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.
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.