74 ms·

Netflix intensifies VPN ban and targets residential IP addresses

385 points by TangerineDream 5y ago

mvanbaak 5y ago
it's simply easier to pirate content then to watch it legally. Even if I want to pay for it, netflix (and other streaming platforms) is making it harder and harder to actually do so.
Semaphor 5y ago
It sounds like the whole DRM thing: Stop a few (in this case even paying[0]) "pirates", hurt regular customers as collateral damage [0] Never seen it for Netflix, but many here buy 3rd world country Spotify subscriptions for a fraction of what it costs in Germany. With Netflix I only hear about avoiding geoblocks.
josephcsible 5y ago
It's awful that Netflix support is telling people to contact their ISPs about this, when it's so obvious that the problem is on Netflix's end and they can just flip a switch back to immediately fix it for everyone.
- randompwd 5y ago
  > telling people to contact their ISPs about this, when it's so obvious that the problem is on Netflix's end They are telling them to contact their ISP because either their ISP directly or the ISPs customers(or the person complaining) are using the ISPs IP addresses to circumvent geo restrictions. So, I'd wager it's more likely the person/the persons household themselves have either wittingly or unwittingly been using something(e.g. Hola VPN) which enables others to proxy through their home IP (& vice versa)
  - josephcsible 5y ago
    > So, I'd wager it's more likely the person/the persons household themselves have either wittingly or unwittingly been using something(e.g. Hola VPN) which enables others to proxy through their home IP (& vice versa) I'm collateral damage of this change, and this definitely isn't the case for me.
  - lp0_on_fire 5y ago
    Imagine a car wash not allowing me to wash my blue car because someone robbed a bank in one of the same color. Then imagine the car wash told me I should talk to Chevy because it's their problem.
    - randompwd 5y ago
      > Imagine a car wash not allowing me to wash my blue car because someone robbed a bank in one of the same color. What a bad analogy.
    - slownews45 5y ago
      Imagine someone is using your actual car / ip to rob banks. And then you drive through the bank line and they don't serve you.
- kobalsky 5y ago
  maybe ISPs are misreporting IP blocks as residential addresses while selling them on the side to some VPN providers?
swiley 5y ago
The primary feature of DRM is that it doesn't work most of the time. Keep that in mind when you're paying to use it.
newfonewhodis 5y ago
If this happens to me, I'm cancelling my Netflix and ramping my Plex server up even more. I pay for Netflix for ease of use, but the harder they make it, the more people will revert to piracy.
- dcdc123 5y ago
  They could just be logging IPs that have been used by a large number of accounts. They could also be tracking accounts that tend to hop between IPs and enforce more strictly on them. EDIT: Oops replied to wrong comment.
  - lnxg33k1 5y ago
    Already did it, got lifetime emby premiere license, can watch whatever I want wherever I am, the ease of use and the low price were charming at the start, but I guess it was too good to last
    - ortusdux 5y ago
      Out of curiosity, what made you go with Emby over Plex?
      - lnxg33k1 5y ago
        the Kodi plugin, emby integrates itself by reusing existing elements, including the Kodi player and Kodi libraries so you can scroll in movies both local files and emby files and use the same flow regardless, Plex last time I tried it, had a full blown view on top of Kodi which was detached from the system, so you either go full Plex or it's not a nice experience
- azinman2 5y ago
  But ramping up Plex with what content? Netflix has the content…
  - 0x000000001 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
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amanaplanacanal 5y ago
Sounds like netflix is in a bind here. They are only licensed to show content in specific regions, and there are no doubt penalties by the actual copyright holders of they go outside those bounds. If they piss off their customers, though, they lose money. They must be buying a database of IP address locations and VPN addresses from somebody. I doubt they are putting that together themselves.
- Philip-J-Fry 5y ago
  It doesn't seem that unreasonable that they could be putting it together themselves. Couldn't they just buy a subscription to all the largest VPN providers and just run through the server list making a note of each server?
  - bgirard 5y ago
    Or find which IPs are logging in with >N unrelated Netflix accounts. Where N is sufficiently high to minimize false positives. Cases like Airbnb would still get the boot with this strategy. They can even let VPN users map the servers for them in the data collection phase. Look at the usage graph and you'll find a cluster of accounts that jump between the same cluster of IPs.
    - Saris 5y ago
      >Cases like Airbnb would still get the boot with this strategy. Or likely anyone on CGNAT for their home internet, I don't think this would be a reliable detection method.
    - laumars 5y ago
      There would be Airbnb traffic would look different from a VPN. For an Airbnb you’d have the accounts change frequently but seldom multiple account from the same IP. Whereas a BPN would see the same accounts frequently but with many overlapping accounts from the same IP. Similarly with hotels you’d see the overlapping of accounts per IP but less regularity of the same accounts. This feels like one of those problems machine learning could help solve. Though there is a lot you can deduce just from good old fashioned rules. Eg some IP subnets are going to have a higher probability of hosting a VPN (eg those bought for AWS EC2) vs legitimate traffic over other IP subnets.
Ansil849 5y ago
It is absolutely ridiculous that anyone's physical location should impact the content they are allowed to watch. Full stop.
- chakerb 5y ago
  It affects how much salary we get paid, what language we speak, what we eat ...etc. Why is that any different?
  - Ansil849 5y ago
    Because in 2021, culture is global. Your examples also don't really make any analogous sense, at all. You are free to learn whichever language you want. Under the corporate geofencing intellectual property regime, you are not free to watch whatever films you want. That is the issue.
    - chakerb 5y ago
      To a recent years, lot of films where banned where I live and watching any of them is a felony! So location indeed affect what you're allowed to watch regardless of whether it's under geofencing intellectual property or another thing. To be clear I wish I lived in a world where I can legally watch everything without a hassle. But there's no such world like that regardless of how much we want to exist. The same way there's no such world where we get paid equally ( doing the same work obviously) because we're living in different locations/countries!
      - Ansil849 5y ago
        > To a recent years, lot of films where banned We are not talking about films which are specifically banned, or content which is generally illegal. We are talking about content that is 'normative' and generally legal around the world, but is artificially restricted based on geofencing. For example, attempting to watch a film that is legal both in Country A and Country B, but not being able to because of the region you are logging into Netflix from.
chris_wot 5y ago
I’m waiting for a lawsuit from enough people getting blocked. It would, however, be difficult to find affected users.
- deleted 5y ago
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- jobigoud 5y ago
  Many people won't bother. If the VPN trick doesn't work they'll just torrent the content.
  - chris_wot 5y ago
    Ah BitTorrent… the ultimate geo-blocking buster.
  - 7ewis 5y ago
    Still means it's worth paying for a VPN then, either way!
LatteLazy 5y ago
Im UK based, I am happy to provide proof of residence, i already pay the uk price in GBP with a UK bank account. So why not let me "lock" my account to UK? Then whatever IP i pop up on, just show me the UK licensed content ive paid for like normal. Even better: give me 20 days a year of holiday use, exclude my vpn from that (just show uk content for any vpn connection i make) and ping me if i spend too long overseas. Im not trying to cheat. I just want to not arse about with my privacy vs their copyright bs.
- isbvhodnvemrwvn 5y ago
  Because the licensing agreement doesn't allow showing content in different countries. There are no provisions for people on vacation.
  - LatteLazy 5y ago
    We already know the agreements arent working. This is a more honest, fairer approach for everyone. Drop the vacation clause if its easier. Im a british resident with a British account, show me what's British-licensed and forget IP Geo faff or vpn detection or whatever. Just ask for proof of residence once in a while.
    - ricktdotorg 5y ago
      Honestly, I bet Netflix would love to do something like this. But they can't, because they'd likely get sued and/or lose rights to distribute content due to breaking contract pledges. This is basically the same reason that the BBC can't offer Brits who are out of the UK access to iPlayer; they just don't have the rights to distribute that content anywhere other than the UK. I hate it.
revlolz 5y ago
Ironically, it was Netflix and Steam that proved if you make things accessible the amount of people pirating content diminishes. People DO want to pay fair prices to legally obtain or consume content.
- croutonwagon 5y ago
  would agree. And why it never made sense at their semi-annual efforts or bluster to crack down on cred sharing. The people piggybacking creds arent going to be buying their own account. Take the MLB as an example. 1. They blackout your home team. 2. They also crack down hard on credential sharing 3. They also crack down hard on using a proxy/VPN to try and bypass blackouts. The blackouts are outrageous in the own rights. The teams i want to follow are 4.5 and 11 hours away by car and are blacked out.....EVEN if i buy the team specific package for that team, games are blacked out.... So I just dont give them money anymore.
  - parineum 5y ago
    The blackouts aren't based on geography, they're based on media markets. A game is blacked out if it can be watched on cable, basically.
- kazoomonger 5y ago
  100% this. I have spent a lot of money on bandcamp. I really wish there was an equivalent of bandcamp for movies and shows.
  - ece 5y ago
    Or a GOG-like service for movies and shows.
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socialist_coder 5y ago
Super lame. In the US, we use a German VPN so that we can get access to more German language content on both Amazon Prime and Netflix. It's the only way my half-German kids can stay fluent with their native tongue. If there were a legal option to do so, I would do it. Why doesn't Netflix allow this? Come on!
- jejoijoij 5y ago
  This likely has more to do with contracts with the content owners rather than Netflix directly. Distribution deals as they are effectively resell the same product by carving up the world into markets. As for Netflix own productions, many I imagine are created in partnership with other production studios who don't generate subscriber revenue from a streaming service but from those same multi-country distribution deals.
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 5y ago
  Same problem. It's undermining dual language speaking kids
- shell0x 5y ago
  It’s not Netflix, but content rights I suspect.
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  What also puzzles me is that the content is generally exclusive to Germany and watching it in the US wouldn't interfere with the American owner of the distribution rights since... there's none! Why still block in country X when nobody owns the distribution rights in country X?
  - netflix_temp 5y ago
    Because the people who own the rights to that think "I might be able to sell the USA rights".
- netflix_temp 5y ago
  Media companies got used to maximizing profits by region locking. Media company lawyers got used to writing those contracts. They are entrenched until people start successfully negotiating global licenses.
Romulus968 5y ago
