I’ll never forget the first time I realized downloading movies was a thing that was possible. Having grown up around my extended family whose living rooms were surrounded by bootleg DVDs and illegal satellite television, my cousin told me he was downloading a movie off the internet, and I couldn’t believe it. Up until then, the internet was just for Neopets, flash games, Ebaumsworld, and MSN Messenger. Could we really just watch movies that have not been released on video without going to Blockbuster?

It was 2003, and downloading music was already the norm by then, if not the only way anyone I knew listened to music. My cousin told me he downloaded movies all the time and said it would be a full day until Dicky Roberts: Former Child Star would be ready to watch. I remember the quality of both the film itself and the download being abysmal, but still—it felt like the future.

By the time I reached my teens, technology had advanced to the point where it took far less than a day to download movies and television, and streaming on media hosting websites like Megavideo meant I could watch whatever I wanted. As a teen, nobody really knew the actual laws around piracy in Canada, but it was common knowledge that it was fine to leech as long as you weren’t the one distributing the content. In any case, I never got caught or felt remotely guilty even if it was technically stealing.

A lot has changed since then. Netflix became a thing, and Blockbuster closed. Websites I had once used were shut down, and I didn’t learn what the new ones were. As new services continued to enter the market, all jockeying for my attention by offering various exclusives, my monthly spending on streaming skyrocketed to the point where I considered just getting cable.