That's why you sail the seven seas and download them from places other than Netflix

That's DRM for you. Never trust it. Get a phone with expandable storage and fill your SD card(s) with GBs of non-DRM encumbered media and you can enjoy having it all instantly accessible to you whenever/wherever you want it for as long as you like.

Control is what DRM takes from you, but we have the technology to take it back for ourselves.

The 'R' does not stand for "rights" (but I'm sure you know that)

Not your (the consumer's) rights anyway.

Or run your own server like emby or plex both have offline access / download for their mobile apps...

Plex offline has never worked for me. It always freezes and never downloads anything. It's astonishing how janky the Plex app is, even after so long.

VLC is available for both flavors of phone/tablet, you don't need an SD card, builtin storage is fine.

builtin storage is tiny (typically 128 or 256 GB) to force people into keeping all their data in the cloud, which doesn't help you when you're offline.

On Android, you can usually plug flash drives into the phone's USB port (either USB-C drives or using the correct dongles/adapters). They might insist you format them first so make sure you start by plugging them in and formatting on the phone before adding media. I think there's some apps that can read, for instance, NTFS (although I remember it being a little flakey)

I never heard about that before, but if that works it'd be amazing! Now I just have to dig up an adapter...

A feature to look for is OTG (USB On The Go) connectors and devices.

This allows storage, peripherals (wired headphones!) to connect to the USB-C port:

<https://www.minitool.com/news/what-is-otg.html>

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_On-The-Go>

You can also do this with iOS/iPadOS devices, although it won’t write NTFS.

You get what you pay for, iPhones, for example, top out at 1TB.

If the tiny built in storage is to "force people" to do things, what are the models with lots of storage for?

Or, if that's your thing, feel free to cheap out on the phone and make up for it with a microSD card, that's why they still sell those models. I'm sure it'll get lots of security updates too, right?

Point being VLC doesn't care whether your phone has a headphone jack. Sorry, I meant SD slot.

> Sure enough, we couldn't watch them. The netflix app needed to phone home before it would allow us to see them.

I had this happen before. I was able to work around it by switching the phone to Airplane Mode. Then it allowed me to see the downloaded content.

Airplane mode usually snaps the app out of its phone home setting. Amazon Video is much less buggy about offline downloads.

ObX: <https://xkcd.com/488/>