Video streaming services while living abroad are mostly rubbish
The internet is currently talking about the new Disney+ streaming service. I have to say, it looks amazing and I desperately want them to have my money. Except I can’t. I live abroad. I spend a lot of time in the UK but most of my life is based in Asia. I am currently living in Thailand but have residency in Hong Kong and might move to Japan at some point. Most of the big video streaming services, apart from Netflix, are hard to watch out here. At a time when most people in Western countries are complaining about too many subscriptions, I am complaining that I don’t have enough.
I had a Netflix and Amazon Prime account in the UK but when I moved to Asia they were both pretty crap. They saw I was on holiday from my own country and the options were severely and annoyingly limited. Netflix was rolling out to other countries but it seemed painfully slow. Then, one day, it arrived in a shit-load of countries almost overnight. Happily, including Thailand. Compare this to Amazon, which remains awful to this day. I buy and rent stuff on Amazon Prime Video through its apps but the streaming service still shows my holiday options even though I am not on sodding holiday. I live abroad!
My last holiday was, ironically enough, to the UK, where I grew increasingly annoyed at how much great content I could watch while there. I briefly signed up again to get a load of deliveries to my parents’ house while also being able to watch The Boys and the last season of the Expanse. (Both are awesome.) Now I have cancelled again because there really is no point. I know the reason for this is some tedious legal bollocks and I look forward to the day where global companies that make movies and TV shows can get together with streaming services and just show stuff, you know, globally.
The region thing is nonsense anyway. It was a practical thing back in the day when we had hardware differences like PAL and NTSC but once we went digital there were still regions on DVDs – which became increasingly dumb with the advent of multi-region players. Now it’s a digital file that I can buy and watch on any device. But if I sign up to a streaming service that same film may be available in one country and not the next.
So now we have Disney+ streaming. They own their content, so I am hoping that when they deign to let countries in Asia watch it, the whole catalog will be there. I don’t have cable TV, so if it wasn’t for Netflix I would have had to go back to reading books, learning new languages, practicing guitar and piano, socialising and travelling a lot like in the 90s and 00s. God forbid.
