...and I'm now on Netflix

While I don't want to nickel-and-dime myself to death with too many subscriptions (I'm on Amazon Prime, for example, and I subscribe to the paid version of MyFitnessPal, not to mention I pay monthly for extra storage space on Google because I upload so many walk photos), I've been wanting to get on back onto Netflix for years. Lately, Netflix has had some talked-about shows that I've wanted to see, and because these shows have been Netflix exclusives, they don't become available at sites like Amazon.com. So now, finally, I can watch Chris Hemsworth's "Extraction," the Korean series "Squid Game" (even though I already know pretty much the whole plot thanks to all the commentary), and "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs," a movie I've seen in bits and pieces on YouTube. My understanding is that Netflix is a lot like the 80s-era HBO I remember from years ago: it broadcasts movies (the difference is that it's a streaming service, so you can watch when you want), but you don't buy movies off the site to own (or can you download them? I'll find out—not that I'd want to download movies; I own many iTunes flicks, but I store them all in the Cloud to minimize the clutter in my own hard drive), and that's fine by me.

My previous inability to sign up for Netflix had a lot to do with my personal situation. I live in Korea, but my lone credit card is American, and the billing address is based in America. When I tried signing up for Korean Netflix, there would always be some problem with completing signup every time I tried using my American credit card to pay for the subscription. When I tried signing up for US Netflix (via my VPN), the site would ask me for a US cell-phone number to which to send a confirmation code. Since my cell number is Korean, I would always be stymied every time I got to this step. You say you're in the States, so give us a Stateside phone number. My computer-savvy coworker suggested a workaround the other day, though: a service called Talkatone, which allows you to create what is essentially an America-based cell-phone number for free. I just did that last night; signup was easy-peasy and took maybe only three steps. This afternoon, I decided to try using my new US cell number to sign up for Netflix... and it didn't work, at first, because Talkatone comes with a catch: international access to your US texts actually isn't free: texting is free only if you physically live in the US or Canada. So I paid a single dollar to give myself 60 so-called "Talkatone credits," and... problem solved. I asked Netflix to resend their confirmation code via text, and I got the text. After that, I was finally able to finish my Netflix signup, and here we are.

Bored yet?

Anyway, Talkatone is indeed a good solution for anyone who might need a US-based cell number for any reason. In reading about the service, I discovered, though, that Talkatone might not work for all texting situations; some very sensitive sites can tell the number isn't for an actual cell phone, and such sites will demand that you give them a real cell number to text to. So with Netflix, I guess I got lucky.

Personally I don't like this toxic combination of exclusivity and the subscription model. I'd prefer to go back to the one-stop shopping I used to enjoy just by going to Amazon to get all my movies. Now, it's all Netflix exclusives, Disney Plus exclusives, etc. You have to sign up for each individual service, and before you know it, you've got hundreds of dollars a month leaking out of your bank account (or credit card, which ultimately means your bank account), and it's death by a thousand cuts. But maybe the answer is for me eventually to unplug from it all and just go back to reading books, although, at this point, I think I may be too addicted to visual entertainment ever to do that.