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?

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