I realise that they're probably just covering their asses, but it really sucks to live in a small country that none of the distributors care about.
The Estonian netflix catalogue is on the order of 500? titles... ridiculous compared to the US catalogue. In the US you have "watch on amazon prime" buttons in imdb. In Estonia, no such luck.
Essentially, there is no legal way at all to watch the vast majority of movies here. And people wonder why piracy happens a lot around here...
Same here in Cyprus, the catalog is pathetic. I am using an unblocker for now once it stops working Netflix will become useless to me and I'll cancel. We're too small to make a difference to Netflix even if all subscribers stop paying we're just a rounding error in their accounts. The change will come from larger markets and from EU who is trying to kill geo blocking within Europe.
Smartflix has gone from 7.99$ lifetime to '2.99$ per month/ 29.99$ lifetime' to '2.99$ per month / 39.99$ per year. A lot of discontent amongst early adopters now/
I guess Netflix and other studios have managed to achieve their goal.
Exactly and they are so short sided with greed that instead of getting a little in their pockets, those people are going to go the easier route and torrent the shows.
That's because they need more money for the "fix" they are about to implement.
And if you know some things about infrastructure/network engineering the "fix" they are talking about here isn't cheap (both in infrastructure and operational costs.)
That's why the prices changed -- if Big Media didn't force Netflix to start blocking nothing would've changed. Now they do, SF is basically forced to pivot their business model slightly or risk go out of business completely.
It's plausible that licensing agreements prevent some content from being shown in some markets. But what could possibly be the reason for Netflix holding back its own content — content that directly drives subscription revenue — in other markets?
In Italy netflix sold house of cards right to sky before its service being available. Now netflix opened shop here but many originals are locked by the initial licensing until the end of times.
Distribution deals happened for House of Cards... For obvious reasons distribution deals are usually exclusive per region (I spend a lot on marketing and then some other guy just starts selling the same content...)
Interesting -- I didn't realize Netflix distributed their content through third parties. So in a few years they've gone from a licensee dependent on the vagaries of contracts they sign with content owners, to a content producer developing their own original material, to a licensor distributing their properties through others. It's a situation not precisely worthy of the "looked from pig to man, and man to pig" quote, nor "content is king", nor "commodify your complements"; perhaps a blend of all three.
The order isn't quite as you put it -- it was only the earlier originals that Netflix couldn't afford to buy out. They aren't looking to license their originals back out at this point (exclusive + global is still the strategy going forward). They've even gone back and worked to pick up expanded rights in more countries for the ones they've missed (e.g., HoC).
They do indeed - here in Germany House Of Cards has an exclusive window on the pay-TV service Sky, which results in Season 4 of House of Cards not being available on Netflix currently.
This is as silly as only selling your products through a single distributor by country. Imagine where Samsung or LG would be if they were doing that. Right now movie studios are both complaining about falling revenues and turning down paying customers.
Content sources typically charge per region. The more the subscribers per region, the better is Netflix chances of broadening the catalogue in that region. It is a tough problem that has several facets. Prime move, capturing a subscription base, marketing, campaigning, trials, licenses, sourcing, regional law compliance (nudity/violence etc.), infrastructure, etc.
Am not saying as a consumer you are wrong. But a perspective from the other side at least partially covers the why.
You'd think so, but unfortunately I can't, again, for some, I can, yes, but the selection is vastly reduced.
Essentially, if you search for movie dvds on amazon and ship them to an US address with a US credit card, then the selection is at least 10x, if not 100x larger than when I try to buy them.
Nevermind of course the time it takes to order things online and then have them ship the dvd, which I don't really want anyway, but fair enough, that's just convenience.
So, the problem is not that I'm not wiling to pay for it, the problem is that nobody will take my money, because the movie studio hasn't signed a redistributor for that movie in my region.
Most of the time you can't. You can't buy something that's explicitly and on purpose not available for purchase in your country. That is the whole point. Even if you were to find someone willing to import American DVDs to Estonia, the movie studios have region code lockout codes on DVD players to prevent that!
> Even if you were to find someone willing to import American DVDs to Estonia, the movie studios have region code lockout codes on DVD players to prevent that!
So use a computer to play your DVDs. Region lockout works on the honor system.
This sub thread is about legal ways to watch movies.
People seem to be missing the fact that importing DVDs is not necessarily legal; and turning your DVD player to region free is arguably not legal (under the various "interfering with rights protections mechanisms" laws.
