Netflix, like countless other online services, is not built for global citizens - people that work in different countries to their own.
I am a British born expat, living in Qatar, so of course I want to watch the UK orientated Netflix programming and not the Arabic or Hindi. I have a UK TV license but of course, I can't watch UK TV from Qatar. Trying to pay for things online is frequently a nightmare as many companies won't take payment from a UK card unless it's from a UK IP. Same trying to pay tax on my US houses, also some websites don't even let you connect to them unless you use a US IP address! Google rightly defaults to Arabic if you're not logged in, that's fine, but even they don't provide a simple way to change the language to English! Similar with Spotify, same with Apple music. Whatsapp voice calls are blocked in Qatar.
All of these problems and many more are bypassed with a good VPN. It amazes me how few services ever take into consideration that people don't always live and work in their country of origin. If VPN's are clamped down on it's going to make life difficult for tens of millions of people. VPN's are actually VITAL in many situations.
Forget country of origin. It seems that most websites don't even acknowledge the existence of multilingual countries: You are in Switzerland, you must speak German; Belgium, here is some French; Canada, I guess that makes you Anglophone.
It reminds me of a comment on an article about one of the giants (Google perhaps) who did not correctly handle capitalization rules for Dutch last names and capitalized "van", etc. Someone said something along the lines of "it's the height of corporate arrogance when a company treats your entire country and identity as an edge case." How useful or convenient tech services are tends to correlate strongly with how close to SF Bay area your life is. A UK person in Qatar is way too far. Even a Francophone in North America seems to be too far for most services.
There are different kinds of multilingual. English-German, French-Spanish, Italian-Spanish, basically there is no problem when your languages are co-located. However, try leading a proper multilingual life if you are German-Russian. You couldn't buy a DVD or BluRay with both languages. With streaming, it gets a bit beter, Netflix is actually one of the better players in the market -- more often than not, they do have a Russian translation and subtitles both for their own productions as well as licensed stuff. Disney+ in Germany doesn't seem to have Russian at all, even though they obviously own Russian translations (NB: no streaming service has managed to offer multiple video tracks, i.e. with localized signs in animated films). Maybe this will change when they enter the Russian market (should be this autumn), but again: why does this have to matter to me, living in Germany? The list goes on and on: there is no Russian in Amazon, i.e. Alexa won't understand Russian and also won't understand the titles of any music tracks in Russian (or Japanese for that matter). There is an Alexa equivalent from Yandex called Alice, but you'll be right to guess that I can't just import it to Germany, since it requires geo-blocked russian services to function. It's infuriating, but I guess that's the price we pay for letting US drive the innovation.
Just give me a service where I can pay a €5 per video track, €1 per audio track and €0.50 for a subtitle track with a full catalog of movies and languages from the whole world. Then I can assemble my own Fight Club with English, German and Japanese dubs and Russian, Swedish and Swahili subs without having to resort to piracy.
The going rate for bulk DVDs on Ebay is 36 American cents[1] a piece. My recommendation (and what I do) would be to set up a Plex server[2], buy 2000 DVDs, rip the DVDs to your server, and import any needed subs from online[3]. You can also upscale the DVDs to 720p quality using FFMPEG's implementation of the nnedi3 neural network AI[4] (example script[5]).
If you are downloading subtitles you are already committing piracy, so you might as well download the whole movie in better quality and with less hassle.
> If you are downloading subtitles you are already committing piracy
OpenSubtitles.org[1] claims that downloading amateur transcribed subs and translation-subs is fair use.
> so you might as well download the whole movie in better quality and with less hassle.
My experience is that most movies that are not extremely popular are either not available for torrent download or if they are the audio is not 5.1 surround sound (6 audio channels whose combined bitrate is 448kbps) and the video bitrate is restricted enough to be DVD quality anyways.
Specifically for the video, a 2GB 1080p h264 compressed video will have an average video bitrate less than 2mbps. Its widely acknowledged that h264 is not greater than twice as efficient as MPEG-2 so lets double that to say that a 2GB 1080p h264 compressed video's perceived bitrate quality is no more than 4mbps. Most commercial DVDs will be 480p MPEG-2 compressed video with a bitrate greater than 5mbps.
For perceived video quality (other than diagonal edges and text) bitrate, not resolution, is what matters. Using an neural network AI upscaler such as nnedi3 (or even something less intensive such as the spline algorithm) to pre-upscale 480p video to 720p video will greatly improve the diagonal edges.
Note: If you have 1080p sources that are larger than 2GB and have 5.1 surround sound then you are absolutely correct in saying that the movie will be better quality. I just have not seen those available for download anywhere for the vast majority of movies.
Until a couple of years ago, google's date picker for custom range search only worked if your locale was set to use the American date format. If your locale used any other other format, it would flip them around and give you a completely different time range. It always amused me how just a couple of clicks from their main product was a case they probably didn't even test for any non-US date formats, and cared so little about it that it took them years to fix it, despite bug reports. In that case, almost all of the non-US world was the edge case.
And if you're multilingual within "monolingual" countries, especially the US, good luck. (microrant: there's no such thing as a monolingual country, and the US has no official language!)
I've gotten emails from multiple bigtechs -- dropbox was one IIRC -- that were half in German, half in English. Or more relevant to Netflix -- your language setting for content has to be the same as your language setting for the UI. I'm sure to some people these things seem like nitpicks, but that's exactly the problem: treating language as an afterthought is such a profoundly middle class white American view. The vast majority of the world works differently, and most tech firms simply don't care. This isn't something trivial. It's a core part of how people interact with the world.
> I've gotten emails from multiple bigtechs -- dropbox was one IIRC -- that were half in German, half in English.
There is one website I use that sends emails when a staff member takes an action on your account (an extremely common and expected behaviour, something that can happen multiple times a day).
The only problem is that these emails are localised to the language setting of the staff member who performed the action, not the language setting of the person actually receiving the email!
> Or more relevant to Netflix -- your language setting for content has to be the same as your language setting for the UI.
Yeah, it sucks! How hard is it to have a general UI language setting and per-profile content language preferences? I usually set everything to English but that means my family can't use my Netflix.
People started to get a clue about this 5-10 years ago though. It used to be much worse. I recall having to deal with it daily and I don't think about it much any more - more like a weekly exception.
In fact, now also I get some places trying to be too helpful to the point of being confusing. For example, a trainer store that auto-detects location and lists prices in GBP but sizes in US (without indication) and doesn't actually have an EU/UK distribution centre. So whoops it's going to take ages to arrive, it gets re-listed in USD at the final checkout, whoops again, 3% charge from my credit card, and then the wrong size arrives. But at least I knew the rough GBP amount!
In World of Warcraft, the Dutch word kunt gets censored because it is a variation of an English curseword. While in Dutch its a very basic word ('can' as in 'you can').
Customer Service rep. was aware of the issue but could not do anything about it.
They are going to use AI in the game more for such moderation, so I hold my breath.
Also, not sure what Spanish implies but Portuguese usually means Brazilian Portuguese. Dutch usually means Dutch, not Flemish, unless its a Belgian production.
Isn't 'cunt' also used much more casually in the UK and Australia?
Cursewords and women's nipples... has their devilish impact on society ever been proven or rather is there even any evidence whatsoever? Why do we accept this idiotic censorship again?
As an Indian, it's especially annoying when websites just assume that I want the website in Hindi. We have 22 languages officially recognised in the Constitution, and a few hundred regional dialects, and Hindi is only spoken by 40% of the population. A lower percentage even reads it. I'm good with English, thanks. It's what I think in.
> How useful or convenient tech services are tends to correlate strongly with how close to SF Bay area your life is.
Exactly rule we've deduced with my wife in our trips in South-East Asia and out living in Russia.
Fun story:
In the middle of nowhere in Myanmar we'd stopped to eat in roadside shack (we'd travelled by motorcycle). Food was delicious, and my wife looked up Google Maps while we waited for ordered second dish. To our surprise, this shack was listed on GMaps. We wrote good review, why not? Google Map asks several additional questions, like «Is this place popular among the college crowd» and «Is this place wheelchair-accessible». Nearest college is about 500km to this place, 0.01% of children go to college, and wheelchairs, of course, could be pushed to this shack, as it has ground floor. I mean, no floor at all. It was very funny indeed.
But most of the time same service behavior is not funny, but irritating.
But I've spent months of my life telling various US based employers all the ways their assumptions about languages were wrong, and it was often a weird level of blindness where they'd be aware of some exceptions but fail to realise the same pattern repeats lots of places.
You'd see companies with separate Spanish versions of their US services still struggle to deal with the existence of Switzerland, for example.
If you really want to blow their minds, show them websites of the Government of Spain, which have separate versions in Basque, Catalan (+ Valencian) and Galician as well as in Spanish.
When is the last time you paid for a google service tho ? Its the height of millenial arrogance to think a compagny should give you a special treatment for free
For Google, you should type in Google.com/ncr . The NCR means no country redirect and you get standard google. I traveled a lot and learned this trick along the way. But your point is well made
Select Tools and then change from All Results to Verbatim. This should eliminate paraphrasing. Surround the query with double quotes if you don't want the words to be split on the page.
I wish that Google never removed the + operator because even if double quotes does something similar, it is not the same (thanks to Google Plus that I think doesn't even exist anymore).
You can put phrases in quotes and some of the initial results may rearrange themselves to reflect this intention that you've signaled but, overall, you'll still get many results that either contain different arrangements of those terms or don't contain them at all.
The minus sign has even hazier functionality and completely falls apart if you are searching --command-line options, etc.
It's not like this isn't a solved problem ... altavista had properly functioning (and complex) boolean operators that worked to give you very precise search results.
The reason you can't do that with google is that google doesn't want you to.
Google used to support all those things - quoted phrases, NOT, minus sign, etc. In fact, for a long time, unlike other search engines, using a + sign (for "must include this term") was unnecessary because every search term was interpreted that way implicitly.
Not only did google have the largest index, it also had the best search engine -- there's a reason they won on search. These days, they still have the largest index and the best crawler, but I'd argue they don't have the best query handler. At least DuckDuckGo takes what I say literally.
I remember 15-20 years ago when you could do complex searches with Google, and while it was great for power users, most regular users had issues with it, since searching "how do I replace a car wheel?" would search for that literal string, instead of parsing it to "how to replace a car wheel"
That said, maybe my memory is fuzzy and there was a time where Google search allowed rich queries and also did a good job at guessing users intentions.
About 10 years or so ago … google was ridiculously good. The web practically jumped out of the screen at you. It’s been piss poor for like the last 5 years or so though.
Someone else commented here in a past thread that the biggest cliff happened when Amit Singhal left Google and the AI lead John Giannandrea replaced him.
John Giannandrea brought about more AI heavy search and forced 'natural language' queries down the throat of everyone.
It obviously makes google money and is the right tool for popular queries. But for anyone doing more 'power user' searches it is just inept and I agree with GGP duckduckgo is now a better search engine for more complex queries.
You are the product. Their goal is to generate revenue with ads and links to their paying customers on the results page. Giving you precise results works against this objective.
Google got rid of that syntax about a decade ago, when they were trying to make Google Plus a thing. (As I recall, they wanted to reserve it for G+ usernames, like using @ for Twitter or Instagram.) I just checked and it looks like they still haven't brought it back.
They "new" syntax is to surround the desired term with double quotes. But of course quoting was already used for searching phrases, so autosuggestions stopped working for phrase searches. Progress!
It's easy to see why they wouldn't reintroduce power user tools once removed. It's sucky, but all mass-market tech is like this, constantly adapting to fit some lowest common denominator. Power users just aren't that.
I learned this the other day because Google thinks I want google.co.hk when I access from my VPN IP address (which is in a New Jersey data center). I filled out their "wrong country" form and of course haven't heard back and don't expect to. The /ncr workaround means I have to go to google.com/ncr before searching instead of searching from the browser search bar - annoying!
What I find strange about this is that, given how Netflix accounts are all attached to a billing instrument, and how it is generally at least "very annoying" to get a bank account in a different country, it seems like Netflix should not care at all about VPN usage: they "should" just use the country from the billing address on your credit card to decide what content you have access to... it not only seems like it would be a lot less work for Netflix, but would also be a much tougher region wall to bypass. (And like, I do see the commentary about using a UK card with the wrong IP, but that's a different backing argument involving credit card fraud and clearly something you are already past due to how you have a Netflix account somehow.) I can only imagine that the underlying contracts with the content providers are "written stupid" in some way (in ways that are needlessly difficult to enforce), limiting the location of the viewer instead of the origin of the viewer. (FWIW: I am now seeing 7ewis mentioned this same idea in a different thread.)
It would be much easier to bypass by using the pirate bay though, in which case Netflix doesn't get any money at all.
I think this is why they're doing it this way, at least they get paid. For Netflix it doesn't really matter which region a subscriber uses as long as they pay.
I think they just act against VPN use because the content owners force them to. They love trying to enforce their old borders in a digital world that has none. Personally I think they should be happy that users are going out of their way to pay for the content given how many alternatives are available. They even pay more for the VPN itself.
Really, how many users will go like "Oh blast, my favourite show is not available in my region, guess I better wait until someone inks a deal and allows me to watch it"?
They restrict to a particular country because it makes vastly, vastly more money.
