Netflix hammers cross-border watchers and there may be no way out
cbc.ca
cbc.ca
They don't _have to_ watch it.
However, the purpose of copyright is to encourage cultural development, not enable cultural rent seeking. The latter is merely the mechanism proposed to do the former. To the extent the latter doesn't encourage the former, we should completely disregard the artificial construct of the latter.
I would argue that media companies have made this shift: Disney is no longer using the profits from copyright to enrich society with new cultural content (see very limited number of new properties), but is instead consolidating cultural control and rent-seeking (see studio/IP purchases, remakes and sequels). We should simply disregard their copyrights for as long as they continue this behavior.
Copyrights, after all, are fundamentally a deed from the public to a company or individual in exchange for a (future) service. If the company fails to render the service, the deed is revoked, and the property redistributed for better public use.
At this point I don't care. I don't watch much of their stuff and I really hope they go bankrupt. Not watch IS an option. Let them die.
There's potential here for a middleman to write software/develop hardware that can share residential connections whilst filtering destination IPs (e.g. allowing AWS addresses) to try and minimize the potential for abuse with the goal of discouraging traffic other than that required for Netflix. The user using the service would pay a fee which the middleman would take a cut from, with the rest going towards the home owner's broadband costs.
Payment is still problematic, ideally I'd be using a US bank account and credit card. But if they start clamping down on use of 'foreign' credit cards they will alienate those taking vacations etc.
From what I understood they were still working on the "driller" problem where people who live in Canada but work in the US as oil drillers/exploration folks during the week in the northern part of the state, and go home for weekends. But the thing you can't change are watching shows from two different regions on the same account.
But that's fine with the OP, that's why he is using his friends broadband anyway. The US catalog is what you want.
But the question for the OP is, is that enough? As far as I can tell Netflix doesn't care at all about people who only stream from one region but they do care about people who stream from multiple regions.
Not sure there's anything good that's UK-only. It's usually the other way around with all the good shows being available in the US.
From what I understand you get to watch the content of the region you are in at the moment. So on holiday you lose access to your home catalogue, but actually gain access to the catalogue of the country you are in at that moment. This seems to be part of how these region limited contracts with the content owners work.
The two alternatives are not being able to use Netflix at all when you are abroad, or having access only to the catalogue of the country you are paying the bills from, regardless of where you physically are.
Netflix appears to be heavily focusing on their own content to prevent this whole problem, but that does mean that the option of being able to pick whatever you want (legally) from a large back-catalogue is now blocked.
Netflix did think I was using a VPN and blocked me from one rural German hotel, though.
Source: I had a bit of netflix subscription when I moved to Norway. Paid with US billing. Not everything was available when I switched countries.
Happens all the time when I travel and wife and daughter stay home.
And when torrenting the movie you don't have to jump through all those hoops, it'll always be available and never block or just stop in the middle of playback.
My PC works fine and can access content. My cell phone, connected to the same home wireless randomly gets messages "You are using a proxy and cannot access this content". Testing both units on whatismyip.com and my own web server show that requests are coming from the same IP. A day or two later it will start working just fine. Stop breaking things or I'll just stick with Amazon and drop your service.
And another note: there are also people who simply do not allow comcast to filter their traffic and therefore always have a VPN. These people despite their efforts to watch netflix content approved for their own country, would be blocked.
Maybe they should not call it UFlix but something like "VPN for your business needs, and for avoiding corrupt and oppressive governments".
My household gave up our Netflix subscription in lieu of giving up IPv6.
Well, you've got me hooked for another month or two.
Netflix also seems to be striking some good deals to lure in more international viewers, e.g. they recently acquired the world-wide rights minus US for the new Star Trek series and also the well regarded The Expanse series by SyFy which is a great bonus considering subscribers in US would need to have services at additional cost in order to watch them.
If you suddenly see 500 different accounts all connecting from the same small block of IP addresses and most of them use out-of-country credit cards, blocking that IP range would be a logical conclusion. This could be managed automatically (or at least alerted to a human to check) with not much effort.
I can't access Netflix from a U.K. data center connection even tho I have a U.K. account because it detects it as a non residential IP address.
Just my speculation.
But there's a much simpler solution with no chance of a false positive [0]: Netflix spends a few dollars signing up for each advertised VPN service, then they instantly block any IP address that the VPN service attempts to route them through.
[0] As long as legitimate Netflix customers aren't sharing their connection with the VPN provider.
It says a great deal about the market conditions of the media industry.
For less cost we use our own US-based vps, running something like the shadowsocks proxy. It's the same rig we found to work the best in China against the great firewall.
With its own dedicated IP, it would likely be cost-inefficient for Netflix to detect without blocking an entire range of legitimate IP addresses.
unless you get an ip in a residential or possibly university range... you're pretty screwed.
As an aside, when I was in Paris, a hotel I was staying at routed their free WiFi through a US VPN (presumably so the Americans wouldn't be offended by having Google return results in French or some shit), and I couldn't even watch French Netflix in France! So annoying.
Worked just fine. I was able to watch a show that's only on American Netflix.
I also have a VPS in Texas that I use with openvpn. It works fine too.
Are they just blocking the "watch American Netflix" services?
Likely commercial VPNs aren't heavily used and may have more of a legitimate use... If Netflix sees a lot traffic from specific methods of access they will look into it...
They have been expanding the blocking efforts since last year. The list continues to grow of failed methods... Wasn't a hard cutover.
Likely this initiative is cause 3rd parties are making money, and content providers werent
(to avoid that particular method that Neflix is using)
If you use technical means to pretend to inhabit another region, they will try to stop you as the article describes.
If I were actually meaningfully affected by this change I would just drop their service and get my content from my peers. It's honestly just not worth the effort.
https://medium.com/@ValdikSS/detecting-vpn-and-its-configura...
You mentioned TORONTO. two problems : you don't know which country the exit node will be in, and the speed is horrible