15 ms·

I am an English person living in Switzerland. Netflix Switzerland is useless to me (no House of Cards, not enough focus on UK and USA content, etc.). Therefor

I am an English person living in Switzerland. Netflix Switzerland is useless to me (no House of Cards, not enough focus on UK and USA content, etc.). Therefore I had a Netflix USA account, which I accessed via unblock-us. The clampdown by Netflix has been "successful" and I now can't access Netflix USA using unblock-us. This happened halfway through watching House of Cards. So my choice was either stop watching or download the remaining episodes... I am tired of companies talking about borderless trade, global economy, etc. when the distribution of movies and tv shows is stuck in the sad world of geo-restrictions. I also legally get access to UK TV channels through my cable subscription, but I don't get access to iPlayer as that's only for UK residents... so again the only option to catch-up on TV that I forgot to record, is to use an unblocker.

kennywinker 10y ago
This blows my mind. How on earth does Netflix not have the rights to show their own show in Switzerland? I understand their hands are sometimes tied in getting content from the studios, but they own House of Cards... I'm so confused how they could end up in that situation...
- detaro 10y ago
  Simple: They sold exclusive rights in quite a few countries to TV networks before they expanded there.
  - michaelbuckbee 10y ago
    Not disagreeing, but it still seems odd as the Netflix Original Content is the big carrot to get people hooked into their ecosystem.
    - detaro 10y ago
      I can only assume they didn't plan to expand this quickly and would have lost a lot of money by adding "in case we are in this market by then" clauses to the contracts. But yes, it certainly leaves a strange impression.
    - messick 10y ago
      "Netflix Original Content" doesn't really mean anything anyway. Better Call Saul is "Netflix Original Content" in every country but the United States, even though they had nothing to do with getting it made. They just bought the non-US rights: http://promo.xfm.co.uk/bettercallsaul/images/970x250_backup_UK.jpg http://promo.xfm.co.uk/bettercallsaul/images/970x250_backup_...
      - talmand 10y ago
        They do the same thing here in the US or I guess Netflix is creating a large number of foreign movies and TV shows.
      - boyter 10y ago
        Not in Australia. Better Call Saul is on a Netflix competitor called Stan.
    - sdm 10y ago
      Just because something is "Netflix Original Content" in one country doesn't mean it's "Netflix Original Content" in another. For example "The 100" is "Netflix Original Content" in Canada but in the US it's not -- it's distributed by some TV network.
- majormajor 10y ago
  IIRC Netflix purchased the streaming rights for House of Cards from a studio, but the studio sold rights to others for medias/locations Netflix wasn't in at the time. E.g. you can buy House of Cards on disc from Sony, or on various on-demand services. Or possibly for streaming, Netflix had those rights but sublicensed them before expanding (oops, if that's the case).
  - rhino369 10y ago
    Netflix doesn't even have an exclusive liscense for the USA. IIRC House of Cards S1 is on comcast xfinity streaming.
- mschuster91 10y ago
  > How on earth does Netflix not have the rights to show their own show in Switzerland? One often-overlooked point is soundtracks. This is why there's no official Cold Case DVD/BD set - it would be prohibitively expensive to license all the music for distribution outside of TV.
  - semi-extrinsic 10y ago
    Another case in point: House MD doesn't have Massive Attack's "Teardrop" as the intro theme anywhere outside the US.
  - tracker1 10y ago
    Same thing with "Wonder Years" it's all about licensing... hell "Daria" had to replace significant portions of the music (thankfully they had the original separate tracks to work from).
- mikeryan 10y ago
  Netflix doesn't "own" House of Cards. Media Rights Capital "owns" House of Cards, Netflix distributes the show. Even then MRC's rights are probably limited because they bought the rights to the concept from the BBC who originally did House of Cards as a mini-series.
- maruhan2 10y ago
  Because Netflix (or other companies) just simply do not have the resources to manage the duty of distributing content all over the world. Hence, there exists regional distributors. Allocating duties to those regional distributors means that you'll need to sign a contract that gives those distributors special rights.
dijit 10y ago
Similar thing happened to me. I'm British living in Sweden. Not only is the selection poor it also does no contain English subtitles for anything; which is frustrating when trying to watch foreign movies. So I turned my NAS back on and cancelled my subscription. I'm happy paying content providers, I really am. I visit the cinema, buy DVDs and even songs on iTunes. But if you stop me or hinder me to the point where piracy is a significantly easier option (Or only one illegal option when there are only illegal options) then I'm going to do it. (This is slightly annoying however because there is a rather large "netflix" button on my new TV remote.)
Grishnakh 10y ago
I'm not familiar with unblock-us. Would a VPN service work, or have they figured out how to block those too? I would imagine that to do that, they'd have to keep lists of IP addresses associated with the VPN services they want to block.