1. I'd like to know the logic behind region locking 2. This will only drive more people to piracy.
legrande 5y ago
Residential IPs are getting harder to find. The only company I know that offers them is: https://www.surgeproxies.com/ https://www.surgeproxies.com/ (No affiliation). These kind of residential proxy servers are typically more expensive than a VPN however. I'm not encouraging anyone to try Surge with Netflix, simply pointing out a rare service that's hard to find on the net, since the market is saturated with VPN companies with OpenVPN and Wireguard being the dominating protocols.
- niij 5y ago
  That site has multiple lorem Ipsum blurbs on the home page. Sketchy.
- nyuszika7h 5y ago
  TorGuard also offers US residential IPs.
8eye 5y ago
well, you will still have your 5 accounts that you can use (at home), and at home you can setup a proxy server, one which you can tunnel into and still watch whatever wherever as if you are at home. yeah, your server has to be fast, but this won’t stop the motivated.
zucker42 5y ago
Is anyone else completely unsatisfied with the "contact your ISP" method of customer service that Netflix seems to be using here? They are basically passing off their issue (false positive VPN detection) to an unrelated company (and a company type that's notorious for poor customer service). Why should an ISP be responsible for figuring out why an IP ended up in Netflix's database? I would be pretty upset if that was the answer I got from Netflix customer service.
- tyingq 5y ago
  It felt like an attempt to convince customers that their ISPs were reporting them to Netflix.
- adamcharnock 5y ago
  As a small ISP I feel the same. If they block one of our IPs the we have to find someone who knows someone who knows someone at Netflix (Amazon, etc) to actually get something done about it. BUT, we launched with IPv6 support, which pretty much negates this whole issue for us when it comes to Netflix.
- est31 5y ago
  If they offered a customer service option to resolve such issues, probably 90% of requests would be from people who legitimately were VPN users. So they'd have to waste a lot of time to help the 10% of false positives affected. And ironically, the better they make their detection system at avoiding false positives, the more time they'd be wasting on that customer service. So maybe they invest more resources into making the detection system better instead of customer service. Also, this problem is probably ISP specific. If an ISP routes their global traffic over a globally shared pool of a couple public ipv4's via CGNAT for example, the ISP is virtually aiding the VPN providers which have obtained users from those ISPs. Netflix probably wants the ISP to stop doing that and instead chop up their public ipv4 pool into smaller pools so that they can ban individual sub-pools instead. The market position Netflix is in allows them to keep the users of small ISPs hostage in this situation. They only have to buckle in to large ISPs, if at all. Anyways, this is a silly waste of time really. People paid for content. People should be allowed to watch it. If they want to watch american shows instead, why not let them.
timbaboon 5y ago
I live in South Africa. This has now happened to me as of today… not on a vpn. I’ve been a paying subscriber for years… trying to do the right thing, but now? TBP?
scaccoway 5y ago
I'm a Vodafone customer with dynamic IP... And I can't watch Netflix because is says that I'm using a VPN, but I'm not. I noticed that it does work on my LG smart TV, but it doesn't on phone, tablet, pc or Chromecast. Having to watch Netflix with 4G is just painful, slow and expensive.
LinAGKar 5y ago
>These changes came after copyright holders repeatedly complained that ‘pirates’ were bypassing Netflix’s geographical restrictions. But this isn't even against pirates, this targets people who go through trouble not to pirate, and instead forces them to pirate to be able to watch certain things at all.
- jobigoud 5y ago
  It's strange, how did the copyright holders figure out this behavior was increasing or that it was a problem? What metrics are they looking at?
  - deadbunny 5y ago
    YouTube ads for VPNs would be my guess.
- LordDragonfang 5y ago
  This is just an example of antiquated media companies trying to change the definition of "piracy" to include paying customers bypassing geo-restrictions.
hatware 5y ago
Dropped Netflix in the winter and haven't looked back since. Self hosting is just the way of the future if you don't want to die from subscriptions snowballing.
mdasen 5y ago
I'm a little surprised that Netflix is going to this amount of effort. I certainly understand why Netflix must take reasonable steps to enforce geo-restrictions. If they buy the rights to Star Trek Discovery for the UK, CBS doesn't want them letting Americans watch Star Trek Discovery when they're trying to sell Americans Star Trek Discovery on another platform. Whether you agree with this or not, if Netflix doesn't comply, they won't get content from third parties. At the same time, one would think this would be an area where Netflix wouldn't care about a very small number of people bypassing restrictions. They need to be seen to be enforcing the restrictions and they need to actually enforce them to a large extent. I guess I'm puzzled as to why they are going above-and-beyond expectations. Are the expectations that high? Have more VPNs made it easy to get around geo-blocks by using residential IP addresses? It seems like Netflix is potentially going to end up blocking IP addresses of customers while cutting down on a very small amount of people hopping their geo-fences. It also seems like their content providers would be placated by the pretty decent job they do of banning VPNs.
- andrewxdiamond 5y ago
  Its likely that studios are pushing this requirement into Netflix. The studios probably have seen the VPN ads everywhere marketing how easy it is to circumvent Netflix’s (and other’s) regional blocks
  - danuker 5y ago
    Funny how ads might backfire this way!
- cairo140 5y ago
  Even if content license holders don't require Netflix to go above and beyond, building sophisticated DRM is a moat against other streaming services. If Netflix can build a sophisticated VPN-detection service, copyright holders will be much less willing to license their content to upstarts who can't match its capabilities. In the same vein, it can be rational behavior for a market leader who deals in private information (most online advertising companies) to advocate for consumer privacy protections. It "hurts" them, but if the resulting regulations are so onerous that only incumbent(s) can comply, it can restrict the competitive landscape and paradoxically be advantageous to the existing leaders.
NelsonMinar 5y ago
Starlink makes this kind of detection a real mess. They're using CGNAT so many people share a single IP address. Also that IP address changes frequently, about once a day? And the addresses don't geolocate very well, either. Starlink customers definitely have a problem with Hulu already; their system does not work at all well with people whose IP addresses change frequently. I wonder if Netflix is about to start being a problem too. More details: https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/l5y9jl/hulu_live_streaming_and_geoip_detection_for/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/l5y9jl/hulu_live_...
- deleted 5y ago
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- majormajor 5y ago
  The link there is about live TV on Hulu - the right for live TV packages are significantly more complicated than just regular streaming, due to sports contracts that are often VERY geo-specific, with much finer granularity than the other country-level stuff. So the streaming companies are pushed to do finer and finer levels of monitoring. I keep my "cable" subscription streaming service (when I even have one) separate from any other content I watch for that reason. Don't want it fucking up more than it has to.
  - NelsonMinar 5y ago
    I agree that TV rights are a complicated business problem. But Youtube TV managed to solve it in a way that doesn't just break for some bizarre technical reason most TV viewers don't understand.
shell0x 5y ago
In Australia half of the content is not available since there are also local competitors. I use Disney+ and Netflix, but I’m tired of wasting hours to find out if that particular movie streams in my country or not. At first we were progressing with online streaming but now movies are streaming across Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Binge, Stan. I can’t be bothered to have that many services, VPNs are getting banned for paying customers due content rights, so I may as well just go back to Torrent/NZB, or don’t watch and read a book instead.
- 6510 5y ago
  Don't forget to seed
  - paulie4542 5y ago
    I had to double take this comment. At first glance I thought it said Sneed.
- lugged 5y ago
  We already cut Netflix from our budget. Torrenting is faster and easier than dealing with Netflix's shitty interface that keeps trying to serve up old shows I've already seen or clearly don't want to see. The amount of stuff I want to watch and isn't on Netflix is very large too, probably about half or more of what I watch is not available on Netflix here but is elsewhere in the world. All that tells me is Netflix is part of the mafiaa.
  - dleslie 5y ago
    The inflection point for Netflix's utility was when they removed the star ratings. It went from being an industry leader in catalog surfing to being one of the worst, seemingly overnight. They'd later make it difficult to narrow by genre, and similar catalog-hiding changes. It was a shame. I found that I enjoyed interesting combinations like "Campy Science Fiction with a rating between 2 and 4". Now Netflix seems transfixed on shoving shitty daytime dating shows down my throat.
bubblethink 5y ago
I hope a new hyperlocal startup disrupts this space. As is, things are way too broad. I want different content when I'm in my living room v/s when I'm taking a shit.
Threeve303 5y ago
Why not limit available content based on the payment information instead of IP address? I'm sure there are international travelers that would be inconvenienced but Netflix could create a separate plan for them.
luis8 5y ago
Prime video does not allow you to see the platform outside your country of residence. You can change your account origin if you migrated to another country. Although this will limit people using it while they travel, it will reduce a lot of people from doing this because they will need to have access to an account outside of their country of residence
ajsnigrutin 5y ago
So.. people are actively looking for vpns and proxies to actually pay netflix to get content, and netflix actively fights then, so they cannot get the content they (want to) pay for. And then people why piracy is becoming popular again.
- judge2020 5y ago
  This is because most people want competition within a country (think local streaming services to compete with the big players), so companies will often grant the streaming license to those smaller companies that aren’t Netflix, which (as we’ve seen happen in the US within the last 3 years) is overall a worse experience for the consumer. Local media libraries (via a legal blu-ray selection & storage device of course) are the best since it doesn’t give the rights holders a say on where you can watch it, just that ‘I paid for it, so I’m going to watch it’.
  - ajsnigrutin 5y ago
    Netflix could just take the money, let vpn users watch, because realistically, they have no idea where the user behind the vpn is actually located. If people want to pay another service just to give you money, let them watch the damn shows.
- netflix_temp 5y ago
  > So.. people are actively looking for vpns and proxies to actually pay netflix to get content, and netflix actively fights then, so they cannot get the content they (want to) pay for. Correct. Because the contracts they have to sign to get the shows you want to watch often come with crazy regional licensing.
chx 5y ago
I want none of this. I want an app that lets me play whatever I want. I have the money to pay for this but right now this app is called bittorrent. Here's a simple challenge: find a legal online streaming service, any service which shows Mists Of Avalon from 2001. (Yes, yes, I know, I can find the Russian site which streams it for free, I strongly suspect it's pirating it.)