Shows are worth disproportionately more in some territories, local broadcasters are also very good customers they want to keep happy and only license in areas covered by their transmission windows, basic things like the structure of the school holidays and weather make a tremendous difference when it's profitable to launch a show etc etc.
If I have a friend in the US, it's easier for them to set me up a guest account than for me to figure out how to use the Pirate Bay. Plus there's almost no risk of legal problems from using a friends Netflix account.
For now, yes. But they are definitely on a campaign to reduce the family sharing between countries as well. Along with this VPN ban I think they are just forcing people to pirate.
Just refusing to take someone's money and expecting them to wait until you will is not realistic. Even people that have worries about torrents will have friends/colleagues/nephews that are happy to produce a USB stick upon request.
Netflix has profiles intended to keep track of different members of the households preferred shows. The most expensive plan only allows 4 screens to be used at one time and they might notice when the "family" members appear to be in different countries.
In theory a single someone can share with another single someone but multiple households would be hard pressed to do so as it would be easy to exceed the number of screens preventing others who pay for the service from watching.
If you aren't already paying the extra $5 for 4 screens and UHD you only get 2 HD screens which is even more unsuited for sharing.
> A UK person could easily get access to Netflix US by getting a friend in the US (or a US-based ebay seller) to set up their Netflix account
This can't be any random stranger if the UK person will be using the US person's means of payments. Therefore, not 100% but it could work in most cases.
Exactly... this simply isn't easy to pull off, and is certainly nowhere near as easy to pull off as changing your IP address, and is going to have way fewer false positives
(in addition to fewer false negatives) than attempting to whack-a-mole VPNs over time with nothing more than limiting the number of Netflix accounts a person can pay for with a single credit card (such as to "1"). I'm literally mostly known for running a worldwide market with tens of millions of users--Cydia--and I'm telling you: it isn't some trivial restriction to bypass if you require someone's billing instrument to be located in a specific country (and the fact that such restrictions work so well is a big reason why blockchain has been so revolutionary to so many sectors... but isn't really going to affect Netflix's billing any time soon).
They'd have to also block BIN ranges often used for virtual cards (e.g. those used by Brex, Wise, privacy.com) and ranges commonly used for prepaid cards. Otherwise it's still easy to bypass.
One thing which supports your view: Spotify uses card billing address, and has large international pricing differences, but I don't hear much about people bypassing it by getting someone in the Philippines to pay for their account.
> They'd have to also block BIN ranges often used for virtual cards (e.g. those used by Brex, Wise, privacy.com) and ranges commonly used for prepaid cards. Otherwise it's still easy to bypass.
They sell netflix cards at supermarkets, so they would need to cease that also.
Just have separate prepaid cards per country? You're already paying the price for that country's content selection, so Netflix should have no issue giving you access to that content either.
That still allows easy bypassing of the country restrictions. If you're a local pay TV broadcaster who has paid a premium price for a show that is particularily attractive in a given country, you are not going to permit Netflix to sell the country you paid exclusive rights for.
Netflix could trivially buy the rights cheaply for a small country with a tiny economy and then use these cards to sell to the US or other major countries where the rights could cost a thousand percent more.
Yes, it can be any random stranger. Just because you have access to a Netflix account, that doesn't mean you get to see/use the payment card details for something else.
If you don't believe me, ask a Chinese friend to show you how easy it is to buy a Netflix account on Taobao.
> It would be nearly impossible for Netflix to comply with their agreements with content owners.
So perhaps Netflix should actually disrupt the industry by killing those stupid regional agreements that are a vestige from when film was distributed on reels.
Films are still sold that way, but if anyone could crack the country-specific market paradigm, surely Netflix could.
Netflix can’t even get parity for licensing on content they’ve helped produce/took over.
I stopped paying for Netflix for a lot of reasons, but the straw that broke the camels back for me was when I wanted to watch something with my Fiancé who lives in the UK and despite the series in question being branded a Netflix series, they didn’t have it on their service in the UK.
I don’t lay this all at Netflix’s feet. This stuff has always been fucked and Netflix has less leverage then ever since every other rights holders wants toss their hat into the ring and hope they reach at least a break even point while their competitors fail and then consolidation happens as the losers make deals with the winners.
I don’t mind paying for services but the incredible fragmentation of the market right now has pushed me back over the line where it is so much easier and more convenient with less bullshit (You still can’t get more than 720p unless you’re using Edge on PC) involved to torrent the limited selection of media I’m interested in again.
Netflix branding is routinely applied to content that Netflix has licensed for distribution in only part of the world. Their FAQ[1] suggests this is because Netflix wasn’t available worldwide at the time, but I’ve seen some internationally-produced shows arrive on Netflix in the US as originals when they aren’t branded as such elsewhere.
"Netflix original" at this point literally just means "Netflix is showing this show for the first time in this particular territory." And nothing else.
With every studio opening their own streaming service, Netflix doesn't have much negotiation power anymore. That's probably the reason of this change, they are trying to sweeten the deal with publishers to keep inventory on the platoform.
Contracts with the owners of the movies are a factor: Netflix might not have the right to show a given film in your country. Their contracts with the studios might require them to try to enforce this.
(You might consider re-reading my final sentence. The proximal cause isn't particularly interesting or surprising: the ultimate cause is the better mystery.)
What you are saying makes sense for legit viewers, but the goal of all this geofencing nonsense is ostensibly because content producers want to sue or press charges against pirates. They have to do that where the pirates are physically located, not where they got a credit card.
This is a shocking explanation, as it doesn't seem compatible with the oft-detailed explanation of these region locking mechanisms as being more about carving up contracts and extracting more value. As an example (from a year ago, before Paramount+, which has been confusing), you can watch Star Trek: Discovery in the United States... burn only on CBS All Access. Netflix managed to score the European rights to stream that, where CBS doesn't have a brand or any other particularly-interesting-to-that-audience content. Netflix thereby isn't allowed to show Star Trek: Discovery to people in the US, but I don't see how any explanation about that could be tied to pressing charges for piracy?
I’m totally talking out my ass, so don’t be too shocked. :-)
It could be that the decision about which service gets European access rights is made only after the decision about which content will even be allowed for broadcast in a region.
It could be that in these huge corporations, the business side of the company negotiates regional access rights. The totally separate legal department enforces the geofence, and they are driven more by their contact with content producers’ anti-piracy legal departments, squeaky wheel style.
I'm registered to vote in Michigan. I live in Mexico. Michigan's web site for requesting absentee ballots blocks connections from Mexico. I checked with various vpn endpoints, they seem to be blocking the poorer countries like Ukraine, Poland, Mexico, while passing the richer ones like UK, Germany, Canada.
I live in Japan and have the same problem with the Massachusetts department of state website (which contains voting information). I contacted my state representative (who does represent me, as I voted for him) and unfortunately he couldn't do much for me other than forward my inquiry.
You are a citizen of a state if you are a US citizen and reside in the state, but you may be a citizen of a state, and entitled to vote their, under other circumstances. Generally, I believe (and this is specifically the rule in California) citizens residing outside the US retain citizenship in the State (if any) in which they were last resident, and are eligible to vote more specifically based on their last resident address. (Military voters have different rules, this is general overseas citizens.)
>Most U.S. citizens 18 years or older who reside outside the United States are eligible to vote absentee for federal office candidates in U.S. primary and general elections. In addition, some states allow overseas citizens to vote for state and local office candidates and referendums. For information about your state, see the Voting Assistance Guide.
>In some states, U.S. citizens who are 18 years or older and were born abroad but who have never resided in the United States are eligible to vote absentee. Direct your questions about eligibility to local election officials
> Google rightly defaults to Arabic if you're not logged in
How about Google uses the user agent's language setting sent in the header? This frustrates me to no end living in Germany using an English language browser.
The point was to connect computers together, and users, whatever their geographical location was. I'm still not certain why we allowed geographical restrictions to exist on these networks of tubes.
Don't worry, with new laws requiring x% of content has to be made in a country, we can ensure that geolocking is enshrined in both old and modern laws.
These laws are simply ridiculous. Good content simply sells. Just look at Parasites, Money Heist. International success from small local foreign studios.
There was a business need so someone stepped up to fill the void by geomapping IPs. Given legal compliance concerns this was inevitable, even completely ignoring the profit potential from even very coarse-grained (ie. country-level) differential pricing.
Actively preventing this would have necessitated some pretty ugly tradeoffs which no one was incentivized to make.
I feel your pain. I'm an American living in Australia, so I'm not as significantly affected. Still my Google account and Apple accounts are all US based. My Apple account is tied into a family account I share with my US based family. I cannot download specific apps that are only on the Australian Apple App Store. My Sony Android TV cannot download some Australian television apps.
I cannot purchase Audible audiobooks without VPN'ing back in to the US, even with credits I've accrued.
I move between three countries but have to keep my account region to my family’s because of family sharing.
I keep three accounts for the three regions, two dummy and one main. One inelegant solution I found is to sign out of the main account, sign in with a dummy account and install the apps I need from that region and signing back in with the main account.
The mobile apps for my US and Taiwanese banks are both region-locked to the US and Taiwan. Once I switched my region to Taiwan the Ally app stopped getting updates and eventually wouldn't let me sign into my account anymore.
It does. I live in Germany, but am American. I couldn't download the EU Digital Vaccine Certificate app until I switched my Apple account from US to Germany...
Have you considered going to the press with this story? It sounds like the kind of thing that could ultimately lead to a very critical piece in some major news media, which might push the tide back somewhat.
Similar for me. My country of origin is the US, and my Apple account is connected to a US credit card. But I live in Israel and was vaccinated here. Since I am linked to the US App Store, I can't download the Israeli Vaccine Certification App ("Green Passport"). Nor can I easily switch my Apple account to Israel as I have several subscriptions that would need to be canceled.
As a Brit living in the middle East for most of the year, I resolved these issues by setting up Home Assistant in my house on UK with the wireguard add-on and upping my bandwidth so my local download speed matches the UK upload speed.
This allows me to use all UK services perfectly. Including iPlayer.
Good thing about wireguard is I can use it with my android TV also, making UK media consumption a breeze.
Thanks for the tip. From a 30,000 perspective, it’s crazy that we have to go through the wasteful exercise of shipping gigabytes of video data up and down scarce residential fiber for no other reason than to tick a performative copyright box.
> It amazes me how few services ever take into consideration that people don't always live and work in their country of origin.
Fun/sad fact (or not really a fact, honestly I didn't ask a lawyer to check) many are unaware off: "digital nomadism" is largely illegal, although nobody is hunting such people actively so far. The laws usually require you to have a local work permit if you work (even remotely, for your usual employer overseas) while residing in a foreign country.
Needless to say getting such a permit usually is unnecessarily hard. I believe governments should fix this by making it easy for foreigners working remotely on "leisure trips" to legalize their status and pay a reasonable amount of local taxes (to support the local infrastructure they use) while legitimately bypassing the mechanisms set to handicap them in competition with the local workforce (because they don't really compete with them in this case). Perhaps they could just introduce remote worker visa type which would be as easy to get as simple leisure travel visas are.
I think free, easy movement between countries is a thing of the past. Climate change is going to lead to nationalist isolation as countries try to preserve their resources as they start to run out.
Things are still largely locked down from the pandemic, and I don’t think international tourism will ever go back to being as easy as it was pre-pandemic. Many formerly bustling tourist sites have decided its really nice not to have tourists.
In this context, I think we can expect the Balkanization of the Internet to continue.
> Things are still largely locked down from the pandemic
I doubt this can be forever because the effect is questionable (as long as countries don't put real lockdowns seriously quarantining every traveler with no exceptions and no chance to escape, and also eliminating illegal border crossing which is hardly possible) and the economic harm is enormous. I believe it's only a matter of time (and of financial resources running out perhaps) before every country will start treating COVID like ordinary influenza (which kills people too) and give up lockdowns.
> Many formerly bustling tourist sites have decided its really nice not to have tourists.
People who worked for tourist-dependent businesses will argue. Also note that for many countries tourism was the primary money source. In many such countries people don't care about COVID, don't wear masks (even though they are required to) and will probably resist governments which would block their income source for long.
I agree; and war has a way of closing borders. I have a feeling that international travel going forward is going to be only for the rich and well-connected.
The number of people working abroad globally is set to grow to over a hundred million in the next couple of years. I'd hardly call that niche, especially when that number looks set to continue climbing - especially when you also take into account the boom in remote work.
I'd call it pretty short-sighted to not see that as an ever increasing problem. I'd also posit that a solution wouldn't take a colossal amount of resources to solve in most cases.
I understand where you are coming from but I think the post you're replying to is more pragmatic.
Let's say Netflix has to chose between two problems to solve: secure distribution for desired content, and ensuring that you can view that content wherever you are.
They likely see the tension between these things - the people who sell them media rights likely insist on tight region controls (or, would charge NF a lot more for "global" rights vs "US" rights.)
If NF messes up securing quality content, they risk losing most of their 75 million users. On the other hand, they risk inconveniencing ... thousands? Tens of thousands? of users while they are traveling.
I honestly don't think it is a complicated problem to solve when it comes to paid services. I'm making an assumption here, but I imagine as a matter of policy, every bank keeps on record if a bank account is local or foreign owned. And I'm also making an assumption that it wouldn't be a big reach for banks to share that information with payment services.
