A big part is also residuals, they don’t want to have to keep paying actors, directors, and others involved with production, after the fact on a losing property. If there is zero income there are zero continued payments.

You’re vpn is probably using its own dns servers, does your vpn allow you to change the dns settings?

I disagree, the vast majority just need a browser, your use case may be quite common, but definitely not the majority.

The Playapod website mentions a web player, does the web player happen to sync with your app on the phone? If so maybe you can extract it through the web player on a desktop.

By my count there are 914 different episodes/movies, that’s a ton of content!

Those are potential connections, outside will be how many you are actually connected to. The potential connections number also isn’t live so don’t take it as fact.

Dissociative identity disorder

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociative_identity_disorder

Until all coal plants are replaced there will be a need for more coal. We can’t just shut down these plants over night, the world is transitioning to cleaner energy production, unfortunately it’s just not happening fast enough.

In regards to your question about hidden methods to catch people, back before digital each film print sent to a theater had a unique “CAP Code” printed directly onto the 35mm film. This was a series of dots in a unique pattern that would show up several times on screen. So when a cam rip would show up somewhere this could be used to narrow down which theater it was recorded at and identify trends after several films.

I don’t know if this was ever successfully used to prosecute anyone though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coded_anti-piracy

Viewing distance and bitrate are most important. Sitting too close will make many things look bad.

For a 32 inch display you want to be 4 and a half feet back, and for a cinematic view you want 3 feet back.

https://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/by-size/size-to-distance-relationship

A neck towel that you regularly wet is truly amazing