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Netflix Decides To Crack Down On VPN Users (netflix.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Netflix have announced they'll be taking further steps to ensure users are not circumventing geo-restrictions. David Fullagar, Vice President of Content Delivery and Architecture at Netflix says "Some members use proxies or "unblockers" to access titles available outside their territory. To address this, we employ the same or similar measures other firms do. This technology continues to evolve and we are evolving with it. That means in coming weeks, those using proxies and unblockers will only be able to access the service in the country where they currently are. This announcement comes just days after Netflix Chief Product Officer Neil Hunt said that a VPN blocking policy might be impossible to enforce."
This reminds me of the poor Tor users who are met with Cloudflare pages for a large part of the net.
of them.
You're starting to make your users hate you even more.
Netflix will play cat and mouse with the unblocking services for 3 months, then give up and point to their initial statement - it is not possible to enforce.
---- Sig. gone.
I, for one, welcome our VPN-blocking overlor... wait... no I don't!
One step forward, two steps back.
Back to ThePirateBay.
This is not a Netflix decision. It's about content providers making Netflix comply with stiffer regional content distribution agreements. The content providers finally saw too many of these users viewing content that the providers did not agree to provide to their region by way of a proxy access. Can't blame Netflix they were probably told do something to block it or lose content completely.
This "crackdown" continues exactly as long as either is required to make Hollywood studios happy, or as long as Netflix bottom line can take it.
Expect mass unsubscriptions from users in overseas areas that have abysmally poor selection in their local Netflix site, so I predict this will continue for a month or two, tops.
Or maybe not so smart, because then they pay nothing. This way the pay for the content. Partitioning the world for the purpose of selling content separately is just artificial scarcity and, at best, an anti-capitalist thing to do.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
What good do regions do to any business strategy?
Users pay to watch content and the content provider gets payed. Why would any outfit make it harder for customers to purchase their products by introducing regions? This discussion is not limited to Netflix but also holds for DVDs, Blue Rays, Amazon Prime, etc...
(I'm well aware that providers have licensed rights to representatives abroad and that that is a limiting factor. The question remains why content providers implement such ridiculous schemes.)
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Where I go online is none of my ISP's business. That's why I use a VPN. If Netflix cuts me off, I simply cancel Netflix and get 100% of my content through bittorrent. No skin off my ass.
Netflix launched themselves in 3000 (or 300? or 150?) more countries.
I tried the 30 day trial in Romania and the content is shit, nothing I'm interested in watching.
I've also discovered that it's impossible to get a full list of the available content, and that they take out content regularly. WTF? Why do they take the content out?
Needless to say, they won't get any billing cycles from me, VPN or no VPN.
Their business model is so screwed up. I mean, no other industry responds to potential customers abroad willing to buy their stuff by making it extra hard for them to do so.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Once again the world is safe from people trying to pay for content they want to watch!
Given the story a few days back, did anyone not see this coming?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
"Some members take the effort to find VPNs so that they can use our service even more, and we obviously don't care very much for that." If it is indeed the content providers, why can't Netflix stand up to them?
It would pretty obviously be impossible to enforce 100%, but I would think it would be pretty easy to block the users of the major proxy services. Someone with their own private VPN woyuld probably never be detected, but 90% of the users would just give up
if they actually enforce this, for me netflx is useless, region switching is necessary to get a decent content selection from netflix ...obviously they are under pressure from content distributors to do this...and i have no interest in supporting local distribution channels that are behind the times in content delivery...
People are willing to pay what they find acceptable for content. Annoying people and don't letting them access what they're paying will only make them move to other services that provide it for free and without annoyances...
They should make the policy say, "The content you will be able to access via a VPN will be only what is available to your IP Addresses Originating Country."
Then they just make all the VPN IP Addresses originate from North Korea. Problem solved.
Everyday you would just get a new episode of "Best Korea: Our Lovely Leader (In Technicolor)"
Have you ever fallen asleep at the keybhanusdiog?
