My wife and I live in the US. My kids spend the school year with their mom in Canada, and spend summers, vacations, and many weekends here in the US. We’re only about 100 miles away from each other, but it crosses an international border. For more than a decade, my kids have been on my account. All of their history and recommendations are attached to their profile in my account. If they want to move their profiles over to their mother’s account for the nine months of the year that they are in Canada, they can’t. They just use their existing profiles in my account at both homes.

In my case, nobody is “stealing” anything. My immediate family has had to deal with these international issues for about eight years, where the kids spend about three months in the US and nine months in Canada every year, crossing the border every 3-4 weeks.

I have no idea how Netflix’s changes are going to affect my family.

Taking another example: Disney+ and Hulu. Hulu is majority (but not entirely) owned by Disney (post-20th Century Fox acquisition). In the US, we have Disney+ and Hulu as separate services. In Canada there is no Hulu, but Disney+ offers something called “Star” which is more-or-less non-US Hulu. In other words, Disney is already getting 2 subscriptions out of me in the US for content that only requires one subscription in other countries.

But I don’t mind. Why? Because Disney has high quality content. Even if I don’t want to watch it, none of it is necessarily “bad”. Netflix, OTOH, churns out so much garbage. And most of their original shows get canceled far too early. I now avoid most new Netflix shows until it has a few seasons under its belt, because I’m tired of getting invested into shows that are canceled after a cliff-hanger.

Ted Sarandos: I’m looking at you.