- duskwuff 5y ago
  An unusual but significant factor in the lack of streaming rights for The Mists of Avalon may be the allegations of child sexual abuse against Marion Zimmer Bradley, the author of the source material for that series.
  - chx 5y ago
    I really dunno, Orange is the new Black continues despite more than allegations against Kevin Spacey.
    - duskwuff 5y ago
      Are you thinking of another show? The final season of Orange is the New Black aired in 2019, and I don't believe Spacey was involved with the show. Besides, actors can be replaced, but you can't replace an author who's already written the book -- and the allegations against Bradley are much worse.
- oehpr 5y ago
  I have the money to pay for this but right now this app is called bittorrent. I maybe am making too much of an assumption about your financial status, but I don't think you do. Because there's not like... an actual market for media. The price, like any monopoly, is how effectively they can price discriminate combined with what they think they can ask. You ask "How much?", the answer is "What you got?".
- nvllsvm 5y ago
  When I was younger I mostly torrented out of necessity. There were a few things I bought, but only if I could afford it. These days I end up buying a fair amount of music and games with only a fraction acquired elsewhere. Both Bandcamp and GOG.com have been have sinks of money for me. As for TV shows and movies, I only wish there was an equivalent which didn't sell an experience subpar to a DRM-free mkv.
rsync 5y ago
The problem here is that I geo-shift my exit IP without a VPN on a regular basis, for a variety of reasons none of which have anything to do with copyright and remain within the copyright jurisdiction that netflix wants me to be in. Nevertheless, exiting my home traffic from the he.net core datacenter (in Fremont, CA, no less) gets the ban. That is not my screwup. That is their screwup.
m3kw9 5y ago
This sounds like they are running out of money making ideas before the next quarter. Look like a red flag
excalibur 5y ago
Lol, go ahead and block me. I'm currently paying for 8 streaming services. Maybe I'll miss Netflix more than they'll miss my subscription fee, but not by much.
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bsharitt 5y ago
Disney+ had inexplicably blocked my IP address for "being a VPN" for close to year, despite me never running a VPN from my home network. Though the block didn't stop me from watching their content, it just stopped me from paying for, which I was more than willing to do and spent far to long dealing with their support to try to make it happen. If the same thing happens with Netflix, it also won't keep me from watching Netflix content, I'll just stop paying for it. Other than the aforementioned Disney+ content, I rarely pirate anything these days and I'd rather not if I can help it.
- deleted 5y ago
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- brundolf 5y ago
  > If the same thing happens with Netflix, it also won't keep me from watching Netflix content, I'll just stop paying for it The Disney+ one sounded like a (hilarious) bug in their logic. Not sure why that would translate to Netflix Edit: I may have misunderstood. I thought Disney+ was blocking the user from paying for Disney+ but not from streaming Disney+. I missed the implication that they started pirating the content.
  - majormajor 5y ago
    There are companies who sell lists of suspected VPN IPs. If Disney+ and Netflix used the same list, you could get blocked from both.
  - dmurray 5y ago
    I don't think it's a hilarious bug in their logic, just collateral damage in the war between VPN providers and Disney/Netflix/etc. The VPN providers try to get IP ranges that look like residential IPs. Ideally they rent them from the same ISPs who really do provide residential service. By the nature of the traffic, Disney can't tell for sure that it's coming from a VPN - just something like "a suspiciously large number of users connected from this range, especially users who currently seem to be travelling internationally". Perhaps the user had a dynamic IP address and kept getting one in the same range that was also used for VPNs. Perhaps he had a static one but Disney banned ranges by the /28 instead of individual addresses.
rogers18445 5y ago
What I don't understand is why these VPN users even bother to try and watch Netflix, just go to rarbg or 1337x and download whatever you want, far more convenient. You get to use a media player such as mpv as well, rather than the web garbage these paid streaming services have you use, +- 1 minute seeks are instant too.
- actually_a_dog 5y ago
  You don't understand why people might want to avoid being flagged by their ISP for torrenting?
  - rogers18445 5y ago
    Reading comprehension must be difficult? They are VPN users.
    - actually_a_dog 5y ago
      Snark really helps your argument. More snark, please!
55555 5y ago
I don't see anyone mentioning the biggest problem with this. Companies like Bright Data (the leading residential proxy provider) sell access to what is essentially a legal botnet. Their IPs are indeed VPN exit points, but they also belong to some innocent family that just accidentally installed a browser extension without reading the EULA. 99% of their residential IPs belong to ordinary people who have no idea they are part of the botnet. When Netflix bans these IPs, they are also banning this family, who are probably very confused as to why they can no longer use their Netflix subscription. My hope is Netflix is smart enough to only block users using these IPs when the browser and system timezone and other attributes don't align with the geolocation of the IP. Also, Bright Data's IP pool is a secret but you can just sign up as a user and make tons of requests and log them for yourself. Not exactly rocket science.
Corinthian 5y ago
Netflix, like countless other online services, is not built for global citizens - people that work in different countries to their own. I am a British born expat, living in Qatar, so of course I want to watch the UK orientated Netflix programming and not the Arabic or Hindi. I have a UK TV license but of course, I can't watch UK TV from Qatar. Trying to pay for things online is frequently a nightmare as many companies won't take payment from a UK card unless it's from a UK IP. Same trying to pay tax on my US houses, also some websites don't even let you connect to them unless you use a US IP address! Google rightly defaults to Arabic if you're not logged in, that's fine, but even they don't provide a simple way to change the language to English! Similar with Spotify, same with Apple music. Whatsapp voice calls are blocked in Qatar. All of these problems and many more are bypassed with a good VPN. It amazes me how few services ever take into consideration that people don't always live and work in their country of origin. If VPN's are clamped down on it's going to make life difficult for tens of millions of people. VPN's are actually VITAL in many situations.
- GrifMD 5y ago
  I feel your pain. I'm an American living in Australia, so I'm not as significantly affected. Still my Google account and Apple accounts are all US based. My Apple account is tied into a family account I share with my US based family. I cannot download specific apps that are only on the Australian Apple App Store. My Sony Android TV cannot download some Australian television apps. I cannot purchase Audible audiobooks without VPN'ing back in to the US, even with credits I've accrued.
  - 908B64B197 5y ago
    > I cannot download specific apps that are only on the Australian Apple App Store That's awesome for tourists. Go for a few weeks and you can't access the local apps. Brilliant.
    - koyote 5y ago
      Yep, and some of them are quite important for tourists such as the national weather app (which has alerts for storms, flooding etc.). Luckily these were easily side-loadable on an Android phone.
joecool1029 5y ago
Good, I welcome this! Zoomers need to learn how to pirate content, they haven't yet as a cohort. All the rise in widescale piracy 10-20 years ago started because media distribution sucked ass. Once the streaming services started and were easy to use, everyone stopped pirating. Netflix didn't just kill Blockbuster, it stopped ThePirateBay from being a household name. Since hell will freeze over before sensible copyright terms come about, piracy is our only hope to get rare/weird/controversial and out-of-print media. We need educated and more importantly, motivated, pirates to build up the communities again.
- MisterSandman 5y ago
  Luckily piracy has been kept alive by a lot of Third World Countries. Ask any Indian college student; they might not have graduated, but they sure as fuck know how to pirate the newest Marvel movie. Interestingly, this is also changing - streaming services are offering plans at dirt cheap prices because they're essentially trying to compete with piracy. That's slowly caused a decrease in piracy, and prices have slowly started to go back up in India too.
  - post_break 5y ago
    I’ve seen people use vpns to sign up for Netflix and other utilities to pay those rock bottom prices.
DarrisMackelroy 5y ago
An interesting anecdote to this: For a while my home network was running OpenMPTCProuter and I was testing bonding my 500mbps cable and 1000mbps fiber out to a linode VPS. So my home IP was a linode address. I went to watch the newest season I Think You Should Leave (on an ATV) but only the first season showed up. As soon as I bypassed OpenMPTCProuter, the new season showed up. The same went for the app on my phone on the bonded wifi vs cellular.
- Spivak 5y ago
  At this point VPS address ranges are basically useless for human traffic. If you want a clean ip your options are business ISPs either directly or via a small colo provider.
  - DarrisMackelroy 5y ago
    Yes, this is the conclusion I came to. I assume Netflix was limiting me the same way they would someone on a VPN. The Linode IP worked for 99% of my home traffic, but I tended to get captchas occasionally and some sites didn’t work at all or said they didn’t work over VPN. It was just bad enough that I wasn’t willing to keep it set up that way.
throwawaysea 5y ago
This is a bad move for Netflix. They have always been lacking high quality first party content, and the cracks are beginning to show with the recent drop in subscribers that led to a drop in stock price. Consumers have more choice than ever, and anecdotally, I am noticing that the pandemic has reset the leisure habits of many people I know away from digital entertainment. This is an unnecessarily user hostile move that gives people one more reason to cancel their subscription.
uptown 5y ago
Anyone have a solution for MLB.tv blackouts? I pay for MLB.tv but I can’t watch my local team because of broadcast blackouts.
- post_break 5y ago
  There are ways to do it, but I wouldn’t know how nor would I share how to do it on this website if that makes sense.
IntelMiner 5y ago
Many years ago, I worked at a small (3 US states) ISP, roughly 500-600K customers This ISP was one that mostly absorbed smaller ISP's that weren't able to scale up enough to remain competitive. One of the ISP's they absorbed was CondoInternet. A Seattle based firm that provided gigabit internet service across Seattle's affluent areas and expensive condos As it turned out, a lot of the customers ordering the service hailed from a country with a very restrictive censorship regime. A "great firewall" if you will They'd set up home-made VPN's using Raspberry Pi's etc for family to tunnel into and watch Netflix on typically Netflix however even in 2017 was smart and their algorithm would see these thousands of people logging in while everyone else in Seattle was typically asleep and eventually ban the entire ISP's IP range. Logging in would give a "please turn off your proxy/VPN" error message Every time this happened the ISP's phone tree would explode, going from mere seconds to literal 6-10 hour queue times. The NOC was entirely upskilled CS agents who had no idea how to contact Netflix's relevant teams to get the IP ban removed, instead they'd simply tell CS to have customers wait until the IP ban expired (usually a few days) This would happen almost every other month
