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.
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.
> 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)
> 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.
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.
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.
They have the content... that you can obtain and host (or pay someone to host via a Plex Share). Piracy is back, and getting more convenient by the day.
When you strip away all the N-marked pulp, very little remains. Of these, very few titles merit being seen. I'm so weary of these I actually consider going back to buying movies as an alternative to renting (i.e. streaming).
But can you even buy most content anymore? Everything has gone digital to the point where I wouldn’t even know where to get said dvds outside of a few rental stores that somehow still exist in SF. Amazon? Somewhere else?
For recent movies you can often rent from RedBox. To buy DVDs, I usually go to Amazon. Sometimes something will catch my eye in the remainder pile at Walmart. Except for some straight to streaming content maybe, my experience is that most films that aren't really obscure are still available for physical purchase.
Also, I may or may not rip the Blu-Ray media to my external HDD, since
- the BR-enabled player software ("Cyberlink something " Windows-only) is a POS[1],
- playing BR directly on Linux is not a fun experience to get working (fucking DRM)
- not having to search through a cupboard of boxes for the disk I want to watch (convenience)
- not being arbitrarily restricted to 720p or less on streaming platforms ( because I have the audacity run Linux ) even for movies/series I would "buy in HD"
- etc. pp.
[1] From what I remember from using that software years ago: extremely laggy interface, audio volume slider does basically nothing above the "2%" setting where the sound will just be so loud it nearly blows your eardrums (even with Windows audio setting for that program at ~10%), basically no useful keybindings apart from <SPACE>, putting the popout menu on the screen to get more controls almost always locked the program up for >20 seconds, the software had giant ad banners for the other garbage made by that company, etc. pp.
Plex is a media server mainly used for serving downloaded content, so I'll let you make of that what you will. Piracy has not gotten harder in the past 20 years. In many countries it is de facto legal.
Netflix has very little content in the grand scheme of things. I quit paying for netflix because 99 times out of a hundred, Netflix didn't have the movie I wanted to watch. They try to hid how small their streaming library is by making it difficult to search, but there are/were third party indexes (with reasonable UX) of their streaming library and once you start using such an index, it becomes clear just how little content they have.
You pay $90 a year to a Usenet provider, $15 a year to a Usenet indexer, and get gigabit+ download speeds of any TV show or Movie you want and they automatically get fetched via https://Sonarr.tv or https://Radarr.video
Plus it's all done over TLS and your ISP won't send you notices because you're not uploading/sharing anything.
Don't wait, just cancel now. Netflix has gone rapidly downhill in terms of content quality in the past couple of years. They have ceded ground to their competition by removing the broad range of content they once had, in favor of their own mediocre content.
I think there could be a genuine market opening for a streaming platform that exclusively has films made before 5-10 years ago. Somethjng curated, with less attempts at using AI to predict what you like. Something for movie enthusiasts (and perhaps TV) to enjoy good cinema, not watch the latest politically charged soap opera with poor dialogue, instagram filter cinematography, and overly safe humor.
I used to think so too, y watch a show that's gonna get cancelled.
Then I realized there do exist some good shows that only had very few seasons: pushing daisies, doll hiuse, sense 8. The problem is many Netflix shows are bad...
Most shows are bad; Netflix is neither more nor less consistent with Sturgeon’s Law than any other network. They probably have far more bad shows than any single broadcast or cable channel simply because they aren't limited by the economy of time slots in how many shots they can fire to see what sticks.
Isn't that the formula? Acquire or create a series on the cheap, and axe the series instead of paying the actors/creators a higher rate for additional seasons?
sometimes even when watching a trailer without seeing the logo i still get a hunch that its a netflix original. i dunno what it is, maybe a combination of the camera gear they use, lighting, actors I've never seen before, the bland dialog
Check out Youtube's Free with Ads movies. Seriously. They've got a good selection of great movies (especially comedies) from the 80s and 90s on there.
Naked Gun series, Oh Brother Where Art Thou?, Raising Arizona, Idiocracy, The Terminal, Major League, Top Secret!, Hot Shots!, Beavis and Butthead Do America, The Terminator, Delirious, Robin Hood Men in Tights, Captain Ron (crap, it's not free anymore), original Robocop, Secret of Nimh, Ghost, I'm Gonna Git You Sucka, Silence of the Lambs, Teen Wolf, to name a few.
It's a smaller selection and they don't seem to stay Free for more than a few months, so you have to keep checking it, but there's some good stuff on there.
You make it sound like this is Netflix's fault, whereas tlit seems to me that 10 years ago it was mich easier to acquire licenses for streaming. now some of the big studios have their own streaming services, so licensing isich harder/impossible
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.
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.
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.
Serving alcohol to minors is illegal, but bartenders don't say "you don't appear obviously over 40, so I'm not serving you alcohol even though your ID looks real to me and says you're over 21, since there's a slim chance it's a high-quality fake." Demanding 100% certainty that someone isn't using a VPN is unreasonable for the same reasons.
They do. I was refused service at a grocery store for having an out-of-state driver’s license. I tried having my 21+ sister who was with me purchase the beer with her in-state ID and they refused because they thought it was a straw purchase.
A similar thing happened to me when I was in my early twenties but with a US passport. We were out in the country a bit and I joked with my friend at the time that the guy serving us had probably never seen one...
Here in Germany my older brother was once forced to show his ID at the local super market checkout to purchase (IIRC) a game/movie from the bargain bin (something with a restriction of >=12yo) while:
- being a tall bald dude (19yo at the time)
- wearing his Bundeswehr uniform (as a conscript on his way home for weekend leave)
Apparently that appearance wasn't enough to make it obvious he was a little older than 12.
