As well as DVD regions, there were/are TV encoding 'regions': NTSC, PAL, and SECAM.

In practise, average-price DVD players sold in Europe were compatible with NTSC in addition to PAL, but DVD players in North America and Japan only did NTSC.

We could buy DVDs on holiday in the USA and play them at home, but it was difficult to find a DVD player in the USA that would play a PAL DVD brought from Europe.

Similarly, it was reasonably practical to import obscure American or Japanese movies to Europe, but less so the other way round.

Those are simple technology differences like the power. Unrelated to either region coding or geofencing.

YouTube is full of ads for VPN services whose point is to let you get around streaming geofencing.

(They say it's for security but they have nearly no security benefit.)

Region encoding yes, but countries had their own versions. So the version in Belgium for example did not come with English subtitles, only Dutch, French and German.

I've yet to travel to a country where I couldn't log in to Netflix. But the content change, which is both fun and annoying.

That's broken.

My wife & I were in the middle of the new dr who a few years ago, purchased on Amazon. (not rented and not prime, purchased, neither of us has prime)

Go on vacation and we could not access that show.

It doesn't matter how many other shows were available, the show I bought was artificially unavailable. Had I a dvd of the same show for the same money and the same laptop, it would have been available.

(Yes obviously I used a vpn and got around that. My awesomeness to overcome something broken does not make the thing not broken.)