Following that, if you're using a local UK bank account, you should be able to access UK structured services. Yes, I'm sure it's not as simple as that, but I can't see such a system requiring a radical overhaul of how services are distributed. Of course dual passport holders will be net winners, but no system is perfect, and I can't imagine many people going to the trouble of getting a US passport just to watch reruns of The Sopranos.
You are deeply under-appreciating the non-technical complexity of this space.
Let's assume media rights are sold on exclusive regional basis. If I own the rights to distribute a show in Latvia, nobody else has that right. Meaning when Netflix buys the rights to stream that same show in the US, it is explicitly prohibited from streaming it to other countries because those rights belong to others (eg, if Netflix allows even a US citizen to stream that show in Latvia, that harms my right as the licensee there.)
I would be surprised if the contract language has provisions for "well, if a US person is in another country you can still stream it to them."
So to do what you're proposing, Netflix has to either put themselves in legal jeopardy by violating the contracts they signed limiting distribution to the US (I know you think it's fine but I bet their lawyers don't think it is) or they would have to pay much more for international distribution - meaning, if NF is allows to stream to everywhere, they have to pay the creators much more because the creators won't be able to sell to others (like my Latvian company.)
So you can see that Netflix's "cost" of making you happy is either being sued into oblivious or dramatically increasing their operating costs. Now, if there were so many people who'd sign up for NF if this was available, they'd certainly do it. But I am guessing this affects such a small minority of their users, and that an even smaller minority cancels subscriptions because of this, that it's just bad ROI and they don't do it.
I would think the law is more concerned that the UK version of the service, is being paid for by a UK account registered at a UK address, and paying UK fees. It's still being distributed to the UK as far as every financial transaction is concerned.
But I see your point, it's a license issue. I guess Netflix's lawyers should sharpen their pencils, because what you described is already happening, because despite their best efforts, the VPN's have managed to remain ahead.
Glad you see my point. This article is about NF making this even harder, so it sounds like they are on it.
It is never about blocking 100% of things - if your wall is 99.99999% effective then you can claim to have done what you need to do to be compliant with your contract.
> I'm making an assumption here, but I imagine as a matter of policy, every bank keeps on record if a bank account is local or foreign owned.
Nope.
There are also some territories where there are significant cross country pollination of bank accounts - Australia and New Zealand are good examples. The EU is attempting to force cross territory banking without any limitations. Virtually nobody in the Middle East has a bank account in their actual country of residence.
> people who sell them media rights likely insist on tight region controls (or, would charge NF a lot more for "global" rights vs "US" rights.)
Netflix could tell them to pound sand. If those distributors want to sell their product, they’ll have to bend. What’s the alternative? Movie theaters? Netflix is such a market mover now, they can play a lot harder than in their early days.
> Netflix is such a market mover now, they can play a lot harder than in their early days.
They are no longer a market mover. Disney is.
Netflix should've "pounded everyone" five years ago when they were the only player in town. Now they don't even have content to show (my feed is 80% Netflix productions and 19% 10-20 year old movies).
> Let's say Netflix has to chose between two problems to solve: secure distribution for desired content, and ensuring that you can view that content wherever you are.
Security of distributing content has literally nothing to do with this. It has been shown times and again that Netflix reduced piracy in countries where it started operations.
Region blocking is the product of greed and shortsightedness by content owners.
This seems unlikely. In many cases multiple companies may own the rights to the same show for different regions. Of course there is going to be an X% discount on the contracts for Netflix if Netflix can prove they are not letting their content be seen out of region. Probably worth much more than the 1% of people who switch countries AND have picky preferences on languages/subscribing to multiple services.
> In many cases multiple companies may own the rights to the same show for different regions
Yes. And the only reason for many of those "different right in different regions" is greed and shortsightedness.
> Probably worth much more than the 1% of people who switch countries AND have picky preferences on languages/subscribing to multiple services.
You're completely ignoring all the other people who are willing to pay money and watch content that is region-locked for no reason. A German will happily watch original content from the states. Because it's not middle ages anymore, and people are quite happy watching content in multiple languages, because they know them.
Netflix isn’t choosing the policy they’re just required to enforce them per the licensing restrictions of the content they get rights too.
The studios who license the content do so on a geographic basis to various streaming providers.
It’s all geographic because its easier, and makes for a more consistent policy that all involved (content owners and distribution partners) can agree to. It’s not that I don’t understand your frustration but the whole system is set up that you can watch the content you can stream from the providers who serve the region you’re in. If the content you want to view isn’t available from a regional provider that’s not Netflix’s fault.
It’s not at all “easy” to switch to using something like a billing address because of the entrenched nature of the licensing system and a lack of motivation on the parts of the studios who have a system that “works” and likely wouldn’t see the benefit of what you’re proposing.
Spending a lot of my time abroad, I want to agree. But the vast majority of those that 100M are the global poor being shipped to the global rich for quasi-indentured servitude. Those folks aren’t worried about Rick’n’Morty S5 being blocked, and even if they are, they’re poor so who cares. /s
Yeah right, these are the people who got a license for their own geography years ago, won’t allow subtitling or control exposure absurdly. Whoever made the film has no say in this any more. Pathetic all around.
They do this with good intentions because not everyone can change this header (e.g if you're using some locked down browser at a kiosk you may not be able to change this) but it's infuriating for everyone who can.
>. It amazes me how few services ever take into consideration that people don't always live and work in their country of origin
I'm pretty sure they would take it into consideration, it's just that licensing of IP is a really tricky business. It's not a technical or business issue, it's a legal issue because bypassing geo-restrictions with a VPN is probably violating the terms of service of most content producers.
In the entire UAE IIRC only licensed telecommunications providers can produce telecom. services, and that's why Whatsapp can't offer call
It's only a legal issue because it's allowed to be.
The concept of "licensing territory" for IP is a 19th century relic. Licensing rights for streamed content could easily be made personal instead of national.
Given the amount of expense and effort required to police specific IPs, it would be likely cheaper to handle this with a fine-grained approach than to keep refining the current mess with ever-more-complex content limiting epicycles.
> It's only a legal issue because it's allowed to be.
That describes all legal issues.
I agree with you that its a relic that we should get rid of.
But its not simple to get rid of. There are tons of existing contracts.
There are some companies that their whole business is being content "distributer" for countries/territories. They will do anything they can to make sure they stay in business. They might be equivalent of horse whip manufacturer, but that doesn't mean they will go down without a fight.
For giant content owners like Disney, its probably easier to "contract renegotiation". Netfilx even if they were prepared to pay for worldwide distribution deal, it doesn't mean that content owners are willing or able to sell (if they have other exclusive agreements).
This mess would take a while (and by that I mean years and possibly decades) even if there was somebody powerful pushing for it. And I am not sure if there is any such powerful entity pushing for it.
Another way would be to have some kind of international
deal-agreement but that's even harder to get.
In short technical side is the easiest. And all IP/VPN blocking is peanuts compared to what it would cost(time and money) to renegotiate all the deals.
Yeah like, if the licensing wasn't an issue, Netflix would have a menu somewhere where you could simply select a country. They aren't doing this to be malicious, they just can't legally show certain content in certain countries.
Maybe there's a high-tech solution here, like asking a UK friend to use their Netflix when they're asleep (given the time difference). Your friend would run a VPN on their home PC for you.
And honestly, I can't see Netflix caring enough to crack down on it. If anything, it mimics what N should do, which is offer people an account with a logical geography independent of physical geography.
This isn't a particularly good solution as it relies on another person's goodwill, which is neither reliable nor available to everyone.
Assuming that the current geo-located situation continues, and realistically who sees that changing?, what's needed is a legal framework that explicitly allows people from different countries to access citizen-appropriate content in other parts of the world. Why should I have to jump through hoops to access a paid service like Netflix just because I happen to be located abroad for a week?
VPNs were never more than a band-aid solution to relocation problems, and truly are a terrible solution. They don't actually offer anonymity, privacy, or convenience. Their original job - tying remote people into a private network - is the only thing they're truly good at.
FWIW, the "high-tech solution"--if we are already giving up any pretext that we are doing anything "by the book" (which simply isn't going to be allowed any way you slice it)--is to just scrape the movie someone wants out of Netflix and let them download it from you... it 100% "solves the problem" ;P.
Haha. I like your thinking, but it’s sort of what caused this last wave of crackdowns. All those “free” VPN services work by letting you VPN to another locale in return for letting other users use your machine as an exit node into your locale. (I’m guessing) Netflix decided to enumerate the “exit node” IPs for some of the free VPNs, and ended up blocking the residential IPs. I could even see it ensnaring innocent apartment dwellers using a NATed IP or people getting IPs recycled through DHCP.
Yeah, I hear you. I'm a US citizen, but live in South Africa. So I have to do extra auth steps to login to banking, when not on a VPN. And also, lots of places now are cracking down on VOIP phone. I very nearly couldn't login to my bank because they wanted a phone number with a physical address attached. Netflix is an annoyance, but its the general trend that is worrying.
Even without switching countries, without a VPN every app on your phone knows when you leave home (switch from residential IP in city x to mobile IP in city x), arrive at work (switch from mobile IP in city x to business connection IP in city x), or take a flight (switch from mobile IP in city x to mobile IP in city y), or drive far, or check in to a hotel, et c et c et c.
VPNs are essential for people who need to obscure their travel patterns from data brokers, for privacy or physical security reasons.
Blocking them is like making an app that doesn't work at all with location services disabled: it's a privacy-invasive dick move.
As an expat from Canada living in Latin America and using a number of services from both regions, I've had similar probems, also these same problems with other services from specific countries outside of where I live that I need to use due to work.
Overall, this general location-obsessed balkanization of online servicces, websites and pages has become ridiculous. A great number of tech companies and websites, in ther fixation of "giving users a more localized, personalized experience" (in part mostly just tracking the shit out of them obsessively) have actually done more to break the ease of using the internet as a traveler and in ways that are ironic as helll when one considers the supposed ideals of an internet that was supposed to help more people become MORE global in their access to media, content and services regardless of where they reside or travel to.
What we're seeing is an absurd, almost fuedalized regression of what should and easily could be fully delocalized platforms, which ruins them in the name of supposedly making them better. It's tedious, annoying and increasingly common.
Even when logged in your google can sometimes roll back to arabic.
Go to accounts.google.com and there's an option for lagnauges and in there there's a setting called something like "automatically add languages", disable that one.
Having dealt with significant cyber attacks from Ukraine, Lithuania, and Russia, I can’t blame them for blocking. They probably could do it more elegantly however.
The first thing that irritated me when I moved to Qatar was how it was impossible to access a wide variety of US sites from foreign countries: my local trash service, Southwest Airlines... the list went on and on and on. I ended up standing up a VPN server in the US to deal with it, but it was a pain in the ass to deal with it.
> I have a UK TV license but of course, I can't watch UK TV from Qatar.
Not from UK but isn't there any app from your Set-top box or DTH provider like Sky-TV app?
I recently found in India that the apps of our set-top box providers are completely functional to watch any TV channel you subscribe, I don't watch TV so I didn't know this earlier but the app was the only way I could watch olympics as events were telecasted across multiple channels often simultaneously and so I had the app in several devices at the same time streaming different events.
Try: www.google.co.uk/?gl=GB
That should give you the same google as if you were in the UK. Or, that is what I use if I want to have the "pages from the UK" option.
Why do I have to tell each website the language I want in a website-specific way when there's been a standard HTTP header[1] to do exactly that for more than 20 years?
I'm honestly asking: do web developers ignore know basic HTTP features or is there some specific reason?
I don't know what Google does exactly, but at least in my case the header works as expected. I live in Germany, have set the language to en-US everywhere and Google serves me an english page just like I want it. And I'm not even logged in to Google.
I agree that it should not be like this. I only offered a workaround, but in this case it's not only the language that changes, the entire site is served as if you geolocation is GB.
> rightly defaults to Arabic if you're not logged in
The browser sends your configured language with literally every http request. If I'm in China, Chinese characters are really not going to help me no matter if I'm logged in or out. That's why my browser transfers that preference. Looking at IP only is just annoying.
Well, I think this is more of a licensing issue. The right owners expect the distributor to make sure to only distribute in areas they‘re allowed to by contract.
Netflix understands global distribution and the power of availability, Hollywood & friends will follow some day, just a matter of time.
The longest time I've worked overseas for was 3 months, so it's probably different to your experience. But I found the different content to be good. I had a whole new selection of shows and movies to watch since aside from the originals the content is pretty different between countries.
Consider finding a non-VPN-provider to set up your own tunnel via.
A VPS already bypasses known VPN provider ranges. A friend in the UK or US willing to put a box on their network and lose some bandwidth for a contribution towards a bigger connection would be even better (but of course requiring some trust)...
> A friend in the UK or US willing to put a box on their network and lose some bandwidth.
It’s very tempting to ask a friend to buy a nuc, and just post them a pre-configured .m2 drive. Likely overkill as a Pi or similar would probably suffice.
