I am mostly disappointed where this all ended up, especially with Netflix. The HTPC movement was all about serving up our bought content at top quality. Nowaday

I am mostly disappointed where this all ended up, especially with Netflix. The HTPC movement was all about serving up our bought content at top quality. Nowadays you don't own any content, you rent it all and its all streamed at poor bitrate with often worse audio options than what we had 20 years ago. Netflix instead of freeing existing content and spreading it across the globe ended up copying the cable company production of its own content and isolating that content to its own platform model to be sold with a monthly rental along with all its other content you don't want. Very little of what the early HTPC movement and Jellyfin/Kodi are today has made it into the official streaming services and its every bit as geolocked as cable services were. Netflix is cable on the internet, none of the devices today are anything but multiple cable devices served over the internet, they share very little in principles with the early HTPC movement. DRM has become ever more prevalent in TV and movies not less.