Netflix hammers cross-border watchers and there may be no way out

Any ideas on what technical means Netflix is using to tip the scales in their favor?

I was about to cancel my Netflix subscription as my family had exhausted its interest in the paltry syndicated cast-offs and young-adult anime that amounted to the totality of Canadian Netflix; but then Stranger Things came out, along with the rest of their fall originals.

Well, you've got me hooked for another month or two.

I can't speak on this with any authority, but I feel like it would be fairly easy to detect.

If you suddenly see 500 different accounts all connecting from the same small block of IP addresses and most of them use out-of-country credit cards, blocking that IP range would be a logical conclusion. This could be managed automatically (or at least alerted to a human to check) with not much effort.

This is one way to increase and encourage piracy while pissing off customers, including those in the US like myself, who like to keep the VPN on all the time. They deserve all the lost revenue this brings them.

My solution to this was to pay a friend in the states to share his residential connection. I'd like to see them try and block Comcast's residential blocks.

There's potential here for a middleman to write software/develop hardware that can share residential connections whilst filtering destination IPs (e.g. allowing AWS addresses) to try and minimize the potential for abuse with the goal of discouraging traffic other than that required for Netflix. The user using the service would pay a fee which the middleman would take a cut from, with the rest going towards the home owner's broadband costs.

Payment is still problematic, ideally I'd be using a US bank account and credit card. But if they start clamping down on use of 'foreign' credit cards they will alienate those taking vacations etc.