Anyway, at least I didn't have to go through that conscription BS since I didn't reach 18 until after the "abeyance" in 2011. The equipment/supply problems and ever shortening training/service time for conscripts (last before the abeyance was 6 months total) make it no wonder that the Bundeswehr is sometimes mocked as "Deutschlands größter Trachtenverein" ("Germany's biggest costume club").
Nah, from what he told me the service pistol was an inaccurate POS, a pain to clean (which one would have to do often) and the G36 rifle is made in large parts (e.g. the stock) from polymer/plastic meaning they were forbidden from ever using the weapon body itself as a weapon because otherwise it would splinter and break.
The AK my father and grandfather used in the NVA instead was a real wartime weapon, rugged, dependable and able to be produced in mass quantities relatively cheaply. The G36 instead is apparently expensive, fragile and not that accurate, ie. more of a showpiece.
This is false in the parts of the US where I live, where my family previously owned a bar. If an establishment is found serving alcohol to a minor, they are at fault, regardless of the ID that a minor has. A bar without a liquor license is a bar with a permanent "closed" sign.
Except that’s exactly how it works. Even in the U.K. where it’s 18 to legally drink, many places have a policy that anyone who looks under 25 will be challenged for ID and only driving licence or passport are accepted. Some places even have a policy that all purchases require ID irrespective of how old you look.
It’s better to pissing a few people off but still have a license, than lose your license and thus have nothing to serve your customers. Which is just as true for pubs and bars as it is for video streaming services. And content owners know this too, which is why they can place such heavy demands on 3rd party platforms.
> 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.
Bingo.
> They must be buying a database of IP address locations and VPN addresses from somebody. I doubt they are putting that together themselves.
Ehhh, I couldn't say. I mean, I could. But I won't.
The most ubiquitous and unblockable form of VPN is international cellular roaming. (While roaming, all traffic is tunneled back to the home carrier and blends in with their traffic.)
Of course, it's the most tedious VPN. It's also the most expensive. But what subset of traffic actually needs to go over the VPN? Like authentication and bot detection, these types of checks tend to be too expensive to perform on every request to every service endpoint.
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.
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!
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.
There is no intellectual consistency in what you're saying, at all. Freedom of Speech is only an actual guarantee (at least in text) in one country. And the electrons/bits in the wire obey physics like every other item the GP mentioned and as a result, are subject to the same political and physical forces that reflect in their regionally relative price.
What they are saying has nothing to do with rules or regulations. If the content of Barney is legal to watch in Canada, and the USA, there is no reason the show shouldn't be available to watch in both countries
"Global and homogeneous" culture is a right wing meme, not reality. Don't believe me? Survey the Americans you know and ask them how many Bollywood movies they've watched ever.
Last I checked Apple TV doesn't even list the languages their subtitles are available in before renting/buying movies. Frankly this is just plain idiotic. I rented Parasite, but my girlfriend couldn't really watch it, since she doesn't speak Swedish. It's such an obvious piece of information they should provide. (And even if it's not obvious, I did email them letting them know. Somehow I doubt my feedback will come to use.)
If you live in the US, going on vacation to Europe doesn't affect how much salary you get paid or what language you speak, but it does impact the content you are allowed to watch.
Yes, that’s true if you only move within the EU. Has been the case for a few years now, also with other streaming services, due to new EU portability laws.
It's so silly. They could at least make it clear - I forgot about it on holiday in Canada, watched a couple of episodes of a series (enough to get into it), returned home to the UK and it wasn't there. I didn't realise until then that would happen; I hadn't even remembered that it was a possibility.
I fully agree, but - and someone please correct me if I'm wrong - I was under the impression that this is essentially out of Netflix's hands. It just depends on the terms of the license that's granted, right? And/or is it a scenario where in some cases Netflix could perhaps pay more to get wider/global airing rights, but they can't justify the additional cost based on the viewership numbers they expect for that piece of content in those additional countries/regions?
By that same token, I wouldn't be surprised if lawyers have been breathing down their neck for years trying to pressure them to crack down on region lock-bypassing VPNs, and perhaps even threatening legal action against them.
(Of course, that's not justification for blocking residential IP addresses as VPNs when there are non-VPN users behind those IP addresses. Just wanted to point out that the blocking policy is probably something they have to do rather than something they want to do.)
Why can't Netflix just allow people to buy another subscription for a new country? I wouldn't mind paying extra to unlock additional content from another country.
But Netflix also has an agreement with whoever owns distribution rights in the other country though... that's why the VPN trick works. Just let me pay extra for the other country, what would be the problem there?
Your suggestion makes "common sense" but probably would cause legal issues.
Suppose you are Canadian. Netflix has permission to sell Americans "Media Package A" and Canadians "Media Package B". They don't have permission to sell Canadians "Media Package A". You are saying "just let me buy both" but Netflix does not have permission from media companies to sell you both.
I would assume the content owners are demanding the Netflix to stop the VPN trick. I would assume the distributors in other countries are telling content owners they will not pay a certain price if Netflix is allowing people to use VPNs.
Ok, but why can't netflix apply the geo restrictions based on the payment and not the incoming IP address? I'd prefer to use a VPN for all of my traffic, and I'll gladly stay region locked to the region I reside in. But forcing me to go outside the VPN is something I'd rather not do.
True, that's a good point. Has it been confirmed that they're just blanket-blocking VPN IPs rather than specifically blocking cases of a customer's region shifting/not matching their registration details?
If the VPN node's public IP matches the country in the subscriber's registration details, then it seems pretty unfair that they'd still restrict their account when accessed from that VPN IP. But I suppose from a technical standpoint it's probably far simpler for them to just find VPN IPs/subnets, add them to a database, and restrict content for any account accessed from any of those IPs, regardless of the account, IP, or content regions.
