All this VPN thing-ie and whether if it's legal or not has to do with licensing and distribution rights.

In the good old days before the Internet, content owners (people who owns content including the intellectual property of those content including characters, plots, etc) monetise their assets by working with content producers (film studios, etc) and getting those produced content (film, series, animation) to users via distributors who then hawk them to exhibitors (tv stations, cinema chains, etc). So it's a complex value chain where rights are all over the place.

The most common distribution model has been carved out based on geographical windows (for example, SEA is one, China is another, North America, etc). So even though for some company as powerful as Disney who tends to own not only the intellectual property but also the production companies and also their own distribution, this is still a fractured system. For example, certain produced content were promised exclusively to certain exhibitors (eg. Astro) for an agreed period of time. Compounding the matter in the past is that digital distribution rights in the past were often not separated or they are bundled in together with broadcasting rights, etc. So that is why the catalogue is different from region to region (and in some cases, country to country).

Now that Netflix has shown the power of streaming, most content owners are slowing clawing back their rights so that they can get into the direct to customer streaming game. The reason why you can't see the content that you want on your local Netflix versus say an American Netflix is often due to the rights not being available for Netflix to show in Malaysia as they probably belong to someone else in this region.

It all has to do with economics- whether if the content owners/producers believe that they can make more money licensing the content to a 3rd party or keeping/buying-back the rights for themselves to offer on their streaming platform.

While it is legal for anyone to subscribe to the streaming providers via VPN, there are some differences which you should take note:-

1. The local Malaysian pricing is usually the cheapest. We are in the part of the world where the subscription cost is lower due to our "developing" status. This is not some "look-down-at-you" situation but more reflective of the market situation where content is "freely" available and these companies have to scale up legal viewership quickly to make up the revenue. The fastest way to do this is to price the service where people can decide that a properly curated streaming service with consistent quality and also accurate recommendation engine can convince you to pay rather than to torrent the content that you want.

2. A local Malaysian account still means that you can VPN to where you want around the world and enjoy the content from there (without paying the country's subscription price). For example, Malaysian Netflix subscription is still cheaper than a US subscription. I have tested this (Netflix, HBO Go) during the good old days when we still get to travel overseas.

For Disney+, this is a little complex. The Disney+ that we will be getting here (like Indonesia) will no doubt be even cheaper than the US one BUT the caveat here is that it is provided by Hotstar. Hotstar is a streaming provider based in India. It was owned by Fox which was subsequently acquired by Disney. Since April 2020, it has been offering Disney+ content on its platform in India and later in Indonesia. It is believed that this will be the vehicle (see the news on their Instagram account handle which is registered as disneyhotstarmalaysia) that will be used by Disney to expand to the Asian markets.

So far, as the service is not launched, it is not clear if a Hotstar subscription (username/password) allows you the same access to the Disney+ platform from across the world and vice-versa. However, you can peruse their Indian and Indonesian website to see the content that we can get. I don't think that it will be same as the US one but from what I can see, Star Wars, Marvel and the Disney libraries are there.