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Don't forget other countries. In Canada, there's no Hulu or any HBO online offering. There's a streaming service operated by Bell that has some HBO content, but they intentionally leave out the most popular shows in an attempt to avoid hurting their cable subscription numbers.

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There's also the technical analog of this, too. Which services work well on my smart TV, my Chromecast, my Roku, my Amazon Firestick, my XBox 360, my PS3, my Android tablets, or my Windows machine is a total crapshoot. Even before we consider the yipping chihuahuas like Google and Amazon refusing to play with each other or questions of effective DRM or region locking, making something work on all those platforms is really hard.

(If only they could have seen this coming... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5639076#5639327 oh right. This is pretty obvious stuff.)

It also works the other way around.. Example, some content is licensed to Netflix for all regions except the US. Most annoying for me was Star Trek Discovery. CBS wanted to use it to promote their own $6/month most-ads or $10/month least-ads streaming service in the US.

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