If its any consolation, the BBC recently pulled everything half decent that they own off netflix (The office, red dwarf, extras, thick of it, and loads more), so you're not missing much
you could get a $5/mo vps and you can make your own vpn. it does not anonymize you, but it does give you an ip in the area you want and it won't be on any block lists since only you use it.
> The law says you need to be covered by a TV Licence to:
watch or record programmes as they’re being shown on TV, on any channel
watch or stream programmes live on an online TV service (such as ITV Hub, All 4, YouTube, Amazon Prime Video, Now TV, Sky Go, etc.)
download or watch any BBC programmes on BBC iPlayer.
> You are supposed to but a TV license if you watch YouTube or Amazon Prime Video???
This is not about those platforms in general; it is about the likes of BBC iPlayer app on those platforms. Only the latter require a TV licence.
It is my understanding that, for example, watching BBC programmes on BritBox (a subscription-based streaming service from BBC and ITV) does not require a TV licence. [1]
Its sometimes just bizarre. I once applied to Facebook from Bangalore and while everything on the website was in English, one of the final questions was about diversity and gender and while the question was in English the multiple choice response was only in Kannada. There was no way to change the language and anyway everything except the multiple choice part was in English. I finally defaulted to using Google Translate to get the correct answer.
I live abroad from some time and never had to use VPN, so vital is relative. The more annoying thing is phone numbers. More and more web services are using it as a security measure, and a lot aren't programmed to deal with international numbers. A bank in my country is especially idiotic in that respect, and I keep a monthly 5€ phone plan from there just to be sure I'll not lose access to a few websites.
It’s not “rightly.” If I go to google.com, I expect google.com not the country-specific version. If, for example, I wanted Mexican google, I’d explicitly type google.com.mx etc. It’s a royal pain that google doesn’t respect the user’s intent and instead infers a language based on geography.
Many years ago, I worked at a small (3 US states) ISP, roughly 500-600K customers
This ISP was one that mostly absorbed smaller ISP's that weren't able to scale up enough to remain competitive.
One of the ISP's they absorbed was CondoInternet. A Seattle based firm that provided gigabit internet service across Seattle's affluent areas and expensive condos
As it turned out, a lot of the customers ordering the service hailed from a country with a very restrictive censorship regime. A "great firewall" if you will
They'd set up home-made VPN's using Raspberry Pi's etc for family to tunnel into and watch Netflix on typically
Netflix however even in 2017 was smart and their algorithm would see these thousands of people logging in while everyone else in Seattle was typically asleep and eventually ban the entire ISP's IP range. Logging in would give a "please turn off your proxy/VPN" error message
Every time this happened the ISP's phone tree would explode, going from mere seconds to literal 6-10 hour queue times. The NOC was entirely upskilled CS agents who had no idea how to contact Netflix's relevant teams to get the IP ban removed, instead they'd simply tell CS to have customers wait until the IP ban expired (usually a few days)
I tried getting my parents internet funneled through UK so that they could watch some stuff...no good. Both netflix and amazon prime picked up that something was off-sides. I suspect it was latency cause other side of world
You have to remember the movie business has been dragged kicking and screaming into progressively larger and larger buckets of money since forever. VCRs? They'll kill the movie industry. DVDs? Same. Blueray, even worse since quality is so good no one will ever buy a movie again. Streaming services? Last one out of Hollywood please turn out the lights. Blah, blah, blah. The then head of the MPAA Jack Valenti literally compared the VCR to a serial killer named the Boston Strangler.
"'I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.' Jack Valenti said this in 1982 in testimony to the House of Representatives on why the VCR should be illegal. He also called the VCR an "avalanche" and a "tidal wave", and said it would make the film industry "bleed and bleed and hemorrhage"
My point is yes there are incredibly strict covenants in place and I'm sure they're probably preventing more revenue than they're allegedly protecting.
Netflix signs licensing deals that are per-country, and the licenses require that Netflix actively enforce that media is steamed only to the country in question.
You think Netflix is enforcing these restrictions because it wants to, or because it thinks it's fun to defeat VPN's?
Of course not. All of this effort costs money that obviously Netflix wouldn't be paying if it weren't required to. It's doing so because it's contractually obligated to.
So don't get mad at Netflix. They don't have a choice. They're just doing what their content providers require them to.
Probably not, but remember Netflix is constantly having to negotiate new contracts with the content providers. If they don’t feel like Netflix is doing enough, they won’t negotiate another deal, or they will demand more money in return. Netflix will use their success at blocking VPNs as a negotiating tool.
I honestly think they are using the copyright lawyers as a scapegoat.
The have to do all sorts of Infrastructure tricks and optimizations to have the performance that they currently do.
They most likely realized they had a non-insignificant number of vpn connections (that can change country in short notice) and this probably introduced a massive spanner in the works on their Infrastructure/Optimizations.
I doubt the studios understand half of what Netflix has to do backend wise to appreciate any of it on a negotiation table.
There's no reason why VPN's would create any engineering headache for Netflix at all. So no, Netflix has absolutely zero engineering reason to crack down on VPN's.
And the studios are a lot smarter than you think, they've been doing regional licensing for a long time now. Everyone doing negotiations knows VPN's are the tool to get around region restrictions, and any exec can just ask their assistant or teenage kid to sign up for a handful of VPN services and see if they're able to watch Netflix through it. VPN's aren't some secret only hackers know about, they've had widespread consumer use for a long time.
The studios don't need to understand much of what Netflix is doing on the backend. They just put in the contract that Netflix must make all reasonable effort to ensure region restrictions can't be evaded via VPN, maintaining up-to-date lists of blocked IP ranges, which will be periodically verified via e.g. the current top 10 most popular VPN providers.
It's all quite simple and straightforward. No scapegoating.
I wish it would be made transparent how Netflix acquired the licence and made that contract transparent. I would evade media with unreasonable enforcement that doesn't live up to the modern world of media anyway.
I suspect you won't get an answer because they are probably not contractually obliged to go to this length. I doubt these contracts would go into such a deeply tech savvy specification.
However it is a pretty good scapegoat convenience to point your fingers to copyright lawyers.
The thing is they probably realized that if they continued to do nothing, everyone and their dog would be connected through a Canadian ip which gives people the most content out of any country out there.
> Of course not. All of this effort costs money that obviously Netflix wouldn't be paying if it weren't required to. It's doing so because it's contractually obligated to.
I feel like this was probably true five years ago, but not today. The whole point of publishers slowly setting up their own streaming services (like Disney -> Disney+) and streaming services slowly vertically integrating with studios (Netflix, Amazon Prime Video + Amazon Studios) is to bypass this stupid shit.
If Netflix financed the show, and Netflix streams the show, and Netflix has global distribution, then why, pray tell, does Netflix give a shit any more about whether a user is using a VPN or not?
> If Netflix financed the show, and Netflix streams the show, and Netflix has global distribution
The number of shows where Netflix has genuinely global distribution can be counted on one hand, since they don't operate in China and tend to very deliberately not pay a bunch of money for rights they can't do anything with.
That's not what I'm asking. I'm asking how above and beyond are they required to go with ensuring this. Technically they could require a Netflix employee to be present to verify identity whenever you stream to ensure you are in the correct country, but obviously they aren't going to that extreme of lengths. But if they're actively using heuristics to target blocks of legitimate residential IPs that might be secretly using VPNs, well that sounds like above and beyond what they may be obligated to do.
Of course there are. Pretty much every stupid geo-restriction, restriction on downloads, restrictions on the number of downloads (why??), etc comes down to some stupid rights holder think this is something they want.
This makes a lot more sense why CondoInternet and other small ISPs joined Wave Division Holdings now.
What do you think the future of Wave is since their leadership exited the firm and convinced an SPAC to put them in charge of a new regional competitor (Ziply Fiber)?
I'm guessing that was probably a blatant abuse of the residential service. Not that I agree, but ISPs already block port 25 for the most part. I'm surprised they didn't just start banning customers abusing the service.
> I'm surprised they didn't just start banning customers abusing the service.
One of CondoInternet's advertised selling points before they sold to Wave Broadband is that you could buy the 1Gbps service and do whatever you wanted, including run your own servers.
So it wasn't an abuse of the service. Everyone I knew on CondoInternet would buy the highest speed package so they could run Minecraft and Plex and other servers for their friends. It was like having Speakeasy Internet Services SDSL back again but with 200 times the upload.
Disney+ had inexplicably blocked my IP address for "being a VPN" for close to year, despite me never running a VPN from my home network. Though the block didn't stop me from watching their content, it just stopped me from paying for, which I was more than willing to do and spent far to long dealing with their support to try to make it happen.
If the same thing happens with Netflix, it also won't keep me from watching Netflix content, I'll just stop paying for it. Other than the aforementioned Disney+ content, I rarely pirate anything these days and I'd rather not if I can help it.
Maybe you just didn't realize? A lot of Chrome extensions are now backdoored with Infatica spyware that literally turns your browser into a proxy for.. whoever:
On the other hand, if everyone looks like they're running a VPN, then maybe the companies will be forced not to discriminate. (Although I suppose the same disclaimers about running a Tor exit node apply.)
It's not like Netflix enjoys making it a PITA to use their service, but the people who on the content care a great deal about it. They leverage these disparities to maximize their cash flow.
Same as Bright Data (https://brightdata.com/), formerly Luminati Networks, who apparently use or used HolaVPN customers [1] as exit nodes for their proxy networks and data collection infrastructure. Their current website sheds some light into how they get their residential and mobile IPs [2] (emphasis mine):
> Bright Data attains its peers (Residential and Mobile IPs) through the Bright SDK, which is integrated into applications as another form of app monetization.
> App users are presented with the option to opt-in to the Bright Data Network and become a peer (share their device idle resources) in exchange for an ad-free or free application. All peers sharing resources with the Bright Data residential network have personally opted-in and may opt-out at any time.
It would be nice to know which applications have their SDK integrated, so I could avoid them.
Well that's concerning. What's the actual use case for this? It's certainly not priced to compete with traditional VPNs. Half tempted to install this on a machine as a honeypot and see what traffic comes through.
Retail bots and sneaker bots. Botters buy proxy IPs in bulk. When botters buy limited edition Nikes using bots, each “task” uses a different proxy, so they can increase their chances by appearing to Nike to be different customers. 500 tasks on a single shoe with 500 proxies and virtual credit cards looks like 500 different people when it’s really just one.
There are two different kinds of proxies (basically — there are more nuances I don’t want to get into): Datacenter (DC) and Residential (Resis). DC proxy servers are blazing fast but easy for a retailer to determine the traffic is coming from a datacenter like AWS so there is a high risk of getting the IP banned. Resis are slower but they are residential IPs so slower but less likely to get banned because they look like traffic from average consumers.
If the average buyer of proxies is buying 100+ IPs per month and IPs get banned constantly, proxy providers need a massive pool of millions of IPs running on residential addresses. That’s where these “free” VPN come into play. The consumer gets no-cost VPN, but their PC becomes an exit node for these residential IP proxy providers who charge people for the proxy access. There are tons of proxy providers but I think most are just reseller accounts of a few massive firms that run the show.
I am only speaking on the topic from a purely technical perspective. I do not want to discuss or spark debate around the ethics or people’s displeasure with the existence of botting and/or scalpers — you asked for a use case, and I’m only answering the question with a multi-billion dollar use case.
> If the same thing happens with Netflix, it also won't keep me from watching Netflix content, I'll just stop paying for it
The Disney+ one sounded like a (hilarious) bug in their logic. Not sure why that would translate to Netflix
Edit: I may have misunderstood. I thought Disney+ was blocking the user from paying for Disney+ but not from streaming Disney+. I missed the implication that they started pirating the content.
I don't think it's a hilarious bug in their logic, just collateral damage in the war between VPN providers and Disney/Netflix/etc. The VPN providers try to get IP ranges that look like residential IPs. Ideally they rent them from the same ISPs who really do provide residential service. By the nature of the traffic, Disney can't tell for sure that it's coming from a VPN - just something like "a suspiciously large number of users connected from this range, especially users who currently seem to be travelling internationally".
Perhaps the user had a dynamic IP address and kept getting one in the same range that was also used for VPNs. Perhaps he had a static one but Disney banned ranges by the /28 instead of individual addresses.
I don't have time to dig up anything authoritative right now, but I assumed this was common knowledge and uncontroversial. It is precisely this kind of practices (reusing/selling/buying user and customer IPs - there are companies that specialize as brokers) that allows them their low prices while generally not getting blocked by services like Netflix, and I suspect it's also what's behind the move from NF.
> there are companies that specialize in brokers...
You're describing a botnet here. There are certainly organizations that will sell you access to their botnet, but I wouldn't describe them as uncontroversial, and I'd like to learn about ones that are structured as companies or that have as authoritative a reach as NordVPN.
For anyone else who also read it as a big: the Disney+ user above torrented (most likely) the Disney content while not being a customer (a decision that was taken out of his hands).
I agree--they're not denying me their content, they're denying my payment. If this is really where they want to go, they know how it ends (read: someone disrupts their model and they get left in the dust).
I'm a little surprised that Netflix is going to this amount of effort. I certainly understand why Netflix must take reasonable steps to enforce geo-restrictions. If they buy the rights to Star Trek Discovery for the UK, CBS doesn't want them letting Americans watch Star Trek Discovery when they're trying to sell Americans Star Trek Discovery on another platform. Whether you agree with this or not, if Netflix doesn't comply, they won't get content from third parties.