To you and me "buying the DVD from some other region" is legit, while "pirate the movie" is less legit, but to the rights-holders there's not much difference. See, for example, this submission which is talking about rights holders asking Netflix to stop people buying content from a different country.
Well then, if there are no legal ways to watch a movie, "pirating" is the only option, right? What possibilities remain? Should people take vacations to watch movies?
My opinion is that people should make their own choices. If it were me I'd try to buy the DVDs, but I'd also pirate the DVDs I had bought (for a backup) and I'd consider pirating the DVDs that are not available to purchase.
But the industry has different ideas, and they are well funded and influential. We see the results of that influence in international copyright agreements and laws like DCMA.
See for example the Japanese games that have "NO RE-SALE" printed on the back of the box. Japanese publishers pushed pretty hard to make second-hand sales of games illegal. (I don't think that succeeded). It is (or was?) illegal to rent games in Japan.
In the face of this kind of vigorous assertion of rights of IP holders it's can be difficult to stick rigidly to the law.
I just don't get it. If some film is unavailable in some region, piracy in that region has no conceivable impact on sales. And so how can there be any damages? Do you argue that piracy notwithstanding, people would be migrating to places with better licensing deals?
In this region: Movies are not available legally, and so people pirate them. When those people come to HN to say why they pirate movies other people say "just buy the DVD", or "just go without".
"Just buy the DVD" doesn't work for the reasons given; just go without is dumb for the reasons you give.
I don't think I'm arguing for the position you think I'm arguing for.
> If some film is unavailable in some region, piracy in that region has no conceivable impact on sales.
This is definitely not true. Piracy in that region builds up a support infrastructure for piracy that can be used in other regions. It builds social support for piracy, and can spread, as a cultural practice, when people from the afflicted region converse with people from other regions. All of those things can impact sales outside the region.
That's rather tenuous. It's also arguable that piracy in such regions helps popularize a film, through reviews social media, etc. And so it would increase sales elsewhere.
And there's a simple solution: Make sure that your stuff is available legally everywhere. Because if it's not, you know that it will be pirated.
It wasn't all that long ago that it was impossible to legally get Japanese content in the US. They just wouldn't take your money. It wasn't until scanlators and fansubbers created a large market that the Japanese producers took foreign markets seriously. Even then, I have been told by reputable sources that companies like Viz used to pay about $1000 per volume with no royalties for North American English language rights to manga. Japanese producers just didn't believe it was worth any amount of money in foreign countries. Of course that has changed dramatically now.
I'm hoping as we move to a global market with digital distribution, these dinosaur companies will realize that there is no risk to handling world wide distribution themselves. But it means killing the distributors (who were the businesses that helped you get that content when nobody else was listening...).
I'm frustrated that Netflix is cracking down in this way. And yet, I can't say that I'm surprised. They are trying to amass as much content as possible, and doing so means that Netflix has to demonstrate that they're trying to enforce the regional exclusivity agreements.
For me, as a consumer who has been using an unblocking system for more than two years, and who would like to continue to see Amazon's content, I'm rooting for the unblockers.
But I wonder whether the cat-and-mouse game between Netflix and unblocking services is almost inevitably in Netflix's favor, at least as things currently run.
Which leads me to ask if a "cloud VPN appliance" SaaS could work, technically and/or as a business: Customers would click to indicate the country where they want to have a VPN server hosted. The appliance would use Digital Ocean, or some other hosting facility with cheap machines that can be created and destroyed via an API. For a $5/month DO server, charge $15/month. Have the appliance update its software, and/or relocate to another hosting system or IP address, as Netflix detects and blocks that machine.
I have to assume that it would be harder for Netflix to block thousands of such privately used VPN machines than blocks of AWS servers being used for such services.
But yeah, it's unfortunate that because of agreements between movie studios and distribution firms in each country, individuals have to play these sorts of games.
>But I wonder whether the cat-and-mouse game between Netflix and unblocking services is almost inevitably in Netflix's favor, at least as things currently run.
I don't see how Netflix or their content producers come out ahead by driving whole national markets to torrent sites. Once you force people onto a pirate distribution channel they're not going to pay even for the titles they could obtain legally.
Others have reported Netflix blocking IP ranges owned by cloud hosting companies. So this solution might not work. What if it was a peer-to-peer service? Whereby the ultimate exit point was the home internet connection of another subscriber?