The copyright applies to a specific viewing of a movie, not the purchase of a license. They can't enable their users to break license or they'll loose their right to distribute content.
Yep. Paramount announced Paramount Plus in New Zealand and Australia. Then the failing pay TV monopoly paid up a bunch of money to make the content exclusive to their terrible 720p streaming service. No Paramount Plus for New Zealand!
To add insult to injury, they don't even bother showing the movies and shows that they lock up this way. It's just about exercising monopoly power.
No, it's not out of Netflix's hands. It's just the usual price negotiation. Netflix doesn't want to license content for global broadcast, which would be more expensive. So, they license it regionally. So, Netflix is as much at fault here as the rights holders.
Yeah, it's definitely not entirely out of their hands. My reason for saying "essentially out of their hands": if their analysis shows that, say, they would almost certainly just be bleeding huge amounts of money by purchasing rights for regions where almost no one would ever watch it, I think it's hard to fault them for that decision.
I'm guessing it's not a matter of nickel-and-diming, but it just really being very unwise or totally infeasible to get global rights for everything. Of course, I'm just blindly speculating and I have no clue and maybe they really are being cheap in some way.
And I think it's quite possible the VPN stuff really is out of their hands. (From a policy perspective, not an implementation perspective. Obviously the implementation is entirely on them, and the false positive bans are their fault.)
From a business perspective, I would think they'd be incentivized to allow them and not dedicate resources to trying to block them. But lots of podcasts I watch have a bunch of ad segments for different VPNs, where the main selling point is typically "watch stuff for other regions on Netflix", and I'm guessing the companies they're licensing from are increasingly seeing this loophole as basically a form of piracy.
Digital goods are still considered property so its far from ridiculous, but we can re-evaluate and change that via legislation if we wish to.
Re: Regional Pricing - Its no different than product prices changing depending on the country. Import/custom taxes/duties, trade treaties, etc, still are a thing in today's world. Again, not ridiculous, but changeable if people want to.
This view doesn't make sense to me. Have you ever created something through effort/cost? Is it not yours if it can only be displayed on a monitor? Most of us here have jobs/products that have the same limitation.
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.
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....
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!
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Residential IPs are getting harder to find. The only company I know that offers them is: 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
>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.
This is just an example of antiquated media companies trying to change the definition of "piracy" to include paying customers bypassing geo-restrictions.
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.
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.
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.
There is a different incentive at play here. Netflix wants to track individuals. I wouldn't be surprised if some other agreement were behind this move, perhaps like other secret agreements:
> There is a different incentive at play here. Netflix wants to track individuals.
Maybe this is naive, but doesn't Netflix already have enough information from the account already? Credit card info, name, address… what does having an IP address get them in addition to all that?
It gives you a lot more information. Where you travel, who you travel with, what types of content you associate with different regions, how much you share with friends, how your preferences change as you hang around different areas and individuals.
Information is deceptive because it's exponential. Detectives often make or break cases on a single lucky clue. Data mining on the Internet is no different. Information goes massively further than most people realize.
No, the second idea is silly. They already have buckets of information. In fact, they have a whole team dedicated to making sure they don't hold onto certain types of PII (Personally identifiable Info)
They have their flaws, but they don't waste time doing useless shit (once they have figured that out).
I mean, obviously they notice which accounts are breaking whatever rules are currently in force.
>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.
Have you missed the events of the last few years? Netflix's future competition isn't going to be scrappy startups, it's going to be content providers with their own streaming service.
This is a super interesting take and I wonder how closely this reflects Netflix's actual strategic thinking. If so it's an interesting game theory question, because the whole reason rightsholders would want this is to guarantee the value of splitting up distribution to multiple local distributors, most of whom would be well outside the realm of matching Netflix capabilities. But if those players can't match Netflix's DRM and thus rightsholders won't license to them, then all they are doing is giving Netflix is a discount for restricted rights without any additional profit.
Geographic licensing of content was technologically superseded by the internet. It’s an inefficiency that distributors are desperately trying to hold on to so they can leverage a profit from it.
But the fact that it’s an entirely artificial inefficiency, means it’s possible to completely ignore it. If somebody’s geo-circumventions are thwarted, they’re just going to return to old fashion piracy most of the time.
It’s a system that turns some paying customers into slightly higher-paying customers via market segmentation, but it turns a lot of paying customers into entirely non-paying customers. Eventually the TV and Movie industry will get to the point where they no longer think it’s worth it, and go the way of the music industry which doesn’t have a geo-restriction problem, or a piracy one.
What I don't get is why having a German VPN IP with an account that has a German billing address is a problem. The VPN restrictions simply shouldn't be relevant in this case as we aren't trying to access content not available here.
If you are using a VPN how do they know you aren't on vacation in Australia and are trying to watch shows that Netflix doesn't have the rights to in Australia.
I understand that this is about your location while streaming not while signing the contract.
But the location only matters because of where you sign the contract. No one loses money from allowing this to happen, no rights are interfered with. If a resident of Australia vpn’s Into Germany to watch an Aussie programme then an Australian network loses a viewer for at least that content, but a German who’s paid for it in Germany?
I pay for UK Netflix still because where I live the local Netflix only gives me subtitles in the local language. If they lock me out of my VPN then I’ll cancel and just pirate stuff instead. This “edge case” is going to lose them money and retain the viability of the pirate network.
> If a resident of Australia vpn’s Into Germany to watch an Aussie programme then an Australian network loses a viewer for at least that content, but a German who’s paid for it in Germany?