It's legacy code. It made perfect sense until a few years ago, but it now needs to be refactored. Suppose you produce a show and CBS (USA) buys the rights to air it. Obviously CBS doesn't want their competitors, such as NBC, to have the same show. So you give CBS an -exclusive- contract.
So your show is on CBS and then the TV station in France wants to air it. CBS isn't competing in France, so they don't much care if the station in France has the same show. CBS only really cares that they have it exclusive in the United States. So that's the way contracts are written, TV networks buy exclusive rights in their country. That goes along fine for 90 years.
After 90 years of that approach working pretty well, Netflix comes along and they want to buy the same TV shows the networks do. The production company either already has sold exclusive rights in different countries or assumes they will (they always have before). The standard model of selling rights to networks in different countries doesn't work well with Netflix, which is available from almost any country (via vpn or otherwise). Hollywood will have to adjust and right contracts differently. Probably, Netflix will have to buy WORLDWIDE rights to the shows, which will be more expensive than buying rights only in a particular service area. They'll adjust, it just takes time to overcome a century of inertia.
Heck, the production companies are still doing something else they've done since the earliest days of TV - casting Betty White. :)
Going after customers who jump to hoops, just to buy your product, is a great business idea.
I just hope they have 80% of their customers on VPN.
If they haven't done this already, they can just make Squid identify itself as a Chrome browser. Right?
You've given the people a viable alternative to torrenting. Don't be a dick and take it away from them.
Isn't it great how Greedy Holywood and other content creators is these stupid geographical restrictions? If you are paying for content shouldn't you have the right to see from anywhere in the world? No wonder why some folks don't have a problem ripping off content.
They should better spend the effort to provide the same content everywhere so the people wouldn't need to use VPNs in the first place.
Here in Germany we pay the same monthly fee as in the US but we only get a fraction of the content. Nobody wants to use a VPN, it's an extra complication and cost but it's needed if you want to get the same content.
Hello The Pirate Bay... I'm back! ;)
Will $CURRENT_YEAR be the year of the Linux Desktop?
If they don't they will lose so much money they will kill themselves entirely. Be funny since they just spread world-wide. I know I'll cancel my service immediately.
The way I see I pay for a service and if I travel and my provider can't fullfill there end of the bargain it's time to find a new one.
Same for VPN my provider (Netflix) sells a service and should not f**k-ing care where I connect from as long as I pay money.
They don't want my money? Maybesomeone else will?
Any suggestions for vendors that doesn't block VPN?
Ex-Netflix customer
I don't see how this is a Netflix problem. This is all a content provider issue of not understanding how the world works now, and wishing to put people in boxes according to where they live.
Just sayin'.
so the content providers would rather I full-out pirate rather than semi-pirate when I am out of the country? lol ok have it your way. I haven't pirated in a few years but it's looking like 'tis the season.
Why isn't your catalog of video choices based upon your billing address, instead of your IP? They certainly know where the CC # is based out of and tie that to the video selection and boom, they don't have to care if you VPN/Proxy in.
IMarv
Trusting software vendors is no smarter than trus
How is it technically possible to know the origin of traffic through a VPN? Or are they just going to restrict to the country of credit card?
"We wont let you show this B movie from 1970!!!!"
Netflix has such a poor selection of movies. TV shows are a little better, but not by much. It's not like they're hosting blockbuster flicks like they used to do when they started up.
1. Teach people to use VPN so they can watch any show/film they like on Netflix. 2. Cut off the VPN users. 3. People discover they can download any show/film they like anonymously using VPN. 4. ???? 5. Profit!
I know quite a few people here in Canada who use US Netflix by simply manually specifying a specific DNS server.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Netflix has to tread a bit lightly here I think.
The majority of their user-base came to be after getting fed up with the shenanigans from Satellite and Cable companies. The entire customer base is pretty much comprised of folks who have already demonstrated their willingness to "cut the cable" as it were when they finally had enough. It will not take much for these same folks to cut Netflix off should their business decisions start to emulate the aforementioned companies.