- 9point6 10y ago
  They block anything they can detect as a VPN, which is a pain in the arse, because I don't want to browse at all without a VPN, so I can't use netflix at all any more.
  - pmalynin 10y ago
    How I solved this problem. Bought a $5 DO instance, which gets me a personal ip that is located in the states combined with OpenVPN I can watch Netflix and do many other things that are US only.
    - sheraz 10y ago
      Does this still work? I have a pptp server up on one of these for Netflix, and I'm getting negged. Should I just rotate the server onto a new IP?
      - rabidrabbit 10y ago
        There is a Docker container on github ( https://github.com/ab77/netflix-proxy https://github.com/ab77/netflix-proxy ) that uses a proxy and an IPv6 tunnel that allegedly works with DO's VPS, but I haven't tried it myself. A normally configured proxy and VPN usually end up with a flagged IP, as I've read multiple reports of people trying with DO or Amazon EC2 nodes.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      - russdill 10y ago
        I hear that using an ssh socks tunnel currently functions.
roosterjm2k2 10y ago
I think the reply would be... why do you feel entitled to consume content that you didn't create, in the first place? You had the choice to stop watching... and thats the only legal choice. To pretend that doing something illegal because you feel entitled to it is right, thats a little bit... childish?
- Programmatic 10y ago
  Illegal is not immoral; copyright is a legal construct designed to reward content creators for their works for a limited period of time before it enters the public domain. Our history, culture, and heritage is a fabric of works created by individuals that enter the public consciousness. If you co-opt culture and won't offer it to people through legitimate means, don't be surprised if they go to the frictionless and better value proposition of copying information from the internet without permission.
  - roosterjm2k2 10y ago
    ...Because they feel entitled to the content...
    - atemerev 10y ago
      You keep confusing "being entitled to content" and "being entitled to equal and non-discriminatory treatment". Do you understand the difference?
      - roosterjm2k2 10y ago
        No, thats not at all what it is. There are regulatory and legal reasons why netflix content (even specific content) isnt available everywhere. Its not discriminatory. Its simple entitlement. Don't try to confuse the issue by making it about some kind of discriminatory issue. A business has to have licences to operate in a country, there are many stipulations and there is a cost involved with those stipulations, netflix has no oblication to jump through legal hurdles and pay more money so everyone can enjoy their content. I work for a global company - one who works in the digital realm and makes AAA games... trust me, I deal with these things. You'd be surprised the effort for a US company to sell their product/service in china...
WA 10y ago
This time, I wanted to watch Game of Thrones legally – from Germany. The rights are with Sky Online, a 10 bucks a month subscription service. Sounds good in theory. I signed up and then: - I had to wait 25 minutes for the activation email - I activated my account, but it wouldn’t let me access my account settings for another 25 minutes - then I had to install Silverlight (I’m on OS X) - then I tried to start the stream, which resulted in an OS freeze and something like the OS X blue screen, which I have never seen ever before - then I rebooted and tried again, which failed with the *authentication* step - the web inspector showed a bunch of JS and/or Silverlight errors - I gave up and installed Silverlight on my wife’s Win 10 machine - the stream would load, but it has hard-coded German subtitles for signs and Dothraki scenes, which is annoying. - it has no optional English subtitles - it is only HD, not Full HD - stream was kind of laggy So, now compare this to the pirated process: - downloads very fast - usually there are subtitles - superb quality - I can watch whenever I want with the player I want - no browser plugins, no errors, no nothing. - it just works
- russdill 10y ago
  Not only that, but the media players available let you use downloaded subtitles, in some cases automatically fetching them.
  - DavidTWco 10y ago
    I have my media collection in Plex set up this way, subtitles are automatically fetched from OpenSubtitles.org for my entire collection.
- ukyrgf 10y ago
  Before HBO Go people in the US had to wait and buy the DVD or Blu-ray too . You aren't forced to pirate something just because you need to watch it NOW.
  - WA 10y ago
    This is not about me being forced to pirate anything. It's about offering paying customers a way worse service than people who just download a copy illegaly. It's not too hard to slap a PayPal or Stripe button in front of an HTML5 video with optional Flash fallback. But no, legal entities need to make sure that you won't rip them off with their digital rights nonsense. I understand that this is mostly a legal requirement, but the technical implementation still sucks tremendously up to a point where I wonder, why a service that charges money can't afford better developers than a free service.
tracker1 10y ago
You may be able to use a cheap VPS, and use that as a proxy server to your account. Though, keep an eye on how much data is allowed, and if the VPS/Cloud host actually tracks data usage.

