Casper

Nothing makes you feel quite as old as trying to find somewhere to stream a TV show or Movie from your childhood only to discover that it is nowhere to be found. There are different ways to mark when the seasons start in the Northern Hemisphere but where I live you can feel the seasons click, autumn is setting in and with the first few leaves falling I wanted to take some time to reconnect with a season that I've overlooked for many years.

If you had to describe me as a season, Winter is undoubtedly my vibe, when everything is dark and dead, covered in snow and silent that is when I am at my happiest. Autumn on the other hand has been a season I have a love hate relationship with. I think part of that comes from the years of hating school and the inextricable link that the end of Summer and the beginning of Autumn has with the feeling of obligation rather than excitement. Autumn was a season I associated with oppression in a way, the end of a period of liberation that as a child felt like it lasted forever, and yet, never long enough.

The only good thing about Autumn or the only happy memories of it that I recall are those of Halloween, for the costumes, the masks, the food, the drinks, and before my social anxiety took hold of my life so firmly, a time when I actually liked parties and seeing friends. To that end I watched a few videos on youtube of people discussing their favourite Halloween and Horror movies, or simply spooky season and all that it entails. A random mention of the 1995 movie adaptation of Casper came to light and with it the memory that I as a child was obsessed with the movie. It's not hard to see why, when you consider the fact that I always felt like an outsider, struggling to connect with others, and wanting nothing more than to be liked, the parallels with the title character don't go unnoticed, that and the macabre affinity with death that ironically has always haunted me.

Trying to find somewhere to legally stream the movie however made me run a cropper, through licensing or copyright issues whatever the bullshit explanation may be, the only places I could find the movie were as purchases or as a rental through Amazon Prime Instant Video or through Apple TV, neither of which I want to use because I can't justify making a one of payment for one single movie at the same cost of the streaming services I use for unlimited access to media like Spotify for music.

I've thought about that idea a lot and the reality that piracy exists because the legal alternative is often too expensive for consumers, the fact that I pay £11.99 for Spotify to get unlimited access to music and think about the fact that when I was younger almost all of the music I consumed I got for free, usually by swapping CDs with friends and ripping them or using iTunes Bonjour service to share media libraries and listen to each others' music. In my Spotify wrapped for 2023, my total minutes listened were 48,530 that's just under 809 hours of music. To imagine what that would cost to actually buy that amount of music, if Spotify was to disappear I wouldn't fork out the equivalent in purchasing music, and there aren't many people that would. If all-you-can-eat services ever disappeared as a business model, piracy through things like torrents would go through the roof.

I didn't find anywhere to watch Casper in the end and gave up, but that futility reminded me of the early days of streaming when I didn't know anyone who actually paid a subscription to stream movies or TV shows legally; the lack of a unified service where you can find everything really holds back the consumption of particularly older content like this.

The same thing happened with software many years ago, there was a time when Softpedia and Download CNET were the go-to places for downloading software but their popularity waned for many when smart phones came along as app stores took their place. Software now is primarily downloaded from the sites of the developers, with the exception of games which use stores like Steam, GOG, and Epic Game Store to distribute their wares. For everything else, the same fade away into obscurity happened, in some cases the software was outright abandoned by its developers which gave birth to Abandonware as a concept - old software that is no longer maintained or orphaned by the collapse of the company that developed the software leaving its IP in limbo with no-one to enforce it.

A lot of the PC games I played as a kid are now Abandonware primarily due to the collapse or closure of the studios and developers that created them. I feel like the same thing will eventually happen with movies, the studios that own the copyright for them devote most of their effort to enforcing current IPs with older properties largely abandoned, they may not care right now but the second you make a penny of profit from exploiting that content they'd be quick to chase you for a loss of earnings, but really how can you make an argument for loss of earning when there's very little opportunity for someone to access that content legally?

There isn't a single DVD player in this house, so the option of buying a physical copy is gone too; I know in the attic there's a large box of old VHS cassettes gathering dust, and I know there's a copy of Casper in there somewhere, the one I watched incessantly as a child but again there isn't a single VCR in this house either and even if I got my hands on one I don't think any TV or Monitor in this house has an input you could connect it to.

There's a sadness in reflecting on that lost nature of old media and the reality that only the content from decades past that had monumental success has any amount of attention paid to preserving it. With content increasingly digitised there seems to be an inevitably point approaching in the future where either through cost cutting measures the storage that contains that content will be wiped or through an active decision not to maintain them that content will eventually degrade to the point of corruption. In my own personal life I have had hard drives die and Gigabytes of data lost including thousands of pictures and hundreds of videos which are irreplaceable.

I have to wonder if that will be the fate of old movies and TV shows that don't get priority - it has happened before, there was a period in the UK, from 1967 to 1978 when the main state broadcaster the BBC routinely deleted archived footage and recorded over old film reels, there are many TV shows and Movies that were lost to the ages because of their short-sighted decision making, some of the best known examples are the missing episodes of Doctor Who which has just under 100 episodes that have been lost. As corporations grow, as capitalism makes decisions based on profitability it's inevitable that the cost of preserving old content that isn't profitable will motivate decisions that endanger it, even more so now as we don't tend to own any of the content we consume and watch it in a transitive state as with streaming, viewed but not saved, watched but not retained.

This also happened in recent years, not too long ago in the days before Elon Musk bought Twitter, during transitions from one design to another the decision to delete on content in the CDN [Content Delivery Network] were made, such that old tweets more than a few years old had the images associated with them deleted. As for the aftermath of Musk's acquisition of the platform most people learned pretty quickly nothing posted to it could be taken for granted. Wikipedia even has a category page dedicated to listing now-defunct websites which for a millennial is a walk down memory lane if you're feeling reminiscent.