thehatfox

I've been a longtime fan of CheapShow, a comedy podcast loosely based around unusual items found in cheap shops and charity shops (thrift stores). Episodes include deep dives in vintage/retro media, taste tests of weird foodstuffs, various games and challenges, plus a lot of complete chaos and toilet humour.

Maybe not for everyone, but if any of the above catches your interest it's worth a try.

As a Pokemon fan I understand your pain. It's not like it's an obscure series, or from a small company. Why is it so hard to stream such a popular anime? I'm surprised The Pokemon Company hasn't rolled out their own streaming platform yet.

Before diving in to Plex I would highly recommend looking at Jellyfin first also. It's offers much the same features as Plex but is fully free and open source.

For my own media server I use an old HP Microserer G8 purchased second hand, and upgraded with a Xeon e3-1260L, also sourced cheaply used. It's small, easy to service and happily runs my Linux disro of choice. I know other people using various SFF PCs, or even repurposed old desktops. For best performance look for a CPU (or GPU) with hardware video encoding support. Otherwise, the rule of thumb for Plex used to be a CPU with at least 2000 Passmark score on cpubenchmark.net per concurrent 1080p stream.

The article says the Japanese government is still working on the exact regulations to be implemented. Perhaps the Japanese government will require the platforms to promote other options somehow - similar to the browser choice screen the EU mandated Microsoft add to Windows to increase web browser competition.

Google does not block 3rd party app stores, but most users do not use or even know of them, and 90%+ of all apps are still downloaded/purchased from the Play Store.

It's still a bigger change for Apple though, who block any third party software from outside the App Store entirely. As the EU are also heading in the same direction, maybe Apple will eventually cave and allow third party software sources globally. There were rumours that they would do this for EU customers only at one point, but if more and more countries adopt similar laws it will cause a lot of fragmentation.