kennywinker 10y ago

This blows my mind. How on earth does Netflix not have the rights to show their own show in Switzerland? I understand their hands are sometimes tied in getting content from the studios, but they own House of Cards... I'm so confused how they could end up in that situation...

detaro 10y ago
Simple: They sold exclusive rights in quite a few countries to TV networks before they expanded there.
- michaelbuckbee 10y ago
  Not disagreeing, but it still seems odd as the Netflix Original Content is the big carrot to get people hooked into their ecosystem.
  - detaro 10y ago
    I can only assume they didn't plan to expand this quickly and would have lost a lot of money by adding "in case we are in this market by then" clauses to the contracts. But yes, it certainly leaves a strange impression.
  - messick 10y ago
    "Netflix Original Content" doesn't really mean anything anyway. Better Call Saul is "Netflix Original Content" in every country but the United States, even though they had nothing to do with getting it made. They just bought the non-US rights: http://promo.xfm.co.uk/bettercallsaul/images/970x250_backup_UK.jpg http://promo.xfm.co.uk/bettercallsaul/images/970x250_backup_...
    - talmand 10y ago
      They do the same thing here in the US or I guess Netflix is creating a large number of foreign movies and TV shows.
    - boyter 10y ago
      Not in Australia. Better Call Saul is on a Netflix competitor called Stan.
  - sdm 10y ago
    Just because something is "Netflix Original Content" in one country doesn't mean it's "Netflix Original Content" in another. For example "The 100" is "Netflix Original Content" in Canada but in the US it's not -- it's distributed by some TV network.
majormajor 10y ago
IIRC Netflix purchased the streaming rights for House of Cards from a studio, but the studio sold rights to others for medias/locations Netflix wasn't in at the time. E.g. you can buy House of Cards on disc from Sony, or on various on-demand services. Or possibly for streaming, Netflix had those rights but sublicensed them before expanding (oops, if that's the case).
- rhino369 10y ago
  Netflix doesn't even have an exclusive liscense for the USA. IIRC House of Cards S1 is on comcast xfinity streaming.
mschuster91 10y ago
> How on earth does Netflix not have the rights to show their own show in Switzerland? One often-overlooked point is soundtracks. This is why there's no official Cold Case DVD/BD set - it would be prohibitively expensive to license all the music for distribution outside of TV.
- semi-extrinsic 10y ago
  Another case in point: House MD doesn't have Massive Attack's "Teardrop" as the intro theme anywhere outside the US.
- tracker1 10y ago
  Same thing with "Wonder Years" it's all about licensing... hell "Daria" had to replace significant portions of the music (thankfully they had the original separate tracks to work from).
mikeryan 10y ago
Netflix doesn't "own" House of Cards. Media Rights Capital "owns" House of Cards, Netflix distributes the show. Even then MRC's rights are probably limited because they bought the rights to the concept from the BBC who originally did House of Cards as a mini-series.
maruhan2 10y ago
Because Netflix (or other companies) just simply do not have the resources to manage the duty of distributing content all over the world. Hence, there exists regional distributors. Allocating duties to those regional distributors means that you'll need to sign a contract that gives those distributors special rights.

dijit 10y ago

Similar thing happened to me. I'm British living in Sweden. Not only is the selection poor it also does no contain English subtitles for anything; which is frustrating when trying to watch foreign movies. So I turned my NAS back on and cancelled my subscription. I'm happy paying content providers, I really am. I visit the cinema, buy DVDs and even songs on iTunes. But if you stop me or hinder me to the point where piracy is a significantly easier option (Or only one illegal option when there are only illegal options) then I'm going to do it. (This is slightly annoying however because there is a rather large "netflix" button on my new TV remote.)

Grishnakh 10y ago

I'm not familiar with unblock-us. Would a VPN service work, or have they figured out how to block those too? I would imagine that to do that, they'd have to keep lists of IP addresses associated with the VPN services they want to block.