At the same time, one would think this would be an area where Netflix wouldn't care about a very small number of people bypassing restrictions. They need to be seen to be enforcing the restrictions and they need to actually enforce them to a large extent. I guess I'm puzzled as to why they are going above-and-beyond expectations. Are the expectations that high? Have more VPNs made it easy to get around geo-blocks by using residential IP addresses?
It seems like Netflix is potentially going to end up blocking IP addresses of customers while cutting down on a very small amount of people hopping their geo-fences. It also seems like their content providers would be placated by the pretty decent job they do of banning VPNs.
Even if content license holders don't require Netflix to go above and beyond, building sophisticated DRM is a moat against other streaming services. If Netflix can build a sophisticated VPN-detection service, copyright holders will be much less willing to license their content to upstarts who can't match its capabilities.
In the same vein, it can be rational behavior for a market leader who deals in private information (most online advertising companies) to advocate for consumer privacy protections. It "hurts" them, but if the resulting regulations are so onerous that only incumbent(s) can comply, it can restrict the competitive landscape and paradoxically be advantageous to the existing leaders.
There is a different incentive at play here. Netflix wants to track individuals. I wouldn't be surprised if some other agreement were behind this move, perhaps like other secret agreements:
> There is a different incentive at play here. Netflix wants to track individuals.
Maybe this is naive, but doesn't Netflix already have enough information from the account already? Credit card info, name, address… what does having an IP address get them in addition to all that?
It gives you a lot more information. Where you travel, who you travel with, what types of content you associate with different regions, how much you share with friends, how your preferences change as you hang around different areas and individuals.
Information is deceptive because it's exponential. Detectives often make or break cases on a single lucky clue. Data mining on the Internet is no different. Information goes massively further than most people realize.
No, the second idea is silly. They already have buckets of information. In fact, they have a whole team dedicated to making sure they don't hold onto certain types of PII (Personally identifiable Info)
They have their flaws, but they don't waste time doing useless shit (once they have figured that out).
I mean, obviously they notice which accounts are breaking whatever rules are currently in force.
>If Netflix can build a sophisticated VPN-detection service, copyright holders will be much less willing to license their content to upstarts who can't match its capabilities.
Have you missed the events of the last few years? Netflix's future competition isn't going to be scrappy startups, it's going to be content providers with their own streaming service.
This is a super interesting take and I wonder how closely this reflects Netflix's actual strategic thinking. If so it's an interesting game theory question, because the whole reason rightsholders would want this is to guarantee the value of splitting up distribution to multiple local distributors, most of whom would be well outside the realm of matching Netflix capabilities. But if those players can't match Netflix's DRM and thus rightsholders won't license to them, then all they are doing is giving Netflix is a discount for restricted rights without any additional profit.
Many VPN providers advertise themselves specifically as being able to get around Netflix restrictions, or if not directly they pay YouTubers or websites to mention it in an ad.
VPNs are definitely making heavy use of residential IPs now, they often have routing rules in place that use non res IPs for most traffic, but traffic to Netflix, Prime, iPlayer etc. get routed via a res IP.
Also have no idea why they're cracking down on it so hard, thought it'd help them retain customers if anything.
Not that I want to give them any ideas, but surely the best solution would be to just lock the account down to the region the billing account is from? Although I think you can sometimes get a payment through with a fake address, it'd at lest mean people can't jump between countries at will.
> Not that I want to give them any ideas, but surely the best solution would be to just lock the account down to the region the billing account is from?
I'm pretty sure (based on dealing with DRM/geoIP restriction requirements in other spheres) that it's because the media companies are incredibly anal about enforcement on strict geographic lines. They don't care if your account is linked to a US credit card at a US billing address, despite how effective that is at ensuring that you are a US user (and how difficult it is to spoof). They are hellbent on the idea that no US-only content should ever be streamed to an IP address terminating at a non-US location. For them it's absolutely not about people or accounts - it's entirely a matter of geography.
Netflix could easily apply a rule based on the region of the billing account, and I am sure it would be vastly more effective than playing whack-a-mole with individual IP addresses. However, the media companies would undoubtedly still insist that they do strict geoIP restriction as well. And if Netflix did both, anybody who is traveling outside of their home country would find Netflix to be bereft of content; anyone who travelled frequently would find Netflix to be perfectly useless. By going all-in on geoIP, Netflix keeps the geoIP-fixated media companies happy, while ensuring that users see plenty of content even as they move from country to country.
I'd guess that Netflix is only upping their game on residential IPs etc now because the media companies are no longer happy and are leaning on them - VPN services are simply becoming too brazen about advertising the ability to bypass Netflix geo restrictions by clicking flags. Whenever it becomes this obvious to the media guys that anyone with a pulse and a credit card can circumvent Netflix's controls, they'll be pressed to 'do better' or lose their rights to content. Netflix takes some steps, catches some backlash, and the media companies are placated for a while.
> Why should I have to jump through hoops just because I happen to be located abroad for a week?
I could easily see a gray market in, essentially, location-specific "rebilling" springing up the same day as this. Want to watch a show that's not available in your country? Sign up here for an account billed through an address that can watch that show, with a small convenience surcharge.
The proper way to implement this restriction would be to only accept payments from a list of approved BINs (the first 6 digits of the credit/debit card). These numbers are strictly tied to the bank that's issuing the cards, the list is publicly available, and bypassing it is incredibly difficult. At the very least this control alone would be (very close to) ensuring that the card holder who's paying for the account has a legal right to live/work in the country in question (which is a requirement for opening a bank account in most places).
There are some BINs which you could associate with a territory, but don't provide this level of assurance about the card holder (those "burner" credit card providers for instance), but the list of exceptions is short enough to manage quite easily.
There are already service providers that implement this, f1.tv does for instance. Another peculiar example is India, where they just use phone numbers, because getting a phone number in India requires a KYC process, non-residents are only entitled to temporary services, and it's very hard to maintain your service if you leave the country.
Isn't the better question to ask if geographically restricted broadcasting rights aren't simply obsolete ?
Like, it possibly made some sense back when the stuff was actually broadcast via terrestrial TV to the given area (and even then it was normal to watch TV across national borders, even over the Iron Curtain!) but it really does not seem to make any sense what so ever in modern global world.
It rather seems like yet another case of someone clinging to and enforcing by any means available an outdated concept because it just so happens to bring them more money if they keep it alive.
It's not obsolete because as a content producer the global players are not always willing to pay top dollar for your content. In many cases you can get more money by selling to multiple local players with single language, geo-restricted distribution rights. And this is the tip of the iceberg because you also have different types of rights for theatrical vs streaming distribution, and your strategy could interleave them in multiple non-intuitive ways.
I understand there is a long running system in place, but from the point of view of a modern viewer/customer it all just looks like a mess.
Basically, there should be a place where you click on a button, pay some money and play the thing anywhere in the world.
Like even some possibly inflated/default price. Like this way you would get something from each viewer in geos where you have not actually sold the rights & nothing really says you can't rise or lower the price if you see demand or lack there of.
Anything else frankly looks like excuses to a normal viewer/customer in the year or 2021.
How long the system has existed has nothing to do with it. It's pure economics. If you owned content rights would you sell it for $1M when you get split up rights and get $2M for partial rights and still have upside for the remainder? If someone on the internet said "it just doesn't make sense to a viewer" would that change your mind?
No it wouldn't. The dollars don't lie. The viewers opinion is reflected in what they pay for, and that is reflected in what distributors are willing to pay. These things do change over time as the landscape shifts and new business model possibilities show up (eg. Disney+ day and date streaming releases), but it has absolutely nothing to do with your armchair notions of what makes sense to a "normal viewer". They pay or they don't, businesses are rewarded by figuring out the aggregate implications.
Selling content for different prices in different markets:
- increases revenue
- relies on being able to separate those markets effectively
It's not obsolete, because it still works.
And it's not a historical accident resulting from past business models.
Content providers with no 'analogue' history also have geographical pricing. Example: Wes Bos' excellent JavaScript courses are priced differently depending on your country.
This makes sense, but it doesn’t make sense why a content seller would want to prevent someone from a cheaper market from appearing to be from a more expensive market. If the subscriber is paying the higher price because they are pretending to be from that country, why wouldn’t they just let them? I can see trying to stop the reverse, but not that.
One classic example from microeconomics textbooks is child/adult admission tickets for cinemas. The cost to provide the service (and the constraints on capacity) are the same for both types of ticket. But children have less money than adults (in general) and it's easy to stop an adult posing as a child (by checking ID).
The Netflix example is more complicated, as there are transactions happening at two levels:
* studios are selling content to distributors in different markets
* Netflix is selling subscriptions to consumers in different markets
Also, unlike the single-event case at the top of my post, the service being provided isn't identical for all buyers. Folks in the UK don't get the same bundle of shows as folks in the US.
Even if folks in the UK pay more, that doesn't mean Netflix is OK with them watching all the shows that are available to Netflix US subscribers. Because the creators of those shows sold the UK rights to a different company (e.g. Sky TV) that was willing to pay more than Netflix.
Netflix doesn't care about this directly but, if UK customers bypass the restrictions at too large a scale, the creators/studios won't be willing to sell rights to Netflix in future. Because, by selling rights to Netflix for the US, they reduce the value of the rights they sell to Sky in UK.
What I don't get is why having a German VPN IP with an account that has a German billing address is a problem. The VPN restrictions simply shouldn't be relevant in this case as we aren't trying to access content not available here.
If you are using a VPN how do they know you aren't on vacation in Australia and are trying to watch shows that Netflix doesn't have the rights to in Australia.
I understand that this is about your location while streaming not while signing the contract.
But the location only matters because of where you sign the contract. No one loses money from allowing this to happen, no rights are interfered with. If a resident of Australia vpn’s Into Germany to watch an Aussie programme then an Australian network loses a viewer for at least that content, but a German who’s paid for it in Germany?
I pay for UK Netflix still because where I live the local Netflix only gives me subtitles in the local language. If they lock me out of my VPN then I’ll cancel and just pirate stuff instead. This “edge case” is going to lose them money and retain the viability of the pirate network.
> If a resident of Australia vpn’s Into Germany to watch an Aussie programme then an Australian network loses a viewer for at least that content, but a German who’s paid for it in Germany?
At one point I understand a double digit percentage of Ebay's entire revenue was people selling US Hulu pre-paid cards to viewers outside the US.
Bypassing financial geofiltering is easier than bypassing IP based geofiltering generally. But, ultimately, generally speaking studios nowadays expect you to do both, not one or the other, so Netflix adopting models on payment territory would not mean they didn't have to block VPNs any more, it means they would have to do both like everyone else does.
Also, having spent some time trying to build this product myself and failed, you are vastly overestimating how reliable international payment identification is on country of origin. Like a lot.
For a while I worked for a company that provided a component used by some streaming services on the server side. I never knew how common this was, and how much of it was just because of the weird position we were in, but we'd get some story like "exec at $big.firm has a child that used a VPN to get out of region content, they demand we fix it"
There were other cases like this where it was less about expending the effort to make some contract happy, and doing so to make it look like we were doing so for the sole purpose of making it appear that it was the case to specific executives. Not their team, but them, specifically.
The way this works is, the content provider (actually, someone working on the content provider's behalf) does an independent check every so often.
Then they (the content lawyers) come back to Netflix and say "hey, 10% of these attempts got through, you are breaking our deal.
Obviously, some of these of these service providers are not the brightest bulbs on the internet, but try telling that to the legal department of a media conglomerate.
So, the technical team that handles this at Netflix has to shoot for the worst case, instead of the average case, even if they are already being effective.
Geographic licensing of content was technologically superseded by the internet. It’s an inefficiency that distributors are desperately trying to hold on to so they can leverage a profit from it.
But the fact that it’s an entirely artificial inefficiency, means it’s possible to completely ignore it. If somebody’s geo-circumventions are thwarted, they’re just going to return to old fashion piracy most of the time.
It’s a system that turns some paying customers into slightly higher-paying customers via market segmentation, but it turns a lot of paying customers into entirely non-paying customers. Eventually the TV and Movie industry will get to the point where they no longer think it’s worth it, and go the way of the music industry which doesn’t have a geo-restriction problem, or a piracy one.
My alternative take is it's because they have too many highly paid engineers who need something to do. People overestimate how logical decision-making is at large companies.
In Australia half of the content is not available since there are also local competitors. I use Disney+ and Netflix, but I’m tired of wasting hours to find out if that particular movie streams in my country or not.
At first we were progressing with online streaming but now movies are streaming across Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Binge, Stan.
I can’t be bothered to have that many services, VPNs are getting banned for paying customers due content rights, so I may as well just go back to Torrent/NZB, or
don’t watch and read a book instead.
We already cut Netflix from our budget. Torrenting is faster and easier than dealing with Netflix's shitty interface that keeps trying to serve up old shows I've already seen or clearly don't want to see.
The amount of stuff I want to watch and isn't on Netflix is very large too, probably about half or more of what I watch is not available on Netflix here but is elsewhere in the world.
All that tells me is Netflix is part of the mafiaa.