- encryptluks2 5y ago
  I'm guessing that was probably a blatant abuse of the residential service. Not that I agree, but ISPs already block port 25 for the most part. I'm surprised they didn't just start banning customers abusing the service.
  - IntelMiner 5y ago
    Port 25 is for unsecured SMTP VPN's can be on any port
  - techsupporter 5y ago
    > I'm surprised they didn't just start banning customers abusing the service. One of CondoInternet's advertised selling points before they sold to Wave Broadband is that you could buy the 1Gbps service and do whatever you wanted, including run your own servers. So it wasn't an abuse of the service. Everyone I knew on CondoInternet would buy the highest speed package so they could run Minecraft and Plex and other servers for their friends. It was like having Speakeasy Internet Services SDSL back again but with 200 times the upload.
shp0ngle 5y ago
The fact that Netflix does not ban people from streaming Netflix-made shows and movies makes me think it's not Netflix that really wants to do it, but third party copyright owners that push them to do this.
serialrapist 5y ago
They better watch the fuck out.
BLKNSLVR 5y ago
Is this a side-channel DoS attack on Netflix by the media companies who have, or are planning to, setup their own streaming services? The pendulum is swinging back to the dark days before Netflix's distribution aggregation solution. I pay for Netflix. If a media company doesn't want their IP on Netflix, then they don't get a share of my subscription. I don't have the time / desire to watch enough TV shows or movies to justify the cost of multiple subscriptions just in case there's one show I don't want to miss on one of those services. I do have Amazon Prime as well, but that's incidental - as soon as Prime TV is de-coupled from the delivery discount: gone from the monthly / annual subs list.
imgabe 5y ago
The distribution issues with media are ridiculously antiquated. It is 2021. There is absolutely zero reason for there to be any kind of region restriction on media. Why do you want to stop people in other countries from giving you money for your content? Because it certainly isn't going to stop anyone in those other countries from watching it, it is only going to stop them from paying for it.
kossTKR 5y ago
Handling tens of subscriptions for all kinds of services and content is getting ridiculous. Yes there's much more and in better quality today but you almost need a Personal Assistant now just to sub/unsub various services while the terms and catalog is constantly getting worse. I had netflix and 10+ other subscriptions but recently just decided to close all of them and just torrent when i need to and drop the rest - no more having to use my already strained mental capacity to find stuff, switch services, unsub, sub, miss subtitles in local languages or in english etc. Way too much content was removed and seemingly disappeared sometimes mid season. I'll still support indie projects, podcasts, smaller creators etc. but big business can get their shit together. Imagine having 150 subscriptions as a family in the future "smart city" dystopia ranging from media to food to transport etc with a million pages of terms - i want less choices, less terms, better curation and don't want to use my life "handling" a personal technocracy.
- shadilay 5y ago
  I just want to pay cash.
- sefrost 5y ago
  > you almost need a Personal Assistant now just to sub/unsub various services I believe the billing methods should be changed to "if you don't use the service this month then you don't pay". If I watch a single minute of Netflix this month then fine, bill me the normal monthly fee. If I don't watch anything then they shouldn't bill me. Same for all streaming services. This would solve that problem nicely for me. This would also be good for game subscription services.
  - DevoidSimo 5y ago
    I think I heard (possibly here) that Netflix actually does stop billing inactive accounts. Never tested that myself though, and the time before being considered inactive may be longer than 1 month.
hellbannedguy 5y ago
Netflix should worry about buying good movies. I had Netflix for a few months, and there is a formula. Throw a lot of money to writers, directors, and stars. Writers use every trick in their box to put out a D+ movie. Ditto for directors. Actors just jawbone what's written. Netflix should be glad anyone wants to watch their garbage. Sounds harsh? I found most movies an insult. And try looking up Award Winning films--in emglish.
- mackrevinack 5y ago
  sometimes even when watching a trailer i can almost guess that its going to be a netflix original. i dunno what it is, something about the lighting or camera gear they use maybe, or the b-list actors that I've never seen before, or the dialog
iamnotwhoiam 5y ago
Living outside of the US this leads to me to scream my least favorite expression in the whole world: "Let me give you money!"
stephen_cagle 5y ago
This is self destructive, as it makes their content look paltry when you view it through a VPN. I just unsubscribed from Netflix yesterday because I was like "none of the movies on my watchlist are on Netflix". Now I wonder if that was actually because I was looking through a VPN. The most insidious part is that they don't tell you that you have reduced content, they just silently remove content if you use a VPN. As an example: I can watch "The Game" (1997) from California, USA if I don't use a VPN. If I connect with Express VPN (through San Francisco) the title is not available. That is dumb.
michaelmrose 5y ago
> The streaming service is working with people who were inadvertently affected to restore access to the full library. I won't bother I'll just stream them for nothing if they foil my attempt to give them money for content and try them again in 2030 if they are still in business. I advise them to prioritize customers. Imagine if you went to Walmart and they threw you out because you looked like a guy who shoplifted there last week. Would you shop there next week or even next year?
- busymom0 5y ago
  Same here. A lot of users started using streaming services for movies/shows and music because the $10 per month was a decent enough deal to not have to bother torrenting/downloading pirated copies. But if these companies are putting geo-locks and other such restrictions on VPN, then they will just go back to pirating again especially with the rise of webtorrent and free streaming sites like fmoviesgo or popcorntime.
- donw 5y ago
  We canceled our Netflix subscription something like six months ago, on the basis that there was literally nothing worth our time to watch. It feels a bit like when I quit social media. I freed a surprising amount of time, and liberated this just incredible reservoir of emotional energy that was previously allocated to the Void. Thanks to that surplus, I learned how to dance. Seriously leveled up my cooking skills. Walking away from the prolefeed made my life better in a cornucopia of ways. Ditching streaming services (Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc.) feels the same.
- nearbuy 5y ago
  Netflix doesn't want to be spending time and money to antagonize its own customers. They do it because rights-holders force them to.
zelienople 5y ago
The image that this brings to mind is the denizens of a post-apocalyptic hellscape fighting over an emaciated corpse.
mdoms 5y ago
The solution to this is so simple that it's frustrating these people can't see it. License all of your content for the global audience and refuse any licensing deals that restrict by region. License holders will soon get on board if they're offered fair prices, when the alternative is no audience. Use the cost savings from the engineering efforts on this ridiculous cat and mouse game to fund the additional license fees. Done and done.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  > when the alternative is no audience. Except that is not the alternative. There are many competing streaming services out there.
hvaoc 5y ago
Get a subscription and download the same content from torrents. You have been fair from your side.
santa_boy 5y ago
Off Topic: I haven't been able to tunnel Netflix through a VPN except for a corporate proxy. Pls advise any working options.
deleted 5y ago
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rdevsrex 5y ago
This annoys me to no end. It's like, I'm paying with a US debit card, you have my physical address in the States (my parents'), so why the hell should it matter where I am at this moment? I think if there is any geofencing, it should be based on where you registered your account, or by method of payment. Maybe we need to pester Congress to change contract law. In lieu of that, does anyone know of a desktop/gui tcp proxy? I was thinking of making one and having it run on my Mom's computer, seeing as how she leaves it on 24/7 :)
Traubenfuchs 5y ago
Ah yes, that phase of a previously explosive growth type company that now suffers from stalled growth where they start investing in fighting some power users they might lose for good. Many such cases! Sad!
daveoc64 5y ago
I don't really get why this whole VPN thing works with Netflix. Spotify only allows free accounts to be used in a different country for up to 14 days[0]. I am surprised Netflix hasn't implemented something similar - your account can only be used outside of the billing region for up to 30 days (perhaps in a 90 day period) or something like that. That would make using a VPN with Netflix less appealing. [0] - https://support.spotify.com/us/article/cant-log-in-abroad/ https://support.spotify.com/us/article/cant-log-in-abroad/
ZoomZoomZoom 5y ago
I remember the first time some web site I visited assumed the language based on my IP (just that, not even localizing the content). I felt indignation: the web was the place to get away from assumptions, borders and other crap, but here it was, being dragged in. Didn't they understand they had started to replicate the idiocy of the old off-line society? What a fool I was.
MomoXenosaga 5y ago
Yes I'm sharing my brother's Netflix account. How could you tell?
imacerealkiller 5y ago
Geez you'd think with all the money they were making, they would ease up a bit and let the people watch what they wanna watch, wherever they wanna watch! Next there'd be a Netflix Premium account that allows you to watch a worldwide collection of series and programs.
- hiddencache 5y ago
  That would probably correlate with a sudden drop in VPN revenues
mouzogu 5y ago
I've noticed the same with Spotify. It stopped working on VPN just this week.
TheSmiddy 5y ago
There's probably about a million people who have had to implement some kind of geo restriction content system and there's probably only about 1000 people in the entire world who want such a system to exist.
joghues 5y ago
Why are there even Netflix exclusives on a certain country? If they tried to release all of the shows, they need not worry about the IP address as some are using VPN to watch shows currently available in a certain country.
xyzzy21 5y ago
I don't do Netflix so my solution is to never start! Never will become a customer and honestly with their woke, there's nothing of value anyway!
crusty 5y ago
User complains that all of a sudden they can only get Netflix originals from home. Netflix suggests they call their ISP and ask why their IP is associated with proxy/vpn activity. The assumption of the article seems to be that Netflix is performing some action on it's own to determine whether a residential user is on a VPN, and that this type of response is unhelpful buck-passing. But IIRC, for years now ISPs in the US have had the green light to monetize customer metadata. It seems possible that either Netflix or an industry-backed anti-piracy entity is buying lists with timestamped VPN usage per IP (based on packet traffic patterns?) for Netflix to compare to their usage time-stamps per IP and just assuming causation. I don't know how far-fetched this is, but it fits with Netflix's response to these people's inquiries and it also removes the question of how Netflix might know if a user was streaming over a VPN through thier own residential ISP connection.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

