For a moment, it seemed like the streaming apps were the things that could save us from the hegemony of cable TV—a system where you had to pay for a ton of stuff you didn't want to watch so you could see the handful of things you were actually interested in.
I never stopped, but I doubled down a good 10 years ago when Netflix first announced they were gonna put an end to people getting around geolocking. I'm Canadian. I'd pay (at the time) for US Netflix 100%. Canadian Netflix wasn't worth the cost of the pot to piss in.
Spun up a Plex server, set up Sonarr, Jackett/Prowlarr, Radarr, Tautulli, and now I am Netflix for 20 people lmao.
I feel your pain as I had Canadian Netflix around 2015. I was bummed when I knew that the new seasons of Suits (iirc) wouldn’t be available in Canadian Netflix for a couple of months.
I had to watch it in putlockers while I was paying for a freaking streaming service.
Such a mess lol. I take pride in knowing that every movie, tv show, comedy special, album, game (up until the ps era cause i'm not made of hard drive money), comic book, novel, piece of software, basically anything I ever enjoyed over the course of my life (as well as a couple terabytes of random data hoarder shit) are sitting 2 feet away from my fingers at all times.
I'm pretty sure around where i live you did not get the alt.binaries groups except if you went to a proper usenet provider and payed. the ISPs didn't want to pay for all of the storage. but this was a long time ago and i wasn't yet interested in stuff like that. maybe i misremember.