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

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

#51
This is a small issue in Netflix's path to its end-game. As content owners build their own streaming platforms in the US, Netflix is gradually losing content but in the meantime its gaining more exclusive content. At some point the exclusive content will be enough to justify international users paying for it Netflix since that content is not region blocked.

Netflix also seems to be striking some good deals to lure in more international viewers, e.g. they recently acquired the world-wide rights minus US for the new Star Trek series and also the well regarded The Expanse series by SyFy which is a great bonus considering subscribers in US would need to have services at additional cost in order to watch them.

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

#52
post #28

So they are blocking by blacklisting foreign ISPs? What happens in tor network?

Netflix is available worldwide, but content is different in each country. They're blocking vps providers. You mentioned TORONTO. two problems : you don't know which country the exit node will be in, and the speed is horrible

I think your auto correct fucked you up here.

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

#53

I know that it's not Netflix's fault per se and they're under pressure from the dinosaurs running the media companies. However really well done - you're now leaving people with no choice but to torrent again.

They have the choice to not torrent and not watch whatever content. They don't _have to_ watch it.

No. They don't. The industry is holding off tiny bits of content laden with ads, features disabled, and the worst tech imaginable and as many roadblocks as possible.

At this point I don't care. I don't watch much of their stuff and I really hope they go bankrupt. Not watch IS an option. Let them die.

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

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may or may not be joking but it's true they really should've. There's no way Netflix can justify to content owners that they are trying seriously when they neglect to block something so obvious.

It doesn't matter. Netflix is successfully blocking most of the commercial VPN providers. It is very hard to actually access Netflix via any sort of VPN used by more than a handful of people. Is suspect even running your own VPS somewhere in the US and using a private VPN is mostly pointless unless you get assigned a residential IP address.

True. They are blocking Linode ip ranges.

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

#55
post #10

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…

This won't work longer term if you also watch shows from your home region. A former Netflix engineer and I were talking about enforcing this sort of thing and people who "hop regions" always watch shows from different regions at different times. That flags your account, and your "home region" is known from your billing address and the "other" regions will get locked out. From what I understood they were still working…

> But the thing you can't change are watching shows from two different regions on the same account.

Happens all the time when I travel and wife and daughter stay home.

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

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This won't work longer term if you also watch shows from your home region. A former Netflix engineer and I were talking about enforcing this sort of thing and people who "hop regions" always watch shows from different regions at different times. That flags your account, and your "home region" is known from your billing address and the "other" regions will get locked out. From what I understood they were still working…

Huh? If you have US billing, you can only watch the US catalog, and you need a US IP, right? But that's fine with the OP, that's why he is using his friends broadband anyway. The US catalog is what you want.

I have Swedish Netflix and when I travel I get the catalog of whatever country I happen to be in.

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

#57
post #10

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…

Connection sharing economy - the next billion dollar idea to disrupt the streaming service business!

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

#58
It is interesting to note, that in a consumer focused market such as the US, highly competitive areas consider "the customer is always right" (I.e. catering and hospitality). In oligopolistic niches, the customer is unimportant (I.e. broadband provision), and in monopolistic niches, such as media consumption, "the customer is always a criminal".

It says a great deal about the market conditions of the media industry.

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

#59
post #16

Netflix has been messing with settings in their system that are breaking the experience for users in the middle of the US too. For the last two weekends I've been getting strange experiences accessing their site from my house. My PC works fine and can access content. My cell phone, connected to the same home wireless randomly gets messages "You are using a proxy and cannot access this content". Testing both units on…

Do you have IPv6 anywhere -- I have found that they think that my IPv6 address is a proxy, and the IPv4 is OK.
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