At one point I understand a double digit percentage of Ebay's entire revenue was people selling US Hulu pre-paid cards to viewers outside the US.
Bypassing financial geofiltering is easier than bypassing IP based geofiltering generally. But, ultimately, generally speaking studios nowadays expect you to do both, not one or the other, so Netflix adopting models on payment territory would not mean they didn't have to block VPNs any more, it means they would have to do both like everyone else does.
Also, having spent some time trying to build this product myself and failed, you are vastly overestimating how reliable international payment identification is on country of origin. Like a lot.
Many VPN providers advertise themselves specifically as being able to get around Netflix restrictions, or if not directly they pay YouTubers or websites to mention it in an ad.
VPNs are definitely making heavy use of residential IPs now, they often have routing rules in place that use non res IPs for most traffic, but traffic to Netflix, Prime, iPlayer etc. get routed via a res IP.
Also have no idea why they're cracking down on it so hard, thought it'd help them retain customers if anything.
Not that I want to give them any ideas, but surely the best solution would be to just lock the account down to the region the billing account is from? Although I think you can sometimes get a payment through with a fake address, it'd at lest mean people can't jump between countries at will.
> Why should I have to jump through hoops just because I happen to be located abroad for a week?
I could easily see a gray market in, essentially, location-specific "rebilling" springing up the same day as this. Want to watch a show that's not available in your country? Sign up here for an account billed through an address that can watch that show, with a small convenience surcharge.
The proper way to implement this restriction would be to only accept payments from a list of approved BINs (the first 6 digits of the credit/debit card). These numbers are strictly tied to the bank that's issuing the cards, the list is publicly available, and bypassing it is incredibly difficult. At the very least this control alone would be (very close to) ensuring that the card holder who's paying for the account has a legal right to live/work in the country in question (which is a requirement for opening a bank account in most places).
There are some BINs which you could associate with a territory, but don't provide this level of assurance about the card holder (those "burner" credit card providers for instance), but the list of exceptions is short enough to manage quite easily.
There are already service providers that implement this, f1.tv does for instance. Another peculiar example is India, where they just use phone numbers, because getting a phone number in India requires a KYC process, non-residents are only entitled to temporary services, and it's very hard to maintain your service if you leave the country.
> Not that I want to give them any ideas, but surely the best solution would be to just lock the account down to the region the billing account is from?
I'm pretty sure (based on dealing with DRM/geoIP restriction requirements in other spheres) that it's because the media companies are incredibly anal about enforcement on strict geographic lines. They don't care if your account is linked to a US credit card at a US billing address, despite how effective that is at ensuring that you are a US user (and how difficult it is to spoof). They are hellbent on the idea that no US-only content should ever be streamed to an IP address terminating at a non-US location. For them it's absolutely not about people or accounts - it's entirely a matter of geography.
Netflix could easily apply a rule based on the region of the billing account, and I am sure it would be vastly more effective than playing whack-a-mole with individual IP addresses. However, the media companies would undoubtedly still insist that they do strict geoIP restriction as well. And if Netflix did both, anybody who is traveling outside of their home country would find Netflix to be bereft of content; anyone who travelled frequently would find Netflix to be perfectly useless. By going all-in on geoIP, Netflix keeps the geoIP-fixated media companies happy, while ensuring that users see plenty of content even as they move from country to country.
I'd guess that Netflix is only upping their game on residential IPs etc now because the media companies are no longer happy and are leaning on them - VPN services are simply becoming too brazen about advertising the ability to bypass Netflix geo restrictions by clicking flags. Whenever it becomes this obvious to the media guys that anyone with a pulse and a credit card can circumvent Netflix's controls, they'll be pressed to 'do better' or lose their rights to content. Netflix takes some steps, catches some backlash, and the media companies are placated for a while.
Isn't the better question to ask if geographically restricted broadcasting rights aren't simply obsolete ?
Like, it possibly made some sense back when the stuff was actually broadcast via terrestrial TV to the given area (and even then it was normal to watch TV across national borders, even over the Iron Curtain!) but it really does not seem to make any sense what so ever in modern global world.
It rather seems like yet another case of someone clinging to and enforcing by any means available an outdated concept because it just so happens to bring them more money if they keep it alive.
It's not obsolete because as a content producer the global players are not always willing to pay top dollar for your content. In many cases you can get more money by selling to multiple local players with single language, geo-restricted distribution rights. And this is the tip of the iceberg because you also have different types of rights for theatrical vs streaming distribution, and your strategy could interleave them in multiple non-intuitive ways.
I understand there is a long running system in place, but from the point of view of a modern viewer/customer it all just looks like a mess.
Basically, there should be a place where you click on a button, pay some money and play the thing anywhere in the world.
Like even some possibly inflated/default price. Like this way you would get something from each viewer in geos where you have not actually sold the rights & nothing really says you can't rise or lower the price if you see demand or lack there of.
Anything else frankly looks like excuses to a normal viewer/customer in the year or 2021.
How long the system has existed has nothing to do with it. It's pure economics. If you owned content rights would you sell it for $1M when you get split up rights and get $2M for partial rights and still have upside for the remainder? If someone on the internet said "it just doesn't make sense to a viewer" would that change your mind?
No it wouldn't. The dollars don't lie. The viewers opinion is reflected in what they pay for, and that is reflected in what distributors are willing to pay. These things do change over time as the landscape shifts and new business model possibilities show up (eg. Disney+ day and date streaming releases), but it has absolutely nothing to do with your armchair notions of what makes sense to a "normal viewer". They pay or they don't, businesses are rewarded by figuring out the aggregate implications.
Selling content for different prices in different markets:
- increases revenue
- relies on being able to separate those markets effectively
It's not obsolete, because it still works.