The inflection point for Netflix's utility was when they removed the star ratings. It went from being an industry leader in catalog surfing to being one of the worst, seemingly overnight. They'd later make it difficult to narrow by genre, and similar catalog-hiding changes.
It was a shame. I found that I enjoyed interesting combinations like "Campy Science Fiction with a rating between 2 and 4". Now Netflix seems transfixed on shoving shitty daytime dating shows down my throat.
Not the parent poster, but I'm running a stack of Sonarr (series crawler) + Radarr (movie crawler) + Lidarr (music crawler), + Bazarr (subtitle crawler) + some torrent client (Deluge) + Jellyfin (you could also use Plex, but Jellyfin doesn't ask for money) + Jackett (indexer) + a VPN. I've also configured a Telegram bot to send me updates about download progress. You add the content you want to *arr, those programs query your indexer(s) for sources, and pass them on to your download client(s). Downloaded files are automatically moved to the right place with a useful folder structure so that media servers (Plex, Emby, Jellyfin) can pick them up. Non-torrent sources for *arr (newsgroups etc.) are also available, but I haven't tried them.
There are various pre-designed docker-compose scripts available online [0] that basically allow you to create such a setup by simply entering your VPN username and password and specifying a storage path. If you have any experience with Docker, they're dead easy to set up and they work flawlessly.
In my experience, Netflix honestly works better and streams more reliably than Plex or any other self-hosted alternative. The Jellyfin project has been making progress, but your mileage may vary.
Not the person you're asking, but I run the same thing. Here's my setup:
Plex/Jellyfin for watching content.
Sonarr(TV)/Radarr(Movies)/Lidarr(Music)/Readarr(Audio/Books) - For searching/organizing/starting downloads, monitoring for new releases and so on
nzbget/qbittorrent - for doing the actual downloads
prowlarr - to handle various indexers/search providers between *arr apps and downloaders
overseerr - to make everything foolproof for people who are not tech savvy. They can see what's downloaded, and request new stuff and they get an email once its been downloaded.
On top of that I have watchtower which does automatic updates, as everything is running as docker containers.
Honestly it seems like complicated setup, but it's really not, and once set up it runs without any issues. I've had this for a few years now, and there's been maaaybe a handful of times where I needed to fix something.
Piggybacking on a reply to this comment, if you want to go an alternative (or additive) route of Usenet you can look to add NZBGet (or SABnzbd) with NZBHydra to manage Usenet downloading and indexer search respectively.
In respect to this my setup for this (on Docker) looks like: radarr, sonarr, nzbget and nzbhydra. I serve my media using Plex (there are a lot of great alternatives to Plex out there also but I'm still very happy with Plex even as a non-paid user).
Plex is ok but feels like it's trying to meet Plex's need for revenue moreso than providing software people want. But for better or worse they're the 1,000 lb gorilla in the space.
The real game changer is getting a reliable sonarr&radarr set up going
We have a media cartel that are also our telecoms, and they collaborate on prices and lobby heavily for protectionist legislation.
On top of that, they hold digital distribution rights for numerous properties and, historically, have done absurd things like only offer them on a service that is _tied to paying for cable_.
It won't change. The head of the regulatory body that oversees them is an ex-lobbyist for one of the larger telecoms.
If this happens to me, I'm cancelling my Netflix and ramping my Plex server up even more. I pay for Netflix for ease of use, but the harder they make it, the more people will revert to piracy.
Don't wait, just cancel now. Netflix has gone rapidly downhill in terms of content quality in the past couple of years. They have ceded ground to their competition by removing the broad range of content they once had, in favor of their own mediocre content.
I think there could be a genuine market opening for a streaming platform that exclusively has films made before 5-10 years ago. Somethjng curated, with less attempts at using AI to predict what you like. Something for movie enthusiasts (and perhaps TV) to enjoy good cinema, not watch the latest politically charged soap opera with poor dialogue, instagram filter cinematography, and overly safe humor.
I used to think so too, y watch a show that's gonna get cancelled.
Then I realized there do exist some good shows that only had very few seasons: pushing daisies, doll hiuse, sense 8. The problem is many Netflix shows are bad...
Most shows are bad; Netflix is neither more nor less consistent with Sturgeon’s Law than any other network. They probably have far more bad shows than any single broadcast or cable channel simply because they aren't limited by the economy of time slots in how many shots they can fire to see what sticks.
Isn't that the formula? Acquire or create a series on the cheap, and axe the series instead of paying the actors/creators a higher rate for additional seasons?
sometimes even when watching a trailer without seeing the logo i still get a hunch that its a netflix original. i dunno what it is, maybe a combination of the camera gear they use, lighting, actors I've never seen before, the bland dialog
Check out Youtube's Free with Ads movies. Seriously. They've got a good selection of great movies (especially comedies) from the 80s and 90s on there.
Naked Gun series, Oh Brother Where Art Thou?, Raising Arizona, Idiocracy, The Terminal, Major League, Top Secret!, Hot Shots!, Beavis and Butthead Do America, The Terminator, Delirious, Robin Hood Men in Tights, Captain Ron (crap, it's not free anymore), original Robocop, Secret of Nimh, Ghost, I'm Gonna Git You Sucka, Silence of the Lambs, Teen Wolf, to name a few.
It's a smaller selection and they don't seem to stay Free for more than a few months, so you have to keep checking it, but there's some good stuff on there.
You make it sound like this is Netflix's fault, whereas tlit seems to me that 10 years ago it was mich easier to acquire licenses for streaming. now some of the big studios have their own streaming services, so licensing isich harder/impossible
They could just be logging IPs that have been used by a large number of accounts. They could also be tracking accounts that tend to hop between IPs and enforce more strictly on them.
Already did it, got lifetime emby premiere license, can watch whatever I want wherever I am, the ease of use and the low price were charming at the start, but I guess it was too good to last
the Kodi plugin, emby integrates itself by reusing existing elements, including the Kodi player and Kodi libraries so you can scroll in movies both local files and emby files and use the same flow regardless, Plex last time I tried it, had a full blown view on top of Kodi which was detached from the system, so you either go full Plex or it's not a nice experience
You pay $90 a year to a Usenet provider, $15 a year to a Usenet indexer, and get gigabit+ download speeds of any TV show or Movie you want and they automatically get fetched via https://Sonarr.tv or https://Radarr.video
Plus it's all done over TLS and your ISP won't send you notices because you're not uploading/sharing anything.
When you strip away all the N-marked pulp, very little remains. Of these, very few titles merit being seen. I'm so weary of these I actually consider going back to buying movies as an alternative to renting (i.e. streaming).
Also, I may or may not rip the Blu-Ray media to my external HDD, since
- the BR-enabled player software ("Cyberlink something " Windows-only) is a POS[1],
- playing BR directly on Linux is not a fun experience to get working (fucking DRM)
- not having to search through a cupboard of boxes for the disk I want to watch (convenience)
- not being arbitrarily restricted to 720p or less on streaming platforms ( because I have the audacity run Linux ) even for movies/series I would "buy in HD"
- etc. pp.
[1] From what I remember from using that software years ago: extremely laggy interface, audio volume slider does basically nothing above the "2%" setting where the sound will just be so loud it nearly blows your eardrums (even with Windows audio setting for that program at ~10%), basically no useful keybindings apart from <SPACE>, putting the popout menu on the screen to get more controls almost always locked the program up for >20 seconds, the software had giant ad banners for the other garbage made by that company, etc. pp.
But can you even buy most content anymore? Everything has gone digital to the point where I wouldn’t even know where to get said dvds outside of a few rental stores that somehow still exist in SF. Amazon? Somewhere else?
For recent movies you can often rent from RedBox. To buy DVDs, I usually go to Amazon. Sometimes something will catch my eye in the remainder pile at Walmart. Except for some straight to streaming content maybe, my experience is that most films that aren't really obscure are still available for physical purchase.
They have the content... that you can obtain and host (or pay someone to host via a Plex Share). Piracy is back, and getting more convenient by the day.
Plex is a media server mainly used for serving downloaded content, so I'll let you make of that what you will. Piracy has not gotten harder in the past 20 years. In many countries it is de facto legal.
Starlink makes this kind of detection a real mess. They're using CGNAT so many people share a single IP address. Also that IP address changes frequently, about once a day? And the addresses don't geolocate very well, either.
Starlink customers definitely have a problem with Hulu already; their system does not work at all well with people whose IP addresses change frequently. I wonder if Netflix is about to start being a problem too.
The link there is about live TV on Hulu - the right for live TV packages are significantly more complicated than just regular streaming, due to sports contracts that are often VERY geo-specific, with much finer granularity than the other country-level stuff. So the streaming companies are pushed to do finer and finer levels of monitoring.
I keep my "cable" subscription streaming service (when I even have one) separate from any other content I watch for that reason. Don't want it fucking up more than it has to.
I agree that TV rights are a complicated business problem. But Youtube TV managed to solve it in a way that doesn't just break for some bizarre technical reason most TV viewers don't understand.
Ironically, it was Netflix and Steam that proved if you make things accessible the amount of people pirating content diminishes. People DO want to pay fair prices to legally obtain or consume content.
would agree. And why it never made sense at their semi-annual efforts or bluster to crack down on cred sharing.
The people piggybacking creds arent going to be buying their own account.
Take the MLB as an example.
1. They blackout your home team.
2. They also crack down hard on credential sharing
3. They also crack down hard on using a proxy/VPN to try and bypass blackouts.
The blackouts are outrageous in the own rights. The teams i want to follow are 4.5 and 11 hours away by car and are blacked out.....EVEN if i buy the team specific package for that team, games are blacked out....
Is anyone else completely unsatisfied with the "contact your ISP" method of customer service that Netflix seems to be using here? They are basically passing off their issue (false positive VPN detection) to an unrelated company (and a company type that's notorious for poor customer service). Why should an ISP be responsible for figuring out why an IP ended up in Netflix's database? I would be pretty upset if that was the answer I got from Netflix customer service.
As a small ISP I feel the same. If they block one of our IPs the we have to find someone who knows someone who knows someone at Netflix (Amazon, etc) to actually get something done about it.
BUT, we launched with IPv6 support, which pretty much negates this whole issue for us when it comes to Netflix.
If they offered a customer service option to resolve such issues, probably 90% of requests would be from people who legitimately were VPN users. So they'd have to waste a lot of time to help the 10% of false positives affected. And ironically, the better they make their detection system at avoiding false positives, the more time they'd be wasting on that customer service. So maybe they invest more resources into making the detection system better instead of customer service.
Also, this problem is probably ISP specific. If an ISP routes their global traffic over a globally shared pool of a couple public ipv4's via CGNAT for example, the ISP is virtually aiding the VPN providers which have obtained users from those ISPs. Netflix probably wants the ISP to stop doing that and instead chop up their public ipv4 pool into smaller pools so that they can ban individual sub-pools instead. The market position Netflix is in allows them to keep the users of small ISPs hostage in this situation. They only have to buckle in to large ISPs, if at all.
Anyways, this is a silly waste of time really. People paid for content. People should be allowed to watch it. If they want to watch american shows instead, why not let them.
> The streaming service is working with people who were inadvertently affected to restore access to the full library.
I won't bother I'll just stream them for nothing if they foil my attempt to give them money for content and try them again in 2030 if they are still in business.
I advise them to prioritize customers. Imagine if you went to Walmart and they threw you out because you looked like a guy who shoplifted there last week. Would you shop there next week or even next year?
Same here. A lot of users started using streaming services for movies/shows and music because the $10 per month was a decent enough deal to not have to bother torrenting/downloading pirated copies. But if these companies are putting geo-locks and other such restrictions on VPN, then they will just go back to pirating again especially with the rise of webtorrent and free streaming sites like fmoviesgo or popcorntime.
We canceled our Netflix subscription something like six months ago, on the basis that there was literally nothing worth our time to watch.
It feels a bit like when I quit social media. I freed a surprising amount of time, and liberated this just incredible reservoir of emotional energy that was previously allocated to the Void.
Thanks to that surplus, I learned how to dance. Seriously leveled up my cooking skills. Walking away from the prolefeed made my life better in a cornucopia of ways.
Ditching streaming services (Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc.) feels the same.
I don't see anyone mentioning the biggest problem with this.
Companies like Bright Data (the leading residential proxy provider) sell access to what is essentially a legal botnet.
Their IPs are indeed VPN exit points, but they also belong to some innocent family that just accidentally installed a browser extension without reading the EULA. 99% of their residential IPs belong to ordinary people who have no idea they are part of the botnet.
When Netflix bans these IPs, they are also banning this family, who are probably very confused as to why they can no longer use their Netflix subscription.
My hope is Netflix is smart enough to only block users using these IPs when the browser and system timezone and other attributes don't align with the geolocation of the IP.
Also, Bright Data's IP pool is a secret but you can just sign up as a user and make tons of requests and log them for yourself. Not exactly rocket science.
So.. people are actively looking for vpns and proxies to actually pay netflix to get content, and netflix actively fights then, so they cannot get the content they (want to) pay for.
And then people why piracy is becoming popular again.
This is because most people want competition within a country (think local streaming services to compete with the big players), so companies will often grant the streaming license to those smaller companies that aren’t Netflix, which (as we’ve seen happen in the US within the last 3 years) is overall a worse experience for the consumer. Local media libraries (via a legal blu-ray selection & storage device of course) are the best since it doesn’t give the rights holders a say on where you can watch it, just that ‘I paid for it, so I’m going to watch it’.
