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Quickflix Wants Netflix To Drop Australian VPN Users
ashshy writes 200,000 Australian residents reportedly use Netflix today, tunneling their video traffic to the US, UK, and other Netflix markets via VPN connections. A proper Netflix Down Under service isn't expected to launch until 2015. Last week, Aussie video streaming company Quickflix told Netflix to stop this practice, so Australian viewers can return to Quickflix and other local alternatives. But Quickflix CEO Stephen Langsford didn't explain how Netflix could restrict Australian VPN users, beyond the IP geolocating and credit card billing address checks it already runs. Today, ZDNet's Josh Taylor ripped into the absurdity of Quickflix's demands. From the article: "If Netflix cuts those people off, they're going to know that it was at the behest of Foxtel and Quickflix, and would likely boycott those services instead of flocking to them. If nothing else, it would encourage those who have tried to do the right thing by subscribing and paying for content on Netflix to return to copyright infringement."
So they want a competitor to cut off customers which they can't serve (or because they can't compete)?
If your service is good and it's what people want, you will survive. If it isn't, and people go elsewhere ... too damned bad. If I was dealing with a company, and their competitor made them stop providing me service, there is no way in hell I'd go with the competitor, since they effectively blocked me from getting the service I do want.
This just sounds like "waah, we can't compete with Netflix, so Netflix needs to stop serving the customers we haven't been able to attract". Screw that. Your "local alternative" may not be as good, and the consumer shouldn't be forced into using your crappy product just because you say so.
I'd be seriously pissed at Quickflix for being self entitles assholes. And I sure as hell wouldn't do business with them.
Why do companies feel they are entitled to our business? I'll do business with whomever I want.
These clowns sound like candidates for the B-ark.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
It says a lot about Quickflix's service when Netflix via VPN is an actual competitive problem for them.
Same reason Blizzard never put servers there. The Australian Telcos have the continent by the balls, no one wants to do business there.
Good-bye
Why is Netflix not available in Australia?
A combination of licencing arrangements with existing distributors and the fact that the market size makes for a not so attractive business opportunity.
Sigger than your average
Given a chance, I believe any company would seek a monopoly.
Given the chance to force consumers to use your product, I think the people who run corporations would jump at it.
But if you think forcing me to subscribe to your product instead of the competitor I was already happy with ... you'd have to be a complete idiot, and I think these people might be.
This isn't anything other than trying to force people to use your service, even if your service isn't as good or people aren't interested in it. And that doesn't always get a good reaction from people.
If I was an Australian Netflix users, Quickflix would not be getting any of my business.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
If people are paying extra, and going to the hassle of signing up with netflix and dealing with the workarounds for paying and actually getting the service rather than just using your service, I think you're doing soemthing wrong.
And that never works well for some reason. Why would anyone think region restriction would be a thing to try now?
"Licensing issues" seems to be the standard reply. But, why would licensing in Australia be different from licensing elsewhere? Isn't a show streamed to Australia is just as profitable as a show streamed to Europe or America?
Yes, but Netflix must sign and *pay for* a license in each separate territory. The company pays per show/movie, per market, per year (or whatever licensing timeframe), and it doesn't make sense to roll out an actual service until you have the rights to a decent content library in that new territory.
Netflix is working on licenses for Australia, but doesn't have a service yet. And whatever agreements it did sign so far likely don't become active until Launch Date X.
So as usual, it all boils down to costs. Follow the money.
#o#
O Moo.
Best guess: the content creators use it as a way to extort more money out of people.
Why go for "just as profitable" when you can have "more profitable". If we can't get more profit, we're not licensing it to you.
The companies who own the content and are in charge of licensing see people as nothing more than a revenue stream, and want to be able to control what you see so it's on their terms.
In other words, greedy assholes.
There's no technical reason I can imagine, which means it's all about money.
Same as the region codes in DVDs, because heaven forbid you be able to buy a movie in another country and watch it at home. Because that could disrupt corporate profits and executive bonuses.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
It would take too much resources to re-encode all the movies upside-down.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
According to TFS Quickflix apparently wants to.
It's not hard from a technology perspective, and it never has been.
