That’s 2 different questions.

I believe VLC can open m3u links (playlists). Not sure about m3u8.

As far as downloading videos from an app, good luck with that. Or if you mean using an app (say, to download from a website), you could probably do it with Firefox?

If you have access to a computer, jdownloader2 is super easy to download from most websites.

I got Macs and an iPhone and I can download stuff so I know you can with Android. (I can also send videos easily between Android and iPhone.)

Here’s what’s wild though. At first with music streaming it was largely just American, Western, popular music. I left Spotify for Apple Music because the latter had Japanese music and I was tired of sideloading it into Spotify. Now Spotify has Japanese music too.

The Japanese music market is super weird. Anime is to Japanese music in the 2010s and 2020s what MTV was to western music in the ‘80s and ‘90s. It’s the international hit maker. So anime is bringing western eyes to all this music, not you go in YouTube and a lot of them have “YouTube edition” videos that are like half the video. Because they don’t fully trust us I guess? Sometimes the video is on Apple Music though.

I know Japanese music is more expensive than ours. I mean like the cost of a CD. So when bands would release a Japanese album, they’d add bonus tracks to help increase the value. Western bands do it too. Look up an album you know on Wikipedia and see if there’s a Japanese version with some bonus tracks.

I’m wondering how Apple Music and later Spotify more or less tamed the Japanese music market but TV and movies are so much harder.

There’s an easy solution to this. I pay for Apple Music because I get access to pretty much all the music I want. I can sideload what they don’t have, which isn’t much. They have better audio quality, and aren’t stiffing artists to pay some right wing nutjob science denier like the other streaming platform of note. I pay because I love music and want to support what I love. Why isn’t there a similar service for TV and movies? That’s the solution. Let us pay for what we love and make it easy. Apple figured it out with music. Valve figured it out with games.

I think they don’t want to solve the problem. I think they want to solve a different problem. I think they’re making this a problem so they can push legislation to protect their profits.