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After Netflix crackdown on border-hopping, Canadians ready to return to piracy

cbc.ca

131–140 of 229 posts

Re: After Netflix crackdown on border-hopping, Canadians ready to return to piracy

#131
post #41

We're in Canada and have been cable cutters for almost five years now. We've gotten by on Netflix US and YouTube with the occasional pirated streaming site, but we're barely ever using Netflix anymore. We've turned to Kodi. We don't want to pirate, but it's hard to make a compelling argument against it when you get everything you want even easier than torrents. Add to that the abusive monopolies of Shaw and Bell, who…

What's wrong with Bell/Saw/Rogers having their own streaming services? I've found Bell's Crave TV to be pretty good, Shomi not as much.

You have to be a subscriber to cable

Re: After Netflix crackdown on border-hopping, Canadians ready to return to piracy

#132

I still can access netflix through the VPN I use. As long as I still can do that, I will keep my account. The second they block it, I'll cancel my netflix account and will go back to resorting to piracy. If movie studios don't want my money then so be it, I'll find better use for it. EDIT: And I say this as someone who spends roughly $100/month supporting artists I like on Patreon and Kickstarter, so I'm not opposed…

How are they screwing you? You pay for a Netflix sub in the country you live in, and you're paying only for the content they can license there. By making sure people can't watch whatever country they want easily, they make it easier to negotiate with license holders.

They're screwing you because, while everyone pays the same price for the same service, the library that you have access to depends entirely on what side of the border you're on. This makes absolutely no sense in a globally connected world.

Re: After Netflix crackdown on border-hopping, Canadians ready to return to piracy

#133

I still can access netflix through the VPN I use. As long as I still can do that, I will keep my account. The second they block it, I'll cancel my netflix account and will go back to resorting to piracy. If movie studios don't want my money then so be it, I'll find better use for it. EDIT: And I say this as someone who spends roughly $100/month supporting artists I like on Patreon and Kickstarter, so I'm not opposed…

Their blocking seems to be quite aggressive, as a lot of regular hosting providers even had their IP ranges blocked by them. I've been following a few forum posts where people were sharing their working VPN provider/ISP, but those were showing the same error message a few days later, so it looks like they are actively monitoring traffic and maybe even social media to block further IP ranges.

I was not able to test it (for example borrowing a residential IP in a different country) but I suspect they detect OpenVPN via packets inspection, like this example: "Detecting VPN (and its configuration!) and proxy users on the server side" by @ValdikSS https://medium.com/@ValdikSS/detecting-vpn-and-its-configura...

Re: After Netflix crackdown on border-hopping, Canadians ready to return to piracy

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The copyright owners aren't losing anything. They're trying to maximize profits, not sales.

That couldn't be farther from the truth, unfortunately. If they were trying to maximize profits, they would focus on providing reasonable ways for everyone on the planet to give them money. Instead, what production companies try to optimize is the funding used to create the content in the first place. They sell the rights as many times as they can, in as many different markets as they can, in order to finance the pro…

Seems a bit unfair to call them idiots.. by optimizing funding they are minimizing their risk at the expense of higher returns.

This seems like a good thing for a business to do, although perhaps they should figure out better ways to do this so they don't anger all their consumers

Re: After Netflix crackdown on border-hopping, Canadians ready to return to piracy

#135
Piracy has always been a convenience problem and only partly a cost problem.

Pirating content is the easiest, fastest, highest quality, and most available method of watching content. The price is just a nice bonus.

Digital restrictions hurt everyone and maybe one day Hollywood will wake up and realize that you can't strong-arm the market into behaving how you want it to and you have to adapt to consumer demand. It's one of the few industries that I know of that try this hard to fight against consumer demand. It's so backwards.

Until the day they change, pirate on.

Re: After Netflix crackdown on border-hopping, Canadians ready to return to piracy

#137
post #15

The same effect is occurring in South Africa. People I know are switching back to piracy because our Netflix catalog is probably in the region of 10% of America (for the same reasons, as well as others). After years of not being able to legally access some copyrighted content, with no discussion and no change, I honestly don't see the copyright holders backing down - strange considering that they are the only ones ac…

>Nobody deserves to have their hard work stolen First off, it's not theft, it's copyright infringement. No one's stealing their content, because the copyright holders still have it. Stealing is wrong because it deprives the owner of the use of that thing: if I steal your car, then you can't drive to work any more. If I sneakily scan your car with a tricorder and 3D-print a clone of it, you still have your car. Semant…

> People in other regions where this stuff isn't available have every right to copy it without paying.

I think you've got this wrong. The people in other regions don't have "every right to copy it", they have "every right to not consume it". Don't like the rules? Don't play. It's their content, so they set the rules. That's kind of all there is to it. I absolutely agree that you can be pissed off about this and not like it though.

But nothing gives you the "right" to force your way into someone else's party just because you weren't invited, or didn't like the ticket price. If you think like that, you're as much of a dick as the people you seem to be mad at.

So unless you are using the word "unethical" in an ironic fashion when you describe what they do, you probably should not use it at all if you're then going to condone what is essentially an unethical response yourself.

Re: After Netflix crackdown on border-hopping, Canadians ready to return to piracy

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The technical delivery is poor. Hiccups, corruption, and drops in service are pretty common :(

I don't think I've gotten through a single episode without the PS4 app either crashing or the stream freezing.

Similarly, I think I've successfully watched maybe three things from Shomi on my Chromecast while Netflix/Spotify/etc are working flawlessly.

Not being able to stream to my TV kind of defeats the point for me.

Re: After Netflix crackdown on border-hopping, Canadians ready to return to piracy

#139
post #42
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

* Unshaped and uncapped copper is also available. I'm paying about USD100/mo for this at 10Mbps. Hellkom is "balancing" my line to 6Mbps, but that somehow still caters for two concurrent Netflix streams. * Soft-capped (or uncapped shaped) copper is now available for much lower prices, even at 10Mbps. * Copper bandwidth limits are much higher. For example, 200GB for something like USD15/mo. * Fiber is being rolled out…

Wow thanks for the reply. It seems like things are really improving. Here in the USA, we seem to be moving almost backward, with the telecom companies just now implementing caps on previously uncapped connections, and fighting against the deployment of next generation infrastructure.

Re: After Netflix crackdown on border-hopping, Canadians ready to return to piracy

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not disagreeing, but it still seems odd as the Netflix Original Content is the big carrot to get people hooked into their ecosystem.

"Netflix Original Content" doesn't really mean anything anyway. Better Call Saul is "Netflix Original Content" in every country but the United States, even though they had nothing to do with getting it made. They just bought the non-US rights: http://promo.xfm.co.uk/bettercallsaul/images/970x250_backup_...

They do the same thing here in the US or I guess Netflix is creating a large number of foreign movies and TV shows.
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