Such a service already exists, it's called Hola[¹]. The problem is that the owners of machines serving as exit nodes are exposing themselves to liability that a regular VPN or VPS service would probably be protected against, and often without even realizing it.
I think most people's asymmetric bandwidth rates would get in the way of a p2p solution being usable.
Maybe if there were some way to break the stream up into individual media files, and then you could download one identical file from lots of different users at the same time.
In the case of Netflix, the video content doesn't need to go through a proxy; only the website does (at the moment). So bandwidth shouldn't really be an issue.
The ability for and dedication to self sabotage is really astonishing with these old media companies (in this case channeled through Netflix). The sad thing is this affects only people who are still somehow determined to actually buy their content instead of straight-up pirating it.
It is likely a requirement of some contract they have with content producers, who have Netflix over a barrel. I can't see them just deciding to do this all on their own.
We'll start to see VPN companies setup auto-rotating IPv6-only networks registered to residential addresses and pseudonyms shortly (if they haven't already) with 2-3 customers per/IP.
VPN's will cater and advertise as "for Netflix" and then the "fight" will shift to copyright takedowns and proxy-lawsuits.
If Netflix continues to crack down and push harder you'll see a lot more false positives/user complaints about being blocked than we currently do.
I sincerely hope they start using their weight to push back.
> A residential vpn doesn’t use a standard data center like traditional vpn services do. A residential vpn service uses the same local internet service providers that offer dsl and cable to home users. This type of service is very unusual in the vpn arena because normal providers of vpn services do not offer this type of service. It is generally unheard of in the vpn world.
> IAPS Security Services, LLC. has gone outside the normal channels and has contracted directly with residential internet service providers to make this type of service possible.
This is pretty much the situation in China with VPNs and GFW. Some providers will specialize in providing ways to get around the locks. They will be able to charge extra for it too and people will pay. Because $7.99 + say $4.99 for the VPN per month is still better than going back to cable. Fortunately, Netflix doesn't appear to be targeting users in China that much. I've use Netflix daily only seen the "something is wrong you appear to be using a proxy message" twice so far. I just switched servers and everything was all right.
While everyone's busy blaming Netflix, the reality is they're just covering their own asses, complying with the content laws of the jurisdictions in which they're operating.
This is not really about compliance. They license their content from their media partners and these licensing agreements state in which territories they are allowed to use the licensed content. Their media partners are contractually requiring them to take steps to block the usage of their content outside the licensed territories.
Keep in mind that the party who has licensed Netflix a production to be used in e.g. the US might not even have the rights to the same production in e.g. the UK.
Licensing can get really lame. Amazon has (or at least had) seasons 1, 2, and 4 of a show I watched. I had to go elsewhere to find season 3. I never went back for season 4.
Out of sheer curiosity: Does anyone know/suspect if Netflix is actually using techniques in addition to blocking IPs of known proxy/vpn/unblocking services? Because I would imagine that is a bit like fighting a hydra, very labor- and cost-intensive, yet they are getting excellent results (apparently, still, the sample of people who complain and thus get media coverage is pretty biased).
Is anyone with a 'homegrown' vpn tunnel experiencing issues? I could also think of a solution involving cookies/fingerprinting that detects if someone's geolocation moves around quicker and more often than is physically possible.
I'm sure the technology is under tight wraps, and I'm also sure that other companies will be dying to license this from Netflix if they get it right, even if it's just a lengthy list of IPs (e.g. the BBC for iPlayer).
The Netflix team is known for using reproducible automation in all their efforts. They have a significant "big data" team that can use and setup automatic classification using hundreds of available data points to classify users who are violating their ToS versus those who aren't. Netflix doesn't do anything that is labor or cost intensive: they have all of this automated.
Even approaching this from a naive set of data points is cheap: It isn't particularly hard to classify IP addresses between cable modem blocks and those for VPS/VPN providers. Geolocation on a country level is relatively reliable. Also it's pretty easy to detect OpenVPN users on layers 2 and 3.:
I don't see how they could block VPN at all. Checking the amount of packet fragmentation works well if you want to make guesses, but if you start blocking on that you're in a lot of trouble...
There was a report on the NANOG list of customers being flagged for VPN use while using an account in two countries simultaneously, but if one used another account from those IPs, there is no issue.
