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Comment by medellin | Hacker News Reader

Netflix also no longer works when i travel. Went on a short trip to see some relatives in another country and my netflix account is blocked. Contacted support and they said i need to pay for a new account in that country.

Netflix is really starting to lose its value for me. But I’m working on setting up a VPN at my house to tunnel all Netflix traffic through and then configure some rpis to send to family members so we can all steal from Netflix again.

At this point they have pissed me off enough that im working on making it as easy as possible for anyone to setup and sharing it when im done.

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Netflix lost its value for me when they just stopped having good content. I kept it around almost out of habit, but the anti-consumer policies were the straw that broke the camels back. Their self produced movies and shows are on average, abysmal. I might put up with their practices if they made good things.

This. Netflix's jumping the shark and pandering to blandest common denominator killed my interest.

For a while, there were still interesting original shows in other countries (Money Heist, Dark), but then those seemed to dry up as well.

Netflix needs to learn the Amazon retail lesson -- if I randomly click on a product, out of your entire catalog, and the odds that it's satisfying (which isn't to say necessarily good, but at least not a waste of time) fall below a certain threshold (70%? So 3/10 unacceptable?), then I will stop using your service.

This was it for me as well. I realized I spent more time browsing the catalogue trying in vain to find something good than I did time spent actually watching things. The way it went is I think "I want to watch X", then realize Netflix doesn't have X, then spend 2 hours mindlessly browsing the catalogue for anything that might scratch the X itch and eventually give up then watch half of something else before quitting.

Now I just torrent X and watch it.

I was a ~10 year account as we kept for our based and cycled through a second options every month or few.

I cancelled on a combination of sharing, as my sister used and that stopped me cancelling earlier, plus general content got more limited for my tastes.

Many people seem similar as me, and this is a world where scale matters.

I actually wonder if it would be good regulation that government seperated streaming from creating/owning catalogues. I'm not sure if correct but I suspect otherwise we will have a small number of players controlling what the world watches which tends to be a bad thing.

Agreed. I want to pay for content but it's either subscribe to all these services, paying cable like pricing or manage which services I'm subscribed to each month.

The third alternative, the high-seas is cheaper and far less time consuming to manage.

> Their self produced movies and shows are on average, abysmal. I might put up with their practices if they made good things.

That's the reality. Getting AAA shows on demand for $10/mo was always a mirage. The cable companies weren't conspiring against viewers by preventing you from getting channels a la carte.

Cross-subsidization is what makes TV work. The straight-to-DVD quality "streaming originals" are getting picked up by cable TV channels around the world that need programming. Eventually Netflix will see more profits from library royalties than they do from the subscription business.

It's a shame, because the non-US production is actually quite nice, creating an outlet for big-budget experimentation that certain markets (ITA, ESP...) sorely lacked.

But yes, the quality of Netflix US productions has nosedived, and their backcatalogue has been drained of anything valuable. I lost access a month ago and absolutely have no intention to subscribe, I'm happy enough with Disney+ as my sole channel.

The UI/UX is still intentionally bad. You just waste time looking for something to watch and even when you do it's content that's 6-9 years old and you kind of already didn't care to watch or it's a blockbuster you've already seen or own. It's just kind of a waste.

Netflix produced content has become so irrelevant for me that whenever I want to watch something I look for thumbnails that don't have the Netflix "N" in the corner. For me it's just algorithm generated junk now, it's a shame.

I wish I could cancel it but my partner wants to keep it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

> my partner wants to keep it

What are some of your partner’s favorite shows on Netflix?

Wow. That’s a complete deal breaker for me. The main draw for Netflix had been that they don’t completely gut my viewing options when out of the US (which is almost always).

They must do that for compliance and licencing reasons. Laws around regional copyrights have always been strong. They can't even show subtitles in languages weren't licenced in the country - e.g. Spanish netflix offers very few shows with English subs.

>Netflix also no longer works when i travel. Went on a short trip to see some relatives in another country and my netflix account is blocked.