And it's not a historical accident resulting from past business models.
Content providers with no 'analogue' history also have geographical pricing. Example: Wes Bos' excellent JavaScript courses are priced differently depending on your country.
This makes sense, but it doesn’t make sense why a content seller would want to prevent someone from a cheaper market from appearing to be from a more expensive market. If the subscriber is paying the higher price because they are pretending to be from that country, why wouldn’t they just let them? I can see trying to stop the reverse, but not that.
One classic example from microeconomics textbooks is child/adult admission tickets for cinemas. The cost to provide the service (and the constraints on capacity) are the same for both types of ticket. But children have less money than adults (in general) and it's easy to stop an adult posing as a child (by checking ID).
The Netflix example is more complicated, as there are transactions happening at two levels:
* studios are selling content to distributors in different markets
* Netflix is selling subscriptions to consumers in different markets
Also, unlike the single-event case at the top of my post, the service being provided isn't identical for all buyers. Folks in the UK don't get the same bundle of shows as folks in the US.
Even if folks in the UK pay more, that doesn't mean Netflix is OK with them watching all the shows that are available to Netflix US subscribers. Because the creators of those shows sold the UK rights to a different company (e.g. Sky TV) that was willing to pay more than Netflix.
Netflix doesn't care about this directly but, if UK customers bypass the restrictions at too large a scale, the creators/studios won't be willing to sell rights to Netflix in future. Because, by selling rights to Netflix for the US, they reduce the value of the rights they sell to Sky in UK.
The way this works is, the content provider (actually, someone working on the content provider's behalf) does an independent check every so often.
Then they (the content lawyers) come back to Netflix and say "hey, 10% of these attempts got through, you are breaking our deal.
Obviously, some of these of these service providers are not the brightest bulbs on the internet, but try telling that to the legal department of a media conglomerate.
So, the technical team that handles this at Netflix has to shoot for the worst case, instead of the average case, even if they are already being effective.
My alternative take is it's because they have too many highly paid engineers who need something to do. People overestimate how logical decision-making is at large companies.
For a while I worked for a company that provided a component used by some streaming services on the server side. I never knew how common this was, and how much of it was just because of the weird position we were in, but we'd get some story like "exec at $big.firm has a child that used a VPN to get out of region content, they demand we fix it"
There were other cases like this where it was less about expending the effort to make some contract happy, and doing so to make it look like we were doing so for the sole purpose of making it appear that it was the case to specific executives. Not their team, but them, specifically.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Plex is ok but feels like it's trying to meet Plex's need for revenue moreso than providing software people want. But for better or worse they're the 1,000 lb gorilla in the space.
The real game changer is getting a reliable sonarr&radarr set up going
Not the parent poster, but I'm running a stack of Sonarr (series crawler) + Radarr (movie crawler) + Lidarr (music crawler), + Bazarr (subtitle crawler) + some torrent client (Deluge) + Jellyfin (you could also use Plex, but Jellyfin doesn't ask for money) + Jackett (indexer) + a VPN. I've also configured a Telegram bot to send me updates about download progress. You add the content you want to *arr, those programs query your indexer(s) for sources, and pass them on to your download client(s). Downloaded files are automatically moved to the right place with a useful folder structure so that media servers (Plex, Emby, Jellyfin) can pick them up. Non-torrent sources for *arr (newsgroups etc.) are also available, but I haven't tried them.
There are various pre-designed docker-compose scripts available online [0] that basically allow you to create such a setup by simply entering your VPN username and password and specifying a storage path. If you have any experience with Docker, they're dead easy to set up and they work flawlessly.
In my experience, Netflix honestly works better and streams more reliably than Plex or any other self-hosted alternative. The Jellyfin project has been making progress, but your mileage may vary.
Piggybacking on a reply to this comment, if you want to go an alternative (or additive) route of Usenet you can look to add NZBGet (or SABnzbd) with NZBHydra to manage Usenet downloading and indexer search respectively.
In respect to this my setup for this (on Docker) looks like: radarr, sonarr, nzbget and nzbhydra. I serve my media using Plex (there are a lot of great alternatives to Plex out there also but I'm still very happy with Plex even as a non-paid user).
Not the person you're asking, but I run the same thing. Here's my setup:
Plex/Jellyfin for watching content.
Sonarr(TV)/Radarr(Movies)/Lidarr(Music)/Readarr(Audio/Books) - For searching/organizing/starting downloads, monitoring for new releases and so on
nzbget/qbittorrent - for doing the actual downloads
prowlarr - to handle various indexers/search providers between *arr apps and downloaders
overseerr - to make everything foolproof for people who are not tech savvy. They can see what's downloaded, and request new stuff and they get an email once its been downloaded.
On top of that I have watchtower which does automatic updates, as everything is running as docker containers.
Honestly it seems like complicated setup, but it's really not, and once set up it runs without any issues. I've had this for a few years now, and there's been maaaybe a handful of times where I needed to fix something.
We have a media cartel that are also our telecoms, and they collaborate on prices and lobby heavily for protectionist legislation.
On top of that, they hold digital distribution rights for numerous properties and, historically, have done absurd things like only offer them on a service that is _tied to paying for cable_.
It won't change. The head of the regulatory body that oversees them is an ex-lobbyist for one of the larger telecoms.
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.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 450 ms ] thread[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.
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)
I'm collateral damage of this change, and this definitely isn't the case for me.
Then imagine the car wash told me I should talk to Chevy because it's their problem.
What a bad analogy.
EDIT: Oops replied to wrong comment.
keep in mind, they won't be small.