I suspect this type of analysis plays a bigger role than most people think.
i.e A user jumping back and forth between US and Australian Netflix - faster than 'physically' possible, would act as a VPN flag.
Personally I had to change the end point of my home made VPN, but have not had any issues since. As a precaution, I have avoided region jumping. If I did, I would try and leave a realistic gap between any access.
I am in the UK and have my user profile always set to the USA. It has been this way pretty much since I joined in 2013. I have not been blocked yet. My girlfriends user profile jumped between USA and UK all the time and was blocked when they started to crack down. Strangely, these two profiles both use the same registered account and unblock.us to switch regions.
Yes, they are using some kind of heuristics in addition to ip ban lists. I was using an openvpn instance on a private US server which was working fine until a couple weeks ago when I didn't notice the VPN connection dropped and accidentally reconnected from 2 different countries quickly. It banned me immediately.
I'm from the US, I've paid for US Netflix for at least 6-7 years, but now I live in the Netherlands. I'm forced to use Dutch Netflix, where my US subscription isn't, for example, paying for those who write the Dutch subtitles.
I've got an Australian Netflix subscription but I'm currently living and watching it in Poland. It doesn't have the same shows, but given the limited catalogue available in Australia, it isn't much smaller in Poland.
The EU were looking at abolishing this as against free trade, much like they are waging war on roaming charges within the EU.
They were talking about it a year or two ago, not sure what has happened since then as different countries in the EU have different censorship so it's not that simple (e.g. games in Germany are usually less gore).
This is the only thing I can find about it, but I'm sure it was reported on here on better known sources:
What does the Commission plan to do about geo-blocking?
Addressing unjustified geo-blocking will give more choice of products and services for consumers at lower prices. The Commission is planning to make legislative proposals in the first half of 2016 to end unjustified geo-blocking. Action could include a targeted change to the e-commerce framework, and to the framework set out by Article 20 of the Services Directive (on non-discrimination of recipients of services). As a result, traders will have only limited possibilities to deny access to online services.In parallel to legislative proposals, the Commission today launched a Competition Sector Inquiry to analyse the application of competition law in this area (press release and factsheet)
There's lots to this behind that link, and at the digital single market site (https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en) but it seems like some DSM legislation will be proposed later this year, but not all of it (since the eCommerce report isn't scheduled to be completed until 2017)
It depends on how long you're abroad for. A short holiday? No. Studying abroad for a year, yes. The Netflix terms of service are pretty clear that you have to use it in the country the account was created in.
>The Netflix terms of service are pretty clear that you have to use it in the country the account was created in.
Why then does Netflix force me (American living in Netherlands for years) to use Dutch Netflix when I've paid for an American subscripton for many years? Why haven't they locked me out?
I don't think that's how they do it (yet). Netflix and the proxy companies are playing cat and mouse, when Netflix blocks them they tweak something and it works again for a couple of weeks, regardless of the address on the account.
That might be how Netflix keeps from actually solving the problem.
Doing what I suggested would probably cause heck, and yeah, I travel and I love going to new countries and see the Netflix they have there. It's pretty cool :)
I live in Kazakhstan and I regularly use my Netherlands VPN. I tried to use Netflix months ago, and I often switched between connections. Didn't got any blocks or even warnings.
The unblocker services use a DNS server to present you as being from another location, Netflix is only making it hard to pirate without incurring the bandwidth costs too - we were only paying $2/month to adfreetime.com for 3 people.
What these DNS-based unblocking services do is to selectively point certain hostnames to their own IPs, where they run TCP tunnels to the actual service.
It sounds like it'd be very easy for Netflix to put a stop to this - they just need to make their webpage / app / whatever check the IP their certain hostnames lookup to and if it's not the whitelisted addresses it refuses to work.
Or (much simpler) use actual IPs rather than hostnames. They can still dynamically change the IPs at will by updating their web code, so it's not hugely worse than using hostnames.
Netflix "gets it" very well, they have to tiptoe between satisfying their content providers with plausible-enough looking action and at the same time trying to not alienate their end-users. They probably know the exact numbers of their chosen paths and have chosen optimally (for now).
I seriously don't understand what the movie companies are trying to do. People who think going to the cinema is special and add something to the experience already go to the cinema. For the rest of us, we see it on Netflix or Amazon or whatever or we will either not see it or pirate it.
