Ouch moving countries is something I did not touch because of what a nightmare it is for many of these services and because it is not the "common" case.

It took me one year to transfer my google account to another country.

I am not doing it again.

It's my understanding that the issues with international content distribution have to do with regulatory differences across borders, not the streaming services themselves.

It has to do mainly with an archaic business model where the rights are given to local distributors that have no purpose anymore.

They are the only ones allowed to license the work in a region, so providibg a movie or selection requires separate licensing agreements for every country or region it is served in.

Businesses that manage to take fees for nothing due historic reasons need to be eliminated.

Segmented distribution, be it to exclusivity silos or regional isolation, doesn't work.

My gut prediction is that if a service has a strong correlation to the desired content, E.G. Disney+ for "kids", it MIGHT work out, at least in the short term. HOWEVER, for wider culture, and particularly with different "tv networks" and studios with content libraries split among many services, the friction of not having a single place with everything, of not having a 'streaming store', will drive many to routing around the insanity and accessing the culture they want on terms they're willing to agree to.

Short version:

    * have everything, I mean it.
    * cost less than basic cable (total)
    * completely ad free (probably)
    * offline caching is a must (road trips)
    * capable of playing on anything I want (DRM free)

Does little to change the point, piracy still doesn’t have these restrictions.

Regulatory differences are a flaw unique to paid services, though. Piracy has no such flaw.

> regulatory differences

Interesting way of saying "corporate exclusivity agreements", which is what this ends up being in 99 out of 100 cases.