There is no way to legally obtain all the content by paying.
and what deal netflix had with the various content providers that expires, see e.g.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/everything-leaving-netflix
- the BR-enabled player software ("Cyberlink something " Windows-only) is a POS[1],
- playing BR directly on Linux is not a fun experience to get working (fucking DRM)
- not having to search through a cupboard of boxes for the disk I want to watch (convenience)
- not being arbitrarily restricted to 720p or less on streaming platforms ( because I have the audacity run Linux ) even for movies/series I would "buy in HD"
- etc. pp.
[1] From what I remember from using that software years ago: extremely laggy interface, audio volume slider does basically nothing above the "2%" setting where the sound will just be so loud it nearly blows your eardrums (even with Windows audio setting for that program at ~10%), basically no useful keybindings apart from <SPACE>, putting the popout menu on the screen to get more controls almost always locked the program up for >20 seconds, the software had giant ad banners for the other garbage made by that company, etc. pp.
Plus it's all done over TLS and your ISP won't send you notices because you're not uploading/sharing anything.
I think there could be a genuine market opening for a streaming platform that exclusively has films made before 5-10 years ago. Somethjng curated, with less attempts at using AI to predict what you like. Something for movie enthusiasts (and perhaps TV) to enjoy good cinema, not watch the latest politically charged soap opera with poor dialogue, instagram filter cinematography, and overly safe humor.
Then I realized there do exist some good shows that only had very few seasons: pushing daisies, doll hiuse, sense 8. The problem is many Netflix shows are bad...
Most shows are bad; Netflix is neither more nor less consistent with Sturgeon’s Law than any other network. They probably have far more bad shows than any single broadcast or cable channel simply because they aren't limited by the economy of time slots in how many shots they can fire to see what sticks.
More isn't necessarily better?
Naked Gun series, Oh Brother Where Art Thou?, Raising Arizona, Idiocracy, The Terminal, Major League, Top Secret!, Hot Shots!, Beavis and Butthead Do America, The Terminator, Delirious, Robin Hood Men in Tights, Captain Ron (crap, it's not free anymore), original Robocop, Secret of Nimh, Ghost, I'm Gonna Git You Sucka, Silence of the Lambs, Teen Wolf, to name a few.
It's a smaller selection and they don't seem to stay Free for more than a few months, so you have to keep checking it, but there's some good stuff on there.
They must be buying a database of IP address locations and VPN addresses from somebody. I doubt they are putting that 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?
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.
Or likely anyone on CGNAT for their home internet, I don't think this would be a reliable detection method.
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.
I hope each person it happens to requires a charge back. It should cause netflix enough of an issue that they go back to focusing on the customer.
- being a tall bald dude (19yo at the time)
- wearing his Bundeswehr uniform (as a conscript on his way home for weekend leave)
Apparently that appearance wasn't enough to make it obvious he was a little older than 12.
Anyway, at least I didn't have to go through that conscription BS since I didn't reach 18 until after the "abeyance" in 2011. The equipment/supply problems and ever shortening training/service time for conscripts (last before the abeyance was 6 months total) make it no wonder that the Bundeswehr is sometimes mocked as "Deutschlands größter Trachtenverein" ("Germany's biggest costume club").
The AK my father and grandfather used in the NVA instead was a real wartime weapon, rugged, dependable and able to be produced in mass quantities relatively cheaply. The G36 instead is apparently expensive, fragile and not that accurate, ie. more of a showpiece.
https://www.driverslicenseguide.com/book-us.html
It’s better to pissing a few people off but still have a license, than lose your license and thus have nothing to serve your customers. Which is just as true for pubs and bars as it is for video streaming services. And content owners know this too, which is why they can place such heavy demands on 3rd party platforms.
There are services that can detect most commercial VPN services, e.g. https://focsec.com
Bingo.
> They must be buying a database of IP address locations and VPN addresses from somebody. I doubt they are putting that together themselves.
Ehhh, I couldn't say. I mean, I could. But I won't.
The most ubiquitous and unblockable form of VPN is international cellular roaming. (While roaming, all traffic is tunneled back to the home carrier and blends in with their traffic.)
Of course, it's the most tedious VPN. It's also the most expensive. But what subset of traffic actually needs to go over the VPN? Like authentication and bot detection, these types of checks tend to be too expensive to perform on every request to every service endpoint.
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!
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.
Plenty of countries have freedom of speech rights in text: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_by_country
https://help.netflix.com/en/node/24853#
So the stereotype is accurate?
By that same token, I wouldn't be surprised if lawyers have been breathing down their neck for years trying to pressure them to crack down on region lock-bypassing VPNs, and perhaps even threatening legal action against them.
(Of course, that's not justification for blocking residential IP addresses as VPNs when there are non-VPN users behind those IP addresses. Just wanted to point out that the blocking policy is probably something they have to do rather than something they want to do.)
Suppose you are Canadian. Netflix has permission to sell Americans "Media Package A" and Canadians "Media Package B". They don't have permission to sell Canadians "Media Package A". You are saying "just let me buy both" but Netflix does not have permission from media companies to sell you both.
If the VPN node's public IP matches the country in the subscriber's registration details, then it seems pretty unfair that they'd still restrict their account when accessed from that VPN IP. But I suppose from a technical standpoint it's probably far simpler for them to just find VPN IPs/subnets, add them to a database, and restrict content for any account accessed from any of those IPs, regardless of the account, IP, or content regions.
To add insult to injury, they don't even bother showing the movies and shows that they lock up this way. It's just about exercising monopoly power.
I'm guessing it's not a matter of nickel-and-diming, but it just really being very unwise or totally infeasible to get global rights for everything. Of course, I'm just blindly speculating and I have no clue and maybe they really are being cheap in some way.
