Netflix To Block Proxy Access To Content Not Available Locally

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It seems anyone using proxies to watch Netflix content not available in their home country is in for a bit of bad news. The company says that it is working on a solution to make all of its content available wherever the service is offered.

Video-streaming service provider Netflix Inc said subscribers will, in a few weeks, no longer be able to use proxies to watch content not available in their home country. Subscribers often resort to proxies, or servers that facilitate access to content that is not locally available, to access Netflix's popular shows such as "House of cards" and "Orange is the new black".

 
Wow Netflix basically doing a China job of not allowing "forbidden" information into the countries of choice.
 
sfsuphysics said:
Wow Netflix basically doing a China job of not allowing "forbidden" information into the countries of choice.
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Well it is less evil than that. They pay licensing fees based on where the user is viewing from, so if they don't at least try to actively police where the traffic is coming from they may get hit with higher fees, or they not get the content in the first place.

Plus they just launched in 120 more countries, so the need for VPN workarounds is becoming less necessary.
 
Shmee said:
Well it is less evil than that. They pay licensing fees based on where the user is viewing from, so if they don't at least try to actively police where the traffic is coming from they may get hit with higher fees, or they not get the content in the first place.

Plus they just launched in 120 more countries, so the need for VPN workarounds is becoming less necessary.
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Hey didn't there used to be an edit button after the forum upgrade? Did they get rid of it? WHY!!!!!
 
Shmee said:
Plus they just launched in 120 more countries, so the need for VPN workarounds is becoming less necessary.
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I thought it was more a work around a particular show not being available in your country and not that Netflix as a whole wasn't available.
 
I'm trying to figure out why this is bad news. Netflix is trying to make it's content (i.e. Netflix original shows) available to everyone wherever Netflix is offered. I read nothing in that article about them trying to "block" anything. Their point is sound: "If we make House of Cards available everywhere you won't need a proxy to access it." Sounds like a good thing to me.
 
Dwango said:
I'm trying to figure out why this is bad news. Netflix is trying to make it's content (i.e. Netflix original shows) available to everyone wherever Netflix is offered. I read nothing in that article about them trying to "block" anything. Their point is sound: "If we make House of Cards available everywhere you won't need a proxy to access it." Sounds like a good thing to me.
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Agreed, confused on well why this is a bad thing.
Someone please enlighten me.
 
guess the news poster is quitly of reading only the " juicy bit" then cutting and pasteing it.
back when i was at BW doing news we would get "punished" for it. but heck that was over 10 years ago
 
Dwango said:
I'm trying to figure out why this is bad news. Netflix is trying to make it's content (i.e. Netflix original shows) available to everyone wherever Netflix is offered. I read nothing in that article about them trying to "block" anything. Their point is sound: "If we make House of Cards available everywhere you won't need a proxy to access it." Sounds like a good thing to me.
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I think some people use a proxy to access content that's not available locally. For example, there may be movies/shows in England that aren't available in the U.S.
 
nilepez said:
I think some people use a proxy to access content that's not available locally. For example, there may be movies/shows in England that aren't available in the U.S.
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But there isn't anything mentioned in the article about them blocking anything. It's all about them making their stuff more available. So far as I read it you can still use the proxy but won't need to if all you want to watch is Netflix branded stuff.
 
Shmee said:
Well it is less evil than that. They pay licensing fees based on where the user is viewing from, so if they don't at least try to actively police where the traffic is coming from they may get hit with higher fees, or they not get the content in the first place.
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Which is BS too. Why make a poor guy in the US pay more than a rich guy in India? Same show same price IMO.

But the way I read it, it says nothing that you don't get in your area, which is another way of saying content that isn't blocked for your region. So if China doesn't want movies critical of the Chinese government, they won't show up on your Netflix or have an easy way around it.

Singapore was big on this too, massive censorship of movies and TV.
 
Dwango said:
But there isn't anything mentioned in the article about them blocking anything. It's all about them making their stuff more available. So far as I read it you can still use the proxy but won't need to if all you want to watch is Netflix branded stuff.
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There are two points in the article:

a) Netflix will be blocking proxy/VPN access to content.
b) Netflix would like to be able to have all its library available globally some day.
 
Yaka said:
guess the news poster is quitly of reading only the " juicy bit" then cutting and pasteing it.
back when i was at BW doing news we would get "punished" for it. but heck that was over 10 years ago
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Considering all you do is post here in Steve's new forum, I am guessing he is doing a pretty good job overall.
 
SLee said:
There are two points in the article:

a) Netflix will be blocking proxy/VPN access to content.
b) Netflix would like to be able to have all its library available globally some day.
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Yeah, there's a site (I can't remember) that allows you to search the global catalog and tells you which proxy/VPN to use to access that. Apparently the catalog overseas in certain areas is pretty decent - most likely the content providers deciding to license for cheap to get something out of an area that has high piracy.
 
This sounds like a preventive measure to keep US subscribers from signing up for a less expensive foreign account, which will likely show the exact same content.
 
Ducman69 said:
Which is BS too. Why make a poor guy in the US pay more than a rich guy in India? Same show same price IMO.

But the way I read it, it says nothing that you don't get in your area, which is another way of saying content that isn't blocked for your region. So if China doesn't want movies critical of the Chinese government, they won't show up on your Netflix or have an easy way around it.

Singapore was big on this too, massive censorship of movies and TV.
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So you want content providers to do a credit report on each viewer to see how much they'll charge for that person to view the movie/tv show on an all you can eat service?
 
