I'll need to reread the thread a bit, to find out what exactly am I being quoted on
Dubbings are great, as a stepping stone towards the originals, but also as a part to widen the spectrum of stuff available in the target language (and sometimes, you just want to watch something in particular, so why not connect this desire with the language learning profit). They've helped me enormously in all the languages I am rather good at these days. My Italian improved thanks to dubbings too, but it is time for me to try the originals. Italian is a bit specific. While it is normal, that most originals are harder than most dubbed series (but let's not forget the other factors, such as the genre, the specific show, the quality of the dubbing, the target audience, the usual background noise in the series,...), Italian is one one of the languages with major presence of local dialects in the series and movies. That's what makes them harder, but also extremely valuable. When you'll have progressed to the hard series originally made in the language and spent some time with them, you'll simply have no problem with the real natives at all. The dubbed series prepared me very well too, but I could clearly notice what parts of native speech was suddenly less comfortable for me, or I was even understanding less.
Unfortunately, the paid streaming sites are still allowed to use geoblocking (which should be illegal at least within the EU, as it goes against the very basics of it, it is a nationality based discrimination, it goes against the one market, and also against the ideas of sharing each other's cultures including langauges, but the lobbyists are too strong). VPN is one of the ways to counter it, or using the non official streaming sites (in most countries, streaming is not illegal, you are not doing anything wrong. And after all, the companies clearly don't want our money, if they don't let us buy the real product we want, only a damaged version in a different language than we want, or a stupid physical DVD many of us cannot even directly put in the computer anymore).
Finding streaming sites in Italian is not too hard, you just need to deal with the usual mess of falsely free sites, weird ads, and so on. But it is not a major problem, you can find almost anything you wish. If you don't want to use them, you'll have to pay extra for DVDs and their delivery fees, wait for the delivery, pray they are not damaged, look for a DVD reader (not all computers have them, and the external ones are sometimes not comfortable to use, especially while travelling), and either use it on the DVD or rip it to your computer (which is definitely legal to do for your use), and clutter your apartment with the outdated physical objects.
