Comment by chatmasta | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chatmasta | Hacker News Reader

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Netflix has an obvious economic incentive to allow location spoofing. As long as you are paying them, they make money. I read a statistic that claimed Netflix had ~300k users in Australia, even though Netflix was technically "not available" in Australia.

The content rights-holders are the ones dependent on the licensing restrictions. They're the ones who get upset when users circumvent those restrictions, not Netflix.

Netflix faces two threats: 1) economic loss from foreign subscribers canceling their subscription because location spoofing no longer works, and 2) economic loss from rights-holders suing Netflix for a negligently insufficient blocking system.

It is in Netflix's best interest to only haphazardly block spoofing, i.e. implement a weak technical system, as long as they can legally prove they are making a "best effort" to detect and block location spoofing. Of course, any semi-technical person knows that even a best effort will fail, because any sort of blocking system is an endless game of cat-and-mouse that Netflix can never win.

Basically, yeah, they're "blocking" proxies, but ;-) ;-) ;-), they know you can still do it.

I don't necessarily think the threat is "rights-holders suing Netflix for a negligently insufficient blocking system", but instead right-holders keeping their content away from Netflix if there's no working mechanism to restrict the content to the geographic region they negotiated.

In the end the right holders sell their content multiple times, often even multiple times within a single market. Now if everybody in the world can get US Netflix content the right-holders are the ones who will have problems selling content in other markets.

> Now if everybody in the world can get US Netflix content the right-holders are the ones who will have problems selling content in other markets.

Or... they could just sell the worldwide rights to Netflix and nobody would have to to use a proxy to begin with.

That would never happen (costs aside). The publishers would be screwing themselves in the long-term because they would slowly erode the market into a monopsony, and eventually Netflix would be able to simply dictate lower licensing costs by being the only game in town.

Another reason it would never happen: Publishers like to charge different prices to different countries, usually based on the average income in that country. So US citizens pay more than, say, Indians.

I had hoped Netflix did the same. The Indian price is similar to US with less then 20% content.

If licensing deals are time bound, Netflix would have to renew them periodically, thereby granting publishers the opportunity to renegotiate terms. They can't screw themselves in the long term that way, while the distributor has the freedom to deliver content to everyone. Wouldn't that work? I'm a travelling user and I'm frustrated by having to decide which shows to choose as replacements every time I cross a border :-/. Personally I feel today's world no longer has a place for territorial licensing.

Is Netflix willing to pay for that? They weren't even willing to pay for worldwide rights to House of Cards and Orange is the New Black--their cornerstone properties.

In the end the right holders sell their content multiple times, often even multiple times within a single market. Now if everybody in the world can get US Netflix content the right-holders are the ones who will have problems selling content in other markets.

Ah, yes, copyright. The ultimate government entitlement program.

It's easy to see why Netflix and Amazon are taking the seemingly-unintuitive step of developing their own shows. They're privy to the greed and stupidity of the incumbent content owners in a way that few of us ever get to see. While the studios' greed and stupidity is a problem for Netflix and Amazon during contract negotiations, it also must look like an opportunity.

While true, I have also noticed that a Netflix exclusive show (I think Making a Murderer) is going to soon become unavailable to watch on Netflix in US. Now, it could be an unrelated issue there... i.e. the show was banned or some-such, but I couldn't find anything like that mentioned anywhere. That sort of makes me confused as to how it is an exclusive to Netflix in the first place.

Some Netflix shows are just not shown in the US on Networks and often they get branded Netflix – like a lot of British Shows. I imagine the rights are worked out as timed rather than for all eternity on Netflix. If Netflix "created" the content it would be on there in perpetuity.

Doesn't "blocking proxies" require Netflix to keep tabs on mercurial exit IP ranges for an ever-growing number of proxy or VPN services?

It seems almost inevitable that they will enforce this rule only lazily.

I'm guessing they'll just block the biggest advertised "Netflix unblocker" services. So the technically literate will be unaffected.

They could region-lock based on where your credit card billing address is if they really wanted to. Pay with a Canadian card, get Canadian Netflix wherever you are. Bit of a can of worms, but if they really really cared about people spoofing their location...

Except that their license for the content isn't tied to the customer's billing location, but their geographical location, and people are mobile... sometimes for relatively long periods of time.

And if you pay using PayPal?

The BBC seems to be managing to do just that quite well. Their IPlayer is quite hard to access from outside of Great Britain.

If Netflix will actually do this, then it will be impossible to use Netflix with the majority of commercial VPN providers.

(Netflix will lose me as a customer as well.)

I will have to leave too if Netflix succeeds in blocking such services. Between The Netherlands and Germany (two neighbouring countries) the offering of shows is significantly different. It sucks having to figure out which shows to choose for replacements of the exciting stuff you were watching before. Frustrating how territorial licensing deals are still made in a world that seems to be getting smaller, with couch-surfers, businessmen and average Joes/Janes crossing borders ever more often.

I know 2 or 3 technically illiterate people who have bypassed it with various location spoofing services. I definitely wouldn't call it hard. They subscribe to paid services that fix this problem for them $5ish per month.

I just switched my vpn's endpoint to the UK, IPlayer works fine for me (I'm in Australia). Now, time to figure out what the differences between BBC 1, 2, 3 and 4 are.

Surely they can just lock it to whatever country your payment details are registered to.

I agree, I think they intentionally do the bare minimum to stop spoofing, because they really don't care. Just point your computer / device to a dns server. That's a joke. I'm sure all they'll do is blacklist know vpn IPs.

Because Netflix is making its own content international perhaps it needs a more accurate view of how that's doing in each market.

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