Netflix could just take the money, let vpn users watch, because realistically, they have no idea where the user behind the vpn is actually located. If people want to pay another service just to give you money, let them watch the damn shows.
> So.. people are actively looking for vpns and proxies to actually pay netflix to get content, and netflix actively fights then, so they cannot get the content they (want to) pay for.
Correct. Because the contracts they have to sign to get the shows you want to watch often come with crazy regional licensing.
Super lame. In the US, we use a German VPN so that we can get access to more German language content on both Amazon Prime and Netflix. It's the only way my half-German kids can stay fluent with their native tongue.
If there were a legal option to do so, I would do it. Why doesn't Netflix allow this? Come on!
This likely has more to do with contracts with the content owners rather than Netflix directly. Distribution deals as they are effectively resell the same product by carving up the world into markets.
As for Netflix own productions, many I imagine are created in partnership with other production studios who don't generate subscriber revenue from a streaming service but from those same multi-country distribution deals.
What also puzzles me is that the content is generally exclusive to Germany and watching it in the US wouldn't interfere with the American owner of the distribution rights since... there's none!
Why still block in country X when nobody owns the distribution rights in country X?
Handling tens of subscriptions for all kinds of services and content is getting ridiculous.
Yes there's much more and in better quality today but you almost need a Personal Assistant now just to sub/unsub various services while the terms and catalog is constantly getting worse.
I had netflix and 10+ other subscriptions but recently just decided to close all of them and just torrent when i need to and drop the rest - no more having to use my already strained mental capacity to find stuff, switch services, unsub, sub, miss subtitles in local languages or in english etc. Way too much content was removed and seemingly disappeared sometimes mid season.
I'll still support indie projects, podcasts, smaller creators etc. but big business can get their shit together.
Imagine having 150 subscriptions as a family in the future "smart city" dystopia ranging from media to food to transport etc with a million pages of terms - i want less choices, less terms, better curation and don't want to use my life "handling" a personal technocracy.
> you almost need a Personal Assistant now just to sub/unsub various services
I believe the billing methods should be changed to "if you don't use the service this month then you don't pay".
If I watch a single minute of Netflix this month then fine, bill me the normal monthly fee. If I don't watch anything then they shouldn't bill me. Same for all streaming services. This would solve that problem nicely for me.
This would also be good for game subscription services.
I think I heard (possibly here) that Netflix actually does stop billing inactive accounts. Never tested that myself though, and the time before being considered inactive may be longer than 1 month.
>These changes came after copyright holders repeatedly complained that ‘pirates’ were bypassing Netflix’s geographical restrictions.
But this isn't even against pirates, this targets people who go through trouble not to pirate, and instead forces them to pirate to be able to watch certain things at all.
This is just an example of antiquated media companies trying to change the definition of "piracy" to include paying customers bypassing geo-restrictions.
It's awful that Netflix support is telling people to contact their ISPs about this, when it's so obvious that the problem is on Netflix's end and they can just flip a switch back to immediately fix it for everyone.
> telling people to contact their ISPs about this, when it's so obvious that the problem is on Netflix's end
They are telling them to contact their ISP because either their ISP directly or the ISPs customers(or the person complaining) are using the ISPs IP addresses to circumvent geo restrictions.
So, I'd wager it's more likely the person/the persons household themselves have either wittingly or unwittingly been using something(e.g. Hola VPN) which enables others to proxy through their home IP (& vice versa)
> So, I'd wager it's more likely the person/the persons household themselves have either wittingly or unwittingly been using something(e.g. Hola VPN) which enables others to proxy through their home IP (& vice versa)
I'm collateral damage of this change, and this definitely isn't the case for me.
Sounds like netflix is in a bind here. They are only licensed to show content in specific regions, and there are no doubt penalties by the actual copyright holders of they go outside those bounds. If they piss off their customers, though, they lose money.
They must be buying a database of IP address locations and VPN addresses from somebody. I doubt they are putting that together themselves.
Serving alcohol to minors is illegal, but bartenders don't say "you don't appear obviously over 40, so I'm not serving you alcohol even though your ID looks real to me and says you're over 21, since there's a slim chance it's a high-quality fake." Demanding 100% certainty that someone isn't using a VPN is unreasonable for the same reasons.
They do. I was refused service at a grocery store for having an out-of-state driver’s license. I tried having my 21+ sister who was with me purchase the beer with her in-state ID and they refused because they thought it was a straw purchase.
Here in Germany my older brother was once forced to show his ID at the local super market checkout to purchase (IIRC) a game/movie from the bargain bin (something with a restriction of >=12yo) while:
- being a tall bald dude (19yo at the time)
- wearing his Bundeswehr uniform (as a conscript on his way home for weekend leave)
Apparently that appearance wasn't enough to make it obvious he was a little older than 12.
Anyway, at least I didn't have to go through that conscription BS since I didn't reach 18 until after the "abeyance" in 2011. The equipment/supply problems and ever shortening training/service time for conscripts (last before the abeyance was 6 months total) make it no wonder that the Bundeswehr is sometimes mocked as "Deutschlands größter Trachtenverein" ("Germany's biggest costume club").
Nah, from what he told me the service pistol was an inaccurate POS, a pain to clean (which one would have to do often) and the G36 rifle is made in large parts (e.g. the stock) from polymer/plastic meaning they were forbidden from ever using the weapon body itself as a weapon because otherwise it would splinter and break.
The AK my father and grandfather used in the NVA instead was a real wartime weapon, rugged, dependable and able to be produced in mass quantities relatively cheaply. The G36 instead is apparently expensive, fragile and not that accurate, ie. more of a showpiece.
A similar thing happened to me when I was in my early twenties but with a US passport. We were out in the country a bit and I joked with my friend at the time that the guy serving us had probably never seen one...
Except that’s exactly how it works. Even in the U.K. where it’s 18 to legally drink, many places have a policy that anyone who looks under 25 will be challenged for ID and only driving licence or passport are accepted. Some places even have a policy that all purchases require ID irrespective of how old you look.
It’s better to pissing a few people off but still have a license, than lose your license and thus have nothing to serve your customers. Which is just as true for pubs and bars as it is for video streaming services. And content owners know this too, which is why they can place such heavy demands on 3rd party platforms.
This is false in the parts of the US where I live, where my family previously owned a bar. If an establishment is found serving alcohol to a minor, they are at fault, regardless of the ID that a minor has. A bar without a liquor license is a bar with a permanent "closed" sign.
The most ubiquitous and unblockable form of VPN is international cellular roaming. (While roaming, all traffic is tunneled back to the home carrier and blends in with their traffic.)
Of course, it's the most tedious VPN. It's also the most expensive. But what subset of traffic actually needs to go over the VPN? Like authentication and bot detection, these types of checks tend to be too expensive to perform on every request to every service endpoint.
Or find which IPs are logging in with >N unrelated Netflix accounts. Where N is sufficiently high to minimize false positives. Cases like Airbnb would still get the boot with this strategy.
They can even let VPN users map the servers for them in the data collection phase. Look at the usage graph and you'll find a cluster of accounts that jump between the same cluster of IPs.
There would be Airbnb traffic would look different from a VPN.
For an Airbnb you’d have the accounts change frequently but seldom multiple account from the same IP. Whereas a BPN would see the same accounts frequently but with many overlapping accounts from the same IP.
Similarly with hotels you’d see the overlapping of accounts per IP but less regularity of the same accounts.
This feels like one of those problems machine learning could help solve. Though there is a lot you can deduce just from
good old fashioned rules. Eg some IP subnets are going to have a higher probability of hosting a VPN (eg those bought for AWS EC2) vs legitimate traffic over other IP subnets.
> Sounds like netflix is in a bind here. They are only licensed to show content in specific regions, and there are no doubt penalties by the actual copyright holders of they go outside those bounds.
Bingo.
> They must be buying a database of IP address locations and VPN addresses from somebody. I doubt they are putting that together themselves.
Ehhh, I couldn't say. I mean, I could. But I won't.
Zoomers need to learn how to pirate content, they haven't yet as a cohort. All the rise in widescale piracy 10-20 years ago started because media distribution sucked ass. Once the streaming services started and were easy to use, everyone stopped pirating. Netflix didn't just kill Blockbuster, it stopped ThePirateBay from being a household name.
Since hell will freeze over before sensible copyright terms come about, piracy is our only hope to get rare/weird/controversial and out-of-print media. We need educated and more importantly, motivated, pirates to build up the communities again.
Luckily piracy has been kept alive by a lot of Third World Countries. Ask any Indian college student; they might not have graduated, but they sure as fuck know how to pirate the newest Marvel movie.
Interestingly, this is also changing - streaming services are offering plans at dirt cheap prices because they're essentially trying to compete with piracy. That's slowly caused a decrease in piracy, and prices have slowly started to go back up in India too.
Im UK based, I am happy to provide proof of residence, i already pay the uk price in GBP with a UK bank account.
So why not let me "lock" my account to UK? Then whatever IP i pop up on, just show me the UK licensed content ive paid for like normal.
Even better: give me 20 days a year of holiday use, exclude my vpn from that (just show uk content for any vpn connection i make) and ping me if i spend too long overseas.
Im not trying to cheat. I just want to not arse about with my privacy vs their copyright bs.
We already know the agreements arent working. This is a more honest, fairer approach for everyone.
Drop the vacation clause if its easier. Im a british resident with a British account, show me what's British-licensed and forget IP Geo faff or vpn detection or whatever. Just ask for proof of residence once in a while.
Honestly, I bet Netflix would love to do something like this. But they can't, because they'd likely get sued and/or lose rights to distribute content due to breaking contract pledges. This is basically the same reason that the BBC can't offer Brits who are out of the UK access to iPlayer; they just don't have the rights to distribute that content anywhere other than the UK. I hate it.
Dropped Netflix in the winter and haven't looked back since. Self hosting is just the way of the future if you don't want to die from subscriptions snowballing.
The problem here is that I geo-shift my exit IP without a VPN on a regular basis, for a variety of reasons none of which have anything to do with copyright and remain within the copyright jurisdiction that netflix wants me to be in.
Nevertheless, exiting my home traffic from the he.net core datacenter (in Fremont, CA, no less) gets the ban.
I have the money to pay for this but right now this app is called bittorrent.
Here's a simple challenge: find a legal online streaming service, any service which shows Mists Of Avalon from 2001. (Yes, yes, I know, I can find the Russian site which streams it for free, I strongly suspect it's pirating it.)
When I was younger I mostly torrented out of necessity. There were a few things I bought, but only if I could afford it.
These days I end up buying a fair amount of music and games with only a fraction acquired elsewhere. Both Bandcamp and GOG.com have been have sinks of money for me.
As for TV shows and movies, I only wish there was an equivalent which didn't sell an experience subpar to a DRM-free mkv.
An unusual but significant factor in the lack of streaming rights for The Mists of Avalon may be the allegations of child sexual abuse against Marion Zimmer Bradley, the author of the source material for that series.
I have the money to pay for this but right now this app is called bittorrent.
I maybe am making too much of an assumption about your financial status, but I don't think you do. Because there's not like... an actual market for media.
The price, like any monopoly, is how effectively they can price discriminate combined with what they think they can ask. You ask "How much?", the answer is "What you got?".
The distribution issues with media are ridiculously antiquated. It is 2021. There is absolutely zero reason for there to be any kind of region restriction on media. Why do you want to stop people in other countries from giving you money for your content? Because it certainly isn't going to stop anyone in those other countries from watching it, it is only going to stop them from paying for it.
It sounds like the whole DRM thing: Stop a few (in this case even paying[0]) "pirates", hurt regular customers as collateral damage
[0] Never seen it for Netflix, but many here buy 3rd world country Spotify subscriptions for a fraction of what it costs in Germany. With Netflix I only hear about avoiding geoblocks.
I live in South Africa. This has now happened to me as of today… not on a vpn. I’ve been a paying subscriber for years… trying to do the right thing, but now? TBP?
What I don't understand is why these VPN users even bother to try and watch Netflix, just go to rarbg or 1337x and download whatever you want, far more convenient. You get to use a media player such as mpv as well, rather than the web garbage these paid streaming services have you use, +- 1 minute seeks are instant too.
sometimes even when watching a trailer i can almost guess that its going to be a netflix original. i dunno what it is, something about the lighting or camera gear they use maybe, or the b-list actors that I've never seen before, or the dialog
Is this a side-channel DoS attack on Netflix by the media companies who have, or are planning to, setup their own streaming services?
The pendulum is swinging back to the dark days before Netflix's distribution aggregation solution.
I pay for Netflix. If a media company doesn't want their IP on Netflix, then they don't get a share of my subscription. I don't have the time / desire to watch enough TV shows or movies to justify the cost of multiple subscriptions just in case there's one show I don't want to miss on one of those services. I do have Amazon Prime as well, but that's incidental - as soon as Prime TV is de-coupled from the delivery discount: gone from the monthly / annual subs list.
Residential IPs are getting harder to find. The only company I know that offers them is: https://www.surgeproxies.com/ (No affiliation).
