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Comment by manmal | Hacker News Reader

Austrian here. We suffer from a severely restricted library on Netflix, but there is a loophole: If you connect via a VPN in another country (e.g. US, Switzerland, Netherlands, Germany,..), you can view the country's respective content. Very clever of them :)

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Also Austrian.

Other way around works too, I had a Netflix account before, that I accessed via a VPN, now I also have access to the Austrian Netflix library while paying less (it's cheaper in the US)

I personally don't mind paying a couple of euros more, but I find the available selection unsatisfactory.

I'm not sure how it compares, but this is a common complaint in the US as well. I assume it's huge compared to the Austrian library, but people usually complain that streaming only has the things people don't want to watch - hence the huge uproar when they doubled the price on mail+streaming.

There aren't that many titles though... I don't know how short the list in Austria is, but I wouldn't call the list of shows available in Germany satisfactory. Diverse, yes. I hope they're going to make more shows available.

In Germany and Switzerland (not sure about Austria) it's legal to download (not legal to upload):

- http://thepiratebay.se/

- Or, if above is blocked: http://194.71.107.80/

If you're torrenting you're likely uploading too…

Eh, just use put.io or something. I have yet to find a legal service that is as convenient (built-in conversion to other formats, streaming to Chromecast, subtitles etc.) and has as big of a selection. It's not like I'm not willing to pay (put.io costs money as well).

Austria has similar laws, downloading for personal use is legal.

Regardless whether is legal or not (I guess not), I´m sure is fairly common in the US as well.

The strength of Netflix (and Spotify, Steam...) is that they offer a service that is more convenient, and offers more value, than just downloading the torrent, at least for a large number of users.

I hope they are successful in Europe as well, although the limited library will surely be a problem.

Did you run into any trouble with payment?

I tried and was unable to use my credit because of some security restriction configuration. As I have never changed anything in that regard, I concluded that this must be a default setting.

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