I've been rather stunned at how no one has come up with a strong workaround to this yet. It's really quite simple, we just need slick, easy-to-use software for it.
Make software that both turns your home computer into a single-user VPN server, that lets you set the maximum upload bandwidth to ~5mbit/s or so, and lets you only pass through Netflix content; and also gives you a VPN client that lets you connect to another's computer and only uses the VPN for Netflix content, allowing your web browser and everything else to continue working through your regular ISP. The whitelisting eliminates the traditional concern of someone using your connection for torrents or worse illegal content. The bandwidth limiting ensures smooth QoS for your own network. Latency here is not a concern at all ... it's streaming video.
Once you have this software, it's simply a matter of setting up a message forum somewhere where people say, "I am from 'country X' and want to watch content from 'country Y'", and waiting for someone in the reverse situation to come along. As long as your connections are always-on, this works perfectly.
As an alternative to the fact that more people will want US Netflix than any other region, people could also offer server-only access for nominal Paypal fees. Eg lease out a 5mbit/s link for $10/mo. The price would naturally follow supply and demand.
I can change my IP any time, and there is no possible way Netflix can ban my hostmask as a VPN (all of Time Warner Cable in Columbus, Ohio.)
And if this forces Netflix to start charging by billing region ... good!! Now we can offer services that let people pay for the regions they want to access! Or if they try and block that too, then perhaps people sharing VPNs can share their account logins next.
Either way, this is a cat-and-mouse game with a very clear end-game. Why the hell is no one working on this problem? There are millions of people affected by this VPN block nonsense.
On that note, I have a US 300/20 connection I'd be happy to share, and I can do the software the hard way with BSD/pf. Is there anyone with an always-on JP connection that would like to trade with me? I would also be willing to pay someone for a residential ISP VPN connection in Japan, which I would use exclusively for Netflix only. I'd really love to be able to use Netflix Japan again; it's helped a lot with my listening comprehension in studying the language.
(Side note: this proxy software wouldn't have to be just Netflix. It could be a wonderful anti-geolocking system. The major VPN and VPS models are clearly detectable and blockable. This could allow fine-grained whitelisting or blacklisting and decentralization of VPN services.)
In my case, it's much more difficult to find Japanese series. Japan isn't nearly as big on file sharing as we are. Anime, sure, but I'd like to watch things with real people too.
Example: try finding the live action version of Nobunaga Concerto [信長協奏曲] (not the anime that's readily available.) Now I'm sure someone here can do it. But look at its seed ratio compared to say, Game of Thrones or Last Week Tonight. And this is a really easy case, because it's being streamed subtitled from Crunchyroll. Now imagine the difficulty of series not conveniently subtitled into English on major streaming services already.
Oh yes, I'm constantly clashing with unavailable/blocked Japanese content. Crunchyroll has quite a bit of non-anime content to offer, but it's still far from other country specific streaming sites.
The oddest thing for me are the constantly blocked Japanese music videos on Youtube. I'm not talking copyright infringing content, but music videos published on the official band/performer's channel and being viewable from within Japan only. Why is a music video blocked outside of Japan, when you can buy the song via the regional iTunes store? One would assume that a music video is meant to promote the music sales, so why are so many of them blocked outside of Japan then?
> Crunchyroll has quite a bit of non-anime content to offer
Yeah, they have a drama-only section that even then is 80% Korean (nothing wrong with that, just I'm not personally studying Korean.) And no option to turn off the English subtitles unless I want to watch movies on my computer instead of my TV. And absolutely, definitely, 100% never any offer for Japanese subtitles (closed captioning.) Very, very rare even on Netflix Japan, but it helps so much when I can find them.
> The oddest thing for me are the constantly blocked Japanese music videos on Youtube.
Yeah ... I don't understand that at all. Of all the countries, Japan seems to have the most obscenely strict copyright takedown enforcements of all. I pretty much always have to resort to torrents to obtain songs even remotely popular.
Japan really is a country that's stuck in the '90s. No surprise that also includes their views on music.
> Why is a music video blocked outside of Japan, when you can buy the song via the regional iTunes store?
I'm surprised they even let you buy it on iTunes. Apple must be forcing their hand somehow.
I've always dealt with extreme aversion to selling to me. The Japanese famously hate selling their wares internationally. It's pretty much a given that anything on Yahoo! Japan will be from sellers that refuse to ship internationally, so you have to use deputy services and pay them an extra 30% markup (plus a predatory and unfair yen exchange rate that's off by 15+ yen from the real market value.) And even then, there are sellers that track deputy IDs and will delete deputy bids. I've even come across one such seller, and my deputy of choice used one of their 'hidden' IDs to pick it up anyway. They're so used to it that they already had sleeper accounts for dealing with such sellers, despite having 100% perfect payment histories to sellers.