9point6 10y ago
They block anything they can detect as a VPN, which is a pain in the arse, because I don't want to browse at all without a VPN, so I can't use netflix at all any more.
- pmalynin 10y ago
  How I solved this problem. Bought a $5 DO instance, which gets me a personal ip that is located in the states combined with OpenVPN I can watch Netflix and do many other things that are US only.
  - sheraz 10y ago
    Does this still work? I have a pptp server up on one of these for Netflix, and I'm getting negged. Should I just rotate the server onto a new IP?
    - rabidrabbit 10y ago
      There is a Docker container on github ( https://github.com/ab77/netflix-proxy https://github.com/ab77/netflix-proxy ) that uses a proxy and an IPv6 tunnel that allegedly works with DO's VPS, but I haven't tried it myself. A normally configured proxy and VPN usually end up with a flagged IP, as I've read multiple reports of people trying with DO or Amazon EC2 nodes.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - russdill 10y ago
      I hear that using an ssh socks tunnel currently functions.

roosterjm2k2 10y ago

I think the reply would be... why do you feel entitled to consume content that you didn't create, in the first place? You had the choice to stop watching... and thats the only legal choice. To pretend that doing something illegal because you feel entitled to it is right, thats a little bit... childish?

Programmatic 10y ago
Illegal is not immoral; copyright is a legal construct designed to reward content creators for their works for a limited period of time before it enters the public domain. Our history, culture, and heritage is a fabric of works created by individuals that enter the public consciousness. If you co-opt culture and won't offer it to people through legitimate means, don't be surprised if they go to the frictionless and better value proposition of copying information from the internet without permission.
- roosterjm2k2 10y ago
  ...Because they feel entitled to the content...
  - atemerev 10y ago
    You keep confusing "being entitled to content" and "being entitled to equal and non-discriminatory treatment". Do you understand the difference?
    - roosterjm2k2 10y ago
      No, thats not at all what it is. There are regulatory and legal reasons why netflix content (even specific content) isnt available everywhere. Its not discriminatory. Its simple entitlement. Don't try to confuse the issue by making it about some kind of discriminatory issue. A business has to have licences to operate in a country, there are many stipulations and there is a cost involved with those stipulations, netflix has no oblication to jump through legal hurdles and pay more money so everyone can enjoy their content. I work for a global company - one who works in the digital realm and makes AAA games... trust me, I deal with these things. You'd be surprised the effort for a US company to sell their product/service in china...

WA 10y ago

This time, I wanted to watch Game of Thrones legally – from Germany. The rights are with Sky Online, a 10 bucks a month subscription service. Sounds good in theory. I signed up and then: - I had to wait 25 minutes for the activation email - I activated my account, but it wouldn’t let me access my account settings for another 25 minutes - then I had to install Silverlight (I’m on OS X) - then I tried to start the stream, which resulted in an OS freeze and something like the OS X blue screen, which I have never seen ever before - then I rebooted and tried again, which failed with the *authentication* step - the web inspector showed a bunch of JS and/or Silverlight errors - I gave up and installed Silverlight on my wife’s Win 10 machine - the stream would load, but it has hard-coded German subtitles for signs and Dothraki scenes, which is annoying. - it has no optional English subtitles - it is only HD, not Full HD - stream was kind of laggy So, now compare this to the pirated process: - downloads very fast - usually there are subtitles - superb quality - I can watch whenever I want with the player I want - no browser plugins, no errors, no nothing. - it just works

russdill 10y ago
Not only that, but the media players available let you use downloaded subtitles, in some cases automatically fetching them.
- DavidTWco 10y ago
  I have my media collection in Plex set up this way, subtitles are automatically fetched from OpenSubtitles.org for my entire collection.
ukyrgf 10y ago
Before HBO Go people in the US had to wait and buy the DVD or Blu-ray too . You aren't forced to pirate something just because you need to watch it NOW.
- WA 10y ago
  This is not about me being forced to pirate anything. It's about offering paying customers a way worse service than people who just download a copy illegaly. It's not too hard to slap a PayPal or Stripe button in front of an HTML5 video with optional Flash fallback. But no, legal entities need to make sure that you won't rip them off with their digital rights nonsense. I understand that this is mostly a legal requirement, but the technical implementation still sucks tremendously up to a point where I wonder, why a service that charges money can't afford better developers than a free service.

tracker1 10y ago

You may be able to use a cheap VPS, and use that as a proxy server to your account. Though, keep an eye on how much data is allowed, and if the VPS/Cloud host actually tracks data usage.