Netflix Geoblocking Loosened Under New EU Law (thestack.com)

An anonymous reader writes: "The European Parliament is now finalizing legislation which will allow EU residents to access their paid subscriptions for online media -- such as video streaming, games and music -- while visiting other EU countries," reports The Stack. Under the new rules, companies will not be able to arbitrarily block subscribers from accessing the content catalog of their home countries while visiting other parts of the European Union, with country of origin to be established by various possible methods besides IP address, including payment details, public tax information and 'checks on electronic identification'. The issue was brought to a head last year when Netflix began blocking the known IPs of VPN providers, often used by subscribers to access the catalogs of their home countries while travelling.

Comments

Look behind the curtain

[Solandri]

As I said before, the streaming services like Netflix would like nothing more than to offer a single streaming catalog for the entire world. It would drastically simplify their operations. All these stories make it seem like they're the culprits, when they're not. They're forced to do this silly geo-blocking by the music and movie studios, who use it as a way to eek out a little more profit via a graduated rollout schedule - movie first shows up in theaters, then via pay per view, then for sale on blu-ray, then on subscription services, then syndicated on TV. Each earlier step gives them a little more revenue per viewer than the later steps.

The "correct" solution to this is for these studios to get their butts in gear and work at synchronizing these rollouts throughout the entire world. But because they have a monopoly on their shows, there is no competition, so there is no pressure for them to work at synchronizing. So they've been lazy and have been relying on the crutch of geo-blocking to prevent certain countries from getting access to movies and shows which have been out for months in other countries. Since the problem stems from a government-granted monopoly (copyright), the correct solution is for government to step in and prohibit use of the geo-blocking crutch.