And I think it's quite possible the VPN stuff really is out of their hands. (From a policy perspective, not an implementation perspective. Obviously the implementation is entirely on them, and the false positive bans are their fault.)
From a business perspective, I would think they'd be incentivized to allow them and not dedicate resources to trying to block them. But lots of podcasts I watch have a bunch of ad segments for different VPNs, where the main selling point is typically "watch stuff for other regions on Netflix", and I'm guessing the companies they're licensing from are increasingly seeing this loophole as basically a form of piracy.
For example, say they want to license a show, and they get it for one year for $50k, usa-only.
Okay, but we want it world-wide. Alright, that will be 3 million, world-wide, except Australia. Okay. wait, what?
We have a 7-year contract on Australia right now. We can't give you Australia.
Now netflix has to decide if it's worth it for the 350 people who want to watch this in Europe and Asia to take the second deal.
Sucks.
Re: Regional Pricing - Its no different than product prices changing depending on the country. Import/custom taxes/duties, trade treaties, etc, still are a thing in today's world. Again, not ridiculous, but changeable if people want to.
That is precisely what makes it ridiculous.
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.
If there were a legal option to do so, I would do it. Why doesn't Netflix allow this? Come on!
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.
Why still block in country X when nobody owns the distribution rights in country X?
Media company lawyers got used to writing those contracts.
They are entrenched until people start successfully negotiating global licenses.
2. This will only drive more people to piracy.
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.
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.
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.
BUT, we launched with IPv6 support, which pretty much negates this whole issue for us when it comes to Netflix.
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.
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.
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.
The studios probably have seen the VPN ads everywhere marketing how easy it is to circumvent Netflix’s (and other’s) regional blocks
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.
https://juliareda.eu/2017/09/secret-copyright-infringement-s...
There is a different incentive at play here. Netflix wants to track individuals. I wouldn't be surprised if some other agreement were behind this move, perhaps like other secret agreements:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/23/nsa-prism-cost...
Maybe this is naive, but doesn't Netflix already have enough information from the account already? Credit card info, name, address… what does having an IP address get them in addition to all that?
Information is deceptive because it's exponential. Detectives often make or break cases on a single lucky clue. Data mining on the Internet is no different. Information goes massively further than most people realize.
No, the second idea is silly. They already have buckets of information. In fact, they have a whole team dedicated to making sure they don't hold onto certain types of PII (Personally identifiable Info)
They have their flaws, but they don't waste time doing useless shit (once they have figured that out).
I mean, obviously they notice which accounts are breaking whatever rules are currently in force.
Have you missed the events of the last few years? Netflix's future competition isn't going to be scrappy startups, it's going to be content providers with their own streaming service.
But the fact that it’s an entirely artificial inefficiency, means it’s possible to completely ignore it. If somebody’s geo-circumventions are thwarted, they’re just going to return to old fashion piracy most of the time.
It’s a system that turns some paying customers into slightly higher-paying customers via market segmentation, but it turns a lot of paying customers into entirely non-paying customers. Eventually the TV and Movie industry will get to the point where they no longer think it’s worth it, and go the way of the music industry which doesn’t have a geo-restriction problem, or a piracy one.
I understand that this is about your location while streaming not while signing the contract.
I pay for UK Netflix still because where I live the local Netflix only gives me subtitles in the local language. If they lock me out of my VPN then I’ll cancel and just pirate stuff instead. This “edge case” is going to lose them money and retain the viability of the pirate network.
At one point I understand a double digit percentage of Ebay's entire revenue was people selling US Hulu pre-paid cards to viewers outside the US.
Bypassing financial geofiltering is easier than bypassing IP based geofiltering generally. But, ultimately, generally speaking studios nowadays expect you to do both, not one or the other, so Netflix adopting models on payment territory would not mean they didn't have to block VPNs any more, it means they would have to do both like everyone else does.
Also, having spent some time trying to build this product myself and failed, you are vastly overestimating how reliable international payment identification is on country of origin. Like a lot.
VPNs are definitely making heavy use of residential IPs now, they often have routing rules in place that use non res IPs for most traffic, but traffic to Netflix, Prime, iPlayer etc. get routed via a res IP.
Also have no idea why they're cracking down on it so hard, thought it'd help them retain customers if anything.
Not that I want to give them any ideas, but surely the best solution would be to just lock the account down to the region the billing account is from? Although I think you can sometimes get a payment through with a fake address, it'd at lest mean people can't jump between countries at will.
I could easily see a gray market in, essentially, location-specific "rebilling" springing up the same day as this. Want to watch a show that's not available in your country? Sign up here for an account billed through an address that can watch that show, with a small convenience surcharge.
There are some BINs which you could associate with a territory, but don't provide this level of assurance about the card holder (those "burner" credit card providers for instance), but the list of exceptions is short enough to manage quite easily.
There are already service providers that implement this, f1.tv does for instance. Another peculiar example is India, where they just use phone numbers, because getting a phone number in India requires a KYC process, non-residents are only entitled to temporary services, and it's very hard to maintain your service if you leave the country.
I'm pretty sure (based on dealing with DRM/geoIP restriction requirements in other spheres) that it's because the media companies are incredibly anal about enforcement on strict geographic lines. They don't care if your account is linked to a US credit card at a US billing address, despite how effective that is at ensuring that you are a US user (and how difficult it is to spoof). They are hellbent on the idea that no US-only content should ever be streamed to an IP address terminating at a non-US location. For them it's absolutely not about people or accounts - it's entirely a matter of geography.