Is this also true if you use the "download for offline use" for travel purposes? I think I recall that I still had to be logged in to view, despite the "offline" note.[1]

[1] https://help.netflix.com/en/node/54816

https://wiki.servarr.com/

Hasn't Netflix always been region locked? Pretty sure people using VPNs just for Netflix is a thing.

Region lock is one thing. When traveling i was fine watching whatever i was restricted to in that country. Now my account is completely worthless outside the US.

No. I signed up for my account in Taiwan and have also used it in Thailand, Vietnam, Japan and the US. I canceled a few years back and went to Amazon Prime, but they recently gutted their selection if you’re outside the US, so I was considering getting Netflix again.

The streaming service that is now majority self produced content has to have region lock? To everything?

The story was always "evil Disney licensing is forcing us" but I guess they lived long enough to turn into Disney.

It's not just Disney. Many companies license their work to different companies to broadcast in different countries. And this licensing scheme continued on into the streaming era.

Content has always been region locked, but accounts could travel freely between regions. This allowed users in the USA to access media available in any country from a VPN, for instance.

> But I’m working on setting up a VPN at my house to tunnel all Netflix traffic through ...

On a technical point, you might be able to get away with just using Squid for the proxy, with pretty much default settings.

http://www.squid-cache.org

I used to use that years ago (not with Netflix though) running from a data centre, using an ssh (autossh) tunnel to reach it securely.

Worked pretty well, aside from the extra latency due to the packets having to go an extra half way around the world. ;)

Before Netflix was available outside US, I had a VM somewhere in the US, with Netflix proxy (they had no issues with accepting payments from Poland).

Proxy-ing web traffic was not enough and, if memory serves, I also had to set up a DNS resolver on that machine and use it. May be easier to just set up WireGuard nowadays.

> DNS resolver on that machine and use it.

That's a good point. I'd kind of suspect that enabling the "Proxy DNS when using SOCKS v5" setting (in Firefox) would achieve the same thing without the extra setup hassle, but I've not tried it to know if it'd work. :)

IIRC Netflix has gotten unreasonably good at detecting VPNs, VMs and other traffic originating from non-consumer IP addresses.

A l7 (http) proxy will not work for this. Even if you are able to redirect the app to your proxy by overriding DNS it would just fail on the TLS handshake since Netflix is using https. You would need to have their private server certificate to make it work. Plus they might infer from extra headers that traffic is Proxied.

=> You need a L4 proxy, aka VPN

That sounds weird to me, as your description of it sounds like https servers in general shouldn't work through a (squid) proxy.

However, they work just fine.

They work if you have control over the client and can either explicitly configure them to use a proxy server or if your client is ok to speak to a different domain for which you have the legit certificates. With the Netflix app both of this won’t be the case. When using it with a browser for which you can change connection settings it might work.

> With the Netflix app both of this won’t be the case.

Thanks, I'd forgotten about that. I've not used Netflix, so didn't really associate "it's an app with no proxy settings ability".

That being said though, if it's being used on a device (android, iSomething) shouldn't it all "just work" if the proxy is set in the OS system settings?

Netflix has always been region restricted. The real problem here is that support lied to you. Even if you got a Netflix account in that country, that country's Netflix wouldn't have the same content that you wanted to take with you. Lying to customers is deplorable.

The correct, honest answer is that when you go traveling, you cannot access your favorite Netflix content other than through a VPN that tunnels back home.

Hrm, they still allow it while traveling.

https://help.netflix.com/en/node/24853

I know not all the U.S. shows are available, but it also works both ways.

Have they changed the rule recently?

It's likely you're sharing it across households/relatives. Not sure I'd go to such lengths for something that costs as much as a Chipotle burrito tbh

By traveling you are sharing netflix?

And I'm sure they would love for you to roll over, too. Come on, man.

They killed all the interest shows for me. I stopped watching when they cut Santa Clarita diet. Bojack horseman was the last complete show I watched.

Please open source it.

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