodes, they said. Gilmore Girls, The Walking Dead, Breaking Bad, whatever I wanted, whenever. Fifty euros a year. I signed up, installed Silverlight, and hit play.

The first nine episodes worked fine. By episode ten—’Forgiven and Forgotten’—it asked me to buy or rent it separately. I scrolled through the rest of season one. Episodes 11-15 were locked. Season two was missing random episodes. Half of season four was just gone. The whole thing was a patchwork.

And this wasn’t just Gilmore Girls. Other people in the forums had the same problem with Stargate, Gossip Girl, Supernatural, Fringe, The Vampire Diaries. Amazon had the licensing but half the content just wasn’t there, or it was, but only if you paid more. Some shows were missing entire season finales.

What got me was how they’d sold this. A subscription means access—that’s the deal. But Amazon could add, remove, or paywall whatever whenever they felt like it, even if the show was complete when I paid. It wasn’t a service. It was a system that had learned to think like a mobile game. Pay this amount, get this piece. Want the rest? Pay more.

I wasn’t going to keep throwing money at that. Not when it meant going back to the pirate sites anyway, which defeated the whole purpose. So I never found out if Rory ended up with Dean, and I’ll never know what happened with Lorelai. That’s probably worth what I saved.