Netflix could easily apply a rule based on the region of the billing account, and I am sure it would be vastly more effective than playing whack-a-mole with individual IP addresses. However, the media companies would undoubtedly still insist that they do strict geoIP restriction as well. And if Netflix did both, anybody who is traveling outside of their home country would find Netflix to be bereft of content; anyone who travelled frequently would find Netflix to be perfectly useless. By going all-in on geoIP, Netflix keeps the geoIP-fixated media companies happy, while ensuring that users see plenty of content even as they move from country to country.
I'd guess that Netflix is only upping their game on residential IPs etc now because the media companies are no longer happy and are leaning on them - VPN services are simply becoming too brazen about advertising the ability to bypass Netflix geo restrictions by clicking flags. Whenever it becomes this obvious to the media guys that anyone with a pulse and a credit card can circumvent Netflix's controls, they'll be pressed to 'do better' or lose their rights to content. Netflix takes some steps, catches some backlash, and the media companies are placated for a while.
From Netflix's point of view, it's better if everything is available in every region, as it makes their service more valuable.
Like, it possibly made some sense back when the stuff was actually broadcast via terrestrial TV to the given area (and even then it was normal to watch TV across national borders, even over the Iron Curtain!) but it really does not seem to make any sense what so ever in modern global world.
It rather seems like yet another case of someone clinging to and enforcing by any means available an outdated concept because it just so happens to bring them more money if they keep it alive.
Basically, there should be a place where you click on a button, pay some money and play the thing anywhere in the world.
Like even some possibly inflated/default price. Like this way you would get something from each viewer in geos where you have not actually sold the rights & nothing really says you can't rise or lower the price if you see demand or lack there of.
Anything else frankly looks like excuses to a normal viewer/customer in the year or 2021.
No it wouldn't. The dollars don't lie. The viewers opinion is reflected in what they pay for, and that is reflected in what distributors are willing to pay. These things do change over time as the landscape shifts and new business model possibilities show up (eg. Disney+ day and date streaming releases), but it has absolutely nothing to do with your armchair notions of what makes sense to a "normal viewer". They pay or they don't, businesses are rewarded by figuring out the aggregate implications.
- increases revenue
- relies on being able to separate those markets effectively
It's not obsolete, because it still works.
And it's not a historical accident resulting from past business models.
Content providers with no 'analogue' history also have geographical pricing. Example: Wes Bos' excellent JavaScript courses are priced differently depending on your country.
The Netflix example is more complicated, as there are transactions happening at two levels:
* studios are selling content to distributors in different markets
* Netflix is selling subscriptions to consumers in different markets
Also, unlike the single-event case at the top of my post, the service being provided isn't identical for all buyers. Folks in the UK don't get the same bundle of shows as folks in the US.
Even if folks in the UK pay more, that doesn't mean Netflix is OK with them watching all the shows that are available to Netflix US subscribers. Because the creators of those shows sold the UK rights to a different company (e.g. Sky TV) that was willing to pay more than Netflix.
Netflix doesn't care about this directly but, if UK customers bypass the restrictions at too large a scale, the creators/studios won't be willing to sell rights to Netflix in future. Because, by selling rights to Netflix for the US, they reduce the value of the rights they sell to Sky in UK.
The majority of TV viewing is still via broadcast methods.
Then they (the content lawyers) come back to Netflix and say "hey, 10% of these attempts got through, you are breaking our deal.
Obviously, some of these of these service providers are not the brightest bulbs on the internet, but try telling that to the legal department of a media conglomerate.
So, the technical team that handles this at Netflix has to shoot for the worst case, instead of the average case, even if they are already being effective.
There were other cases like this where it was less about expending the effort to make some contract happy, and doing so to make it look like we were doing so for the sole purpose of making it appear that it was the case to specific executives. Not their team, but them, specifically.
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_...
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.
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.
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.
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.
The real game changer is getting a reliable sonarr&radarr set up going
There are various pre-designed docker-compose scripts available online [0] that basically allow you to create such a setup by simply entering your VPN username and password and specifying a storage path. If you have any experience with Docker, they're dead easy to set up and they work flawlessly.
In my experience, Netflix honestly works better and streams more reliably than Plex or any other self-hosted alternative. The Jellyfin project has been making progress, but your mileage may vary.
[0]: https://github.com/sebgl/htpc-download-box
In respect to this my setup for this (on Docker) looks like: radarr, sonarr, nzbget and nzbhydra. I serve my media using Plex (there are a lot of great alternatives to Plex out there also but I'm still very happy with Plex even as a non-paid user).
Plex/Jellyfin for watching content.
Sonarr(TV)/Radarr(Movies)/Lidarr(Music)/Readarr(Audio/Books) - For searching/organizing/starting downloads, monitoring for new releases and so on
nzbget/qbittorrent - for doing the actual downloads
prowlarr - to handle various indexers/search providers between *arr apps and downloaders
overseerr - to make everything foolproof for people who are not tech savvy. They can see what's downloaded, and request new stuff and they get an email once its been downloaded.
On top of that I have watchtower which does automatic updates, as everything is running as docker containers.
Honestly it seems like complicated setup, but it's really not, and once set up it runs without any issues. I've had this for a few years now, and there's been maaaybe a handful of times where I needed to fix something.
I've messed around with Plex but honestly find using a computer easier. Watch a lot of YouTube too but almost prefer the tv app for that.
Gigabit internet helps, everything is watchable almost instantly.
We have a media cartel that are also our telecoms, and they collaborate on prices and lobby heavily for protectionist legislation.
On top of that, they hold digital distribution rights for numerous properties and, historically, have done absurd things like only offer them on a service that is _tied to paying for cable_.
It won't change. The head of the regulatory body that oversees them is an ex-lobbyist for one of the larger telecoms.