In this day and age, there really shouldn't be any Regional / Geo restrictions on content. Continuing to try and enforce them is merely a waste of time and detrimental to your business core.
Netflix has a history under accounts of what you watched or currently watching and you are telling me they can't figure out with a few SQL logical statements if someone is violating their service? If John Doe from U.S is currently watching Rambo which is only available in the U.K does it not signal any red flag regardless of vpn?
For those who complain about content geo-restrictions, look at it from the other side of the coin. If you are a TV network that has just paid up big for the rights to a new show, the last thing you want is for people to be able to get it via Netflix USA and kill your revenue (ad dollars, subscription fees, whatever)
The problem is that conflates that paying for exclusive broadcast (and/or streaming) rights, also grants exclusive rights to the audience as well.
Or from a different point of view, you can't have globalization only when it benefits yourself (or said TV broadcaster in this example).
When we relocated from NYC to Toronto this April I had a USA based iTunes account.
At one point trying to rent a movie, I was asked to confirm my billing information. Apple would not accept any of the following forms of payment for my USA based iTunes account: (1) US Credit Card with Canadian billing Address.(2) Canadian Credit card with Canadian billing address.
Apple basically told me I had to "convert" my account to a Canadian iTunes account. Ok so I did that. And lost 95% of my "owned" content. Movies, music etc just vanished into this air. I don't even remember if they warned me about it. I was pretty pissed off, but didn't have that much stuff on there that I cared about. I understand there are different distribution rights, and licensing schemes between the two countries, but I do wonder if I moved back to the USA, if I would be able to retrieve the stuff that was previously mine. I mean - where did my rights to those items go? Why can't Apple negotiate some kind of "transfer" procedure.
My wife on the other hand has hundreds of movies on her iTunes, and doesn't want to lose them, so she has to maintain a USA based credit card with her mother's address as the billing address, just to keep the content we've already paid for. And that works - there doesn't appear to be any regional restriction on using our Apple TV to view US owned content, so long as you have a IS billing address you can use.
It's just another form of punishment for those of us trying to doing things the legal way, and my answer is to torrent anything I would have previously been willing to rent or purchase from iTunes.
In some ways the digital delivery system sucks compared to physical media. Nobody had any concerns about the hundreds of DVDs, CDs, books etc we brought over the border. As an aside - we ran into no such problems with my Steam account which retained everything. At least not yet.
Why not make content available to the entire world, and adjust prices accordingly?
Undoubtedly it's the content providers doing this, and then they wonder why so many people are still pirating their content.
I'd rather stream legally off Netflix but it's mighty frustrating when you're halfway through a series and it just vanishes from Netflix (but is still available on some other country's Netflix). If they successfully block VPNs, I'm probably going to cancel my subscription.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
srsly fuck cloudflare
How hard would it be for a VPN service to have the US IP changing daily?
How hard would it be to compile a list of VNP services that NETFLIX does not track?
Can we create an AWS elastic bandwidth session to get a legit usproxy to watch Neflix?
You can use a US iTunes card to charge a US account. When we moved, we made a new-country account, and kept the old. And we buy US cards from the US to charge the US account when we need. No restrictions on using the US account outside the US. Just restrictions on buying.
Learn to love Alaska
Is X available for streaming? Nope
Is Y available for streaming? Nope
Is Z available for streaming? Nope
And they wonder why people still prefer outright downloading.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Does IPv6 make it harder to block VPN users?
I'm in the U.S. and use a well known VPN service. It's already blocked from many sites for streaming (e.g., Disney).
Maybe if Netflix/USA didn't treat other countries like scum, and only allows me (Netherlands) to watch 10 or so series, whereas the entire USA gets to see *everything*, maybe then would I not be using a VPN. As it stands now, when this goes live, they can kiss my money good-bye. For ever. Morons.