it's simply easier to pirate content then to watch it legally. Even if I want to pay for it, netflix (and other streaming platforms) is making it harder and harder to actually do so.

Semaphor 5y ago

It sounds like the whole DRM thing: Stop a few (in this case even paying[0]) "pirates", hurt regular customers as collateral damage [0] Never seen it for Netflix, but many here buy 3rd world country Spotify subscriptions for a fraction of what it costs in Germany. With Netflix I only hear about avoiding geoblocks.

josephcsible 5y ago

It's awful that Netflix support is telling people to contact their ISPs about this, when it's so obvious that the problem is on Netflix's end and they can just flip a switch back to immediately fix it for everyone.

randompwd 5y ago
> telling people to contact their ISPs about this, when it's so obvious that the problem is on Netflix's end They are telling them to contact their ISP because either their ISP directly or the ISPs customers(or the person complaining) are using the ISPs IP addresses to circumvent geo restrictions. So, I'd wager it's more likely the person/the persons household themselves have either wittingly or unwittingly been using something(e.g. Hola VPN) which enables others to proxy through their home IP (& vice versa)
- josephcsible 5y ago
  > So, I'd wager it's more likely the person/the persons household themselves have either wittingly or unwittingly been using something(e.g. Hola VPN) which enables others to proxy through their home IP (& vice versa) I'm collateral damage of this change, and this definitely isn't the case for me.
- lp0_on_fire 5y ago
  Imagine a car wash not allowing me to wash my blue car because someone robbed a bank in one of the same color. Then imagine the car wash told me I should talk to Chevy because it's their problem.
  - randompwd 5y ago
    > Imagine a car wash not allowing me to wash my blue car because someone robbed a bank in one of the same color. What a bad analogy.
  - slownews45 5y ago
    Imagine someone is using your actual car / ip to rob banks. And then you drive through the bank line and they don't serve you.
kobalsky 5y ago
maybe ISPs are misreporting IP blocks as residential addresses while selling them on the side to some VPN providers?

swiley 5y ago

The primary feature of DRM is that it doesn't work most of the time. Keep that in mind when you're paying to use it.

newfonewhodis 5y ago

If this happens to me, I'm cancelling my Netflix and ramping my Plex server up even more. I pay for Netflix for ease of use, but the harder they make it, the more people will revert to piracy.

dcdc123 5y ago
They could just be logging IPs that have been used by a large number of accounts. They could also be tracking accounts that tend to hop between IPs and enforce more strictly on them. EDIT: Oops replied to wrong comment.
- lnxg33k1 5y ago
  Already did it, got lifetime emby premiere license, can watch whatever I want wherever I am, the ease of use and the low price were charming at the start, but I guess it was too good to last
  - ortusdux 5y ago
    Out of curiosity, what made you go with Emby over Plex?
    - lnxg33k1 5y ago
      the Kodi plugin, emby integrates itself by reusing existing elements, including the Kodi player and Kodi libraries so you can scroll in movies both local files and emby files and use the same flow regardless, Plex last time I tried it, had a full blown view on top of Kodi which was detached from the system, so you either go full Plex or it's not a nice experience
azinman2 5y ago
But ramping up Plex with what content? Netflix has the content…
- 0x000000001 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

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amanaplanacanal 5y ago

Sounds like netflix is in a bind here. They are only licensed to show content in specific regions, and there are no doubt penalties by the actual copyright holders of they go outside those bounds. If they piss off their customers, though, they lose money. They must be buying a database of IP address locations and VPN addresses from somebody. I doubt they are putting that together themselves.

Philip-J-Fry 5y ago
It doesn't seem that unreasonable that they could be putting it together themselves. Couldn't they just buy a subscription to all the largest VPN providers and just run through the server list making a note of each server?
- bgirard 5y ago
  Or find which IPs are logging in with >N unrelated Netflix accounts. Where N is sufficiently high to minimize false positives. Cases like Airbnb would still get the boot with this strategy. They can even let VPN users map the servers for them in the data collection phase. Look at the usage graph and you'll find a cluster of accounts that jump between the same cluster of IPs.
  - Saris 5y ago
    >Cases like Airbnb would still get the boot with this strategy. Or likely anyone on CGNAT for their home internet, I don't think this would be a reliable detection method.
  - laumars 5y ago
    There would be Airbnb traffic would look different from a VPN. For an Airbnb you’d have the accounts change frequently but seldom multiple account from the same IP. Whereas a BPN would see the same accounts frequently but with many overlapping accounts from the same IP. Similarly with hotels you’d see the overlapping of accounts per IP but less regularity of the same accounts. This feels like one of those problems machine learning could help solve. Though there is a lot you can deduce just from good old fashioned rules. Eg some IP subnets are going to have a higher probability of hosting a VPN (eg those bought for AWS EC2) vs legitimate traffic over other IP subnets.

Ansil849 5y ago

It is absolutely ridiculous that anyone's physical location should impact the content they are allowed to watch. Full stop.

chakerb 5y ago
It affects how much salary we get paid, what language we speak, what we eat ...etc. Why is that any different?
- Ansil849 5y ago
  Because in 2021, culture is global. Your examples also don't really make any analogous sense, at all. You are free to learn whichever language you want. Under the corporate geofencing intellectual property regime, you are not free to watch whatever films you want. That is the issue.
  - chakerb 5y ago
    To a recent years, lot of films where banned where I live and watching any of them is a felony! So location indeed affect what you're allowed to watch regardless of whether it's under geofencing intellectual property or another thing. To be clear I wish I lived in a world where I can legally watch everything without a hassle. But there's no such world like that regardless of how much we want to exist. The same way there's no such world where we get paid equally ( doing the same work obviously) because we're living in different locations/countries!
    - Ansil849 5y ago
      > To a recent years, lot of films where banned We are not talking about films which are specifically banned, or content which is generally illegal. We are talking about content that is 'normative' and generally legal around the world, but is artificially restricted based on geofencing. For example, attempting to watch a film that is legal both in Country A and Country B, but not being able to because of the region you are logging into Netflix from.

chris_wot 5y ago

I’m waiting for a lawsuit from enough people getting blocked. It would, however, be difficult to find affected users.

deleted 5y ago
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jobigoud 5y ago
Many people won't bother. If the VPN trick doesn't work they'll just torrent the content.
- chris_wot 5y ago
  Ah BitTorrent… the ultimate geo-blocking buster.
- 7ewis 5y ago
  Still means it's worth paying for a VPN then, either way!

LatteLazy 5y ago

Im UK based, I am happy to provide proof of residence, i already pay the uk price in GBP with a UK bank account. So why not let me "lock" my account to UK? Then whatever IP i pop up on, just show me the UK licensed content ive paid for like normal. Even better: give me 20 days a year of holiday use, exclude my vpn from that (just show uk content for any vpn connection i make) and ping me if i spend too long overseas. Im not trying to cheat. I just want to not arse about with my privacy vs their copyright bs.

isbvhodnvemrwvn 5y ago
Because the licensing agreement doesn't allow showing content in different countries. There are no provisions for people on vacation.
- LatteLazy 5y ago
  We already know the agreements arent working. This is a more honest, fairer approach for everyone. Drop the vacation clause if its easier. Im a british resident with a British account, show me what's British-licensed and forget IP Geo faff or vpn detection or whatever. Just ask for proof of residence once in a while.
  - ricktdotorg 5y ago
    Honestly, I bet Netflix would love to do something like this. But they can't, because they'd likely get sued and/or lose rights to distribute content due to breaking contract pledges. This is basically the same reason that the BBC can't offer Brits who are out of the UK access to iPlayer; they just don't have the rights to distribute that content anywhere other than the UK. I hate it.

revlolz 5y ago

Ironically, it was Netflix and Steam that proved if you make things accessible the amount of people pirating content diminishes. People DO want to pay fair prices to legally obtain or consume content.

croutonwagon 5y ago
would agree. And why it never made sense at their semi-annual efforts or bluster to crack down on cred sharing. The people piggybacking creds arent going to be buying their own account. Take the MLB as an example. 1. They blackout your home team. 2. They also crack down hard on credential sharing 3. They also crack down hard on using a proxy/VPN to try and bypass blackouts. The blackouts are outrageous in the own rights. The teams i want to follow are 4.5 and 11 hours away by car and are blacked out.....EVEN if i buy the team specific package for that team, games are blacked out.... So I just dont give them money anymore.
- parineum 5y ago
  The blackouts aren't based on geography, they're based on media markets. A game is blacked out if it can be watched on cable, basically.
kazoomonger 5y ago
100% this. I have spent a lot of money on bandcamp. I really wish there was an equivalent of bandcamp for movies and shows.
- ece 5y ago
  Or a GOG-like service for movies and shows.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

socialist_coder 5y ago

Super lame. In the US, we use a German VPN so that we can get access to more German language content on both Amazon Prime and Netflix. It's the only way my half-German kids can stay fluent with their native tongue. If there were a legal option to do so, I would do it. Why doesn't Netflix allow this? Come on!

jejoijoij 5y ago
This likely has more to do with contracts with the content owners rather than Netflix directly. Distribution deals as they are effectively resell the same product by carving up the world into markets. As for Netflix own productions, many I imagine are created in partnership with other production studios who don't generate subscriber revenue from a streaming service but from those same multi-country distribution deals.
Fire-Dragon-DoL 5y ago
Same problem. It's undermining dual language speaking kids
shell0x 5y ago
It’s not Netflix, but content rights I suspect.
908B64B197 5y ago
What also puzzles me is that the content is generally exclusive to Germany and watching it in the US wouldn't interfere with the American owner of the distribution rights since... there's none! Why still block in country X when nobody owns the distribution rights in country X?
- netflix_temp 5y ago
  Because the people who own the rights to that think "I might be able to sell the USA rights".
netflix_temp 5y ago
Media companies got used to maximizing profits by region locking. Media company lawyers got used to writing those contracts. They are entrenched until people start successfully negotiating global licenses.

