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Comment by laoba | Hacker News Reader

"and when you've got Netflix why bother?)"

Because Netflix takes forever to get the latest movies, and is filled with terrible straight to dvd movies! :)

And because Netflix contains wildly different content in different regions.

My parents use Netflix and I recently got a request from them to set them up to access US Netflix. I didn't even know they were aware of the difference, but they are, and they're sick of the crap that shows up on our side of the boarder.

Not Netflix' fault, and I'm elated that they're pressing the ISP issue, but there are valid concerns about content as well.

Netflix adjusts to whatever region you're in, so getting "US Netflix" isn't going to work for your parents. You're going to need to set them up with something like www.unlocator.com which can spoof their region. Once they turn it on it will open up a lot of titles with their existing Netflix account.

I thought that was implied by his statement.

I read it as they wanted a "US Netflix account" which is really no different than having a "UK" or "Canadian" Netflix account. Netflix doesn't make the distinction between where the account is, only where your IP address is located. This is in contrast to a company like Amazon where purchasing something from amazon.ca or amazon.co.uk is much different than buying from amazon.com. I'm not sure how this effects watching Prime when you're traveling, though, and if it's also IP based.

At any rate, I don't think the implication is obvious.

amz is ip biased, as is google. apple is the only content provider i've found that works traveling abroad (minus vpns/tunnels) as they associate content to account based on cc billing address (though they have terms to indicate otherwise).

Not only that, is that Netflix (insert country other than the USA here) has a much smaller cache of films and TV shows that disappear and appear seemingly at random and without notice.

Netflix fails to offer many titles with the full high bitrate DTS-MA audio track that is available via popcorntime. Even for discs (not streaming), popcorntime wins on quality.

Netflix claims they are just using the product made available to them since the content publishers issue "rental-only" discs with inferior quality product. Apparently Netflix lacks the buying power to influence the quality of product they can make available to their customers.

And because there's a lot of stuff missing:

http://blogs.indiewire.com/shadowandact/films-on-spike-lees-...

and I'd add that netflix is one of the reasons why Firefox was forced to include the infamous DRM crap..

And Netflix doesn't work as well in 720p or 1080p.

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