Same here. The catalog in Canada isn't worth it. Once the proxy companies lose, I'll cancel Netflix. No I will not go to the cinema, I will not buy the DVDs. The media company will just lose the revenue from me and people similar to me for those movies.
I live in France and have been subscribed to Netflix for many years, with a fake US address (but a French debit card). I access Netflix over a VPN provider.
When Netflix arrived in France I was able to access Netflix without VPN from France, with a different catalog, but retained the access to the US catalog via VPN (without doing anything else: same account, same browser, same session even).
I have seen no change since this move was announced, and therefore doubt if it's real??
>I have seen no change since this move was announced, and therefore doubt if it's real??
Are you doubting that they're blocking users who access through a VPN? They certainly are. Maybe your VPN hasn't been blacklisted, but that's not to say it won't be in the future.
I just buy DVDs/Blue-rays. That way I own the medium, can watch it any time at superior quality (video + audio) and get some bonus content (behind the scene, interviews, deleted scenes, etc.) too. And I watch amateur short clips on YouTube. It's amazing how short sighted average joes are.
Btw. I can play some 1983 audio CDs just fine, multimedia CD-ROMs from 1990 and DVDs from 1996. Neither a hard disk nor flash-drive nor an internet service will last that long. Triva: Did you know MySpace.com used to be a online storage service (think of DropBox) during the dot-com bubble, it resurfaced as social media website years later, and years later it rebooted as social media website again (with little success) and you know both first two iterations of content are lost forever. Welcome to reality.
The first new 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray (max 100 GB) just came out on March 1th.
> Btw. I can play some 1983 audio CDs just fine, multimedia CD-ROMs from 1990 and DVDs from 1996. Neither a hard disk nor flash-drive nor an internet service will last that long.
A hard drive is much easier to back up and transfer to fresh storage than a stack of CDs.
$70 for 25x25GB archival discs is pretty reasonable. Almost 9GB per dollar. The 100GB discs are ~5.8GB per dollar, but if taking up 1/4th the space and 1/4 the disc-swapping is worth it, those could be a good option ($425 for 25x100GB)
I meant the few early 1980s audio CDs I own. All still work fine. Pressed CDs last a lot longer than burned CDs. I only ever had problems with CD I burned myself (especially a CD production series in the early 2000s).
While I've not been using VPNs for this, and can see why this sucks for a lot of consumers, I can't really feel sad for any unblocking companies that die over this. They were providing a service that were strictly against the TOS of Netflix, akin to creating cheats/bots for online video games. They had to know that this could come to an end.
It's also very clear that Netflix didn't want this, and that it was forced to make this move. (Couldn't find the exact quote, but newspapers have reported this).
The availability is quite sad now, though. Looking at uNoGS[0] and gk2[1], you can quickly see the disparity. USA pays $7.99 to access 5649 videos. Germany pays ~$9 to access 1412. Scandinavia (little to no dubbing) pays ~$9.5 to access 2038 videos. Most countries have half the content of the US, but pay above US prices on average.
So for some time now, EU has basically been subsidizing Netflix for America and Friends. I really hope that our licensing laws will get straightened out soon, although I can't see the movie business wanting to get rid of the middle-man businesses anytime soon. It generates a huge amount of cash.
As much as this looks like a result of Netflix attempting to cover their asses with content licensing, the story going around is that this is actually a result of Netflix's freedom and responsibility doctrine. Apparently some asshole engineer internally said he'd be willing to build a proxy blocker, but only if he could do it right.
I cancelled my netflix account last week because they cracked down on both my VPN providers. In my country, we legally get around 12-13% of the shows available on the US Netflix.
Paying customers get shafted, and the mega-corps wonder why piracy is rampant.
So netflix has gone full circle, people want to move away from cable companies because price/content is crap. Netflix is killing off region hopping thus making price/content crap. Long live piracy
Internet-based companies want borders when it benefits them, and want the network to be without borders or geographic locations when that benefits them.
Actually, the Internet-based company (Netflix) probably doesn't want this, as they'll lose money. The media companies want this, and Netflix has to deliver if they want to keep their distribution rights.
The Estonian netflix catalogue is on the order of 500? titles... ridiculous compared to the US catalogue. In the US you have "watch on amazon prime" buttons in imdb. In Estonia, no such luck.
Essentially, there is no legal way at all to watch the vast majority of movies here. And people wonder why piracy happens a lot around here...