Romulus968 5y ago

1. I'd like to know the logic behind region locking 2. This will only drive more people to piracy.

legrande 5y ago

Residential IPs are getting harder to find. The only company I know that offers them is: https://www.surgeproxies.com/ https://www.surgeproxies.com/ (No affiliation). These kind of residential proxy servers are typically more expensive than a VPN however. I'm not encouraging anyone to try Surge with Netflix, simply pointing out a rare service that's hard to find on the net, since the market is saturated with VPN companies with OpenVPN and Wireguard being the dominating protocols.

niij 5y ago
That site has multiple lorem Ipsum blurbs on the home page. Sketchy.
nyuszika7h 5y ago
TorGuard also offers US residential IPs.

8eye 5y ago

well, you will still have your 5 accounts that you can use (at home), and at home you can setup a proxy server, one which you can tunnel into and still watch whatever wherever as if you are at home. yeah, your server has to be fast, but this won’t stop the motivated.

zucker42 5y ago

Is anyone else completely unsatisfied with the "contact your ISP" method of customer service that Netflix seems to be using here? They are basically passing off their issue (false positive VPN detection) to an unrelated company (and a company type that's notorious for poor customer service). Why should an ISP be responsible for figuring out why an IP ended up in Netflix's database? I would be pretty upset if that was the answer I got from Netflix customer service.

tyingq 5y ago
It felt like an attempt to convince customers that their ISPs were reporting them to Netflix.
adamcharnock 5y ago
As a small ISP I feel the same. If they block one of our IPs the we have to find someone who knows someone who knows someone at Netflix (Amazon, etc) to actually get something done about it. BUT, we launched with IPv6 support, which pretty much negates this whole issue for us when it comes to Netflix.
est31 5y ago
If they offered a customer service option to resolve such issues, probably 90% of requests would be from people who legitimately were VPN users. So they'd have to waste a lot of time to help the 10% of false positives affected. And ironically, the better they make their detection system at avoiding false positives, the more time they'd be wasting on that customer service. So maybe they invest more resources into making the detection system better instead of customer service. Also, this problem is probably ISP specific. If an ISP routes their global traffic over a globally shared pool of a couple public ipv4's via CGNAT for example, the ISP is virtually aiding the VPN providers which have obtained users from those ISPs. Netflix probably wants the ISP to stop doing that and instead chop up their public ipv4 pool into smaller pools so that they can ban individual sub-pools instead. The market position Netflix is in allows them to keep the users of small ISPs hostage in this situation. They only have to buckle in to large ISPs, if at all. Anyways, this is a silly waste of time really. People paid for content. People should be allowed to watch it. If they want to watch american shows instead, why not let them.

timbaboon 5y ago

I live in South Africa. This has now happened to me as of today… not on a vpn. I’ve been a paying subscriber for years… trying to do the right thing, but now? TBP?

scaccoway 5y ago

I'm a Vodafone customer with dynamic IP... And I can't watch Netflix because is says that I'm using a VPN, but I'm not. I noticed that it does work on my LG smart TV, but it doesn't on phone, tablet, pc or Chromecast. Having to watch Netflix with 4G is just painful, slow and expensive.

LinAGKar 5y ago

>These changes came after copyright holders repeatedly complained that ‘pirates’ were bypassing Netflix’s geographical restrictions. But this isn't even against pirates, this targets people who go through trouble not to pirate, and instead forces them to pirate to be able to watch certain things at all.

jobigoud 5y ago
It's strange, how did the copyright holders figure out this behavior was increasing or that it was a problem? What metrics are they looking at?
- deadbunny 5y ago
  YouTube ads for VPNs would be my guess.
LordDragonfang 5y ago
This is just an example of antiquated media companies trying to change the definition of "piracy" to include paying customers bypassing geo-restrictions.

hatware 5y ago

Dropped Netflix in the winter and haven't looked back since. Self hosting is just the way of the future if you don't want to die from subscriptions snowballing.

mdasen 5y ago

I'm a little surprised that Netflix is going to this amount of effort. I certainly understand why Netflix must take reasonable steps to enforce geo-restrictions. If they buy the rights to Star Trek Discovery for the UK, CBS doesn't want them letting Americans watch Star Trek Discovery when they're trying to sell Americans Star Trek Discovery on another platform. Whether you agree with this or not, if Netflix doesn't comply, they won't get content from third parties. At the same time, one would think this would be an area where Netflix wouldn't care about a very small number of people bypassing restrictions. They need to be seen to be enforcing the restrictions and they need to actually enforce them to a large extent. I guess I'm puzzled as to why they are going above-and-beyond expectations. Are the expectations that high? Have more VPNs made it easy to get around geo-blocks by using residential IP addresses? It seems like Netflix is potentially going to end up blocking IP addresses of customers while cutting down on a very small amount of people hopping their geo-fences. It also seems like their content providers would be placated by the pretty decent job they do of banning VPNs.

andrewxdiamond 5y ago
Its likely that studios are pushing this requirement into Netflix. The studios probably have seen the VPN ads everywhere marketing how easy it is to circumvent Netflix’s (and other’s) regional blocks
- danuker 5y ago
  Funny how ads might backfire this way!
cairo140 5y ago
Even if content license holders don't require Netflix to go above and beyond, building sophisticated DRM is a moat against other streaming services. If Netflix can build a sophisticated VPN-detection service, copyright holders will be much less willing to license their content to upstarts who can't match its capabilities. In the same vein, it can be rational behavior for a market leader who deals in private information (most online advertising companies) to advocate for consumer privacy protections. It "hurts" them, but if the resulting regulations are so onerous that only incumbent(s) can comply, it can restrict the competitive landscape and paradoxically be advantageous to the existing leaders.

NelsonMinar 5y ago

Starlink makes this kind of detection a real mess. They're using CGNAT so many people share a single IP address. Also that IP address changes frequently, about once a day? And the addresses don't geolocate very well, either. Starlink customers definitely have a problem with Hulu already; their system does not work at all well with people whose IP addresses change frequently. I wonder if Netflix is about to start being a problem too. More details: https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/l5y9jl/hulu_live_streaming_and_geoip_detection_for/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/l5y9jl/hulu_live_...

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majormajor 5y ago
The link there is about live TV on Hulu - the right for live TV packages are significantly more complicated than just regular streaming, due to sports contracts that are often VERY geo-specific, with much finer granularity than the other country-level stuff. So the streaming companies are pushed to do finer and finer levels of monitoring. I keep my "cable" subscription streaming service (when I even have one) separate from any other content I watch for that reason. Don't want it fucking up more than it has to.
- NelsonMinar 5y ago
  I agree that TV rights are a complicated business problem. But Youtube TV managed to solve it in a way that doesn't just break for some bizarre technical reason most TV viewers don't understand.

shell0x 5y ago

In Australia half of the content is not available since there are also local competitors. I use Disney+ and Netflix, but I’m tired of wasting hours to find out if that particular movie streams in my country or not. At first we were progressing with online streaming but now movies are streaming across Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Binge, Stan. I can’t be bothered to have that many services, VPNs are getting banned for paying customers due content rights, so I may as well just go back to Torrent/NZB, or don’t watch and read a book instead.

6510 5y ago
Don't forget to seed
- paulie4542 5y ago
  I had to double take this comment. At first glance I thought it said Sneed.
lugged 5y ago
We already cut Netflix from our budget. Torrenting is faster and easier than dealing with Netflix's shitty interface that keeps trying to serve up old shows I've already seen or clearly don't want to see. The amount of stuff I want to watch and isn't on Netflix is very large too, probably about half or more of what I watch is not available on Netflix here but is elsewhere in the world. All that tells me is Netflix is part of the mafiaa.
- dleslie 5y ago
  The inflection point for Netflix's utility was when they removed the star ratings. It went from being an industry leader in catalog surfing to being one of the worst, seemingly overnight. They'd later make it difficult to narrow by genre, and similar catalog-hiding changes. It was a shame. I found that I enjoyed interesting combinations like "Campy Science Fiction with a rating between 2 and 4". Now Netflix seems transfixed on shoving shitty daytime dating shows down my throat.

bubblethink 5y ago

I hope a new hyperlocal startup disrupts this space. As is, things are way too broad. I want different content when I'm in my living room v/s when I'm taking a shit.

Threeve303 5y ago

Why not limit available content based on the payment information instead of IP address? I'm sure there are international travelers that would be inconvenienced but Netflix could create a separate plan for them.

luis8 5y ago

Prime video does not allow you to see the platform outside your country of residence. You can change your account origin if you migrated to another country. Although this will limit people using it while they travel, it will reduce a lot of people from doing this because they will need to have access to an account outside of their country of residence

ajsnigrutin 5y ago

So.. people are actively looking for vpns and proxies to actually pay netflix to get content, and netflix actively fights then, so they cannot get the content they (want to) pay for. And then people why piracy is becoming popular again.

judge2020 5y ago
This is because most people want competition within a country (think local streaming services to compete with the big players), so companies will often grant the streaming license to those smaller companies that aren’t Netflix, which (as we’ve seen happen in the US within the last 3 years) is overall a worse experience for the consumer. Local media libraries (via a legal blu-ray selection & storage device of course) are the best since it doesn’t give the rights holders a say on where you can watch it, just that ‘I paid for it, so I’m going to watch it’.
- ajsnigrutin 5y ago
  Netflix could just take the money, let vpn users watch, because realistically, they have no idea where the user behind the vpn is actually located. If people want to pay another service just to give you money, let them watch the damn shows.
netflix_temp 5y ago
> So.. people are actively looking for vpns and proxies to actually pay netflix to get content, and netflix actively fights then, so they cannot get the content they (want to) pay for. Correct. Because the contracts they have to sign to get the shows you want to watch often come with crazy regional licensing.

chx 5y ago

I want none of this. I want an app that lets me play whatever I want. I have the money to pay for this but right now this app is called bittorrent. Here's a simple challenge: find a legal online streaming service, any service which shows Mists Of Avalon from 2001. (Yes, yes, I know, I can find the Russian site which streams it for free, I strongly suspect it's pirating it.)

