Comment by reuven | Hacker News Reader

Comment by reuven | Hacker News Reader

I'm frustrated that Netflix is cracking down in this way. And yet, I can't say that I'm surprised. They are trying to amass as much content as possible, and doing so means that Netflix has to demonstrate that they're trying to enforce the regional exclusivity agreements.

For me, as a consumer who has been using an unblocking system for more than two years, and who would like to continue to see Amazon's content, I'm rooting for the unblockers.

But I wonder whether the cat-and-mouse game between Netflix and unblocking services is almost inevitably in Netflix's favor, at least as things currently run.

Which leads me to ask if a "cloud VPN appliance" SaaS could work, technically and/or as a business: Customers would click to indicate the country where they want to have a VPN server hosted. The appliance would use Digital Ocean, or some other hosting facility with cheap machines that can be created and destroyed via an API. For a $5/month DO server, charge $15/month. Have the appliance update its software, and/or relocate to another hosting system or IP address, as Netflix detects and blocks that machine.

I have to assume that it would be harder for Netflix to block thousands of such privately used VPN machines than blocks of AWS servers being used for such services.

But yeah, it's unfortunate that because of agreements between movie studios and distribution firms in each country, individuals have to play these sorts of games.

>But I wonder whether the cat-and-mouse game between Netflix and unblocking services is almost inevitably in Netflix's favor, at least as things currently run.

I don't see how Netflix or their content producers come out ahead by driving whole national markets to torrent sites. Once you force people onto a pirate distribution channel they're not going to pay even for the titles they could obtain legally.

Others have reported Netflix blocking IP ranges owned by cloud hosting companies. So this solution might not work. What if it was a peer-to-peer service? Whereby the ultimate exit point was the home internet connection of another subscriber?

Such a service already exists, it's called Hola[¹]. The problem is that the owners of machines serving as exit nodes are exposing themselves to liability that a regular VPN or VPS service would probably be protected against, and often without even realizing it.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hola_(VPN)

Hola doesn't route users through other users, it uses proxy servers. Users are turned into exit nodes for Luminati.io customers (servers/bots) only.

Ha ha. Why to avoid Hola ;)

I think most people's asymmetric bandwidth rates would get in the way of a p2p solution being usable.

Maybe if there were some way to break the stream up into individual media files, and then you could download one identical file from lots of different users at the same time.

BitTorrent?

BitTorrent works because uploaders only ever upload a small piece of the file. This works well for downloads but not at all for streaming.

Multipath TCP exists:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multipath_TCP

but that requires the cooperation of Netflix, naturally.

In the case of Netflix, the video content doesn't need to go through a proxy; only the website does (at the moment). So bandwidth shouldn't really be an issue.

EC2 is blocked

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