Spidey329 said:
Apparently the catalog overseas in certain areas is pretty decent - most likely the content providers deciding to license for cheap to get something out of an area that has high piracy.
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Yeah, I'd also expect regional tastes come into play as well; a show that's a hit in one country may not translate well to another country and it's not as valuable.
 
the-one1 said:
Front Page News never had the Edit function.
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Not sure never is correct, but it's definitely been like this for years (and it's annoying).
It'd really be better if you were allowed to edit it for a few minutes after submitting.
 
nilepez said:
So you want content providers to do a credit report on each viewer to see how much they'll charge for that person to view the movie/tv show on an all you can eat service?
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Huh? I said what I want. Same price no matter where you live, because you can't assume income based on broad geographical location:
Ducman69 said:
Same show same price IMO.
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Dwango said:
I'm trying to figure out why this is bad news. Netflix is trying to make it's content (i.e. Netflix original shows) available to everyone wherever Netflix is offered. I read nothing in that article about them trying to "block" anything. Their point is sound: "If we make House of Cards available everywhere you won't need a proxy to access it." Sounds like a good thing to me.
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Blocking stuff comes next.
 
Dwango said:
I'm trying to figure out why this is bad news. Netflix is trying to make it's content (i.e. Netflix original shows) available to everyone wherever Netflix is offered. I read nothing in that article about them trying to "block" anything. Their point is sound: "If we make House of Cards available everywhere you won't need a proxy to access it." Sounds like a good thing to me.
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There are plenty of movies / TV series that aren't available in the US, but available for Mexico.

One example is all the Star Wars movie that is available in Mexico, but somehow not in the US. I have to use VPN to get on it.

Netflix in US is getting more useless than ever. I find myself using Hulu, HBO Now more often to stream my content than Netflix, since it offers more and better contents now.
 
I use a DNS service for Netflix as the selection in the UK isn't great - you get many more recent films in some of the other markets.

It's a shame if we will all lose access - it will be interesting how Netflix implement it if they do close DNS access down. I seem to recall they threatened this a year ago but that obviously never happened.
 
Ducman69 said:
Huh? I said what I want. Same price no matter where you live, because you can't assume income based on broad geographical location:
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You can assume that the typical citizen in India, where the median income is $1600/year, cannot afford 10 bucks a month.
 
Ducman69 said:
Huh? I said what I want. Same price no matter where you live, because you can't assume income based on broad geographical location:
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You'd be surprised. Try buying a plane ticket from USA to India, then buy a ticket from India to USA. The Indian ticket will be less than half price.

I'm sure Netflix prefers to have a billion Indian viewers for 1 dollar a month in stead of 0 Indian viewers for 10 bucks a month.
 
The market will react to Netflix's decisions. By individual country Netflix does not have enough quality content IMO. We will see.
 
Netflix is going global, and by expanding to all the countries they did recently, that is a good start. However, the contents are only a fraction of what US gets, so there's still that issue that motivates people to watch Netflix through a US VPN connection.

Netflix have said they are trying to make all content available globally someday, but knowing the movie industry, I'm not sure if that will happen anytime soon. I hope Netflix will be able to convinced the industry, we'll see.

But until that happens, disabling proxy will be bad news for the global viewers outside of US, as they will not be able to access a large portion of the library.
 
Dwango said:
I'm trying to figure out why this is bad news. Netflix is trying to make it's content (i.e. Netflix original shows) available to everyone wherever Netflix is offered. I read nothing in that article about them trying to "block" anything. Their point is sound: "If we make House of Cards available everywhere you won't need a proxy to access it." Sounds like a good thing to me.
Click to expand...

tylertoast said:
Agreed, confused on well why this is a bad thing.
Someone please enlighten me.
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If I'm an American stationed in Germany and I want to watch "Fat elephant house wives of Montana" while I'm over there but it isn't available in Germany, I'll no longer be able to do that...where as before I could just VPN from "America" and watch my show.
 
How are they going to block VPN access? banning the IPs of the VPN servers?
 
shansoft said:
There are plenty of movies / TV series that aren't available in the US, but available for Mexico.

One example is all the Star Wars movie that is available in Mexico, but somehow not in the US. I have to use VPN to get on it.

Netflix in US is getting more useless than ever. I find myself using Hulu, HBO Now more often to stream my content than Netflix, since it offers more and better contents now.
Click to expand...

I have a Mexican account and I only have Episode VI... weird.
 
Wrecked Em said:
This sounds like a preventive measure to keep US subscribers from signing up for a less expensive foreign account, which will likely show the exact same content.
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Nah, it's more about this the fact that that Netflix US has three or four times more available content most other countries. Even Netflix Canada is pretty anemic by comparison, a rough guess would probably be half the content.

I have a feeling much of this is just noise to keep the various licence holders handy. They likely don't want to give up 20 million plus paid subscribers in China alone


http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jan/09/why-netflix-wont-block-vpn-users
 
ymer said:
How are they going to block VPN access? banning the IPs of the VPN servers?
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Pretty much. If you have 2000 accounts on one IP it's pretty easy to tell it's a circumvention method. The DNS method used is easy to block as well, reverse lookup the IP connected to the streaming server. People like me that have a vps running a VPN that's only used by myself won't be effected.
 
Wrecked Em said:
This sounds like a preventive measure to keep US subscribers from signing up for a less expensive foreign account, which will likely show the exact same content.
Click to expand...

Less expensive?

Less expensive than $10USD a month for an American earning US wages?

If your that poor or that cheap you got bigger problems then saving a couple bucks a month for Netflix.
 
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