duskwuff 5y ago
An unusual but significant factor in the lack of streaming rights for The Mists of Avalon may be the allegations of child sexual abuse against Marion Zimmer Bradley, the author of the source material for that series.
- chx 5y ago
  I really dunno, Orange is the new Black continues despite more than allegations against Kevin Spacey.
  - duskwuff 5y ago
    Are you thinking of another show? The final season of Orange is the New Black aired in 2019, and I don't believe Spacey was involved with the show. Besides, actors can be replaced, but you can't replace an author who's already written the book -- and the allegations against Bradley are much worse.
oehpr 5y ago
I have the money to pay for this but right now this app is called bittorrent. I maybe am making too much of an assumption about your financial status, but I don't think you do. Because there's not like... an actual market for media. The price, like any monopoly, is how effectively they can price discriminate combined with what they think they can ask. You ask "How much?", the answer is "What you got?".
nvllsvm 5y ago
When I was younger I mostly torrented out of necessity. There were a few things I bought, but only if I could afford it. These days I end up buying a fair amount of music and games with only a fraction acquired elsewhere. Both Bandcamp and GOG.com have been have sinks of money for me. As for TV shows and movies, I only wish there was an equivalent which didn't sell an experience subpar to a DRM-free mkv.

rsync 5y ago

The problem here is that I geo-shift my exit IP without a VPN on a regular basis, for a variety of reasons none of which have anything to do with copyright and remain within the copyright jurisdiction that netflix wants me to be in. Nevertheless, exiting my home traffic from the he.net core datacenter (in Fremont, CA, no less) gets the ban. That is not my screwup. That is their screwup.

m3kw9 5y ago

This sounds like they are running out of money making ideas before the next quarter. Look like a red flag

excalibur 5y ago

Lol, go ahead and block me. I'm currently paying for 8 streaming services. Maybe I'll miss Netflix more than they'll miss my subscription fee, but not by much.

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bsharitt 5y ago

Disney+ had inexplicably blocked my IP address for "being a VPN" for close to year, despite me never running a VPN from my home network. Though the block didn't stop me from watching their content, it just stopped me from paying for, which I was more than willing to do and spent far to long dealing with their support to try to make it happen. If the same thing happens with Netflix, it also won't keep me from watching Netflix content, I'll just stop paying for it. Other than the aforementioned Disney+ content, I rarely pirate anything these days and I'd rather not if I can help it.

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brundolf 5y ago
> If the same thing happens with Netflix, it also won't keep me from watching Netflix content, I'll just stop paying for it The Disney+ one sounded like a (hilarious) bug in their logic. Not sure why that would translate to Netflix Edit: I may have misunderstood. I thought Disney+ was blocking the user from paying for Disney+ but not from streaming Disney+. I missed the implication that they started pirating the content.
- majormajor 5y ago
  There are companies who sell lists of suspected VPN IPs. If Disney+ and Netflix used the same list, you could get blocked from both.
- dmurray 5y ago
  I don't think it's a hilarious bug in their logic, just collateral damage in the war between VPN providers and Disney/Netflix/etc. The VPN providers try to get IP ranges that look like residential IPs. Ideally they rent them from the same ISPs who really do provide residential service. By the nature of the traffic, Disney can't tell for sure that it's coming from a VPN - just something like "a suspiciously large number of users connected from this range, especially users who currently seem to be travelling internationally". Perhaps the user had a dynamic IP address and kept getting one in the same range that was also used for VPNs. Perhaps he had a static one but Disney banned ranges by the /28 instead of individual addresses.

rogers18445 5y ago

What I don't understand is why these VPN users even bother to try and watch Netflix, just go to rarbg or 1337x and download whatever you want, far more convenient. You get to use a media player such as mpv as well, rather than the web garbage these paid streaming services have you use, +- 1 minute seeks are instant too.

actually_a_dog 5y ago
You don't understand why people might want to avoid being flagged by their ISP for torrenting?
- rogers18445 5y ago
  Reading comprehension must be difficult? They are VPN users.
  - actually_a_dog 5y ago
    Snark really helps your argument. More snark, please!

55555 5y ago

I don't see anyone mentioning the biggest problem with this. Companies like Bright Data (the leading residential proxy provider) sell access to what is essentially a legal botnet. Their IPs are indeed VPN exit points, but they also belong to some innocent family that just accidentally installed a browser extension without reading the EULA. 99% of their residential IPs belong to ordinary people who have no idea they are part of the botnet. When Netflix bans these IPs, they are also banning this family, who are probably very confused as to why they can no longer use their Netflix subscription. My hope is Netflix is smart enough to only block users using these IPs when the browser and system timezone and other attributes don't align with the geolocation of the IP. Also, Bright Data's IP pool is a secret but you can just sign up as a user and make tons of requests and log them for yourself. Not exactly rocket science.

Corinthian 5y ago

Netflix, like countless other online services, is not built for global citizens - people that work in different countries to their own. I am a British born expat, living in Qatar, so of course I want to watch the UK orientated Netflix programming and not the Arabic or Hindi. I have a UK TV license but of course, I can't watch UK TV from Qatar. Trying to pay for things online is frequently a nightmare as many companies won't take payment from a UK card unless it's from a UK IP. Same trying to pay tax on my US houses, also some websites don't even let you connect to them unless you use a US IP address! Google rightly defaults to Arabic if you're not logged in, that's fine, but even they don't provide a simple way to change the language to English! Similar with Spotify, same with Apple music. Whatsapp voice calls are blocked in Qatar. All of these problems and many more are bypassed with a good VPN. It amazes me how few services ever take into consideration that people don't always live and work in their country of origin. If VPN's are clamped down on it's going to make life difficult for tens of millions of people. VPN's are actually VITAL in many situations.

GrifMD 5y ago
I feel your pain. I'm an American living in Australia, so I'm not as significantly affected. Still my Google account and Apple accounts are all US based. My Apple account is tied into a family account I share with my US based family. I cannot download specific apps that are only on the Australian Apple App Store. My Sony Android TV cannot download some Australian television apps. I cannot purchase Audible audiobooks without VPN'ing back in to the US, even with credits I've accrued.
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  > I cannot download specific apps that are only on the Australian Apple App Store That's awesome for tourists. Go for a few weeks and you can't access the local apps. Brilliant.
  - koyote 5y ago
    Yep, and some of them are quite important for tourists such as the national weather app (which has alerts for storms, flooding etc.). Luckily these were easily side-loadable on an Android phone.

joecool1029 5y ago

Good, I welcome this! Zoomers need to learn how to pirate content, they haven't yet as a cohort. All the rise in widescale piracy 10-20 years ago started because media distribution sucked ass. Once the streaming services started and were easy to use, everyone stopped pirating. Netflix didn't just kill Blockbuster, it stopped ThePirateBay from being a household name. Since hell will freeze over before sensible copyright terms come about, piracy is our only hope to get rare/weird/controversial and out-of-print media. We need educated and more importantly, motivated, pirates to build up the communities again.

MisterSandman 5y ago
Luckily piracy has been kept alive by a lot of Third World Countries. Ask any Indian college student; they might not have graduated, but they sure as fuck know how to pirate the newest Marvel movie. Interestingly, this is also changing - streaming services are offering plans at dirt cheap prices because they're essentially trying to compete with piracy. That's slowly caused a decrease in piracy, and prices have slowly started to go back up in India too.
- post_break 5y ago
  I’ve seen people use vpns to sign up for Netflix and other utilities to pay those rock bottom prices.

DarrisMackelroy 5y ago

An interesting anecdote to this: For a while my home network was running OpenMPTCProuter and I was testing bonding my 500mbps cable and 1000mbps fiber out to a linode VPS. So my home IP was a linode address. I went to watch the newest season I Think You Should Leave (on an ATV) but only the first season showed up. As soon as I bypassed OpenMPTCProuter, the new season showed up. The same went for the app on my phone on the bonded wifi vs cellular.

Spivak 5y ago
At this point VPS address ranges are basically useless for human traffic. If you want a clean ip your options are business ISPs either directly or via a small colo provider.
- DarrisMackelroy 5y ago
  Yes, this is the conclusion I came to. I assume Netflix was limiting me the same way they would someone on a VPN. The Linode IP worked for 99% of my home traffic, but I tended to get captchas occasionally and some sites didn’t work at all or said they didn’t work over VPN. It was just bad enough that I wasn’t willing to keep it set up that way.

throwawaysea 5y ago

This is a bad move for Netflix. They have always been lacking high quality first party content, and the cracks are beginning to show with the recent drop in subscribers that led to a drop in stock price. Consumers have more choice than ever, and anecdotally, I am noticing that the pandemic has reset the leisure habits of many people I know away from digital entertainment. This is an unnecessarily user hostile move that gives people one more reason to cancel their subscription.

uptown 5y ago

Anyone have a solution for MLB.tv blackouts? I pay for MLB.tv but I can’t watch my local team because of broadcast blackouts.

post_break 5y ago
There are ways to do it, but I wouldn’t know how nor would I share how to do it on this website if that makes sense.