These kind of residential proxy servers are typically more expensive than a VPN however.
I'm not encouraging anyone to try Surge with Netflix, simply pointing out a rare service that's hard to find on the net, since the market is saturated with VPN companies with OpenVPN and Wireguard being the dominating protocols.
For a while my home network was running OpenMPTCProuter and I was testing bonding my 500mbps cable and 1000mbps fiber out to a linode VPS. So my home IP was a linode address.
I went to watch the newest season I Think You Should Leave (on an ATV) but only the first season showed up. As soon as I bypassed OpenMPTCProuter, the new season showed up. The same went for the app on my phone on the bonded wifi vs cellular.
At this point VPS address ranges are basically useless for human traffic. If you want a clean ip your options are business ISPs either directly or via a small colo provider.
Yes, this is the conclusion I came to. I assume Netflix was limiting me the same way they would someone on a VPN.
The Linode IP worked for 99% of my home traffic, but I tended to get captchas occasionally and some sites didn’t work at all or said they didn’t work over VPN. It was just bad enough that I wasn’t willing to keep it set up that way.
I remember the first time some web site I visited assumed the language based on my IP (just that, not even localizing the content). I felt indignation: the web was the place to get away from assumptions, borders and other crap, but here it was, being dragged in. Didn't they understand they had started to replicate the idiocy of the old off-line society? What a fool I was.
I fully agree, but - and someone please correct me if I'm wrong - I was under the impression that this is essentially out of Netflix's hands. It just depends on the terms of the license that's granted, right? And/or is it a scenario where in some cases Netflix could perhaps pay more to get wider/global airing rights, but they can't justify the additional cost based on the viewership numbers they expect for that piece of content in those additional countries/regions?
By that same token, I wouldn't be surprised if lawyers have been breathing down their neck for years trying to pressure them to crack down on region lock-bypassing VPNs, and perhaps even threatening legal action against them.
(Of course, that's not justification for blocking residential IP addresses as VPNs when there are non-VPN users behind those IP addresses. Just wanted to point out that the blocking policy is probably something they have to do rather than something they want to do.)
No, it's not out of Netflix's hands. It's just the usual price negotiation. Netflix doesn't want to license content for global broadcast, which would be more expensive. So, they license it regionally. So, Netflix is as much at fault here as the rights holders.
Yeah, it's definitely not entirely out of their hands. My reason for saying "essentially out of their hands": if their analysis shows that, say, they would almost certainly just be bleeding huge amounts of money by purchasing rights for regions where almost no one would ever watch it, I think it's hard to fault them for that decision.
I'm guessing it's not a matter of nickel-and-diming, but it just really being very unwise or totally infeasible to get global rights for everything. Of course, I'm just blindly speculating and I have no clue and maybe they really are being cheap in some way.
And I think it's quite possible the VPN stuff really is out of their hands. (From a policy perspective, not an implementation perspective. Obviously the implementation is entirely on them, and the false positive bans are their fault.)
From a business perspective, I would think they'd be incentivized to allow them and not dedicate resources to trying to block them. But lots of podcasts I watch have a bunch of ad segments for different VPNs, where the main selling point is typically "watch stuff for other regions on Netflix", and I'm guessing the companies they're licensing from are increasingly seeing this loophole as basically a form of piracy.
Why can't Netflix just allow people to buy another subscription for a new country? I wouldn't mind paying extra to unlock additional content from another country.
Yep. Paramount announced Paramount Plus in New Zealand and Australia. Then the failing pay TV monopoly paid up a bunch of money to make the content exclusive to their terrible 720p streaming service. No Paramount Plus for New Zealand!
To add insult to injury, they don't even bother showing the movies and shows that they lock up this way. It's just about exercising monopoly power.
Ok, but why can't netflix apply the geo restrictions based on the payment and not the incoming IP address? I'd prefer to use a VPN for all of my traffic, and I'll gladly stay region locked to the region I reside in. But forcing me to go outside the VPN is something I'd rather not do.
True, that's a good point. Has it been confirmed that they're just blanket-blocking VPN IPs rather than specifically blocking cases of a customer's region shifting/not matching their registration details?
If the VPN node's public IP matches the country in the subscriber's registration details, then it seems pretty unfair that they'd still restrict their account when accessed from that VPN IP. But I suppose from a technical standpoint it's probably far simpler for them to just find VPN IPs/subnets, add them to a database, and restrict content for any account accessed from any of those IPs, regardless of the account, IP, or content regions.
The copyright applies to a specific viewing of a movie, not the purchase of a license. They can't enable their users to break license or they'll loose their right to distribute content.
But Netflix also has an agreement with whoever owns distribution rights in the other country though... that's why the VPN trick works. Just let me pay extra for the other country, what would be the problem there?
Your suggestion makes "common sense" but probably would cause legal issues.
Suppose you are Canadian. Netflix has permission to sell Americans "Media Package A" and Canadians "Media Package B". They don't have permission to sell Canadians "Media Package A". You are saying "just let me buy both" but Netflix does not have permission from media companies to sell you both.
I would assume the content owners are demanding the Netflix to stop the VPN trick. I would assume the distributors in other countries are telling content owners they will not pay a certain price if Netflix is allowing people to use VPNs.
Because in 2021, culture is global. Your examples also don't really make any analogous sense, at all. You are free to learn whichever language you want. Under the corporate geofencing intellectual property regime, you are not free to watch whatever films you want. That is the issue.
To a recent years, lot of films where banned where I live and watching any of them is a felony! So location indeed affect what you're allowed to watch regardless of whether it's under geofencing intellectual property or another thing.
To be clear I wish I lived in a world where I can legally watch everything without a hassle. But there's no such world like that regardless of how much we want to exist. The same way there's no such world where we get paid equally ( doing the same work obviously) because we're living in different locations/countries!
We are not talking about films which are specifically banned, or content which is generally illegal. We are talking about content that is 'normative' and generally legal around the world, but is artificially restricted based on geofencing.
For example, attempting to watch a film that is legal both in Country A and Country B, but not being able to because of the region you are logging into Netflix from.
There is no intellectual consistency in what you're saying, at all. Freedom of Speech is only an actual guarantee (at least in text) in one country. And the electrons/bits in the wire obey physics like every other item the GP mentioned and as a result, are subject to the same political and physical forces that reflect in their regionally relative price.
What they are saying has nothing to do with rules or regulations. If the content of Barney is legal to watch in Canada, and the USA, there is no reason the show shouldn't be available to watch in both countries
Last I checked Apple TV doesn't even list the languages their subtitles are available in before renting/buying movies. Frankly this is just plain idiotic. I rented Parasite, but my girlfriend couldn't really watch it, since she doesn't speak Swedish. It's such an obvious piece of information they should provide. (And even if it's not obvious, I did email them letting them know. Somehow I doubt my feedback will come to use.)
If you live in the US, going on vacation to Europe doesn't affect how much salary you get paid or what language you speak, but it does impact the content you are allowed to watch.
Yes, that’s true if you only move within the EU. Has been the case for a few years now, also with other streaming services, due to new EU portability laws.
It's so silly. They could at least make it clear - I forgot about it on holiday in Canada, watched a couple of episodes of a series (enough to get into it), returned home to the UK and it wasn't there. I didn't realise until then that would happen; I hadn't even remembered that it was a possibility.
Digital goods are still considered property so its far from ridiculous, but we can re-evaluate and change that via legislation if we wish to.
Re: Regional Pricing - Its no different than product prices changing depending on the country. Import/custom taxes/duties, trade treaties, etc, still are a thing in today's world. Again, not ridiculous, but changeable if people want to.
This view doesn't make sense to me. Have you ever created something through effort/cost? Is it not yours if it can only be displayed on a monitor? Most of us here have jobs/products that have the same limitation.
Okay, I accept that this is your position. I don't agree that it is ridiculous as its the basis of our entire digital economy including software licensing and everything else. No point arguing over it, so I'll just let you have the last word. Have a nice day.
User complains that all of a sudden they can only get Netflix originals from home. Netflix suggests they call their ISP and ask why their IP is associated with proxy/vpn activity.
The assumption of the article seems to be that Netflix is performing some action on it's own to determine whether a residential user is on a VPN, and that this type of response is unhelpful buck-passing. But IIRC, for years now ISPs in the US have had the green light to monetize customer metadata. It seems possible that either Netflix or an industry-backed anti-piracy entity is buying lists with timestamped VPN usage per IP (based on packet traffic patterns?) for Netflix to compare to their usage time-stamps per IP and just assuming causation.
I don't know how far-fetched this is, but it fits with Netflix's response to these people's inquiries and it also removes the question of how Netflix might know if a user was streaming over a VPN through thier own residential ISP connection.
I'm a Vodafone customer with dynamic IP... And I can't watch Netflix because is says that I'm using a VPN, but I'm not.
I noticed that it does work on my LG smart TV, but it doesn't on phone, tablet, pc or Chromecast.
Having to watch Netflix with 4G is just painful, slow and expensive.
This is self destructive, as it makes their content look paltry when you view it through a VPN. I just unsubscribed from Netflix yesterday because I was like "none of the movies on my watchlist are on Netflix". Now I wonder if that was actually because I was looking through a VPN.
The most insidious part is that they don't tell you that you have reduced content, they just silently remove content if you use a VPN.
As an example: I can watch "The Game" (1997) from California, USA if I don't use a VPN. If I connect with Express VPN (through San Francisco) the title is not available. That is dumb.
I don't really get why this whole VPN thing works with Netflix.
Spotify only allows free accounts to be used in a different country for up to 14 days[0].
I am surprised Netflix hasn't implemented something similar - your account can only be used outside of the billing region for up to 30 days (perhaps in a 90 day period) or something like that.
That would make using a VPN with Netflix less appealing.
This annoys me to no end. It's like, I'm paying with a US debit card, you have my physical address in the States (my parents'), so why the hell should it matter where I am at this moment? I think if there is any geofencing, it should be based on where you registered your account, or by method of payment. Maybe we need to pester Congress to change contract law.
In lieu of that, does anyone know of a desktop/gui tcp proxy? I was thinking of making one and having it run on my Mom's computer, seeing as how she leaves it on 24/7 :)
This is a bad move for Netflix. They have always been lacking high quality first party content, and the cracks are beginning to show with the recent drop in subscribers that led to a drop in stock price. Consumers have more choice than ever, and anecdotally, I am noticing that the pandemic has reset the leisure habits of many people I know away from digital entertainment. This is an unnecessarily user hostile move that gives people one more reason to cancel their subscription.
The solution to this is so simple that it's frustrating these people can't see it. License all of your content for the global audience and refuse any licensing deals that restrict by region. License holders will soon get on board if they're offered fair prices, when the alternative is no audience. Use the cost savings from the engineering efforts on this ridiculous cat and mouse game to fund the additional license fees. Done and done.
Prime video does not allow you to see the platform outside your country of residence. You can change your account origin if you migrated to another country. Although this will limit people using it while they travel, it will reduce a lot of people from doing this because they will need to have access to an account outside of their country of residence
Geez you'd think with all the money they were making, they would ease up a bit and let the people watch what they wanna watch, wherever they wanna watch!
Next there'd be a Netflix Premium account that allows you to watch a worldwide collection of series and programs.
There's probably about a million people who have had to implement some kind of geo restriction content system and there's probably only about 1000 people in the entire world who want such a system to exist.
The fact that Netflix does not ban people from streaming Netflix-made shows and movies makes me think it's not Netflix that really wants to do it, but third party copyright owners that push them to do this.
Ah yes, that phase of a previously explosive growth type company that now suffers from stalled growth where they start investing in fighting some power users they might lose for good.
I hope a new hyperlocal startup disrupts this space. As is, things are way too broad. I want different content when I'm in my living room v/s when I'm taking a shit.
Lol, go ahead and block me. I'm currently paying for 8 streaming services. Maybe I'll miss Netflix more than they'll miss my subscription fee, but not by much.
well, you will still have your 5 accounts that you can use (at home), and at home you can setup a proxy server, one which you can tunnel into and still watch whatever wherever as if you are at home. yeah, your server has to be fast, but this won’t stop the motivated.
it's simply easier to pirate content then to watch it legally. Even if I want to pay for it, netflix (and other streaming platforms) is making it harder and harder to actually do so.
Why are there even Netflix exclusives on a certain country? If they tried to release all of the shows, they need not worry about the IP address as some are using VPN to watch shows currently available in a certain country.
I am a British born expat, living in Qatar, so of course I want to watch the UK orientated Netflix programming and not the Arabic or Hindi. I have a UK TV license but of course, I can't watch UK TV from Qatar. Trying to pay for things online is frequently a nightmare as many companies won't take payment from a UK card unless it's from a UK IP. Same trying to pay tax on my US houses, also some websites don't even let you connect to them unless you use a US IP address! Google rightly defaults to Arabic if you're not logged in, that's fine, but even they don't provide a simple way to change the language to English! Similar with Spotify, same with Apple music. Whatsapp voice calls are blocked in Qatar.
All of these problems and many more are bypassed with a good VPN. It amazes me how few services ever take into consideration that people don't always live and work in their country of origin. If VPN's are clamped down on it's going to make life difficult for tens of millions of people. VPN's are actually VITAL in many situations.