This was during an era where VHS was standard and DVD’s were just brand new at the time (before streaming sites existed). Chains like Blockbuster were booming back then with people renting movies or even TV shows for a fee but have to return them by an expected date, what happens is that in order to “keep” a copy, people would use a PC with disc burning software to burn the contents from that DVD onto a blank one.
Know those blank white DVDs? Basically those were used on storing a “pirated” disc for themselves before returning the rented copy back at the video rental store. When I was a kid, I remember encountering what clearly a pirated copy of The Prince of Egypt (so who ever pirated it kept the rented copy) since the disc art is crappy & low quality (it’s been printed then glued onto a blank DVD used for copying upon peeling it off).
staying at my friends relatives house for the weekend was pretty awesome because they had a “black box” cable hookup and you heard about it but rarely saw it.
in fact thats how i saw bash at the beach 96.
The ol de-srambler. Those were def pretty rare (in my area anyways) I think I only ever actually saw one of them in the wild. We live pretty close to the US border where I’m from, so everyone in my area missed the descrambler phase, but were pretty captivated in that whole DirecTV copy the card and unlock all the channels for free era. My buddy even had the card copier thing and everything, like you’d get whacked and he’d just nonchalantly would stroll back across the street and burn you a new card, and you’d be back up in like 5 or 6 minutes.
The ol era where you figured out like gee I’ve got 600 channels here, but I still cant find anything on that I want to watch lol.