IntelMiner 5y ago

Many years ago, I worked at a small (3 US states) ISP, roughly 500-600K customers This ISP was one that mostly absorbed smaller ISP's that weren't able to scale up enough to remain competitive. One of the ISP's they absorbed was CondoInternet. A Seattle based firm that provided gigabit internet service across Seattle's affluent areas and expensive condos As it turned out, a lot of the customers ordering the service hailed from a country with a very restrictive censorship regime. A "great firewall" if you will They'd set up home-made VPN's using Raspberry Pi's etc for family to tunnel into and watch Netflix on typically Netflix however even in 2017 was smart and their algorithm would see these thousands of people logging in while everyone else in Seattle was typically asleep and eventually ban the entire ISP's IP range. Logging in would give a "please turn off your proxy/VPN" error message Every time this happened the ISP's phone tree would explode, going from mere seconds to literal 6-10 hour queue times. The NOC was entirely upskilled CS agents who had no idea how to contact Netflix's relevant teams to get the IP ban removed, instead they'd simply tell CS to have customers wait until the IP ban expired (usually a few days) This would happen almost every other month

encryptluks2 5y ago
I'm guessing that was probably a blatant abuse of the residential service. Not that I agree, but ISPs already block port 25 for the most part. I'm surprised they didn't just start banning customers abusing the service.
- IntelMiner 5y ago
  Port 25 is for unsecured SMTP VPN's can be on any port
- techsupporter 5y ago
  > I'm surprised they didn't just start banning customers abusing the service. One of CondoInternet's advertised selling points before they sold to Wave Broadband is that you could buy the 1Gbps service and do whatever you wanted, including run your own servers. So it wasn't an abuse of the service. Everyone I knew on CondoInternet would buy the highest speed package so they could run Minecraft and Plex and other servers for their friends. It was like having Speakeasy Internet Services SDSL back again but with 200 times the upload.

shp0ngle 5y ago

The fact that Netflix does not ban people from streaming Netflix-made shows and movies makes me think it's not Netflix that really wants to do it, but third party copyright owners that push them to do this.

serialrapist 5y ago

They better watch the fuck out.

BLKNSLVR 5y ago

Is this a side-channel DoS attack on Netflix by the media companies who have, or are planning to, setup their own streaming services? The pendulum is swinging back to the dark days before Netflix's distribution aggregation solution. I pay for Netflix. If a media company doesn't want their IP on Netflix, then they don't get a share of my subscription. I don't have the time / desire to watch enough TV shows or movies to justify the cost of multiple subscriptions just in case there's one show I don't want to miss on one of those services. I do have Amazon Prime as well, but that's incidental - as soon as Prime TV is de-coupled from the delivery discount: gone from the monthly / annual subs list.

imgabe 5y ago

The distribution issues with media are ridiculously antiquated. It is 2021. There is absolutely zero reason for there to be any kind of region restriction on media. Why do you want to stop people in other countries from giving you money for your content? Because it certainly isn't going to stop anyone in those other countries from watching it, it is only going to stop them from paying for it.

kossTKR 5y ago

Handling tens of subscriptions for all kinds of services and content is getting ridiculous. Yes there's much more and in better quality today but you almost need a Personal Assistant now just to sub/unsub various services while the terms and catalog is constantly getting worse. I had netflix and 10+ other subscriptions but recently just decided to close all of them and just torrent when i need to and drop the rest - no more having to use my already strained mental capacity to find stuff, switch services, unsub, sub, miss subtitles in local languages or in english etc. Way too much content was removed and seemingly disappeared sometimes mid season. I'll still support indie projects, podcasts, smaller creators etc. but big business can get their shit together. Imagine having 150 subscriptions as a family in the future "smart city" dystopia ranging from media to food to transport etc with a million pages of terms - i want less choices, less terms, better curation and don't want to use my life "handling" a personal technocracy.

shadilay 5y ago
I just want to pay cash.
sefrost 5y ago
> you almost need a Personal Assistant now just to sub/unsub various services I believe the billing methods should be changed to "if you don't use the service this month then you don't pay". If I watch a single minute of Netflix this month then fine, bill me the normal monthly fee. If I don't watch anything then they shouldn't bill me. Same for all streaming services. This would solve that problem nicely for me. This would also be good for game subscription services.
- DevoidSimo 5y ago
  I think I heard (possibly here) that Netflix actually does stop billing inactive accounts. Never tested that myself though, and the time before being considered inactive may be longer than 1 month.

hellbannedguy 5y ago

Netflix should worry about buying good movies. I had Netflix for a few months, and there is a formula. Throw a lot of money to writers, directors, and stars. Writers use every trick in their box to put out a D+ movie. Ditto for directors. Actors just jawbone what's written. Netflix should be glad anyone wants to watch their garbage. Sounds harsh? I found most movies an insult. And try looking up Award Winning films--in emglish.

mackrevinack 5y ago
sometimes even when watching a trailer i can almost guess that its going to be a netflix original. i dunno what it is, something about the lighting or camera gear they use maybe, or the b-list actors that I've never seen before, or the dialog

iamnotwhoiam 5y ago

Living outside of the US this leads to me to scream my least favorite expression in the whole world: "Let me give you money!"

stephen_cagle 5y ago

This is self destructive, as it makes their content look paltry when you view it through a VPN. I just unsubscribed from Netflix yesterday because I was like "none of the movies on my watchlist are on Netflix". Now I wonder if that was actually because I was looking through a VPN. The most insidious part is that they don't tell you that you have reduced content, they just silently remove content if you use a VPN. As an example: I can watch "The Game" (1997) from California, USA if I don't use a VPN. If I connect with Express VPN (through San Francisco) the title is not available. That is dumb.

michaelmrose 5y ago

> The streaming service is working with people who were inadvertently affected to restore access to the full library. I won't bother I'll just stream them for nothing if they foil my attempt to give them money for content and try them again in 2030 if they are still in business. I advise them to prioritize customers. Imagine if you went to Walmart and they threw you out because you looked like a guy who shoplifted there last week. Would you shop there next week or even next year?

busymom0 5y ago
Same here. A lot of users started using streaming services for movies/shows and music because the $10 per month was a decent enough deal to not have to bother torrenting/downloading pirated copies. But if these companies are putting geo-locks and other such restrictions on VPN, then they will just go back to pirating again especially with the rise of webtorrent and free streaming sites like fmoviesgo or popcorntime.
donw 5y ago
We canceled our Netflix subscription something like six months ago, on the basis that there was literally nothing worth our time to watch. It feels a bit like when I quit social media. I freed a surprising amount of time, and liberated this just incredible reservoir of emotional energy that was previously allocated to the Void. Thanks to that surplus, I learned how to dance. Seriously leveled up my cooking skills. Walking away from the prolefeed made my life better in a cornucopia of ways. Ditching streaming services (Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc.) feels the same.
nearbuy 5y ago
Netflix doesn't want to be spending time and money to antagonize its own customers. They do it because rights-holders force them to.

zelienople 5y ago

The image that this brings to mind is the denizens of a post-apocalyptic hellscape fighting over an emaciated corpse.

mdoms 5y ago

The solution to this is so simple that it's frustrating these people can't see it. License all of your content for the global audience and refuse any licensing deals that restrict by region. License holders will soon get on board if they're offered fair prices, when the alternative is no audience. Use the cost savings from the engineering efforts on this ridiculous cat and mouse game to fund the additional license fees. Done and done.

MattGaiser 5y ago
> when the alternative is no audience. Except that is not the alternative. There are many competing streaming services out there.

hvaoc 5y ago

Get a subscription and download the same content from torrents. You have been fair from your side.

santa_boy 5y ago

Off Topic: I haven't been able to tunnel Netflix through a VPN except for a corporate proxy. Pls advise any working options.

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rdevsrex 5y ago

This annoys me to no end. It's like, I'm paying with a US debit card, you have my physical address in the States (my parents'), so why the hell should it matter where I am at this moment? I think if there is any geofencing, it should be based on where you registered your account, or by method of payment. Maybe we need to pester Congress to change contract law. In lieu of that, does anyone know of a desktop/gui tcp proxy? I was thinking of making one and having it run on my Mom's computer, seeing as how she leaves it on 24/7 :)

Traubenfuchs 5y ago

Ah yes, that phase of a previously explosive growth type company that now suffers from stalled growth where they start investing in fighting some power users they might lose for good. Many such cases! Sad!

daveoc64 5y ago

I don't really get why this whole VPN thing works with Netflix. Spotify only allows free accounts to be used in a different country for up to 14 days[0]. I am surprised Netflix hasn't implemented something similar - your account can only be used outside of the billing region for up to 30 days (perhaps in a 90 day period) or something like that. That would make using a VPN with Netflix less appealing. [0] - https://support.spotify.com/us/article/cant-log-in-abroad/ https://support.spotify.com/us/article/cant-log-in-abroad/

ZoomZoomZoom 5y ago

I remember the first time some web site I visited assumed the language based on my IP (just that, not even localizing the content). I felt indignation: the web was the place to get away from assumptions, borders and other crap, but here it was, being dragged in. Didn't they understand they had started to replicate the idiocy of the old off-line society? What a fool I was.

MomoXenosaga 5y ago

Yes I'm sharing my brother's Netflix account. How could you tell?

imacerealkiller 5y ago

Geez you'd think with all the money they were making, they would ease up a bit and let the people watch what they wanna watch, wherever they wanna watch! Next there'd be a Netflix Premium account that allows you to watch a worldwide collection of series and programs.

hiddencache 5y ago
That would probably correlate with a sudden drop in VPN revenues

mouzogu 5y ago

I've noticed the same with Spotify. It stopped working on VPN just this week.

TheSmiddy 5y ago

There's probably about a million people who have had to implement some kind of geo restriction content system and there's probably only about 1000 people in the entire world who want such a system to exist.

joghues 5y ago

Why are there even Netflix exclusives on a certain country? If they tried to release all of the shows, they need not worry about the IP address as some are using VPN to watch shows currently available in a certain country.

xyzzy21 5y ago

I don't do Netflix so my solution is to never start! Never will become a customer and honestly with their woke, there's nothing of value anyway!

crusty 5y ago

User complains that all of a sudden they can only get Netflix originals from home. Netflix suggests they call their ISP and ask why their IP is associated with proxy/vpn activity. The assumption of the article seems to be that Netflix is performing some action on it's own to determine whether a residential user is on a VPN, and that this type of response is unhelpful buck-passing. But IIRC, for years now ISPs in the US have had the green light to monetize customer metadata. It seems possible that either Netflix or an industry-backed anti-piracy entity is buying lists with timestamped VPN usage per IP (based on packet traffic patterns?) for Netflix to compare to their usage time-stamps per IP and just assuming causation. I don't know how far-fetched this is, but it fits with Netflix's response to these people's inquiries and it also removes the question of how Netflix might know if a user was streaming over a VPN through thier own residential ISP connection.

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