There are several major doujinshi websites for buying from artists, and these sites are 100% perfectly capable of accepting Visa cards from anywhere in the world ("it's everywhere you want to be... unless you want to be in Japan"), yet they block you anyway.
It was only just very recently that Amazon finally started selling new Japanese games internationally. Before then, I was paying 50% markups to small, sleazy extortionist companies. On top of having to buy Japanese systems to get around their region blocking attempts. Half surprised the fuckers don't try to use GPS to pinpoint you're not actually in Japan while playing their precious games.
Apologies if I seem bitter... it's because I am. I probably wasted $2000 on deputy fees alone trying to build a game collection and buy other items I like. And the harder I try to practice and learn this language, the more I get taken for a ride.
This solution likely won't work because Netflix would do this:
A) Tally up all the Account <-> IP relationships.
B) Perform an analysis on # of accounts per IP that exceed predefined thresholds.
C) Scrutinize accounts who are using an IP that is swarming with accounts from other countries.
Total cat and mouse, but can be automated quite easily.
> A) Tally up all the Account <-> IP relationships.
In my scenario, it would be two accounts with two IPs each.
That threshold is way below something truly actionable. I mean, could you imagine? A guy travels and uses hotel wi-fi, perhaps internationally. Now he has two IPs associated with his account, and so they block/ban him. Not going to happen.
Hell, locally one's IP often changes thanks to DHCP leases expiring.
> C) Scrutinize accounts who are using an IP that is swarming with accounts from other countries.
This won't scale, and that's entirely the point. They catch ExpressVPN and co because there are 500+ accounts from each of the pool of ~20 IP addresses they have. They probably just block the whole subnet mask. VPS is the same, "this is a datacenter IP range. No customer is running out of a datacenter, it must be being used as a VPN."
But a guy's home connection of 50/20 mbit/s can only handle two users, and can't be flagged as belonging to a datacenter, and can't be range-blocked. I'm sure there will be cases of a person wanting access to 10+ regions, but for the most part, people just want one extra region. In my case, Japan. In most people's cases, the US.
The huge one being that your connection won't be used for illegal purposes. I would never in a million years operate what is essentially a mini Tor exit node.
And even the paid one way option ... there's also too many people on Hola sharing the same endpoints, and the threshold is high enough that many people are reporting that Hola is getting blocked as well.
The ratio needs to be 1:1. And if Netflix manages to block a user connecting from only two residential IP addresses, then the final step in this game is those two people will share their logins with each other. I connect to a Japan exit point, and use that person's Japanese account login; and vice versa. At that point, there is nothing left that Netflix can possibly do to stop me.
Make software that both turns your home computer into a single-user VPN server, that lets you set the maximum upload bandwidth to ~5mbit/s or so, and lets you only pass through Netflix content; and also gives you a VPN client that lets you connect to another's computer and only uses the VPN for Netflix content, allowing your web browser and everything else to continue working through your regular ISP. The whitelisting eliminates the traditional concern of someone using your connection for torrents or worse illegal content. The bandwidth limiting ensures smooth QoS for your own network. Latency here is not a concern at all ... it's streaming video.
Once you have this software, it's simply a matter of setting up a message forum somewhere where people say, "I am from 'country X' and want to watch content from 'country Y'", and waiting for someone in the reverse situation to come along. As long as your connections are always-on, this works perfectly.
As an alternative to the fact that more people will want US Netflix than any other region, people could also offer server-only access for nominal Paypal fees. Eg lease out a 5mbit/s link for $10/mo. The price would naturally follow supply and demand.
I can change my IP any time, and there is no possible way Netflix can ban my hostmask as a VPN (all of Time Warner Cable in Columbus, Ohio.)
And if this forces Netflix to start charging by billing region ... good!! Now we can offer services that let people pay for the regions they want to access! Or if they try and block that too, then perhaps people sharing VPNs can share their account logins next.
Either way, this is a cat-and-mouse game with a very clear end-game. Why the hell is no one working on this problem? There are millions of people affected by this VPN block nonsense.
On that note, I have a US 300/20 connection I'd be happy to share, and I can do the software the hard way with BSD/pf. Is there anyone with an always-on JP connection that would like to trade with me? I would also be willing to pay someone for a residential ISP VPN connection in Japan, which I would use exclusively for Netflix only. I'd really love to be able to use Netflix Japan again; it's helped a lot with my listening comprehension in studying the language.
(Side note: this proxy software wouldn't have to be just Netflix. It could be a wonderful anti-geolocking system. The major VPN and VPS models are clearly detectable and blockable. This could allow fine-grained whitelisting or blacklisting and decentralization of VPN services.)