It's hard from a "these corporations are greedy bastards" perspective. They want to maximize profits. Pure and simple.
If that means telling the consumer "no, you can't have our product until we can figure out how to sell it to you for more money", they're OK with that.
You don't need to look beyond money, because technology isn't the roadblock here.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Why would a content provider care about geography?
Mostly decades-long exclusive distribution contracts that predate the Internet.
Quickflix's biggest shareholder is an Nine Entertainment, which appears to be their ticketmaster and clearchannel equivalent. They don't appear to be a telco but they do seem likely to be in bed with them.
TV networks in various countries buy exclusive rights to distribute the program in thier country (or sometimes a group of countries, for example EU regs mean you can't really limit a license to an individual country in the EU).
The primary rightsholder can't sell rights to distribute the program worldwide to netflix because they have already sold exclusive rights to distribute it in particular countries to various TV networks.
So getting rights to show programs in australia requires a totally new set of negotiations with totally different parties to getting rights to show those same shows in the US.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
I keep hearing "greed" but that is a copout. Greedy people do not refuse to license their products for decades.
This is all because in the 1990s the government allowed FOXTEL to goto the USA, and buy up exclusive licenses to all new and back catalogues from every major media company in America. They spent billions on it and at the time everyone thought they were overpaying.Turns out they very smartly bought themselves a monopoly position in media, one that has effectively locked out all Australian competitors (All the local media services are shit, from the PSN movies, to Xbox Live, to Quickflix.) and the government hasn't had the balls to call them out and break them up for it.
They do if they believe that the new channel will cannibalize their existing channels (DVDs) and produce lower net revenue.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
I wasn't looking for a distilled answer. I really wanted to know what specifically is the problem. If the licenses are locked-up by exclusive agreements with existing broadcasters, then I can understand the problem. Netflix might only be able to solve that by buying out the broadcasters. I wonder if the broadcasters could let the content providers break the contract, in exchange for some agreement. Or if they can sub-license the rights back to Netflix, and profit as a middleman.
Q: Why does this code not work?
Distilled answer: Bad programming.
Answer I wanted: Line 27 doesn't allocate enough memory.
Q: Why can't I stream The Simpsons?
Distilled answer: Licensing and greed.
Answer I wanted: Viacom has an exclusive licensing agreement that expires on March 21, 2018
There are a few similar services starting up down here. I had a look at Quickflix because they have a client for my smartTV and TiVo but all they have to offer are old BBC shows which I already own on DVD and their movie selection is woeful even compared with what we can get on AppleTV. Worse, the compression is too high so what they do have looks terrible. If they had the vast array of stuff that Netflix has then they might have a chance but without it they're going nowhere. I don't subscribe to Netflix as I've taken the approach of buying or renting what I want to see but if it was legitimately offered here I would be interested.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
They can normally license with the holder of the exclusive rights, but in many cases said holder sees netflix as competition and thus wants to charge huge rates for said licenses. That's where time to conduct negotiations comes in. It doesn't make sense for netflix to sign a licensing agreement where the cost is $12/month per netflix customer, after all. Even $1 a customer per year gets quite dear.
I don't read AC A human right
That reason is Foxtel. It buys up the rights to everything at hugely inflated prices, and then charges an arm and a leg for consumers to get it.
Want Games of Thrones as it's released? Foxtel is the only legal game in town.
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It gets better. Foxtel (the major rights holder for TV content in Australia) wants people to have their internet connections cut off if they pirate TV shows, whilst charging $150 a month for cable TV in HD. There's no legal way to access shows like Game of Thrones in Australia via streaming, the cheapest possible way to watch it as it airs overseas is with a "Foxtel-Play" subscription for $35/month for the 3 months. And then Foxtel and Village Roadshow and Quickflix all cry about piracy, because people don't want to pay a 400% markup for TV content. Netflix and a VPN service is costing me $15/month for five times the content I can get from Foxtel for $150/month
... wait, what?
There's some Murdoch ownership there, via Sky, owned mainly by Mordoch like Foxtel is. Whether the link is enough to set policy is a bit of a guess but Rupert has a habit of taking a very active interest in anything he owns a part of and tends to have influence far beyond his level of ownership in some things.